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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 th

by 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...
  - maxharris 13y ago
    I don't think you understood my point at all. I'm not saying that any nuclear incident is minor, or that there will never be one again. A Chernobyl-style incident will never happen with a LWR reactor. That much is known, and the experts - nuclear engineers - are unanimous on this point. Feynman's point was, "when judging risk, ask the engineers that actually design and build the technology, not the management." The article I linked to (http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/RBMKvsLWR.html http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/RBMKvsLWR.html) was written by nuclear engineers (who were students at the time, but have been in their field for many years now). The article you linked to was written by ... a journalist that writes about the computer industry? Now I'm left with the idea that you have missed Feynman's point.
    - Spooky23 13y ago
      Chernobyl won't, but Fukushima may. You also have the key weaknesses associated with waste containment. I think we're unfortunate that nuclear power was built out in the 60s/70s. I'm sure we could build safer facilities today.
    - keithflower 13y ago
      You're right. I don't think I understand your point because I don't think you know what your point is. Are you trying to advance the theory that management had no hand in the terrible decision-making around TMI, including the numerous shortcuts that Cringely noted (nb: you are hardly using an engineering approach when you resort to ad hominem criticism of Cringely as a "journalist" without responding to any of the legitimate problems he noted). Or are you trying to advance the theory that no engineering mistakes were made at TMI? And are you trying to advance the theory here that somehow, magically, management will not continue to make NASA-like management mistakes in current and future nuclear facilities? Because if so, that's precisely Feynman's point, which you seem to be ignoring. And c'mon, you're merely moving goal-posts around when you focus on the severity of Chernobyl vs TMI. That isn't speaking at all to how technology was misused in both instances by people making exactly the kinds of errors Feynman emphasizes. > A Chernobyl-style incident will never happen with a LWR reactor [emphasis added]. That much is known, and the experts - nuclear engineers - are unanimous on this point [emphasis added]. Really? Never? Unanimous? That sounds like a really interesting engineering judgment. Could you kindly link to the unanimous consensus statement from nuclear engineers that support that strong but odd statement? Because that sounds an awful lot like NASA management who claimed that the chances of loss of a space shuttle were so remote as to be negligible. And your statement is even more curious when we read review papers like the one[1] from nuclear engineer Bah Sehgal[2] of the National Academy of Engineering, who concludes: "The presently-installed LWR plants in Western countries have been addressing their safety performance from the day they were installed and operating...Clearly, not all the severe accident issues have been resolved for the presently-installed plants [emphasis added]. "The presently-installed LWR plants made improvements in components, systems, operator training, man-machine interface, safety culture, etc., thereby significantly reducing the probability of a severe accident occurring. They also instituted severe accident management backfits, systems and procedures, which are providing assurance of the elimination of an uncontrolled and large release of radioactivity even in case a severe accident occurs. Still, the presently-installed plants can not provide assurance of coolability of a melt pool/debris bed, which could be formed during a bounding severe accident. In that situation, the LWR owner can not assure the public that the accident has been terminated and that there is no further danger of the release of radioactivity. [emphasis added]" Sorry. It is you with your pronouncements of never who is absolutely not getting Feynman's point whatsoever. In particular, he decried management and others with their own wishful pronouncements of never, which stood in stark contrast with the concerns of engineers who were well aware that there were quantifiable and real risks associated with their technology. [1] http://www.kns.org/jknsfile/v38/JK0380697.pdf http://www.kns.org/jknsfile/v38/JK0380697.pdf [2] https://www.nae.edu/69277.aspx https://www.nae.edu/69277.aspx
- Zigurd 13y ago
  "...a bad design, with a high failure rate" Once we have inherently safe reactors powered by safer fuels, we'll be dope-slapping ourselves about those pressurized water uranium reactors while saying those same words.
- makomk 13y ago
  You do realise this is exactly the attitude to safety that Feynman calls out as having lead to the Challenger disaster, right? There were zero deaths from space shuttle accidents until that happened, so NASA dismissed all the close calls and unexpected issues that were warning them it wasn't as safe as their predictions claimed. To quote Feynman, "When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next."
  - maxharris 13y ago
    Do the words "positive void coefficient" mean anything to you? RBMK and LWR are very different designs, with very different safety records. For details, read the article I linked to in the post above.
- philwelch 13y ago
  There were seventeen Apollo missions that flew (1 was cancelled due to a fatal ground accident so that leaves 2-17 plus the Apollo-Soyuz docking). There were no in-flight Shuttle fatalities in its first seventeen missions either.
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.

by marze 13y ago

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...
- maxharris 13y ago
  I don't think you understood my point at all. I'm not saying that any nuclear incident is minor, or that there will never be one again. A Chernobyl-style incident will never happen with a LWR reactor. That much is known, and the experts - nuclear engineers - are unanimous on this point. Feynman's point was, "when judging risk, ask the engineers that actually design and build the technology, not the management." The article I linked to (http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/RBMKvsLWR.html http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/RBMKvsLWR.html) was written by nuclear engineers (who were students at the time, but have been in their field for many years now). The article you linked to was written by ... a journalist that writes about the computer industry? Now I'm left with the idea that you have missed Feynman's point.
  - Spooky23 13y ago
    Chernobyl won't, but Fukushima may. You also have the key weaknesses associated with waste containment. I think we're unfortunate that nuclear power was built out in the 60s/70s. I'm sure we could build safer facilities today.
  - keithflower 13y ago
    You're right. I don't think I understand your point because I don't think you know what your point is. Are you trying to advance the theory that management had no hand in the terrible decision-making around TMI, including the numerous shortcuts that Cringely noted (nb: you are hardly using an engineering approach when you resort to ad hominem criticism of Cringely as a "journalist" without responding to any of the legitimate problems he noted). Or are you trying to advance the theory that no engineering mistakes were made at TMI? And are you trying to advance the theory here that somehow, magically, management will not continue to make NASA-like management mistakes in current and future nuclear facilities? Because if so, that's precisely Feynman's point, which you seem to be ignoring. And c'mon, you're merely moving goal-posts around when you focus on the severity of Chernobyl vs TMI. That isn't speaking at all to how technology was misused in both instances by people making exactly the kinds of errors Feynman emphasizes. > A Chernobyl-style incident will never happen with a LWR reactor [emphasis added]. That much is known, and the experts - nuclear engineers - are unanimous on this point [emphasis added]. Really? Never? Unanimous? That sounds like a really interesting engineering judgment. Could you kindly link to the unanimous consensus statement from nuclear engineers that support that strong but odd statement? Because that sounds an awful lot like NASA management who claimed that the chances of loss of a space shuttle were so remote as to be negligible. And your statement is even more curious when we read review papers like the one[1] from nuclear engineer Bah Sehgal[2] of the National Academy of Engineering, who concludes: "The presently-installed LWR plants in Western countries have been addressing their safety performance from the day they were installed and operating...Clearly, not all the severe accident issues have been resolved for the presently-installed plants [emphasis added]. "The presently-installed LWR plants made improvements in components, systems, operator training, man-machine interface, safety culture, etc., thereby significantly reducing the probability of a severe accident occurring. They also instituted severe accident management backfits, systems and procedures, which are providing assurance of the elimination of an uncontrolled and large release of radioactivity even in case a severe accident occurs. Still, the presently-installed plants can not provide assurance of coolability of a melt pool/debris bed, which could be formed during a bounding severe accident. In that situation, the LWR owner can not assure the public that the accident has been terminated and that there is no further danger of the release of radioactivity. [emphasis added]" Sorry. It is you with your pronouncements of never who is absolutely not getting Feynman's point whatsoever. In particular, he decried management and others with their own wishful pronouncements of never, which stood in stark contrast with the concerns of engineers who were well aware that there were quantifiable and real risks associated with their technology. [1] http://www.kns.org/jknsfile/v38/JK0380697.pdf http://www.kns.org/jknsfile/v38/JK0380697.pdf [2] https://www.nae.edu/69277.aspx https://www.nae.edu/69277.aspx
Zigurd 13y ago
"...a bad design, with a high failure rate" Once we have inherently safe reactors powered by safer fuels, we'll be dope-slapping ourselves about those pressurized water uranium reactors while saying those same words.
makomk 13y ago
You do realise this is exactly the attitude to safety that Feynman calls out as having lead to the Challenger disaster, right? There were zero deaths from space shuttle accidents until that happened, so NASA dismissed all the close calls and unexpected issues that were warning them it wasn't as safe as their predictions claimed. To quote Feynman, "When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next."
- maxharris 13y ago
  Do the words "positive void coefficient" mean anything to you? RBMK and LWR are very different designs, with very different safety records. For details, read the article I linked to in the post above.
philwelch 13y ago
There were seventeen Apollo missions that flew (1 was cancelled due to a fatal ground accident so that leaves 2-17 plus the Apollo-Soyuz docking). There were no in-flight Shuttle fatalities in its first seventeen missions either.

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.