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Safe Enough?

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Re: Safe Enough?

#61

Post by GTP »

wokwokwok wrote: post #20
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…

There is certainly bias, but there’s also a whole lot of “refuse to acknowledge reality”. Certainly, there is a cost/benefit to compare, but really, bluntly, we’re shit at cleaning up nuclear disasters. In every situation where they’ve occurred, it’s taken longer and cost more than anticipated, and the point here is that this enormously expensive disaster could have been 10x worse if not for a lucky coincidence. > Ev…

> (hey, won’t be in office when it does, this is your problem next generation, haha~)

Isn't global warming a problem we're trying to ignore and offload to the next generations too? Despite all you said is true, I still think we're better equipped to deal with nuclear power plants than hurricanes, floodings and all the other disasters that climate change has in store for us in the future. This is something we have to consider too when discussing the cost/danger-benefits of nuclear energy.

Re: Safe Enough?

#62

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Safe Enough?

#63

Post by verve_rat »

troupo wrote: post #60
verve_rat wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 --- It's also the first…

The point being, freak events are not nearly as freak as they are being made out to be.

Edit: but I agree with the "wow". I can't even imagine what a wall of water that tall would look like. That is just so outside normal experience.

Re: Safe Enough?

#64

Post by troupo »

verve_rat wrote: post #63
troupo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 --- It's also the first…

The point being, freak events are not nearly as freak as they are being made out to be. Edit: but I agree with the "wow". I can't even imagine what a wall of water that tall would look like. That is just so outside normal experience.

> The point being, freak events are not nearly as freak as they are being made out to be.

They are extremely rare.

12 megatsunamis in 123 years spread over the entire surface of the earth.

Re: Safe Enough?

#65

Post by gizmondo »

exmadscientist wrote: post #23

The article is fine, but the link in its Footnote 3 is the really interesting part: https://www.ans.org/news/article-1556/tmi-operators-did-what... It's a story from the Davis Besse NPP operators, who happened to face the exact same fault as caused the accident at Three Mile Island... and made it through OK... except they experienced it first , 18 months earlier. So why, when this happened a second time, did no one l…

This is the story of the Chernobyl disaster as well. There had been two similar accidents preceding it, in 1975 at the Leningrad NPP and in 1983 at the Ignalina NPP. Only after the second one the design flaws were well understood, but they weren't fixed in the following years.

Re: Safe Enough?

#66

Post by grun3 »

noduerme wrote: post #39

>> A nuclear power plant's approximately twenty thousand safety components have a Rube Goldberg quality. Like dominoes, numerous pumps, valves, and switches must operate in the required sequence to simply pump cooling water or shut down the plant. There were innumerable unlikely combinations of failures that could cause an accident Query: Is anything this complex designed this way today, without actually running all…

After watching industrial disaster post-mortems by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, I think the answer is yes. Plenty of stuff gets built without considering each failure mode.

https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB

Re: Safe Enough?

#67

Post by troupo »

masswerk wrote: post #53
troupo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36560103 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36559760

Re: Safe Enough?

#68

Post by nerdponx »

troupo wrote: post #18
nerdponx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're ignoring the fact that humans generally do not think in terms of expected value, nor should they. An improbable outcome of widespread catastrophe (irradiating a million people) is and should be treated as something worse than a more-probable outcome of localized catastrophe (plane crash). You can't just do "loss x probability = cost".

> An improbable outcome of widespread catastrophe (irradiating a million people) is and should be treated as something worse than a more-probable outcome of localized catastrophe (plane crash). Quoting myself again: Imagine if any other tech had the same fear-mongering. We'd never have a single hydroelectric plant after Banqiao dam failure that killed anywhere from 25 000 to 240 000 and left 11 million people homeles…

Fair about the dam. If that happened in the West then yes, it'd change things. The biggest dam failures in North America for example have never been that big. And you'd surely never get a major new dam built today anywhere near any kind of populated area in the USA.

Also, it's worth noting that nuclear disasters remain dangerous for amounts of time ranging from "one generation" to "longer than human history so far", adding an extra element of catastrophe.

Re: Safe Enough?

#69

Post by Gwypaas »

troupo wrote: post #22
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…

> 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 Why do we keep building hydroelectric plants (and dams in general)? Why do we keep building coal plants which are more radioactive than niclear plants, and are often located in densely populated areas? Why don't you apply the same logic to other things?

We are not? We are building renewables where the risks all come from the people working on the equipment. Fitting the analogy of airline safety nicely.

Re: Safe Enough?

#70

Post by kurthr »

wokwokwok wrote: post #43
kurthr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the Tsunami had hit Tokyo? How big would that disaster have been? Sendai is a much smaller city and it had over 100k destroyed buildings, 15k dead or missing, and well over 100k without shelter. Estimates of the damage to infrastructure is estimated in the $Trillion range (over $300B spent in direct govt rebuilding incentives). Maybe we shouldn't build large cities next to water since we're not technologicall…

Sendai was hit by a tsunami and the cost was huge, but if you visit Sendai now, it’s quite nice. People can understand this kind of risk. There was a disaster, it got cleaned up. Now, people live there and are happy. The same is true of many other floods. So… I’d say we technologically advanced enough to deal with flood waters. Unlike, literally every nuclear disaster. Believe what you want to believe dude. No amount…

I've stayed with people in Sendai before and after 2011.

Based on the snarky prancing I don't think you have, dude.

Watch footage of that event again and repeat the words, "People can understand this kind of risk".

Over 7M people use 300km of track and ~300 subway stations in Tokyo daily. Below sea level without electricity? There are many possible horrors we choose not to consider every day. Dealing with them rationally as a society is the only real hope.

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