Comment by delinka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delinka | Hacker News Reader

I digress thus:

I am two minds on the subject of nuclear power. But the "ain't so safe" side tends to win out because humans make mistakes. We put all the failsafes in place, we put up seawalls, we presume to know that the walls will never be breached at the same time too many other failsafes have indeed failed. When one valve doesn't function and no one knows because that monitoring system was down for maintenance and the automatic switch for the backup generator got a little too rusty and that maintenance guy hadn't reached that item on his checklist and then the hurricane sweeps too much water inside the infallible seawall...

We seem to hit the "too much shit failed at once" lottery too often. In hindsight, these things may or should have been preventable. But that's after meltdown and contamination and global panic ... This is why nuclear energy is unpopular. And it will remain so as long as failures have the slightest chance of contaminating so much of our world.

I completely agree with you. On western style reactors I think we should be removing a lot of unnecessary safe guards and educate the public on what actually happens in the case of a western designed, pressurized water reactor meltdown. What happens is practically nothing but fear and panic. Chernobyl was a very dangerous design. Fukushima was not.

No one died from radiation exposure from fukushimas meltdown and no one was going to die. Radiation exposure is very hard for the public and even educated people to understand. Releases of radioactive materials from a meltdown like Fukushima are barely above normal radioactive background noise and simply will not cause the devastation people believe it will. The most recent numbers I saw were that in the next 20 years, 4 out of every 100,000 in the area around Fukushima were likely to contract a form of cancer when as it was 40,000 out of every 100,000 were already going to get some form of cancer.

This modeling is also based on the Linear No Threshold (LNT) theorem which is patently wrong. Aside: LNT states that if 100% of people die at a high radiation exposure then, linearly, at 1% of that exposure, 1% of people will die. This is false. It is equivalent to saying that since 100 out of 100 people die from falling from 100ft up then at least 1 out of a 100 people will die from falling from 1ft.

Radiation is just not the monster it's made out to be.

What happens in a meltdown in a pressurized water reactor is the fuel turns to a solid mass with enough decay heat that it's still hot. It ruins the plant, yes. It's a economic loss, yes. But as far as I'm concerned, if it's not dispersed into the atmosphere then it's not an issue and it won't be dispersed into the atmosphere because it won't light on fire. Not in a design like Fukushima or three mile island.

Regarding your last paragraph, there was and possibly is still a risk that the spent rods stored in the cooling ponds at Fukushima could overheat and catch fire. They only just managed to pump enough seawater over them to prevent this happening.

Your post is so wrong that it is almost trolling. Just some counterexamples.

The Fukushima Mark-1 reactors are of very dangerous design, and that is well-known. (For example their containment is perforated at key positions, by design)

Ambient radioactivity is so high in central Japan that it should definitely be considered a hazard (just search on Youtube for Japanese people filming themselves walking around with Geiger counters and measuring the signal, e.g Youtube user "Chanbukimi"). Government ignores it or plays it down.

Exremely radioactive "radiotrophic funghus" (see Wikipedia) is everywhere in the Fukushima area and even in Tokyo.

Cancer risks by long-term low-dose radioactive exposure are even higher than estimated by the models promoted by governmental regulatory bodies. Risks are higher for children and women in particular, and simple back of the envelope calculations can show this convincingly (to me, that is).

The whole food chain in Japan is messed up for the foreseeable future, and this holds for Pacific seafood as well. Young Tuna fish catched in the San Diego area are slightly radioactive, although these fish are so young that they could not have stayed in radioactive seawater near Japan for more than a couple of months, and they are still contaminated.

There is much more contamination to come as the radioactivity spreads just by natural mass transfer processes (water cycle, carbon cycle).

I for one am very pessimistic.

I will be first in line to eat any fish with evidence of radioactivity from Fukushima that still meets legal limits on radioactivity in food.

I've been repairing bridges. And I've studied them to some extent.

The magical tendency of nature such that nothing man built will lats forever. Every bridge will collapse, every dam will fall, every house, windmill and electric line. Heck we can't even slope ground so that it would not fall down someday (it just might take few million years).

Men make errors all the time. Sometimes dudes don't care about rusty bearings under a bridge, the some truckers don't care about maximum weight limitations. The bridge designer was in hurry and they had to cut some steel from the bridge to fit the concrete sprouting nozzle in between. And Voila.

If you treat all risks equal, you avoid driving and favor nuclear energy.

PS. Safe driving to your all.

>I am two minds on the subject of nuclear power. But the "ain't so safe" side tends to win out because humans make mistakes.

I'm of two minds about this as well but I came to a different conclusion. In the case of Fukushima and Chernobyl I believe it was reduced to incompetence to save cost. I would hope that others have learned the lesson when dealing with nuclear energy because fossil fuels can be deadlier (generally more casualties) and more expensive.

I don't know about Chernobyl at all. With regard to Fukushima, there appears to have been a very cozy relationship btwn TEPCO (Tokyo electric Co.) and the government. In addition, the oversight body was woefully understaffed.

The problem with Japan is that in many cases there are obvious conflicts of interest which aren't addressed. For example, A former Manager for a TEPCO might eventually get a position in either the gov't overseeing nuclear policy or with the oversight body (JNES). In addition, gifts from Nuclear Operators to the Oversight body were not uncommon. This evolved into loosey goosey regulation.

This downside is in a way build into every nuclear energy administration. Nuclear engineers simply have only the options to work for (at best a few) power companies or for the regulator. Because of this few different employers you will almost always have a tight knit network between power companies and regulators.

I'd like to see a reactor where greed and incompetence of the operators are actually considered failure modes and designed for.

As far as I can tell, it's not greed and incompetence during operation that's the big problem, so much as greed and incompetence during the design and construction itself.

Otherwise, I like your thinking.

I'd like to see an airline company where greed and incompetence of the operators are actually considered failure modes and designed for.

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