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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

I've been pro-nuclear for a long time, though the Fukushima disaster changed my mind a little.

What shocked me more than anything about the accident, is that when things go horribly wrong with Nuclear, we literally have no plan. We have no way of getting inside to stop things getting worse, or to contain what has already happened. We literally stood around watching, waiting, to see what would happen. When the highly contaminated water flowed into the ocean, the response was "where else did you think it would go?".

I'm aware that new reactor designs mean things going that badly is very unlikely in the future, but I still think it's scary we can build a machine with such immense power, and it can get to a point where we just stand back and watch it go bad.

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> when things go horribly wrong with Nuclear, we literally have no plan.

What was your reaction when the Deepwater Horizon spill happened? We had no real plan then, either. And the aggregate impact of that incident was arguably larger than that of Fukushima. (For example, the "highly contaminated water" released into the ocean from Fukushima is probably going to do a lot less ecological damage than the oil released by Deepwater Horizon. The contaminated water will just get diluted to the point where it's indistinguishable from other ocean water. The oil, not so much.)

> we can build a machine with such immense power, and it can get to a point where we just stand back and watch it go bad.

First of all, a nuclear reactor that produces 1 Gw of electricity doesn't have any more "immense power" than a coal, oil, or natural gas plant that produces the same electrical power output.

Second, we have every right to insist that, before a nuclear reactor gets built, we have a contingency plan in case something goes wrong. But, to be fair, we should insist on that for all sources of energy. Want to drill for oil? What's your contingency plan if there's a leak in the well? As I commented to someone else upthread, nuclear power appears to be the only energy technology where everyone focuses on the worst case; other energy sources seem to get what amounts to a free pass in this regard.

> First of all, a nuclear reactor that produces 1 Gw of electricity doesn't have any more "immense power" than a coal, oil, or natural gas plant that produces the same electrical power output.

Stop putting those control rods in there and see how much energy it will generate.....

> Stop putting those control rods in there and see how much energy it will generate.....

Which is not what happened at Fukushima, or TMI, or even Chernobyl, so it's irrelevant. You might as well say, stop metering fuel into that natural gas plant and light it off all at once and see how much energy it will generate. If we are going to restrict ourselves to energy sources that can't possibly be misused, we won't have any energy sources at all. Even solar can be made to do damage if it's focused.

I think Fukushima, and various investigations and revelations it inspired, showed how the problems are more social than technical.

Nuclear power plants produce a lot of power very cheaply for many years. But companies can't help but push the boundaries to boost profits, extending plant life past spec and skimping on maintenance and safety measures, with just a bit of regulatory capture to smooth the process.

I'm still pro-nuclear. We just need to follow through on the regulation. Maybe we can start by not being so damn secretive about nuclear stuff. Anyway, we have to build new ones to take on the capacity so we can shut down old ones. Which means we can't be so scared of building them, since not building them is what's unsafe.

Also the Japanese culture is too deferent to authority to really trust that the safeguards are in place. There was not one, but TWO completely failed safeguards that caused Fukushima. Both were reported and went unfixed for over a decade because of top down pressure. This would never happen in Canada. Someone would whistle blow to the government or the press.

Fukushima was caused by a Mw 9.0 earthquake / tsunami which cased over 15,000 deaths, in a 1st world country with the world's best earthquake mitigation. The meltdown was caused by an absolutely huge disaster.

The contamination might kill a few hundred, and has resulted in an exclusion zone.

IMO, the biggest problem with nuclear is how unacceptable disasters are. One old reactors built in high risk zone has a little meltdown, and the entire world freaks out over it. This is a major practical impediment to nuclear - you won't get costs getting driven down (for better or worse), because people see the risk as completely taboo.

It's like people worrying about tall buildings, because of 9/11. There's always risks.

> and has resulted in an exclusion zone

And how many of those can we afford to have in the world?

How much liquid contaminated waste can we put into the ocean?

How often do we get 9.0 earthquake + tsunamis? I'm sure the earth and humanity would be much better off if every nuclear reactor was hit by one of these then the catastrophic damage caused by global warming.

How many countries can afford to feed their population when their farmlands have turned to arid deserts and their coastal cities are all underwater? Just look at all the recent super storms and California's drought. Compare that to fukushima. And this is only the beginning. Global warming is the threat you should be worried about.

> if every nuclear reactor was hit by one of these

I don't know, if Iowa and Nebraska got hit by a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, I would be pretty fucking terrified.

ha. To clarify my point. The end game of a runaway greenhouse effect is far more terrifying than thousands of nuclear accidents. Sure the local effects of a melt down are scary, but it takes the worst earthquake in the Japan's history to cause that kind of disaster on an obsolete, ancient reactor.

Every generation of reactor get safer. Even if they weren't, we learn from every accident. Fukushima could have been prevented. In fact, Onagawa a nearly identical reactor under similar circumstances was spared by the heroic efforts of its operators.[1]

[1] http://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant-...

How much pollution and c02 can we put into the atmosphere? The total effects of pollution and c02 i would say are worse than the occasional meltdown. It's just that meltdowns are so much more high profile so everyone notices and freaks out. (Definitely not saying meltdowns are good though)

Well, the world is a big place, and the exclusion zones are pretty small.

The ocean can take a lot of contimination. Obviously nobody wants that, but a tiny bit of somewhat radioactive water is going to dilute quite substantially.

> How much liquid contaminated waste can we put into the ocean?

A lot. The Wikipedia article [1] quotes a flow rate of 400 tons per day. Let's suppose that that flow rate was maintained for 30 years, a typical reactor lifetime (which is far longer than anyone is claiming a flow of contaminated waste from Fukushima). That comes to 400 * 365 * 30 = 438,000 tons of contaminated water, or 4.4 x 10^8 kg.

According to the Physics Factbook, the mass of water in Earth's oceans is about 1.3 x 10^21 kg. So 30 years' worth of contaminated water from Fukushima amounts to about 0.3 parts per trillion of contaminated water in Earth's oceans. That's not even comparable to naturally occurring trace radioactive elements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Rad... [2] http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/AvijeetDut.shtml

That is of course what the safest way of disposing nuclear waste would be : disperse it sufficiently, and spread it everywhere. That is, after all, what nature has been doing for billions of years, and it doesn't bother anyone because we evolved under background radiation levels. Accumulation is what makes these things dangerous, and what do we do ? We put them all together, behind a thin layer of metal, guaranteeing that a localized problem bad enough to pierce a 3mm layer of metal and a dozen centimeters of concrete becomes a complete catastrophe.

But good luck defending that one politically, no matter how much you've got physics on your side.

>the Fukushima disaster changed my mind a little.

This is what I don't understand. The earthquake and tsunami that caused Fukushima's problems killed 20,000 people, and created an almost unimaginable amount of devastation. No one has died from Fukushima's radiation, and no one is expected to die. How horrible would the disaster have to be for a 1,000 people to have died from radiation? Would there have been 1,000,000 other deaths?

> I still think it's scary we can build a machine with such immense power

...this nails it on the head. It seems like most of the thoughts about nuclear power seems to be in the category of "we've created something unnatural, and we're worried that we'll anger the gods, and they'll release the invisible evil spirits as punishment". Not that I'm saying that we shouldn't have to take aspect of human nature into account.

http://myths.e2bn.org/mythsandlegends/textonly562-pandoras-b...

Perhaps it'd help if more people were familiar with the natural nuclear reactor that ran in Africa a billion years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...

We have no plan for cars hitting each other at highway speeds either. We just send out the fire and police to mop up and look for survivors. Every day, around the world, more people are killed and injured in vehicles than the entire history of nuclear accidents. Over time, better road and car design has reduced this toll, but physics can only be overcome to a limited extent.

What is important is that we be proactive. Nuclear plants are reaching end of life, and will either be replaced with more nuclear or replaced with coal. Those are the choices. Coal mining kills more people than nuclear ever has.

Life is risky. By all means make sane decisions on risk but the current policy of sitting on our hands and hoping for a miracle is just wrong. Replace old plants with better designed, safer, new plants.

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