101–110 of 190 posts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... reminds us that nuclear kills much less than regular earthquakes, car accidents, or air pollution due to the burning of fossil fuels...
"At Chernobyl, the Soviets simply entombed the charred reactor in concrete after the deadly 1986 accident. But Japan has pledged to dismantle the Fukushima plant and decontaminate the surrounding countryside, which was home to about 160,000 people who were evacuated after accident." How much of this decision is simply about space? Russia is the largest country by area, with 21 people per square mile, while Japan is m…
Chernobyl is still in Ukrane (near the boarder with Belarus) and not Russia (yet). At the time it was part of the Soviet Union, but Ukraine has always been a bread basket of Central Europe. Fundamentally, Chernobyl is a much larger (order of magnitude) event with 6 tons of radioactive material burned and released. Frankly, for all the coverage Fukushima gets, it's amazing that you rarely hear about the associated tsu…
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> Kind of surprising at this point Fukushima was built when the nuclear power industry was 13 years old. Now it's 63 years old. You are seeing the folly of youth, with consequences delayed 60 years, not a design that would be typical of new construction.
Sounds like life :| Those cigarettes you smoked in your early twenties? Those beers you smashed working in IT? 63 will be interesting..
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> improve the structure The key question is: Who would have paid for it? Once running, much of the structure is considered to be radioactive. Work in active radioactive areas is expensive and time consuming. Without shutting down the reactor entirely followed by an expensive cleanup, doing major structure upgrades to the reactor chambers is virtually impossible. They also couldn't just decommission it once they reali…
> Who would have paid for it? The disaster could have been prevented by the simple expedient of elevating the backup generators, or putting them in flood-resistant bunkers. Cheap.
The actual tradeoff would have been not just this one mitigation, but all the mitigations for all the equally probable risks. Including all the assessments to find out what those risks would have been.
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> Who would have paid for it? The disaster could have been prevented by the simple expedient of elevating the backup generators, or putting them in flood-resistant bunkers. Cheap.
Hindsight. The actual tradeoff would have been not just this one mitigation, but all the mitigations for all the equally probable risks. Including all the assessments to find out what those risks would have been.
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>> And that's with incompetence and neglect. Yes, and rightly so. Engineers must design around human fallibility. They don't get to blame human error and claim the whole system is otherwise perfectly safe. Either the system is safe under conditions of human fallibility, or it is unsafe. >> There's just no good reason for either Chernobyl or Fukushima Of course there is reason. Humans are part of the system and a rela…
How do engineers design around the propensity of politicians to kick the can down the road?
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There are very few people who are anti-nuclear power who are pro-coal. Even ignoring renewables, gas solves many of the worst problems with coal.
Being anti-nuclear is pretty much accepting the status quo though. Modern nuclear power is much, much more sustainable than coal, scales very well, and is very safe. If you believe in a quick solution for energy issues then you shouldn't halt all nuclear development and leave fossil fuels for the next couple decades.
Early on there was considerable talk about the contaminating impact this might have on the Pacific. Has anything come of that?
Most of the scary charts were fake: https://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/fukushima.asp
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Nuclear scientist's weren't like "naive" teenagers though. Sure the design could've been better; However by your logic they had 50 years to take extra safety pre-cautions and improve the structure. In-fact, it still absolutely amazes me it was even running at the time of the disaster and built on a coast in a country notorious for Tsunamis.
> Nuclear scientist's weren't like "naive" teenagers though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident... Not only scientists but the whole humanity is acting like "naive teenagers" here.