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Fukushima

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Re: Fukushima

#31

Post by tinco »

facepalm wrote: post #19
ggreer wrote: post #17

I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear sentiment really irked me. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there a…

You are just creating straw mean to support your own belief. Comparing to other causes of death is hardly relevant. It's only relevant if you weigh two options against each other. So comparing coal to nuclear is kind of valid, except that coal is not the only alternative to nuclear power. Also, if you really want to nitpick, then you'd also have to count the lives that could have been saved with the money that now go…

What is the other alternative to nuclear power?

Re: Fukushima

#32

Post by pdkl95 »

richmarr wrote: post #27
mixedbit wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don Norman, the author of "The Design of Everyday Things", writes that in most cases when the fault is attributed to human operator, it is actually a design error.

In the case of Chernobyl the accident wasn't attributed to a human operator. The safeguards built into the reactor had been disabled to perform an experiment to test a potential new safety feature.

That "new safety feature" was a foolish attempt to patch the terrible design of the reactor. (see my other post)

Everything about that situation was terrible: the badly design reactor, the laughably-bad "safety feature" try wanted to use as a workaround, the untrained operators that were ordered to run the test, and the Soviet politics that caused the foolish rush to complete the test. All of these factors "caused" the disaster. The combination of these failures created a situation that was far more dangerous than a single design problem or human error.

Re: Fukushima

#33

Post by simoncion »

tinco wrote: post #31
facepalm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are just creating straw mean to support your own belief. Comparing to other causes of death is hardly relevant. It's only relevant if you weigh two options against each other. So comparing coal to nuclear is kind of valid, except that coal is not the only alternative to nuclear power. Also, if you really want to nitpick, then you'd also have to count the lives that could have been saved with the money that now go…

What is the other alternative to nuclear power?

And (before you answer), make sure to read Scott Alexander's Livejournal post (linked by ggreer above) in its entirety. Make sure to pay especially careful attention to the last five paragraphs. :)

Re: Fukushima

#34

Post by Shivetya »

isn't all that packed up debris just waiting another tsunami or other natural disaster to spread it? Seems awfully close to the ocean considering how the last disaster occurred.

So many of the scenes reminded me of the recent Godzilla movie, amazing to see so much of a recent bustling environment abandoned, returning to nature. The number of spider webs in the supermarket is remarkable, I assume the rotting food stores brought insects which in turn made for a good feeding ground for spiders

Re: Fukushima

#35

Post by inatreecrown »

ggreer wrote: post #17

I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear sentiment really irked me. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there a…

Get the facts straight: Fukushima is human failure. In the accident the neccecary cooling could not be supplied. As a result, people will die of cancer from the radiation. The tsunami is not human failure, and to say that living by the sea is human failure is another discussion completely.

Re: Fukushima

#36

Post by pdkl95 »

facepalm wrote: post #20
gambiting wrote: post #13

As much of a tragedy this was, this is still nothing compared to the damage coal is doing to our society. I live in a coal mining town that also has a coal-fueled power and heating plant - the number of people who suffer in some way due to this is also huge. People get lung disease due to coal dust. In winter, everything is literally covered in soot - snow is blackish, with dark dots on everything. Pretty much every…

You assume that coal is the only alternative to nuclear power (there are not only other energy sources, but also the option to use less energy), and that there is no way to use coal in a cleaner way. I leave the judgement up to you, just wanted to point out some confirmation bias in your convictions.

> the option to use less energy

Do you wash your clothes by hand, with water heated from solar? No? Then why are you suggesting that most of the women in the world should continue spending their lives doing such menial activity?

This idea that we need to use less energy is one of the most short-sighted examples of western cultural privilege that I've ever seen. The amount of energy the average person has available to utilize for day-to-day needs is one of the best correlations to social progress and freedom.

People that don't have to spend their days washing their cloths by hand have spare time to spend on things like getting an education or participating in a democracy. We should be using nuclear power to significantly increase the amount of power people use so the social benefits currently enjoyed by the "west" can reach more areas in the world.

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing...

I not joking or exaggerating when I say that if we let the amount of available energy per-person reduce significantly, society will start to revert back to old institutions like feudalism and slavery. Without energy, you don't have the free time to become educated. Without education, we lose institutions that depend on an educated population like democracy.

edit: fixed missing word

Re: Fukushima

#38

Post by DangerousPie »

inatreecrown wrote: post #35
ggreer wrote: post #17

I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear sentiment really irked me. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there a…

Get the facts straight: Fukushima is human failure. In the accident the neccecary cooling could not be supplied. As a result, people will die of cancer from the radiation. The tsunami is not human failure, and to say that living by the sea is human failure is another discussion completely.

I disagree.

You seem to suggest that the fact that Fukushima was not adequately prepared for this tsunami was human failure, presumably because they should have expected such a tsunami to occur.

If this is the case, then you can just as well argue that it was human failure that the towns in the affected areas flooded because of the tsunami. After all, if they expected such a tsunami to occur they could/should have built higher levees.

The way I see it, the deaths resulting from the Fukushima accident were just as much (or as little) caused by human failure as most of the other deaths related to the tsunami.

Re: Fukushima

#40

Post by ekianjo »

pdkl95 wrote: post #23
ekianjo wrote: post #5

> The disaster could have been forseen and prevented. As in the Chernobyl case, it was a human, not technology, that was mainly responsible for the disaster. It's always easy to say that with hindsight. Remind me, how frequent are Magnitude 9 earthquakes resulting in massive Tsunami? Of course you can plan for everything, but there's always something that occurs you did not think of. The good thing is, we learn from…

> Chernobyl The RBMC design was always known to be an absolutely terrible idea because it's use of graphite as a moderator that required active cooling, creating an inherently unsafe positive void coefficient[1]. In fact, this was such a problem that there was concern before the disaster that the ~60 seconds the emergency diesel pumps would require before they could pump enough coolant would not be fast enough to pro…

> Absolutely. We had safer designs decades ago (and even better ideas[2] today), but upgrading to these safer designs has been hindered at every step by radiophobic activists and "not in my backyard" politics. So we're stuck with minor revisions (if any) to reactors designs from the 50s-70s.

There are still countries investing in nuclear energy, like China, and I suppose these new reactors are made to the latest norms of safety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

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