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In the hypothetical situation where Tokyo needed to be evacuated, or a large enough portion of the population there feared for their health and wanted to leave, i wonder if in the long term, the redistribution of population back into regional Japan would not be a good thing over all.
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…
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…
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?
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 learn from the first occurrence? Why were people more worried about assigning blame, substandard training materials, and taking cover from lawsuits, than about ensuring this could not happen again?
THIS is why we cannot have nice things. It does not matter whether the technology can or cannot be implemented safely. It matters whether the human organizations that support that technology are up to the task of managing something where a single mistake can ruin tens of millions of people's lives, with consequences for ten thousand years. It's not like one plane dropping out of the sky, ruining 500 people's lives... this is a much longer term problem. And probabilistic risk assessment, as technically correct as it is when it gets perfect input information, is absolutely horrid at driving humans to make the right choices.
> 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…
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 technologically advanced enough to deal with natural disasters?
> 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…
In the hypothetical situation where Tokyo needed to be evacuated, or a large enough portion of the population there feared for their health and wanted to leave, i wonder if in the long term, the redistribution of population back into regional Japan would not be a good thing over all.
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…
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…
I agree with you, but you are overestimating the cost on live of an accident by many orders of magnitude. How do you get to the tens of millions of live ruinned?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear costs a fortune under the regulatory regime it's operated with to date. We genuinely don't know how much less it would cost to have nuclear power on an equal-safety-to-coal-power basis, because it's not been tried.
Why would you equal-to-coal today? You need to equal wind, solar or at least gas safety. Lately I'm reading a lot about lowering nuclear safety to improve costs. Imagine cars makers asking to get rid of ABS, airbags, safety belts... to make cheaper cars. Any sane person would raise a brow when hearing that, any industry should aim to be as safe as possible, not to cut costs on safety and assume some preventable death…
Some countries are closing nuclear plants and ramping up coal. (Look at Germany)