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Safe Enough?

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Re: Safe Enough?

#51

Post by snovv_crash »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #45
troupo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you want to build them ignoring safety lessons. No, I don't > The aeronautical industry is improving safety all the time, and accidents prompt new safety measures. Yes, they do. Note: we're still flying. The number of aircraft is increasing. And we don't turn aircraft into boogey men. Had aircraft been treated the way nuclear plants are treated, we'd stop building most of them in the early 80s, and the construc…

Had nuclear plants been treated the way airplanes are treated, any fault in one plant would lead to steps to redesign all of them, present and future, to definitively avoid this fault; and frankly, the fact that this is not being done is such a massive fuckup that it's making me more anti-nuclear. My pro-nuclear position is based on an assumption of baseline competence! This doesn't seem to actually be the case!

Incorrect, old aircraft are grandfathered into new regulations. This is why it's so hard to get the GA industry to switch away from leaded avgas, because it's almost impossible to certify new engines.

Re: Safe Enough?

#52

Post by troupo »

masswerk wrote: post #25
troupo wrote: post #8

> a slippage between tectonic plates so powerful that it moved Honshu, the main island of Japan, 2.4 meters to the east. The earthquake generated a tsunami 14 meters high The definition of a black swan event. And yet the conclusion is, unsurprisingly, indistinguishable from "nuclear is bad, be very very wary". Imagine if any other tech had the same fear-mongering. We'd never have a single hydroelectric plant after Ba…

However, it took less than 60 years of commercial nuclear power generation for that black swan event to occur. (Compare hydro-engineering, where it's common to design for 100-year events and even 500-year events. Also, compare tsunami stones marking flood levels from the 1930s.)

> However, it took less than 60 years of commercial nuclear power generation for that black swan event to occur.

Hmm... We've been building cities for millenia, but look, in this event "45,700 buildings were destroyed and 144,300 were damaged by the quake and tsunami".

> Compare hydro-engineering, where it's common to design for 100-year events and even 500-year events

The 1975 Banqiao Dam failure was the collapse of the Banqiao Dam and 61 other dams in Henan, China, under the influence of Typhoon Nina in August 1975. The dam collapse created the third-deadliest flood in history which affected a total population of 10.15 million and inundated around 30 cities and counties of 12,000 square kilometers (or 3 million acres), with an estimated death toll ranging from 26,000 to 240,000. The flood also caused the collapse of 5 million to 6.8 million houses.

Re: Safe Enough?

#53

Post by masswerk »

troupo wrote: post #52
masswerk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, it took less than 60 years of commercial nuclear power generation for that black swan event to occur. (Compare hydro-engineering, where it's common to design for 100-year events and even 500-year events. Also, compare tsunami stones marking flood levels from the 1930s.)

> However, it took less than 60 years of commercial nuclear power generation for that black swan event to occur. Hmm... We've been building cities for millenia, but look, in this event "45,700 buildings were destroyed and 144,300 were damaged by the quake and tsunami". > Compare hydro-engineering, where it's common to design for 100-year events and even 500-year events The 1975 Banqiao Dam failure was the collapse of…

You may note the tsunami stones, marking flood levels from the 1930s with inscriptions like, "Do not build any homes below this point (…) Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis." Also, earthquakes, even sever ones (there had been 9 with magnitudes > 8 in the 100 years before), are expected and reoccurring events in Japan. They had been explicit design criteria for the power plant. This was quite literally a 100-year event with similar past events happening in the last 100 years before this. So this is hardly a black swan.

Re: Safe Enough?

#54

Post by zarzavat »

XorNot wrote: post #42
zarzavat wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crucial difference is that people consent to get on a plane. There are quite a few people who are afraid of flying, so afraid that they refuse to fly. That’s of course their prerogative. The problem with nuclear power stations is that when they have serious accidents they don’t just affect the people who wanted to build them, they affect everybody , including the people who didn’t want them to be built, and even…

And yet nobody consented to climate change. I certainly didn't. They also don't consent to PM2.5 from uncovered coal trains running through residential areas. Nobody consents to being downstream of a hydroelectric dam...

I wasn’t saying that we can’t have nuclear power at all. I was saying that we can’t nuclear power that is as risky as aviation. If that makes nuclear unviable, then so be it.

Getting on an aircraft involves taking a risk. You may die. People die every year because they boarded an aircraft. The risk is small, but it’s not zero. We are okay with people taking this risk because they chose to do it.

For nuclear power, small is not good enough, the risk of a serious incident such as Chernobyl has to be effectively zero. This is very expensive.

Hydroelectric is not really comparable, if you are not happy living downstream of a hydro plant then you can move somewhere else.

Nuclear fails in unpredictable ways. When Chernobyl happened, the whole of Europe held its breath to see which way the fallout would blow. The only way to escape the risk is heavy regulation or bans.

Re: Safe Enough?

#55

Post by verve_rat »

taneq wrote: post #46
verve_rat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How many 14-meter tsunamis have there been? Since 1900 there have been at least 12 megatsunami with a height up to 1/2 a kilometre.

Wait, what? A tsunami 500m high is not something you’d miss.

524m, 5 dead. In 1958.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay_earthquake_a...

Re: Safe Enough?

#56

Post by tgv »

_a_a_a_ wrote: post #47
roenxi wrote: post #4

> Is it right to ignore the cost of the evacuation of Tokyo, merely because an unplanned flow of water saved us? What if we assume the maximum cost of a nuclear event is not $1 trillion for the Fukushima we lived, but $10 trillion for the Fukushima we escaped This continued focus on cost rather than cost-benefit must be some sort of cognitive bias because it makes no sense. Even if there is risk of a $10 trillion dis…

Has anyone else noticed these kind of posts appear quickly for certain vested-interest areas, get voted to the top but don't have much if any backup to them? Let's break this down. > rather than cost-benefit must be some sort of cognitive bias because it makes no sense Agreed > ...once assessing the upside nuclear is still going to be a contender for the best possible form of energy. No justification given in the for…

The HN audience is for a large part in favor of nuclear energy. There's also a group that may not like it but sees it as a quick win in climate change.

Re: Safe Enough?

#57

Post by drpixie »

_a_a_a_ wrote: post #47
roenxi wrote: post #4

> Is it right to ignore the cost of the evacuation of Tokyo, merely because an unplanned flow of water saved us? What if we assume the maximum cost of a nuclear event is not $1 trillion for the Fukushima we lived, but $10 trillion for the Fukushima we escaped This continued focus on cost rather than cost-benefit must be some sort of cognitive bias because it makes no sense. Even if there is risk of a $10 trillion dis…

Has anyone else noticed these kind of posts appear quickly for certain vested-interest areas, get voted to the top but don't have much if any backup to them? Let's break this down. > rather than cost-benefit must be some sort of cognitive bias because it makes no sense Agreed > ...once assessing the upside nuclear is still going to be a contender for the best possible form of energy. No justification given in the for…

Yes - cost v benefit - ha!

I don't see nuclear proponents comparing potential cost (say $10T) against benefit (power produced during plant's lifetime - optimistically $10B (over 30 years). That's 1000:1 against.

By wikipedia, there are about 170 nuclear power plants and have been 6 accidents costing over $1B - approximately 1 in 30 plants have had very expensive accidents.

Those odds don't make sense for any country. Though they might make sense for an investor, knowing that they won't be required to pay those big costs - they might win and (in the event of a disaster) they only loose their investment. Perhaps if they have to guarantee the $10T potential costs, they'd look realistically at the "investment".

Re: Safe Enough?

#58

Post by _a_a_a_ »

tgv wrote: post #56
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone else noticed these kind of posts appear quickly for certain vested-interest areas, get voted to the top but don't have much if any backup to them? Let's break this down. > rather than cost-benefit must be some sort of cognitive bias because it makes no sense Agreed > ...once assessing the upside nuclear is still going to be a contender for the best possible form of energy. No justification given in the for…

The HN audience is for a large part in favor of nuclear energy. There's also a group that may not like it but sees it as a quick win in climate change.

> The HN audience is for a large part in favor of nuclear energy

Maybe. Do you have anything to back that up?

> There's also a group that may not like it but sees it as a quick win in climate change

That would possibly include me, but that does not allow glossing over their risks and failures, which is exactly what the parent post did. I'm not disagreeing with it, I'm asking it to be backed up with evidence. To repeat, this isn't about nuclear energy but the quality of HN posts about various subjects.

Re: Safe Enough?

#59

Post by _a_a_a_ »

drpixie wrote: post #57
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone else noticed these kind of posts appear quickly for certain vested-interest areas, get voted to the top but don't have much if any backup to them? Let's break this down. > rather than cost-benefit must be some sort of cognitive bias because it makes no sense Agreed > ...once assessing the upside nuclear is still going to be a contender for the best possible form of energy. No justification given in the for…

Yes - cost v benefit - ha! I don't see nuclear proponents comparing potential cost (say $10T) against benefit (power produced during plant's lifetime - optimistically $10B (over 30 years). That's 1000:1 against. By wikipedia, there are about 170 nuclear power plants and have been 6 accidents costing over $1B - approximately 1 in 30 plants have had very expensive accidents. Those odds don't make sense for any country.…

> By wikipedia...

This is exactly what I'm talking about – provide the bloody link so we can actually check your claims.

Provide a link! Don't just tell us, allow us to verify!

Edit: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster

"Initial estimates of costs to Japanese taxpayers were in excess of 12 trillion yen ($100 billion).[299] In December 2016 the government estimated decontamination, compensation, decommissioning, and radioactive waste storage costs at 21.5 trillion yen ($187 billion)"

I am not against nuclear power, but I am deeply worried by people like you who clearly only want to see the upside - and it is that which makes me nervous of nuclear power not the technology itself but the blindness of people around it."Costing over $1 billion" is just plain misleading.

Re: Safe Enough?

#60

Post by troupo »

verve_rat wrote: post #55
taneq wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? A tsunami 500m high is not something you’d miss.

524m, 5 dead. In 1958. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay_earthquake_a...

Note that this particular megatsunami is completely irrelevant when we're talking about Fukushima. Because context matters. You can't just say "oh we had 500 meter megatsunamis, Fukushima should have protected against those".

The one you linked happened:

- in a narrow bay

- with a dual-slide that involved both a huge rockfall, and a huge release of sediment connected to a glacier breaking off

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It's also the first time I've heard of this event, and.... Just wow. Never thought it would be possible

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Edit: According to Wikipedia all megatsunamis recorded since 1900 were caused by landslides: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatsunami Only some of the landslides were caused by earthquakes.

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