Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding | Hacker News Reader

Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

fastcompany.com

436 pointssebkomianos322 comments

I've heard about this, but it is surprising how little coverage it gets compared to other things.

If you were to tally up how much airtime each news story gets, plotted against the general tone of the coverage, you'd probably come up with something resembling the news room agenda (you'd also have to weigh it against other stories developing at around the same time).

I have to wonder why a story of environmental disaster (and presumably, negligence) making a small town uninhabitable isn't being milked for every drop of sensation that can be mustered. I'd wager they're getting something better than ratings out of this.

Because the guilty party are ad buyers.

Don't think Norfolk Southern is a big ad buyer.

Berkshire Hathaway owns 14%, and BH definitely buys ads.

I'm pretty sure the only way I know their name is from their commercials on CNN, tbh

Because if the media starts covering it hard, way more than half the population of the US will plug their ears and start saying "LA LA LA LA LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" really loudly.

If this gets coverage, suddenly lots of inconvenient questions start popping up around monopoly, safety regulations and OSHA, and union workers warning about this 2 months ago.

But, hey, everybody got their Amazon packages by Christmas, so if a piece of shit town in Ohio has to pay the price that's just the way it goes, knowwhatimean?

> union workers warning about this 2 months ago

First I've heard that, got a reference?

Union negotiations shut down by Biden and Congress included safety reforms regarding car length and working hours. Both were factors in this derailment: https://www.rutgers.edu/news/why-did-government-step-prevent...

It would be nice when the dust settles to have a single bad actor to blame instead of systemic negligence, decades of inadequate maintenance or the like. Hopefully the investigation findings will reflect willingness to assign clear blame where it belongs.

No, the factor was a broken car axle.

It also included limits around the scheduling systems that are being used to overrun the infrastructure as well as maintenance requirements.

from another thread, https://time.com/6238361/joe-biden-rail-strike-illegal/

Can you quote the part where union leaders are warning about something in the way the grandparent describes? I’m not seeing it.

you're right, the other comment led me astray and i didn't check. it's just partisan trash. so to make up for it,

Wp starts its `background` analysis <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_...> with `The rise of precision scheduled railroading has resulted in resource and staffing cuts; to compensate railroad companies have enacted strict attendance policies for employees. These policies eliminate any free time which workers have, requiring them to be effectively on-call for weeks at a time. Workers have complained of increased levels of stress and fatigue.` The bulk of the argument is supported by this vice article <https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkp9m8/what-choice-do-i-have...> which is frankly horrifying. It's a bunch of quotes from train conductors talking about falling asleep, being tired, taking caffeine pills, etc. It ends with a 2020 derailment. "A BNSF TRAIN CARRYING OIL TANKERS DERAILED IN WASHINGTON STATE IN 2020. WORKERS ARE WORRIED MORE CRASHES LIKE THIS WILL OCCUR UNDER THE NEW ATTENDANCE POLICY."

Wp again "Unions representing about 17,000 workers threatened to strike over the points system, but BNSF Railway sued and won a restraining order to prevent the unions from striking. The Railway Labor Act grants Congress the authority to intervene in any railway or airline strike. Under this authority, the National Mediation Board has mediated negotiations between multiple freight railroads and unions starting in June 2021." and there's your crux.

then a bunch of back and forth happens, and then it ends with biden/congress/senate doing their thing. it seems like the gist of the forced solution was to raise salaries and some sick leave, but no other mitigations.

wp again, "Writing for Jacobin, Barry Eidlin, associate professor of sociology at McGill University, said the message sent to the rail workers by the president and Congress was "shut up and get back to work." The Biden administration's intervention in the dispute was condemned by over 500 labor historians in an open letter to Joe Biden and Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh."

I mean it's not a union leader but it is about train derailment in northeast ohio

https://twitter.com/SawyerHackett/status/1625295841769431046

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden...

It is pretty odd. One hopes the story will get picked up and disseminated more widely and create a necessity for authorities to react.

So far we have not heard from the secretary of transportation/

Biden has not bothered to shuffle himself over there to appease the population with platitudes about his deep interest in the safety of the population and worry for the environment and how he's going to hold those at fault "accountable" -che sera sera, as they say.

So far, crickets... but quite disconcerting is the apparent disinterest in the story by environmentalists.

> If you were to tally up how much airtime each news story gets, plotted against the general tone of the coverage, you'd probably come up with something resembling the news room agenda

It's not like it's subtle. There have been hundreds of Chinese weather balloon stories in the past week. Have there been hundreds of stories about this? US companies make money from stories about Chinese weather balloons. They lose money when horrific things like this happen.

There is a man who was shot twice (and grievously injured) in a robbery who is filing suit against the city of Chicago for its policy of breaking off high-speed chases (which have killed plenty of innocents in Chicago), arguing that they would have captured the perpetrator before they shot him if they had chased him during another incident. Local Chicago news is so determined to roll back recent reforms like ending cash bail and high speed chases in the city that we not only get multiple stories every day about the suit, we got multiple stories before the suit was filed about rumors and announcements that the suit was being filed.

> US companies make money from stories about Chinese weather balloons. They lose money when horrific things like this happen.

The carrier will lose money. But a news company would make money, wouldn't they? Bad news is good news after all, and environmental disasters are bad news.

Likely there is considerable overlap in ownership between the handful of railway companies that dominate the market and handful of media companies that dominate the market.

Plus advertisers (which could include chemical plants etc) are their clients.

> advertisers (which could include chemical plants etc) are their clients

The closest in the top 200 is Berkshire Hathaway [1], because they train. Also, this media hypothesis predicts Google, Pfizer, Amazon and Walmart are media darlings. (And that Apple is not.)

[1] https://advertisers.mediaradar.com/Top_Print_Advertisers

Trains derail all the time. It’s dog bites man, not man bites dog.

It isn't always "Chernobyl in Ohio", as locals are calling it. Although, that is becoming more common. If only the rail industry were regulated... maybe we need to dig up Teddy Roosevelt?

The rail industry is regulated. In certain ways over and in certain ways under. Eg, there's very little sense to the requirements a passenger train needs to reach to run on the same rails as freight, and Europe does it safely all the time.

Not so much a matter of safety as that it’s the freight railroads that own the rails, whereas is most of Europe the infrastructure is mostly government owned, or in some cases was and is now (sorta) privatized but still under a sort of open access model.

That's a different, orthogonal issue. Look it up there's a bunch of tedious FRA rules about crash-worthiness which Europe doesn't have. It makes the trains which can legally run needlessly expensive and they wear out the tracks faster. The rules don't apply to metros and subways, but if the tracks have any switch anywhere connecting to the national network then FRA rules apply to the whole system. The result is that planners can't extend their metro via shared freight corridors. There are plenty of regulations already, and in some cases they are clearly counterproductive. Proposing to solve things by putting more regs on the pile is a dubious proposition.

Do metros in the US even use the same gauge as trains? Here in Europe they're almost always smaller gauge so sharing isn't an option.

The exception here in Barcelona is Line 1 which is a wider gauge than all the other lines, for historical reasons though it doesn't share any tracks (but lays right beside the train ones at some stations)

It's all over the place. Probably standard gauge is most common, but there's tons of variation. For instance, the DC Metro is slighly (like a half inch) narrower than standard gauge, but SF BART is MUCH wider, something like 8 inches.

For the most part yes. Post below me named some exceptions, but in general the US has done a better job than Europe at standardizing rail gauges everywhere. New York runs at standard gauge, and that alone accounts for about 1/3 of all the metro rail on the continent.

Yeah Europe is a total mess. Signalling systems, rail gauges. True.

PS I didn't know the NYC metro was so big compared to the rest. Wow.

Gauge is basically irrelevant, as the signalling is entirely different between mainline and urban (ASFA/ETCS vs TrainGuard MT in the case you're mentioning, and I have no idea what the FGC uses). Also, urban is typically closed network where the infra and rolling stock are all under the control of the same entity, whereas in mainline that is generally not the case.

It isn't regulated in ways that matter. We're down to five Class I American freight railroads. (So we're not quite to Klobuchar's monopoly board... just wait!) Their networks overlap even less than one might think, so there is effectively no competition. Asshole billionaires like Warren Buffett aren't even trying to provide good service, because they figure they make more money burying the organizations under mountains of debt, which is why they have paid the Biden administration to crush their union employees. Over the last several decades, rail freight charges and derailments have exploded while the amount of freight shipped has actually dropped. That's one of the main reasons we have to contend with so many semi trucks on our highways.

In many industries, commercial competitors discover when regulators have shirked their duties. In the rail industry, with no effective competition, many theoretical regulations are not actually enforced. This problem has gotten worse over time.

Your concerns about Amtrak may be valid, but they are orthogonal to the topic at hand.

Your dismissal make the ops point. The train derailment is not the news the environmental disaster that is happening because of it is the news. But you only know about the train derailment not much about the environmental disaster which should have been milked for views by the media normally.

No, I know about it because I read it on the my times the day after it happened.

I think jingoistic China bashing pays better than putting the spotlight on America's various problems and shortcomings.

They did it in the 1970s and aside from brilliant Hollywood movies it wasn't a good decade for America. The less introspection the better as far as the media and political interests are concerned.

How is it jingoistic when China is flying warplanes over Taiwan and their media is now making claims the US has flown 10 balloons over their territory and supposedly were about to shoot down one of them and feign ignorance about the ones they sent over to us? Or are you saying both sides are being jingoistic?

A lot of these issues, unfortunately, exist because a huge chunk of Chicago media simply doesn't understand legal processes involved in criminal cases or even where to begin researching. It gets technical, quickly, and many of the reporters I know shy away from anything technically nuanced . That includes court reporters. So much of it has become political arbitrage, and policing/jailing institutions are well aware of the lack of understanding of their systems. It's beyond wild to me that many seasoned reporters out there who've been on these beats for years who don't even know how to answer fundamental questions through FOIA requests. It's understandable to a point because of the low pay in Chicago journalism, but it manifests as legitimate harm all over the place. I'm convinced we'll get there.

*Insert obligatory reference to “The Wire” here.*

Newsrooms have been hemorrhaging beat reporters with in-depth knowledge of esoterica in a given field since the World Wide Web first began its thorough disruption of one of its first victim industries. It’s been decades since local news outlets have had the sort of manpower and institutional knowledge and connections to report effectively on things like criminal justice, local government oversight, environmental protection, or healthcare (among others). All of the talent either seeks positions with national outlets, or otherwise becomes stretched thin covering too many assignments, across too many areas, plus they’re probably now responsible for getting their own art (photos/video/audio/literature/brand packs/etc.) and deadlines have only become tighter with the importance of getting the story out first exacerbating an already stuffed and horribly problematic editorial calendar.

So you’re right on all counts, and it’s sadly by design as local news increasingly falls into the hands of a precious few companies and investment firms, all of whom are eager to thoroughly wring out what little value remains in these hollowed and brittle organizations.

> Have there been hundreds of stories about this?

Chinese balloons are novel. This is not. It’s tragic. But its most memorable element seems to be the meta-debate around its coverage. That's boring.

I think the people in Ohio wondering if they're going to be in a Flint-like situation, WTF these chemicals the average person has never heard of are, and what's going to be done about it are all interesting subjects.

Alas, I haven't heard much about them from those knowledgeable enough to chime in on the subjects and I'd love to.

As for balloons, they got boring last week, other than some airspace closures that only pilots need worry about. China has always been spying on us, the methods might be new, but not the fact of it.

> the methods might be new, but not the fact of it

It’s a diplomatic escalation with global geopolitical ramifications. If you have any business or personal exposure to China, or anything in Southeast Asia, that’s directly relevant in a way lives in Ohio, unfortunately, are not.

Also, Ohio is out of immediate crisis. Now is the time for investigation and litigation. The train has derailed. Yet balloons may keep coming—that’s the drama one story has that the other lacks.

For that last part, some people are worried it might not be. I don't claim to know enough about it to say who is right, but the people there are understandably concerned about what to watch for and want more info. Some of that might be worrying too much, but hey, a train full of hazardous chemicals did just explode out there.

It's not like we can't point to a time when things were majorly screwed up in a way that didn't just go away quickly despite the news moving on (Flint says hello).

> some people are worried it might not be

Absolutely. But the problem is slow, silent and lurking in the dark. (It's also safely localized.)

I'm not saying this issue deserve eyeballs. Just that there is no evidence of a scheme to suppress. The cold, dark reality is most Americans aren't interested in the long-term health of a 5,000-strong Ohio town from an accident in which nobody died, for which there is no partisan bogeyman to blame.

Well, unless that cloud of chemical smoke becomes rain elsewhere, stuff seeps into the water, etc. That said, I've had some time to peruse some of the sources here and at least the nearby water treatment plants claim to be doing more testing, so there's that.

I'd still be more than a little concerned if I were nearby, though. And it doesn't usually take a partisan boogeyman to talk about better safety and prospects of environmental damage.

Part of the problem with that is usually exactly what you say: it really is too easy to ignore and it really shouldn't be.

> It's also safely localized

... It sure as fuck isn't. You need to get more news sources than CNN and the EPA.

>ohio is out of immediate crisis

Is it? Sounds like an environmental crisis with serious ramifications

Man, your priorities are totally inverted.

> The train has derailed. Yet balloons may keep coming

The balloons may keep coming - the environmental disasters are certain to keep coming.

I think it's simpler?

With the balloons you have someone to point to and pin the blame who is not you.

With derailments and the recent acrimonious railworker labor agreement still in the rearview, the blame can't be cast far away; so the play is to ignore it and hope it fades.

> the blame can't be cast far away

From whom? The implicit assumption in this is that the powers that ended the railroad strike are perfectly aligned with the media. Or that bipartisan Congressional idiocy doesn’t get called out in the press. There are loads of powerful people who would benefit if this became a story. They’re not because it’s a bad story for national interest. Nobody died. It’s getting cleaned up. It happened in Ohio.

Conservatives don't want to stir up anti-industry sentiments.

Progressives don't want to stir up anti-railroad sentiments.

It's not novel that a train derailed spilling toxic chemicals into a small town literally weeks after Congress forced a settlement on train workers who wanted to strike partly over safety concerns? On the facts it's frankly a huge scandal.

I think the coverage tells quite a different story though, namely distractions on external "enemies", like Chinese balloons, providing cover for corporate sponsors that fund the political parties and buy ads on the major networks. Unregulated capitalism at its finest.

> not novel that a train derailed spilling toxic chemicals into a small town literally weeks after Congress forced a settlement on train workers who wanted to strike partly over safety concerns?

No, it's not. Over a thousand trains derail every year [1][2]. We have superfund sites under millions of Americans [3] that even locals can sometimes barely muster a bother with.

We also have no evidence this derailment was caused by an issue the recent deal forced, e.g. unpaid sick time. (It could have been. That would be a story.) But in the meantime it's not novel unless you're into trains or from that region. Exhibit A of that is the most interesting thing we, on Hacker News, can find to discuss about it being the meta debate.

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/3539221-how-often-do-trains-der...

[2] https://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/OfficeofSafety/publicsite/Que...

[3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/superfund/

> Over a thousand trains derail every year

How many of them require a controlled burn of its content that forces nearby citizens to evacuate?

> We have superfund sites under millions of Americans

How many of them are a result of a derailed train?

Yes, separately those events aren't novel. Their intersection is.

You: "We are constantly fouling our environment in the most horrible ways, so there's no point in even thinking about it!"

> Over a thousand trains derail every year

How many of them are filled with toxic chemical substances that force the evacuation of a town?

WA state passed a law that says a cop cannot chase a suspect unless they committed a violent crime. This resulted in a surge of crimes where the suspect driver just flips off the police and drive off. Common crimes resulting from this:

1. catalytic converter thefts

2. thieves steal a car, ram it into a store, loot the store, drive off in another stolen car

Um if a person drives a car into an occupied structure with people is that not violent? If you drove into the police station the officers would say they feared for their lives and open fire.

Presumably they do it at night when nobody is around to be hurt. And hopefully nobody reports it to police in time.

You should enter the Olympics for those mental gymnastics.

Yes, that's exactly what they do.

Catalytic converter thefts are up across the country. Does it mean all other states passed similar laws too?

Or maybe there are other reasons, like their high value and relative ease to steal.

Those thefts surged after the "no chase" law went into effect.

Catalytic converter thefts surged in recent years elsewhere in the United States and also in the United Kingdom and France. Those places didn't get a new "no chase" law. Either the state of Washington has an unusual reach or there's a different explanation.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-64057742

https://www.tf1info.fr/justice-faits-divers/video-vols-votre...

Post hawk air go prompter hawk.

Thanks phonetical memory of television’s “The West Wing”!

And yet almost all the rest of the world has these rules, and we don't see crime waves.

To me, you're describing the incompetence of your police forces.

> thieves steal a car, ram it into a store,

This is really considered a non-violent crime in the US?

I live in a city where car chases would be impossible. And yet there are criminals here, and they have a higher apprehension rate than in the US.

If this crime happened here, they would use drones, helicopters and roadblocks. They get way ahead of the escaping criminal. The different police departments cooperate well here, so you can't just drive to another area.

Which is why, generally, criminals dump their car almost immediately and try to escape on foot.

It's most likely 3 different violent crimes according to FBI:

Definition. In the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses that involve force or threat of force.

Last week has been full of horrific earthquake news, with the balloon nonsense as light relief. Couple that with local authorities and the freight hauling corporation saying that everything is fine, and I'm not surprised it flew below most people's radar. I submitted a story about it on Saturday and hardly anyone was interested.

I don't take the US military getting spooked enough to finally use F-22s to actually shoot something down, and have those somethings be publicly unidentified, as "light relief".

All in all, seems extremely concerning to me.

I think it was political pressure at the end

>have to wonder why a story of environmental disaster (and presumably, negligence) making a small town uninhabitable isn't being milked for every drop of sensation that can be mustered.

Trains crash. Accidents happen. It's about as newsworthy as a severe thunderstorm. Sad for the people involved, but true nonetheless.

You can't really believe that brain-damaging chemicals in the air (and soil and water) is the same thing with lightnings in a severe thunderstorm!

>You can't really believe that brain-damaging chemicals in the air (and soil and water) is the same thing with lightnings in a severe thunderstorm!

To a news cycle it is. There will surely be longform thinkpieces, investigative journalism, and maybe a Peabody or two to come out of this in a year. But as far as national headlines, simply nobody cares about a train wreck with zero casualties somewhere in the midwest.

>>simply nobody

Mmm… I love sociopaths…

Let’s pump more CO2 into the air because simply nobody cares about the global South & it will make me a bit of money I can take a vacation with.

It’s not getting much play because that area is poor.

There have been regions of West Virginia that have had problems with potable tap water for years and it gets no press at all.

If Aspen, CO or East Hampton, NY had this kind of event there would be a national state of emergency and possibly a holiday added to the calendar. Never forget.

It's because Political-Corporate Environmentalism is not actually about helping the environment, it is about coopting the environmentalist movement to consolidate wealth and power.

Where those two things intersect is coincidental. Reducing greenhouse gas pollution might be a great thing, but the ruling class sure isn't counting on that effort costing them any money. So if they can't see a way to make money or win votes by pushing this train derailment story they won't.

Unsurprising. Even the love canal disaster in the US faced massive disinterest before it was quietly revealed to have been a cataclysmic environmental contamination. It boils down to this:

- rail fired a ton of employees a while ago and is now seeing serious issues due to mismanagement

- government oversight is a moderate Republican masquerading as a liberal democrat and just wants the clout from successful negotiations but the concep of most government oversight in the US is hold music at best.

- this city does not threaten harm or inconvenience elites.

- reporting this issue harms and threatens elites and could see a ripple effect during a recession. Rail is a primium mobile for most of wealths investments at some level.

Also add on that the rail workers tried to strike over the issues and Biden was like "lol nope"

It's just capitalism being capitalism in the end

For all of you who down vote:

https://time.com/6238361/joe-biden-rail-strike-illegal/

> Biden decided the broader economy was a bigger priority than 100,000 freight rail workers having any paid sick leave in their next contract. After campaigning as the most pro-union presidential candidate in history, Biden signed into law a measure that makes a rail strike illegal.

Forcing it like that is not capitalism.

...Sounds like a great opportunity for everyone to resign simultaneously.

Sure be a pity if you couldn't find enough people to hire to do all that train work needing to be done. Not a strike if everyone just says "Fuck it" and leaves.

It would be catharthic but they might have children and mortgages

Set up a gofundme. I'll donate.

The greatest trick capitalism ever pulled is convincing people that it's not a form of government.

That's exactly the thing, get people to hyper focus on the individual and they miss the forest for the trees.

Among its greatest modern hits is “gofundme.com”. Crowdsourcing social policy! It’s the New New Deal—-we took everything great about helping the unfortunate, but without any of the pesky oversight, collective participation, democratic processes, or predictability of your grandparents New Deal. Welcome to the Welfare State II - The Reapportioning! This new social fabric is fresh, capricious, and heavily favors those who bring an existing marketing and outreach apparatus…y’know, the needy people with a solid PR firm.

Public school teacher can’t afford treatment for their cancer? Go Fund Them! Favorite politician indicted for criminal fraud and campaign finance violations for paying for their previous indictment’s legal fees using campaign donations? Go Fund Them! Local dive bar threatened with closure unless they install flushable toilets in the restrooms? Go Fund Them! Single mother of three facing another night in the cold without enough to eat? Our thoughts go out to them, maybe if their mother can pass a urine screen and remain at a single address long enough to fill out the requisite forms and has successfully completed their probation on that loitering charge then they might get a few bucks from Uncle Sam…you never know, because with Go Fund Me anything is possible!

Quibble: "uninterest". "Disinterest" means "impartiality". Disinterest is good.

I can't quibble with any of the rest of your argument, though.

I've often wished for something that I'm calling (in my fiction) The Ministry of Indices.

It would be their job to rank things. Things like media coverage. We could turn to the MoI and see that this chemical spill got a 4 and then compare with other events.

Sure, it's subjective all the way down. People will always quibble about the outputs of services like that. But having a number that some expert (statistician?) or organization thereof came up--even if you disagree with them--with would make for more nuanced conversation and decision making around that thing.

IIRC there's a few articles on 538 that do some crude-but-objective analysis like this.

I wonder about who is pushing narratives about this vs. the balloons in an attempt to distract the public, but I can explain why the derailment isn't much of a story.

It's because it's being handled fairly well. There is a cloud of smoke that's scaring people, but it's "ordinary" smoke. There's no environmental apocalypse that's going to make that town "uninhabitable". There will be after effects from everything associated with an industrial accident, including economic and legal repercussions, but the actual accident is being managed.

People seem very ignorant of the science involved with the situation and very accepting of conspiracy narratives, which is unfortunately no surprise given the last 6 years in this country.

There are various reports of animals in the area getting sick or dying in unnatural ways, so that is unsettling. And there's also the incident where a journalist who was trying to cover the incident was arrested. So it doesn't seem like it is being handled well, imo.

Lots of discussion is occurring on Twitter, so people seem interested. The news coverage of it just seems superficial. Like, it's not zero, but they seem to be doing the bare minimum on a story where lots of people want answers. Give us the journalism so we can hold people accountable instead of spinning up conspiracies.

The conspiracies serve to help the parties at fault.

You must be joking.

> It's because it's being handled fairly well.

Even if that were true, which is debatable, it should be a huge scandal that this happened at all literally weeks after rail workers tried to strike over safety issues and were forced back to work, and that Obama required train brakes to be upgraded, then softened the requirements after corporate pushback, which Trump then repealed and Biden failed to reverse. There is a lot to say on this topic and no one in the mainstream is saying it.

I agree that that is where the attention should be - on the rail system.

>I've heard about this, but it is surprising how little coverage it gets compared to other things.

Probably because the most current, most related story is about how Biden + Congress just recently killed a rail worker strike. And the complicit media isn't going anywhere near that: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden...

They're covering it as "averting a strike" as if that's a good thing to make striking illegal.

Instead of speculating about what the tally might look like and making assumptions based on your guesses maybe you should get real data to validate your hypothesis?

Imagine you’re a reporter, do you want to rush down to the toxic accident nobody is correctly accessing or containing? Didn’t think so.

If anyone has insider information about this train derailment, and the decision to set it alight, or the political background (or any of the other three train derailments this week), you should contact James O'Keefe at project... oh, er, never mind.

I think it falls outside what the average viewer understands well, so it's hard to get that visceral emotional response. We're talking chemicals outside the average lexicon, which are then burned and turned into other weird chemicals, which may or may not affect the water table (and the water table itself is not commonly understood or referenced).

I just don't think there's a good hook here. The topic is complicated, the people impacted aren't a minority, so there just isn't a good single-sentence headline to drive outrage.

April 2022 a locomotive engineer wrote an open letter to the STB about the dangers of Precision Scheduled Railroad trains that are so long radio communication doesn’t even reach both ends.

A lot of armchair experts on here wrote him off when it was posted to hn.

I worked with a former locomotive engineer at the time who echoed the concerns reported here. He left the industry after about 10 years because of the grueling schedule and conditions.

It is interesting and alarming how it is essentially an open secret among industry workers that trains are run such that they are always in an elevated risk of derailment and danger.

https://www.railwayage.com/regulatory/it-is-getting-worse-pe...

>April 2022 a locomotive engineer wrote an open letter to the STB about the dangers of Precision Scheduled Railroad trains that are so long radio communication doesn’t even reach both ends.

It's not just purely length. A long train can easily have mountains in between the ends.

These trains are over 3 miles long. This is to amortise the overhead of staffing? The locomotives and their cost scale linearly with the train, but the engineers do not?

that's part of it but not the main reason. the main reason is that if you make the cargo train too big to fit into the pull off on single tracked rail, then passenger trains have to yield to the cargo trains.

I have a grudging admiration for the sociopath that came up with that solution. Still, it has an easy fix: make it illegal to run a train that does not fit into the pull off.

LeMegantic should have been a wakeup but nope... Gotta make a few extra bucks for the hedgies

Lac Megantic.

Thank you.

Yeah, this is why it was "impossible" to give railroad workers sick leave. It would be incompatible with PSR, and scrapping PSR would mean gasp lower short-term profits for shareholders!

Frankly getting tired of hearing about how I haven't heard about it, and nobody wants me to hear about it. If you want to write about news, write about it. If you want to point out instances of news media not covering this story where they might have covered other stories go for it, cite instances. All I've been convinced of so far is some people have an axe to grind, and part of their narrative is how the media or the government doesn't want me to know about a thing I know about.

edit: please downvote my trash, the same as this article. Go find better reporting on this event to shove in front of everybody's eyeballs. (post title has since changed, see article for relevance)

Then maybe this isn't about you, specifically?

How are the mainstream media dealing with it?

> How are the mainstream media dealing with it?

Apparently CNN reported on this 8 days ago[0] (when it happened). Fox is running coverage live as we speak[1]. If there is any evidence of a cover-up, it has yet to be presented.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/05/us/east-palestine-ohio-train-...

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-train-derailment-prompts-wat...

So the live coverage from Fox is 8 days late, right?

no, it's 8 contiguous days of coverage.

Thanks for the correction!

Fox has reports on it from a few days ago too: https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/ohio-mayor-norfolk-sou...

It's more likely that nobody really cared about this until it went viral on Twitter and TikTok, when people felt a social obligation to show support. It's not bad to recognize the issue, but our willingness to shoot the messenger has prevented us from being able to learn anything in the first place. How many people would have learned about this sooner if they watched the "mainstream media" they so vehemently claim is covering it up?

I don't really care either way, it's just food for thought.

Thanks for the reply!

May I ask why "you don't care", though?

Mostly because of the Flint thing in my other comment, but also because I spent an inordinate amount of my childhood on 4chan listening to people peddle their own coverup theories.

So, it's not the actual disaster that you don't care about but the "you have not heard about this" part of the news?

The disaster is terrible, but I'm completely ambivalent towards the "underground" narrative and overall response to the story.

Other apathetic here. There's a certain amount of background cosmic dice rolls and related instances of suffering all the time. Plane crashes, house fires, robberies, lottery winners etc. Its all just noise. Like a log of lightening strikes. There's nothing interesting to be learned looking at individual instances, and those instances don't really affect your life. The next illogical step in the process is to figure out who or what to blame, but why? You think if they nailed this derailment down to a single thing that went wrong this time, there would never be any more derailment accidents? If the answer is no, then why care so much about where to pin blame?

Derailments of this type have been increasing a lot over the past few years due to premature automation of rail lines and increased length of freight trains. Ultimately this is a story about cutting costs at the expense of lives and the environment.

https://railroads.dot.gov/accident-and-incident-reporting/tr...

My take is that the world is a massive place with countless atrocities and bad things happening. It is impossible for a single human to actually "care" for all these issues besides sweet nothings "thoughts and prayers" and maybe a donation of a 100$.

Instead, I orient myself to my local circle, strata, whatever you want to call it to something I can care for and manage. I recently funded a few tickets for my local highschool for a science trip for instance. I give money to a local shelter I like to stop by and say hey to. I do a lot of things for a circle I've deemed mine to care about.

So it sounds mean or rude not to care, but it's what everyone is doing. No one just wants to admit it. Champion a few causes that you can handle and let your taxes take care of what you can't.

Nothing on the NY Times front page as 11:09 EST 02-13-2023

> How are the mainstream media dealing with it?

https://abcnews.go.com/US/toxic-chemicals-train-derailed-ohi...

The person who wrote this article doesn't owe you anything. And they certainly didn't beg you to read this.

If they want to make false claims and not back them up then my two-cents is more than they deserve. This article does nothing to reinforce the headline. It's just a clickbait summary that leads to myself and others flaming the article rather than the kind of discussion that's worthwhile on HN.

This feels like a reply in bad faith. The point that the parent comment is making is that the title of the article isn't convincing, it's just making a provocative statement with no backing.

Tinfoil hat spin: the “no one is talking about it” angle is being propagated by foreign psy-ops as a distraction from the balloon stories. The “look, we found balloons too” angle floated like a lead aerostat.

The general population pays closer attention to the derailment story because a cover-up is intimated by a “grassroots” perspective, and the balloon story floats away into thin air.

Pretty sure this is a way fucking bigger deal than a bunch of balloons.

I say this earnestly: I trust that the military has interest in making sure our national security is protected. I don't harbor suspicions of intentional negligence with these balloons.

I totally believe that our civilian federal government and executive agencies have no capacity to deal with massive environmental crises like the one in Ohio, or Flint, or in CA with PG&E or many other places. Our system is too weak, and the companies too powerful, the problems too costly to be dealt with without significant pushback.

The companies have progressively made the system weak through lobbying and regulatory capture

Because literally nobody cares about the balloons aside from the laughingstock the US military became after they let the first one float across the entire United States before finally shooting it down.

Not sure if true but I read that we couldn't shoot it down where it was. It was in an odd elevation, too high for some equipment, too low for others.

Supposedly we shot it down after it lost elevation on the coast.

These chemicals will have a major impact on the environment and people around the wreckage. People in the town are already reporting illness.

People 1.5 miles away from the wreck are having their dogs die in their yard while letting them out to pee.

The balloon is just bullshit, but this isn't.

It should also be noted that they just fixed the train tracks and just covered up the spill, instead of doing a proper cleanup.

The issue is that PSR trains have been resulting in these crashes for a while. If you want to look at the data for yourself: https://railroads.dot.gov/accident-and-incident-reporting/tr... Select "Class 1 Railroad". That's nearly half a billion dollars in damage since 2018 to ecosystems and small towns that are hamstrung on dollar amounts like that. The fact that you're just hearing about this kind of stuff is the problem that people are trying to communicate.

The problems that underly these kinds of PSR accidents aren't lost on people either. PSR trains were a way of scaling down an industry of people. That's to say, it's a labor movement problem; more cynically put, mutli-billion dollar companies are passing their error rates off on ecosystems and relatively unwealthy areas. It's not some tin-foil hat secret that American media generally does not cover these kinds of areas or things.

Instead of responding in rage, respond in empathy, or you could use the old tactic of just ignoring it until it goes away. It's not like you'll suffer social penalties for any of those options; after all, you just did the ASCII version of dropping trou in response to outrage over a social and ecological crisis and suffered zero penalties.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34772687

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34759611

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34676114

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34762965

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34770772

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783940

“You’ve not heard about it”

The previous HN comments were also filled with “the media is not covering this!”. With the HN post linking to the Guardian and the top comment I saw at the time being a link to the NYTimes.

There may be legitimate arguments about whether it should get more coverage relative to other news, but it isn’t a conspiracy. It’s simple. People don’t want read/hear about this stuff in the US and US news, unfortunately, is a completely eyeball driven enterprise.

I searched for this. There are 4 pieces in the NYTimes alone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/train-derailment-fire-...

https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000008756189/ohio-train-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/us/ohio-derailment-chemic...

https://www.nytimes.com/article/ohio-train-derailment.html?s...

So people keep pointing to NYTimes stories, but I go on the Time's site at least 2-3 times daily, spread throughout the day, and I still have not seen a single story on the Time's main page. I'm not going to call it "front page" now because there are around ~130 stories there. Not one of those 130 stories there currently cover this. Ctr-F "train", "Ohio", "Palestine" etc.

In those 130 articles there are the Wirecutter reviews for kettles, "The Man Who Caught Marilyn Monroe’s Skirt on Film," "Where #VanLife meets #SkiBum," the size of the surf waves, etc etc etc, but nothing on the train derailment.

Have these articles been showing up on the main page and I keep missing them? Or are they permanently buried in the "US News" section where I'm sure only a small fraction of Times digital readers ever turn to?

To my understanding, a huge portion of NYT works on algorithms. "Not enough hits on the news? Probably others don't either, so no need to put on front page" kinda scenario. Which, I kinda understand. The other news are more... engaging. Balloons, super bowl, thousands of people dying from another environmental catastrophe in Turkey and etc. are more engaging in daily discussions, so other stories simply get buried.

I definitely saw in the top headlines on NYTimes.com. Wouldn't be surprised if different layouts are served. The reviews and lifestyle/art definitely fell underneath the news of the train.

That basically shows a lack of interest from readers. The NYTimes publishes a newspaper worth of articles and opinion pieces daily. And then they add a whole bunch of videos, cooking stuff, reviews (wire cutter), sports (athletic) online.

Most of it gets surfaced largely by algorithm. And it’s evident the algorithm is not tracking any interest from readers.

“Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio issued an urgent evacuation notice on Sunday night to more than 500 people who had previously declined to leave their homes and were within a one-mile radius of the derailment site.”

I searched for this

That's the point.

I would argue this is getting covered exactly the amount it should. Because everyone seems to know about it, and no one who thinks it should be covered more seems to have anything to add to it.

i personally want whoopi goldberg to go over the shipping manifest <https://epaosc.org/sites/15933/files/TRAIN%2032N%20-%20EAST%...> during her day time show, and eli5 to her listeners what those various substances are, what their short and long term effect on the environment are, and specifically the effects on the various ohio river tributaries where EPA has already detected some of the contaminants. i know that's too much to ask, so a passing mention would be good enough. i /suspect/ people who think it should be covered more find the situation to be horrendous enough to warrant that kind of media reaction.

She should also mention the names of top executives at the company, the names of relevant officials, and how to contact all of them.

Sure but here's the problem: all of those chemicals are biodegradable. Most information about what is happening is basically "there was a large release of a non-environmentally persistent contaminant" which just plain isn't going to hit the fears right for people.

Vinyl chloride doesn't hang around[1]: nothing with an ethene-double bond is going to be good for you if you ingest it, but it's not stable because that's why it's used: UV light and most biological processes will degrade it very quickly.

Would you want to bathe in it? No. You also wouldn't want to be near a really large, concentrated release but it's not perfluorocarbon, nor heavy metal.

Which is to say, you could go look these things up right now - this information is not even slightly secret. But it is both a serious situation, and one that isn't what the "why isn't this being covered" people want it to look like.

[1] https://semspub.epa.gov/work/05/437069.pdf

It's also on top of reddit for like 3rd day with very psy-opsy title

22 hours ago - 217 comments

2 days ago - 1 comments

7 day ago - 0 comments

1 day ago - 0 comments

9 hours ago - 291 comments

This event happened February 3rd.

11 DAYS AGO. Thanks for proving OPs point.

Oh, in fact, I have heard of it, and all the coverage I've heard is people grimly telling me about how horrible it is and how no one is covering how terribly horrible it is.

What I haven't seen is any actual reporting. You know, talking to an expert, someone who has any actual knowledge about what steps are being taken, what the threat is, what steps should be taken but aren't, etc.

But hey, those ominous black clouds sure make for good clickbait.

I submitted this the other day and it has abundant context: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/norfolk-southern-giving-25-00...

> What I haven't seen is any actual reporting. You know, talking to an expert, someone who has any actual knowledge about what steps are being taken, what the threat is, what steps should be taken but aren't, etc.

https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-de...

> “I think it was not in the best interest of human health and welfare and the environment to simply cover it up and keep going without at least a preliminary evaluation to determine if the level of vinyl chloride that was present in the soil was going to create a potential contamination threat to surface or groundwater,” said Dr. Julie Weatherington-Rice who has a Ph.D. in soil science and has been working for Bennett & Williams Environmental Consultants since 1986.

> Weatherington-Rice said it’s possible vinyl chloride can travel through the ground as rain and precipitation move through the soil. It then has the potential to reach groundwater and eventually hit well fields.

> “It’s not a question of whether it’s going to be an issue, it will be an issue, the question is how bad of an issue is it gonna be, where is it gonna go, and how long is it gonna take to get there, and what’s gonna happen when it gets there,” Weatherington-Rice said.

https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-de...

> “We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open,” said Sil Caggiano, a hazardous materials specialist.

> Caggiano says ethylhexyl acrylate is especially worrisome. He says it’s a carcinogen and contact with it can cause burning and irritation in the skin and eyes. Breathing it in can irritate the nose and throat and cause coughing and shortness of breath.

> Isobutylene is also known to cause dizziness and drowsiness when inhaled.

> “I was surprised when they quickly told the people they can go back home, but then said if they feel like they want their homes tested they can have them tested. I would’ve far rather they did all the testing,” Caggiano said.

> Caggiano says it’s possible some of these chemicals could still be present in homes and on objects until you clean them thoroughly.

> “There’s a lot of what ifs, and we’re going to be looking at this thing 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the line and wondering, ‘Gee, cancer clusters could pop up, you know, well water could go bad,” Caggiano said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/residents-ohio-tr...

> Andrew Whelton, a professor of environmental and ecological engineering at Purdue University, said it's possible the burn created additional compounds the EPA might not be testing for.

> "When they combusted the materials, they created other chemicals. The question is what did they create?" he said.

Note that cover up in some context refers to literally covering pools of chemicals with the new rail line without doing a proper decontamination in order to get the line open again.

https://www.nytimes.com/article/ohio-train-derailment.html?s...

To those in the meta talking about how people are talking about this: congratulations on being extremely online.

As of now:

https://www.cnn.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 0 results / 'trump' 2 results)

https://www.foxnews.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 1 result / 'trump' 2 results)

https://www.nytimes.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 0 results / 'trump' 4 results)

https://www.msnbc.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 2 results / 'trump' 9 results!)

It almost feels like the bots are out in force to gaslight us. I’ve seen very little coverage of the topic and didn’t find out about it until several days after it happened, and yet almost every single comment on these threads is “everyone knows, shut up already, oh look ufo/drumpf/football”.

Evidently this briefly hit the mass tv news cycle then went silent... This deserves wide scale attention... Pollution and toxic destruction needs to trigger a commensurate fine both for clean up and punitive damages sufficient to motivate big business to proactively avoid these events

Looks like media has been told to drop this story... Or even worse to self censor anything outside it's allowed news topic criteria

What media? I saw it on CNN today. Fox News's website has multiple stories about this from the last hour.

The only place where the train stuff seems underrepresented is on some of the big subreddits (which are echo chambers already, so not surprising)

> today

> last hour

It happened a week and a half ago, so...

They have been covering it the entire time.

Right. If they're STILL running multiple stories per hour after all this time, it must be a big deal, right? Seems to contradict the narrative that the media is now trying to hide what happened.

> is now trying to hide

The story seems to be blowing up now, after people were saying last week it wasn't getting much attention.

It's hilarious watching the 3 threads on HN surrounding this topic.

First had one brand new account uttering psyop nonstop with zero evidence. All their posts were flagged before the story went from front page to gone in 2secs.

The second one had several accounts saying the exact same message, in the exact format and wording as the first. And a few extras with similar but clearly different people. Also went from front page to nowhere in 2secs.

This being the third I noticed is absolutely full of these opinions. Which are entirely conspiracy theories.

If a group of activists choose this story as their attack vector, so be it. Clearly it is interesting enough to keep on fire. There's also a lot of unanswered questions and nobody has been held to any sort of account.

Maybe if we jail an executive for this we will stop seeing it.

It's just one executive, who cares.

I'm hearing contradictory theories in this thread. Either that the media initially reported on the train derailment and then was forced to stop following up. Or that the media initially tried to cover up the derailment and then gave up and started reporting on it.

Do both of these competing theories have traction? If so, why?

> and then was forced to

There is no contradiction in your two understandings, but a possible small misunderstanding in your second one.

What seems to have happened was, media was slow on the uptake (there were some stories last week, but nothing like there is now), and also it is/was getting suppressed or the severity downplayed due to external factors (for example that reporter who was arrested).

And the chemicals are going to leech into crops and well water for decades.

It's another https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-decepti...

> The only place where the train stuff seems underrepresented is on some of the big subreddits (which are echo chambers already, so not surprising)

Huh? https://www.reddit.com/r/news/search/?q=ohio&include_over_18...

If you open your eyes you can see more clearly. This story has been covered extensively

You can lose your job for supporting Harry Potter but if your policies derail a train and force 500 people to evacuate (which is an offence to free movement btw) you are safe.

The coverage isn't the issue. It's the lack of accountability being talked about.

>Pollution and toxic destruction needs to trigger a commensurate fine both for clean up and punitive damages sufficient to motivate big business to proactively avoid these events

It's going to dump into the Ohio river and spread this over the planet, just like C-8.

Less than a month after Biden made it illegal for rail workers to strike.

No political party taking corporate money is your friend.

My priors: I've lived in (chemically toxic) Silicon Valley for decades near a long-term Superfund site created by a long-gone semiconductor facility. I'm also a former Midwestener who understands the importance of the Ohio River ecosystem.

In my personal sense of current importance, balloons over North American, maybe all from China, get my news and political attention since it could have both personal and global impact.

So at this point, I don't blame the Democratic Party or capitalism or various media although I recognize they aren't my friends either.

I may change my mind in a month, course, if events prove catastrophic. Or if I eventually develop cancer because semiconductors.

Apologies to the fine citizens of Ohio. And thanks ChickenNugger for the opportunity to think about the situation.

I would worry far more about local unrest than a "spy" balloon you could see with your eyes. Especially from SV.

Some of the best reporting on this with actual data is coming from social media (as usual), versus from official sources. Here is someone reviewing the manifest of chemicals and number of spilled train cars: https://www.tiktok.com/@nickdrom/video/7199486059212868910

So this train was carrying all of these various chemicals, but it wasn't classified as a High-Hazard Flammable Train?

Talk to your local train union guys sometime. That’s basically normal

Here's some data from the federal EPA (what they're measuring and where and what the numbers are),

https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=1593... ("East Palestine Train Derailment")

This is what I was looking for, thank you.

Lost in the profoundly unhelpful debate between "no one has heard of this" and "well I have" are the actual conditions in the community and whether the concentrations of either the initially released compound or the byproducts of the "controlled burn" are high enough to cause effects in humans. From the EPA link:

> Feb. 13, 2023 Update

Re-Entry air screenings are underway. Community air monitoring will continue operating 24 hours a day. As of yesterday evening, 291 homes have been screened. To date, no detections of vinyl chloride or hydrogen chloride were identified for the completed screened homes. There are 181 homes that remain to be screened.

Good news, to be sure, though this is only the very beginning of the process.

This is too confusing for me to parse:

https://response.epa.gov/sites/15933/files/East%20Palestine%...

Why is almost every number in sample column #2 and #3 exactly 100 times greater than in column #1? Aren't they all [μg/L]?

There's a section on page 3 ("petroleum products") that's labelled as being both μg/L and mg/L.

So the government investigates a big disaster caused in part by their actions and everything is within normal levels. A lot of time the same regulators will say the water is fine when brown stuff is coming out of the faucet.

This was posted to reddit the other day: https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/110nlai/...

The footage has a lot of NSFW language, so just watch out for that. Within that thread there's some good discussion about some of the compounds that are being released into the air, and it is indeed very grim.

Interestingly here in Australia, I've heard about it a lot more in traditional media than my American friends seem to be hearing.

God, that footage is grim. Every railroader I know (BNSF & UP) has been super vocal about the working conditions for years. I know a guy who left his engineer position with the BN just due to how much the schedule sucks, this guy took a ~50% pay cut simply because the schedule and working conditions are so bad. All of this is preventable, but the railroads would rather chase higher profits and cut down on salary expenses.

> but the railroads would rather chase higher profits and cut down on salary expenses.

All companies will do that. The reason rail companies can do this so ruthlessly and recklessly is complete lack of competition and exceedingly generous industry deregulation.

This footage is of regular clouds, despite the breathless commentary in the video. Details here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/110nlai/...

The derailment is, no doubt, a serious public health crisis. However, it helps no-one to spread misleading videos and commentary.

The wave of panic in the thread you posted is a stark example of "fake news" in action. A sign of the times, I suppose.

Pictures of the plume from a distance don't look much better, it may be cloudy but this is no stormcloud:

https://www.wfmj.com/story/48362031/fifth-negligence-suit-wo...

https://twitter.com/Justice314Lady/status/162347826755341107...

Its sad, it really is. The word of the conductor vs manager on how far to push it. Ultimately management has to accept the blame. Where was the Atlas robot(s) to do to pump & hose work for the possibly exploding tanks? But, odds are the phosgene & HCL killed the animals & that is not a long term problem. If the Ohio EPA gets any the settlement money out of this it would be better off going towards a frack water processing facility to handle all the radioactive slush going into the injection wells & winter road "salt" in that area that makes the whole Australian find the pellet story quaint.

Eerily similar to the recent Netflix movie "White Noise": https://www.netflix.com/title/81317320

I can't stop thinking about this.

It's kinda sad how the best way to get attention for serious environmental policy issues these days is to make a screwball comedy starring some Hollywood heavy hitters playing against type.

More than eerily, it's where the crash in that film was staged.

https://decider.com/2023/02/13/train-derailment-ohio-same-to...

> Last week, in an instance of life imitating art (or vice-versa), a train carrying harmful chemicals derailed in the very same town used as filming location for White Noise‘s on-screen crash.

> One resident, Ben Ratner, had the crazy experience of not only having to evacuate his own home this week, but also acted out the scenario earlier as an extra in White Noise.

A thread from Mastodon, with a few pictures: https://oldbytes.space/@swordsjew@mstdn.social/1098487070662...

> now megatoxins are Chernobyling Ohio and there's a news blackout and the police are beating reporters and camera people and dragging em

Unless this poster can supply some corroborating information, or perhaps a scientific definition of "megatoxin," this is more noise than signal.

> The local police blew it up like a beached whale, now megatoxins are Chernobyling Ohio and there's a news blackout and the police are beating reporters and camera people and dragging em

This is simply a set of lies.

It's a lot of hyperbole, but yes, a reporter was knocked to the ground and handcuffed face-down and dragged out of a press conference because he continued to quietly speak into his camera as the governor started speaking...at the opposite end of a gymnasium. He was trying to wrap things up and wasn't given the chance.

https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/local/ohio/reporter-arrest...

https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/reporter-arrested-du...

etc.

I'm sure, of course, that the police reaction had nothing whatsoever to do with his ethnicity. /s

Does the NTSB look into train derailments? Would be interesting to see whether the systems engineering for trains hauling large quantities of industrial chemicals is on par with that of airlines. If not, it probably should be.

There are defect detectors on rail lines, "hot box" detectors [1] [2], that are infrared detectors used to observe and report bearing failures on a train. My understanding of the situation is that with the current rail labor configuration, railroad workers are only permitted ~90 seconds to verify the operational capacity of the wheelset on a rail car vs a previous average of 3 minutes.

Also, more importantly, someone at a railroad indicated "crews are no longer notified of the defects. The dispatch makes that call and then notifies the crew", which means train operators might not even be aware they have a dangerous car in operation (and the data indicates a bearing can fail outright within minutes of being observed as being "hot" [3]).

High level, this is a result of "Precision Railroading" [4], which is just a fancy term of running a railroad with just enough labor to continue to operate. Congress voted to prevent union railroad labor from striking [5], so what actions take place after this incident remain to be seen. The Purpose Of The System Is What It Does [6], and as designed, this system is configured to extract billions of dollars in profits from rail freight operations [7] while avoiding liability for any damages caused or labor costs that can be avoided.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defect_detector

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_box

[3] https://doi.org/10.1080/23248378.2019.1636721

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_railroading

[5] https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/business/railway-labor-act-fr...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

[7] https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/24/business/union-pacific-railro...

Additional context:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/toxic-chemicals-train-derailed-ohi... (There were more toxic chemicals on train that derailed in Ohio than originally reported, data shows)

This isn't too far from me. Curious to hear thoughts from folks with deeper backgrounds in chemistry than I have (high school).

The two "helpful" byproducts of vinyl chloride burning like that is HF and phosgene. The wind is going to spread those rapidly.

I'm doubtful on the HF since it's not vinyl fluoride. More likely HCl. Likely, there's some phosgene, though I've read that in large fires that mostly get's burned up. Of course there's CO. The liquid remnants are carcinogenic.

https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=10699...

https://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/2001.pdf

There’s not nearly enough F in the air to create HF. Where does the fluorine come from? It’s like 5ppb in the air.

It doesn't... there is none. Any reporting that says there is likely is confused about other stuff too. I'm open to finding out there was a tank of Fluorine (now that's hazardous cargo!) in a nearby car, but it just sounds like gibberish from here.

HF? Vinyl chloride does not contain fluorine. It would be HCl instead, which is a naturally occurring mineral acid. The acid rain is going to be a disaster in the short term, but it's not that bad. Phosgene is fairly toxic when inhaled from at a significant concentration, but also dissipates and doesn't stay that long in the atmosphere.

Indeed, VC is associated with much longer lasting chemicals that cause similar damage. VC comparatively lasts very little even in the ground.

One of the chemicals that is produced by burning this delicious cocktail is Phosgene Gas ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosgene ) which among its numerous delightful uses is a nerve agent

No, not a nerve agent. It was used as a "poison gas" in World War I, but it's not a "nerve gas". It will still kill you very effectively, but not by poisoning your nerves.

Ah, got it. Still certainly not something you want to be throwing into the air above towns.

I’d like to hear what the actual consequences of these leaks and subsequent combustion are without the alarmism (which, even if warranted, doesn’t need to be in every actual explanation of what’s going on!)

Right now, I see the EPA saying ‘it’s okay to return to the area’ (not ‘everything is fine’), and alarmist commentators listing chemical names and saying ‘this is bad’ and ‘Bhopal’ with no actual explanation of the mechanisms of ‘bad’.

I don’t know what the truth is. I’d _like_ to be able to believe the EPA rather than random internet commentators.

I posted some things on Reddit about it, but I'll summarize here.

There are a lot of alarmist people posting about how they're sure the town is "uninhabitable" and that it's being "covered up".

The truth is that the people handling the derailment and fire made some very tough calls to avoid an explosion that might have leveled half that town or exposed hundreds to thousands of people to a carcinogenic chemical.

They chose to burn off the chemicals to avoid the explosion. People are scared by the dark cloud and by the smells, and that's understandable.

But the burning does seem to have eliminated much of the chemicals on site, and none of the air testing that's being done to look for combustion products or gaseous Vinyl Chloride is finding any. There are pictures of people walking near the destroyed railroad cars now, with no hazmat suits.

Vinyl Chloride has a half life in the atmosphere of about 20 hours. It decomposes into CO, CO2, HCl and trace Phosgene (a tiny fraction of a percent). Any Vinyl Chloride Monomer released into the air or soil will be decomposing into acid (once the HCl mixes with atmospheric water) and that acid will have a somewhat higher (weaker) pH than household vinegar.

At least with regard to the Vinyl Chloride monomer tanks, the authorities seem to have done the right thing. If they managed to burn off the other tanks, those chemicals create even fewer toxic combustion products - carbon monoxide is basically it.

The dark cloud is probably coming from all the other stuff that burned or partly combusted due to that very hot fire... paint on the rail cars, plastics in the box cars, whatever else was in the box cars, railroad ties that caught on fire, and chemicals outgassed from nearby objects exposed to that amount of heat. It's probably not something you'd want to breathe, but it's also not the "cloud of death" that's being clamored about by the conspiritards.

Both the air test reports and the pictures of people without masks walking on the site now show that it's likely the burn off achieved the desired effect. Within a few days the dark clouds will dissipate like any other smoke, and people will finally calm down.

It's still an awful situation for anyone whose home got covered in smoke or whose animals died due to the derailment or fire, but it's not an apocalypse.

This is fine but we can't have nuclear reactors.

"Nuclear powerplants take too long to built, if we start building them now, it'll take around 10 years to get them to produce power, and by then we'll have better alternatives!"

(this is what they were telling me in the 90s.... and 2000s... and 2010s... and are still telling me now...)

Or maybe neither are fine and we should stop making unnecessary shit?

Do you think reducing our reliance on burning fossil fuels is "unnecessary"? Because that can't be done without nuclear power

It's neither necessary nor sufficient. Nor is it even a good strategy.

There’s a couple just a few miles down the road from this derailment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Valley_Nuclear_Power_...

And fun fact, this is also where the worlds first civilian nuclear power plant was built.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Atomic_Power_St...

Would you prefer that the people in charge of this rail line operate a nuclear power plant?

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/02/the-ohio-train-...

> Yesterday, DeWine added it’s “very understandable” that residents might want their homes tested before reentering. The state says Norfolk Southern must pay for the cleanup costs, and that “the burden is upon them to assure the public that what they do everyday is safe.”

What a shitty thing to say given that the public has no direct way to deny them what they do if they don't deem it safe.

"Investigations are expensive and we will not show them the slightest mercy in asking the suspect to run their own."

I'm curious what I'm supposed to be hearing about? If we know details, I'd love to hear them. If it is finger pointing and blaming... I'll wait for an investigation.

If there has to be news coverage nonstop to get said investigation, go for it.

Holy crap. Is this a real life version of the film White Noise[0]?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(2022_film)

Never heard about this in the past 1.5 hours...

It’s funny how much coverage rich people in jets get, but this destructions of the lives of tens of thousands from an environmental catastrophe gets very little media coverage and outrage.

This should never have happened and tens of thousands will die from the after effects. It’s disgusting.

On my mainstream media outlet of choice, I’m pretty sure there has been a front page headline about the derailment at least half of the days since it occurred. This “quietly” “they don’t want you to know” meme is just bullshit superiority cynicism and/or clickbait.

Did they mention the president's recent strikebreaking? https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden...

I'm guessing they didn't.

The story here is less about the train and more about the lack of response. Which is why it took a while to get where it is.

People said it was unsafe.

Officials disagreed.

Proof is provided.

Nobody has pie on their face.

The story is about a lack of pie.

"Hey, that's Ohio, that's a quarter!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf0XU_3DlKQ

If this had happened in the USSR, we would have blamed it on an an irretrievably broken economic system and an utterly corrupt political system. So how about that USA huh.

I sure have heard a lot about how I haven't heard about it.

I saw pictures on reddit and was surprised I haven’t seem more coverage of it in major news outlets

This really should be part of the EPA doing an honest and thorough scientific investigation.

I see a million tweets on Twitter about this story that "I haven't heard of."

You are able to consume and digest millions of tweets? You are a wonder!

Let's not forget the dozens of Reddit posts that have made it to the front page of /r/all

This might be hard to believe, some people don't use reddit or twitter! You bet your ass I still heard about balloons, though.

This might be hard to believe, but if events are at the top of the most used social media sites, it’d be pretty ignorant to think awareness is isolated in any way to social media. You’d have to have been living under a rock to not have heard of these derailments last week.

And yet, many people are talking about how no one is talking about it, presumably because the news didn't reach below the rock they are apparently living under. Funny that.

Or, much more likely, they're mindlessly parroting "no one is talking about it" because headlines say "no one is talking about it" to drum up discussion and controversy.

Okay man, you know best.

I explained to my sister that this was "Bhopal[1]" level bad and she didn't believe me because "If it was that bad the news would be covering it." Sigh.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

How is it Bhopal-level bad, exactly? An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 deaths occurred in Bhopal. How many have died in Ohio so far?

Not saying it's not tragic, or that it's not outrageous, but reckless exaggeration doesn't help.

Bhopal was probably an order of magnitude 'worse' than this.

At least two.

actually 3-4 ORDERS of magnitude worse

Say two people were to eventually die here. Bhopal: 20,000. That's literally 4 orders of magnitude worse. And nobody has died or been seriously injured yet, so even that is premature.

Being chicken-little is not helpful. The next stage is being "boy who cried wolf". OP: Let's keep things in at least a little balance.

So I didnt know what to compare for the orders of magnitude.

Like you said, by death it's more than 4 (since as far as i know no one has died yet).

But by affected area, toxicity normalized mass of spill, amount of ground water affected, etc, I don't know how they compare. And a cursory search showed it would be hard to get clean data.

But any way you slice it, you're right. Two orders of mag is not enough. Bohpal was such a tragedy :(

Let's compare-

Bhopal: 2000-8000 estimated deaths within 2 weeks of disaster

2023 Ohio train derailment: 0 estimated deaths within 10 days of disaster

I definitely see why it's appealing to exaggerate something that has been under-reported, and it's popular to do, but I don't think it's a winning strategy.

I think the max number of people will listen if the severity of events is portrayed in context. People mistrust the media for sensationalism and are looking for better ways to understand the world more accurately.

>2023 Ohio train derailment: 0 estimated deaths within 10 days of disaster

And if it causes cancer for four generations? No big deal? We're 10 days out and they just poisoned a region that has a history of it, again: https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-decepti...

It's weird to me that so many people in this thread are downplaying it. As someone with family niblings in Ohio and WV downstream from East Palestine, I'm very interested.

To the question: "How could it be that bad?"

Here is my reasoning:

Poly Vinyl Chloride is exceptionally toxic, the plume from this event is east of New Palestine into Pennsylvania based on radar data from both news stations and the National weather service.

Health effects of exposure are dramatic at high levels (death), and delayed at low levels (cancers) (so there is both initial health impact and "long tail" impact).

Between East Palestine and Enor Valley are a bunch of farms.

That suggests to me a number of ways for the PVC to impact the people in that area. Presumably the EPA will establish some monitoring but I haven't been able to find anything from the EPA yet that discusses that.

And FWIW I hope I'm incorrect and we don't see a serious public health crisis associated with this event.

Correction: this is Vinyl Chloride (VC), a precursor to (and much, much worse than) Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) (side note: I've mostly been hearing that PVC is largely inert and relatively fine, as part of the clarifications around vinyl chloride).

I'd have run away fast and not come back.

> you've not heard about it

False. I have heard about it.

This is going to sound exceptionally crass…

But as somebody who’s from the outright poorest part of Ohio, with generations of coal workers in the family… I’m sitting here, in the West Coast sun, laughing about this. I’ve also spent significant amounts of time in the general region of this disaster

It’s awful. The situation is absolutely awful, that town & everything in a radius around it is genuinely fucked, and from what I’ve heard but not completely personally confirmed, it’s already contaminating downstream into the Ohio river.

But. I don’t know what to say. Other than… these people have been voting against their best interests. Their entire damn lives. How can you possibly have any wake-up call for a populace so deep into hatred & corporate bootlicking. There is none. That generation simply has to die out, and I very truly hope that most of their children are able to make it out to greener pastures & receive some form of education that may lead them to stop voting for the absolute sociopaths that peddle policies making large-scale environmental disasters a possibility.

I unfortunately have the personal experience of knowing not very many people get the opportunities to GTFO this area into greener pastures. I don’t know what to feel other than deep & genuine sadness - there’s absolutely nothing I can do to help the fact, & now that I’m a couple thousand miles away, I just delusionally hope that things are getting better while I’m gone.

But, again. I do not know what to say. For decades, so many of these people have voted for those that pass laws to make corporations not even slightly accountable & strike down reforms aiming to regulate these industries - regulate so that they’re forced to take up safety measures so shit like this cannot happen

Spewing outright hatred & death threats to their fellow countrymen who try to tell them there may be a path to a better life, the ability to make meaningful change.

They got what was coming to them. I don’t know how many this catastrophe will wake up to the fact they’ve been swindled all this time, that the political party they’ve sworn their lives to have already sold their souls for pennies on the dollar, so long ago.

Some of them, a few I’ve already personally seen, will have the realization. But it’s far too late. The damage is done, and they will die before they ever see a better community - politicians that care for their well being. I can only hope they have the humility to tell the younger people they know that they were dead wrong, & that the politicians they’ve been voting for as long as they’ve been able have sold out their entire livelihoods for the most meager amounts of $USD

Appalachia is such an unfortunate place - so beautiful, but abandoned by modern first world society. (okay, northern ohio is technically slightly out of Appalachia proper - GOMD)

/endddrunkrant

"I’m sitting here, in the West Coast sun, laughing about this. "

Myself, I'll try not to laugh when millions of people stupid enough to live on the San Andreas fault line relocate into the ocean overnight. Out of a misplaced sense of unrequited empathy.

Rural Ohio is my home, and I will one day come back if I have the money to make meaningful change amongst its downtrodden & underprivileged, or if they’ve managed to sort things for the better themselves.

I’m currently living the life of an absolute pauper on the West Coast - I could have magnitudes of a much nicer living back home

But, You can’t reason with unreasonable people, which is what the majority of rural Ohio is. So why would I want to continue to live amongst their unrelenting self-inflicted misery?

I can’t control the fault lines in the West, as the Indians whose remains were buried in mounds around my home property couldn’t control the invading & murderous Europeans.

But - my peers, to at least some degree, could control who they vote into representation that make decisions regarding these disastrous policies that lead to a near literal salting of our earth. And they’ve always chose the worst people, mostly for nefarious or hateful reasons (if you disagree with this statement, and you didn’t spend decades of your life growing up amongst these folk - you’re arguing something you’re ignorant of)

If I could vote, on the West Coast, to send aid for these environmental catastrophes in the MidWest from either our state funds in the form of $, or just in skilled recovery workers - I would. The majority of those I’ve found to be my peers would as well, as would many of the neighbors I don’t have much acquaintance with - their public voting records tell enough.

I can however tell you with near certainty those I grew up around would not vote to assist the West Coast when we eventually have our big quake.

If you want to speak of empathy, feel free to start there.

The federal conditions that bring about the rail lines as they are today have more voting influence from California than they do from Ohio.

The greater Los Angeles metro area is home to more than 20 million people.

We have 2 senators.

Please tell me the population of the entire MidWest & also how many senators they have.

Anyways, getting overtly political at this point- will excuse myself from further discussion.

You said 'vote' 4 times and spoke about politics and rebuke about getting overtly political when I rebut? That's classic friend.

California has 55 electoral votes in the presidential election and 52 seats in the house. That's something like 3x Ohio for each. The rail lines are overwhelmingly dictated by federal law and influence and not by relatively miniscule number of folks in rural Ohio. Your statements in that context are quite frankly absolutely baffling.

it would make sense for you, a midwest defector, to be willing to make concessions for your birthplace, but i don't think you speak for the coastal america. on the other hand the minstrel show midwesterns that you selected to represent the entire region wouldn't have any connection to the west coast, if not feel outright hostility. the hostility might have more to do with cultural and political divide that you yourself is expressing, than it does with the midwestern capacity for compassion. i am a total outsider to the region, but i've seen about as many church mission trips to help the needy as i've met ngo activists in cities, which necessarily makes for a much larger proportion of people.

Are you serious? “They got what was coming to them” — wow…

You’re living in what sounds like it’s one of the highest cost of living regions in the world laughing at the misfortune of innocent people who don’t have the option to just pickup and move.

If you’ve lived in this area, you would know how “stuck” most people are. The cost of living and wages don’t provide most people the option to do a whole lot more than make a living. Even if they can leave, they have families/friends/communities.

This is also not too far from where individuals have been fighting very hard for worker’s rights for a long time. The UAW against the auto factories. A generation of coal miners who migrated from KY and WV.

You claim you’re from one of the poorest areas in Ohio but are laughing from the West Coast. I signed in just to respond to you because this is one of the most sociopathic things I’ve heard. Have some sympathy.

I'm also from Appalachia. But just across the river in WV.

>from what I’ve heard but not completely personally confirmed, it’s already contaminating downstream into the Ohio river.

As someone who grew up in the town both The Devil We Know (Documentary on Netflix) and Dark Waters (loosely based on real events) are about - and the bizarre fillings to prove it - when it was happening to the people living there, this is sadly normal.

>But. I don’t know what to say. Other than… these people have been voting against their best interests. Their entire damn lives.

This is such a patronizing thing to say. Especially given this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34635291

>How can you possibly have any wake-up call for a populace so deep into hatred & corporate bootlicking.

The other side would accuse their opponents of...exactly the same things. The boots are just Big Tech flavored. And the hatred is based on ignorance, as it usually is.

>They got what was coming to them. I don’t know how many this catastrophe will wake up to the fact they’ve been swindled all this time, that the political party they’ve sworn their lives to have already sold their souls for pennies on the dollar, so long ago.

Which political party is that? The recent strikebreaking was led by Biden, which would make the party you're talking about the Democrats:

>So on Friday morning, after three years of failed negotiations, President Biden instead signed into law a measure that imposes the contract agreement brokered by his administration back in September

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden...

>But, again. I do not know what to say. For decades, so many of these people have voted for those that pass laws to make corporations not even slightly accountable & strike down reforms aiming to regulate these industries - regulate so that they’re forced to take up safety measures so shit like this cannot happen

Again, the recent strikebreaking wasn't the party you're obviously implying.

>The damage is done, and they will die before they ever see a better community - politicians that care for their well being.

Outside of Bernie, and maybe the Pauls, I'm not sure those exist.

And you accuse them of hatred? You should re-read what you've written when you've sobered up, methinks.

>Appalachia is such an unfortunate place - so beautiful, but abandoned by modern first world society. (okay, northern ohio is technically slightly out of Appalachia proper - GOMD)

Appalachia goes all the way up into NY state, homie. Much of Ohio along the eponymous river is just Appalachia with a big river in it. And the mountains are older than Saturn's rings(!).

>that the politicians they’ve been voting for as long as they’ve been able have sold out their entire livelihoods for the most meager amounts of $USD

So we've correctly identified the problem as politicians that don't serve their constituents interests. What do we do about it? I suggest uncapping the number of members of the House. Let's see a country where people actually know their Congrescritter. Like it was supposed to be.

>> Appalachia goes all the way up into NY state, homie.

Given the fact you’ve presumed I’m not able to make factual assertions about geographically bounded regions, I’m not going to give the effort to seriously read the rest of your reply.

Northern Ohio is not Appalachia, outside of one eastern most county.

Southern-Eastern Ohio mostly is.

Oh, yeah - if you’re right over the river, 20 years of my life is right next to you & I’ve had many a trip to the Parkersburg mall in my youth :)

Perhaps you know the route towards your river crossing I had to take that is a few strung out miles of completely crumbling mobile homes & the smell of natural gas/sulfur that stings your nostrils when rolling down your car windows.

IIRC there is even a small, many decades rusted over & tree vined carnival/amusement park type thing with a little rollercoaster that you pass on the way to the toll bridge. Can only imagine that was some day a fun place, now it stinks of gas & sulfur runoff.

Thankfully I was lucky enough to not grow up in that exact zone. Cannot imagine the cognitive deficits a childhood of breathing that in causes.

I was trying to be emotionally inclusive, not sarcastic. "Homie" was what we called people when being nice where and when I grew up. It's disappointing that this is the only point you focused on.

>Perhaps you know the route towards your river crossing I have to take that is a few strung out miles of completely crumbling mobile homes & the smell of natural gas/sulfur that stings your nostrils when rolling down your car windows.

Yes, it's called generational poverty. I escaped by going deeply into debt to pay for a degree from a good school. Many in the area have big stars on their house indicating a military enlistee. I'm not sure what point you're driving at here.

>Thankfully I was lucky enough to not grow up in that exact zone. Cannot imagine the cognitive deficits a childhood of breathing that in causes.

...

Plus when Joe Biden cancelled Keystone XL pipeline he forced more oil to be transported by train. Which could also be another factor in this accident.

I do wonder if that's one reason the media isn't eager to cover this.

Keystole XL was halted to "save" the endangered species, you can't make this shit up. The animals need us to use the most dangerous and least efficient methods possible.

  On April 15, 2020, District Judge Brian Morris issued a suspension for the pipeline's construction after the plaintiffs, the Northern Plains Resource Council, alleged the project was improperly reauthorised back in 2017.[94][95] In the summary judgment, the judge agreed that the Endangered Species Act was violated, thereby voiding the permit.

I disagree, politics is changing for the better in Appalachia. See for example Senator J. D. Vance

One conspiracy theory floating around is that the UFO shoot downs came at a fortuitous time to keep this chemical spill off the front page.

Yes, and it's being mostly spread by people who are fixated on conspiracies.

A very convenient line of reasoning for the conspirators ;)

What would a legitimate cover up conspiracy actually look like?

Your comment itself is a conspiracy theory though.

Conspeption

In a world where the Ukraine war ended Covid, balloons in the sky can certainly keep environmental catastrophes off the front page.

Preach, brother.

It’s very interesting that news media can only handle one story at a time. I always thought they could do like 3-4 stories. Guess not.

I got to know, do the pro nuclear crowd really want to live down wind of a nuclear power plant when they will be run by the same business processes and deregulation that lead to this disaster, Fukushima, the BP oil rig disaster, etc?

I got to know, do the pro coal crowd really want to live down wind of a coal power plant when they will be run by the same business processes and deregulation that lead to this disaster, Fukushima, the BP oil rig disaster, etc?

Coal is dying on it's own, the free market has decided.

I have zero problem living down wind of solar panels and wind turbines

Coal is only "dying" in areas with access to cheap natural gas. It's currently not being replaced by renewables. Developing countries still build a lot of coal plants.

Total global electricity generation from coal has nearly doubled since year 2000. In absolute terms the amount of new coal based electricity from coal increased by almost 5TWh from 2000 to 2021, about twice as much as wind+solar combined. (Also natural gas based electricity grew by 3.5TWh in the same period).

As long as Russia is being sanctioned and Canada refuses to export their NG, I expect coal to continue to grow.

Maybe someday in the future, wind+solar can provide stable electricity supply without relying on fossil fuels for the non-windy cloudy days (and nights). Like nuclear has been able to since the 70s.

Nobody knows exactly when, though. But simply based on the mining capacity of critical minerals, it's really unlikely to happen within 20 years at a large scale. The world is simply not planning enough mines.

The 'pro nuclear' crowd that say idiotic shit like this are the pro coal crowd.

I think something like 20% of electricity in the US currently comes from nuclear. It's an extremely safe source of power - proven out over decades. So, yes, it's perfectly safe to live near a nuclear power plant.

I live and work within sight of the vapor plume from a major nuclear station. Visited the station (admittedly, the visitor side of the control center nowhere near the reactor) as a schoolkid. Living here doesn't worry me, and I really think we should be developing more nuclear power.

They don't. They don't believe the nuclear reactors will be built (especially when there's 20 years to sabotage them), just that diverting the money that is going into renewables is better for their coal shares.

I would much rather live next door to a nuclear plant than almost any other type of large scale power plant, including wind and hydro (assuming I was downstream to the hydro).

Being afraid of a nuclear plant is like being afraid of flying.

In fact, flying is way, way more dangerous. Even if you ONLY consider radiation exposure, a few hours in a plane per year will eclipse the increase in exposure the average person living next to a nuclear plant will receive.

And what makes it so safe the tech or the government regulations?

The government regulations that were in place in 1970, combined with the tech from that time, makes most western style reactors, even from back then, incredibly safe.

More recent tech makes it even easier to achieve safety, which would have made it even cheaper, had it not been for the excessive regulations (and other forms of red tape) that have been added since then.

> More recent tech makes it even easier to achieve safety, which would have made it even cheaper, had it not been for the excessive regulations (and other forms of red tape) that have been added since then.

Does that mean you believe there is too much regulations for nuclear power? That would also mean you would want to see less regulations?

Yes, and yes.

Specifically, I would prefer if all energy types were regulated according to the same principles when it came to risk/harm tolerance, emission rates, etc.

If a coal plant is allowed to emit X Bq/GWh, every other plant types should have the same limit.

Or even better, if you add all polutants together, one should calculate total expected harm (in terms of X * deaths/GWh + Y * disease/GWh + Z * Global Warming contribution, or something) and either set a ceiling on total harm, or add a tax on each power plant based on total expected harm caused.

This wouldn't necessarily mean that the regulations would be written using fewer words, but it would/should lead to an optimal balance between cost of energy and the harm caused.

The current system seems to lead to both harm and price levels that are much higher than they need to be.

I find this absolutely fascinating with in the context of this article and the deregulation that has contributed to this environmental disaster. We keep having to deal the consequences of deregulation/less safety as path to more profit and fact there are people actively who want this for nuclear power is mind-blowing to me.

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