7 ms·

The last sentence from this piece is just beautiful, it has become my personal motto: For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public rel

by stiff 13y ago

The last sentence from this piece is just beautiful, it has become my personal motto: For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. It captures in a capsule form the reasons for a huge fraction of all the big engineering catastrophes, maybe even most of them. For everyone interested in similar case studies, and in reliability from a wide engineering perspective, I strongly recommend the book "Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering" by Henry Petroski.

marze 13y ago
Collectively, the public has a similar approach to nuclear power plants, which make vast tracts of land useless for agriculture if they melt down. We've had three meltdowns in 40 years, about one per 13 years so far. Have we been lucky? Or have we been unlucky? Time will tell.
- maxharris 13y ago
  We've had three meltdowns in 40 years, about one per 13 years so far. This is not a fair comparison. The shuttle was a bad design, with a high failure rate, and it doesn't make any sense to lump it in with tried-and-true rockets, which have a far lower failure rate. Similarly, it doesn't make sense to lump the dangerous RBMK reactor design used at Chernobyl with the far safer reactors designed in the West. How many people died in flight during the Apollo missions? The answer is the same number that died as a result of the events at Three-Mile Island and Fukushima: zero. Design matters, and if you're trying to be objective on this topic, you have to distinguish between good designs and bad ones. Also, not all meltdowns are created equal, as your post suggests. If you look at Three Mile Island on Google Maps today, you'll see all sorts of arable cropland in active use all around the site. EDIT: Why the downvote? Is there anything I've said that isn't factual? EDIT 2: here's a link that explains the differences between the Soviet RBMK and the Western LWR designs: http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/RBMKvsLWR.html http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/RBMKvsLWR.html
  - WalterBright 13y ago
    Different designs matter. For example, airliners have gotten enormously safer over the years. You simply cannot conflate the safety record of 1930's airliners with modern airliners.
  - keithflower 13y ago
    Wow, NASA-think redux! I really don't think you want to use Three-Mile Island as some sort of exemplar of safe technology: The lessons of Three Mile Island have been, for the most part, forgotten. The nuclear industry changed and improved somewhat, but the deep understanding of what went wrong was lost on the public in general and the real lessons that we could have learned as a society were, too. The financial mess we are experiencing right now isn’t all that different from Three Mile Island. If we’d taken better to heart the true lessons of TMI we might not be in our present jam. Looking back at the accident with the benefit of knowing what it took to clean it up and what the workers found when they were finally able to send robots inside the containment, the TMI accident was very bad indeed. There were pressure spikes during the accident that would have cracked an average containment vessel, releasing radioactive gases into the atmosphere. Fortunately the Unit 2 containment wasn’t average. TMI-2 was built on the final approach path to Harrisburg International Airport, a former U.S. Air Force base, and was therefore beefed-up specifically to withstand the impact of a B-52 hitting the structure at 200 knots. A normal containment would have been breached. TMI wasn’t caused by a computer failure but the accident was made vastly worse by an error of computer design. Specifically, TMI-2 had a terrible user interface. What happened at Unit 2 was a little more complex. A cascading series of events caused the computer to notice SEVEN HUNDRED things wrong in the first few minutes of the accident. The ONE audible alarm started ringing and stayed ringing continuously until someone turned it off as useless. The ONE visual alarm was activated and blinked for days, indicating nothing useful at all. The line printer queue quickly contained 700 error reports followed by several thousand error report updates and corrections. The printer queue was almost instantly hours behind, so the operators knew they had a problem (700 problems actually, though they couldn’t know that) but had no idea what the problem was. So they guessed. Not good. http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/31/three-mile-island-memories/ http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/31/three-mile-island-memorie...
- kabdib 13y ago
  Many reactors are bad designs, dating from the 1960s. Newer designs are much simpler and safer. Also, coal plants kill a lot more people than nuke plants do. . . .
- ggreer 13y ago
  You're worried about three meltdowns, but not the 2,000 nuclear weapons that have been detonated since the start of the atomic age? Compared to bomb tests, the fallout from nuclear power is a rounding error. But let's review those three meltdowns. Three Mile Island didn't cause a single case of cancer. Chernobyl was a ridiculously unsafe design run with incredible incompetence. The WHO estimates it caused 40,000 cases of cancer and 4,000 deaths from those cancers. That may sound bad, but pollution from coal kills around 30,000 people each year just in the US. Finally, there's Fukushima. It's expected to cause 100-200 premature deaths from cancers. Remember, the cause of that meltdown was an earthquake-tsunami combo that killed almost 20,000 people. If anything, shutting down nuclear power worsens public health. Demand for electricity isn't going to go down, so we end up burning coal, and coal plants are much worse than nuclear. From http://squid314.livejournal.com/292620.html http://squid314.livejournal.com/292620.html: According to the Clean Air Task Force, coal plants kill about thirty thousand people per year in the US through pollution (which causes respiratory disease). There are six hundred coal plants, so that's about 50 deaths per plant. These numbers are much higher - maybe even by an order of magnitude - in Chinese and third-world coal plants, which lack the US' stringent environmental restrictions. Even in the worst-case scenario, nuclear power still does better than coal: When you hit a nuclear plant with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami, and then it explodes, it still kills fewer people than an average coal plant does every single year when everything goes perfectly. There are lots of things that cause long-term harm to the environment: toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and yes, radioisotopes. If we want to enjoy a first-world quality of life, we have to accept some pollution. The least harmful energy source today is nuclear power.
  - marze 13y ago
    Uh, math. A reactor complex like Fukushima has ~100 tons of reactor fuel per reactor, not counting spent fuel rods. Say 1000 tons total. A bomb has a few kg of fissionable material, maybe 100,000 times less than a reactor complex. Do the math, if a reactor fails containment, the contaminants dwarf that of a bomb. I think Fukushima contaminants have tripled the radioactive cesium in the Pacific still left over from the 2000 bombs you mention. Nuclear is an outdated cold-war technology that won't compete with solar economically. They are slowly being phased out, down from 17% electric worldwide a few years ago to 10% now.
logicallee 13y ago
That is ridiculous. Let's say DWave was even better in what it actually produced, but even worse in its PR: it creates a true quantum cumputer proof of concept. But it is even worse at public relations and EVERYONE thinks that it is a scam with rigged demos. It has no credibility. Now I ask you: in this thought experiment, is nature going to fund your quantum company, because you actually kicked nature's ass and proved a true quantum computer in concept? No. You have to actually maintain real credibility, much as the space program did. Nature can't be fooled, but Nature also doesn't fund shit. Whether the government, VC's, or the people, only people fund people. Credibility is super important!
- hobs 13y ago
  I think you are not wrong for saying you need to convince the public for giant expenditures, but if all of those things are not doing as they pretend to be, people die and all credibility is lost anyway.
  - dclara 13y ago
    This is a sad reality, different from the "reality" in the sentence. So I have to say: this is a sad fact. But I love that sentence. The nature cannot be fooled eventually.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

by stiff 13y ago

marze 13y ago

Collectively, the public has a similar approach to nuclear power plants, which make vast tracts of land useless for agriculture if they melt down. We've had three meltdowns in 40 years, about one per 13 years so far. Have we been lucky? Or have we been unlucky? Time will tell.

maxharris 13y ago
We've had three meltdowns in 40 years, about one per 13 years so far. This is not a fair comparison. The shuttle was a bad design, with a high failure rate, and it doesn't make any sense to lump it in with tried-and-true rockets, which have a far lower failure rate. Similarly, it doesn't make sense to lump the dangerous RBMK reactor design used at Chernobyl with the far safer reactors designed in the West. How many people died in flight during the Apollo missions? The answer is the same number that died as a result of the events at Three-Mile Island and Fukushima: zero. Design matters, and if you're trying to be objective on this topic, you have to distinguish between good designs and bad ones. Also, not all meltdowns are created equal, as your post suggests. If you look at Three Mile Island on Google Maps today, you'll see all sorts of arable cropland in active use all around the site. EDIT: Why the downvote? Is there anything I've said that isn't factual? EDIT 2: here's a link that explains the differences between the Soviet RBMK and the Western LWR designs: http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/RBMKvsLWR.html http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/RBMKvsLWR.html
- WalterBright 13y ago
  Different designs matter. For example, airliners have gotten enormously safer over the years. You simply cannot conflate the safety record of 1930's airliners with modern airliners.
- keithflower 13y ago
  Wow, NASA-think redux! I really don't think you want to use Three-Mile Island as some sort of exemplar of safe technology: The lessons of Three Mile Island have been, for the most part, forgotten. The nuclear industry changed and improved somewhat, but the deep understanding of what went wrong was lost on the public in general and the real lessons that we could have learned as a society were, too. The financial mess we are experiencing right now isn’t all that different from Three Mile Island. If we’d taken better to heart the true lessons of TMI we might not be in our present jam. Looking back at the accident with the benefit of knowing what it took to clean it up and what the workers found when they were finally able to send robots inside the containment, the TMI accident was very bad indeed. There were pressure spikes during the accident that would have cracked an average containment vessel, releasing radioactive gases into the atmosphere. Fortunately the Unit 2 containment wasn’t average. TMI-2 was built on the final approach path to Harrisburg International Airport, a former U.S. Air Force base, and was therefore beefed-up specifically to withstand the impact of a B-52 hitting the structure at 200 knots. A normal containment would have been breached. TMI wasn’t caused by a computer failure but the accident was made vastly worse by an error of computer design. Specifically, TMI-2 had a terrible user interface. What happened at Unit 2 was a little more complex. A cascading series of events caused the computer to notice SEVEN HUNDRED things wrong in the first few minutes of the accident. The ONE audible alarm started ringing and stayed ringing continuously until someone turned it off as useless. The ONE visual alarm was activated and blinked for days, indicating nothing useful at all. The line printer queue quickly contained 700 error reports followed by several thousand error report updates and corrections. The printer queue was almost instantly hours behind, so the operators knew they had a problem (700 problems actually, though they couldn’t know that) but had no idea what the problem was. So they guessed. Not good. http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/31/three-mile-island-memories/ http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/31/three-mile-island-memorie...
kabdib 13y ago
Many reactors are bad designs, dating from the 1960s. Newer designs are much simpler and safer. Also, coal plants kill a lot more people than nuke plants do. . . .
ggreer 13y ago
You're worried about three meltdowns, but not the 2,000 nuclear weapons that have been detonated since the start of the atomic age? Compared to bomb tests, the fallout from nuclear power is a rounding error. But let's review those three meltdowns. Three Mile Island didn't cause a single case of cancer. Chernobyl was a ridiculously unsafe design run with incredible incompetence. The WHO estimates it caused 40,000 cases of cancer and 4,000 deaths from those cancers. That may sound bad, but pollution from coal kills around 30,000 people each year just in the US. Finally, there's Fukushima. It's expected to cause 100-200 premature deaths from cancers. Remember, the cause of that meltdown was an earthquake-tsunami combo that killed almost 20,000 people. If anything, shutting down nuclear power worsens public health. Demand for electricity isn't going to go down, so we end up burning coal, and coal plants are much worse than nuclear. From http://squid314.livejournal.com/292620.html http://squid314.livejournal.com/292620.html: According to the Clean Air Task Force, coal plants kill about thirty thousand people per year in the US through pollution (which causes respiratory disease). There are six hundred coal plants, so that's about 50 deaths per plant. These numbers are much higher - maybe even by an order of magnitude - in Chinese and third-world coal plants, which lack the US' stringent environmental restrictions. Even in the worst-case scenario, nuclear power still does better than coal: When you hit a nuclear plant with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami, and then it explodes, it still kills fewer people than an average coal plant does every single year when everything goes perfectly. There are lots of things that cause long-term harm to the environment: toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and yes, radioisotopes. If we want to enjoy a first-world quality of life, we have to accept some pollution. The least harmful energy source today is nuclear power.
- marze 13y ago
  Uh, math. A reactor complex like Fukushima has ~100 tons of reactor fuel per reactor, not counting spent fuel rods. Say 1000 tons total. A bomb has a few kg of fissionable material, maybe 100,000 times less than a reactor complex. Do the math, if a reactor fails containment, the contaminants dwarf that of a bomb. I think Fukushima contaminants have tripled the radioactive cesium in the Pacific still left over from the 2000 bombs you mention. Nuclear is an outdated cold-war technology that won't compete with solar economically. They are slowly being phased out, down from 17% electric worldwide a few years ago to 10% now.

logicallee 13y ago

That is ridiculous. Let's say DWave was even better in what it actually produced, but even worse in its PR: it creates a true quantum cumputer proof of concept. But it is even worse at public relations and EVERYONE thinks that it is a scam with rigged demos. It has no credibility. Now I ask you: in this thought experiment, is nature going to fund your quantum company, because you actually kicked nature's ass and proved a true quantum computer in concept? No. You have to actually maintain real credibility, much as the space program did. Nature can't be fooled, but Nature also doesn't fund shit. Whether the government, VC's, or the people, only people fund people. Credibility is super important!

hobs 13y ago
I think you are not wrong for saying you need to convince the public for giant expenditures, but if all of those things are not doing as they pretend to be, people die and all credibility is lost anyway.
- dclara 13y ago
  This is a sad reality, different from the "reality" in the sentence. So I have to say: this is a sad fact. But I love that sentence. The nature cannot be fooled eventually.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]