<During a routine test on April 26, 1986, reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced a power surge that triggered an emergency shutdown.>
Not routine. Operators disabled numerous safety features to perform a turbine spin-down test before shutting down the reactor for scheduled maintenance. The power surge was due to putting the reactor in an unstable state before shutdown. The safety features they bypassed were designed to keep the reactor out of the unstable operating region.
Nuclear power is very safe if run by sensible humans without external pressure.
I just don't trust humans to accomplish this for the next thousand years without fail. Even less if a nuclear power plant is run for profit. Even less if storage of nuclear waste does not give off any profit and safe storage needs to be ensured for thousands of years.
Basically, the idea is that you remove the human factor where possible (and modern robotics/drone technology can handle where humans ARE needed... to a degree) and build it with the focus on protecting that valuable waste from bad folk.
There are definitely some concerns still, but this combined with much safer reactor technology gets rid of a lot of the concerns.
One of the big problems is that even a lot of existing tech is still very old because people are terrified of nuclear energy and don't want to build new stuff. Which leads to making do with old stuff and finding ways to retrofit. Which is basically NASA's problem just with fear instead of apathy leading to crap budgets.
New nuclear power plants are designed to be safe even when run by unsensible humans (up to 72h)
Any nuclear storage has to designed to be safe and secure from the second you close it up, irrespective of what humans will be doing the next thousands of years. (except of course, deliberately opening said storage)
I question the generally-accepted necessity of such storage. Yes, nuclear waste remains dangerous for thousands of years. But chemical waste such as arsenic and mercury remain dangerous forever, but we don't take anything like those precautions when disposing of those.
CANDU reactors in Canada, I think are designed to be run by nobody at all.
They require heavy water to keep the reaction going. No heavy water, it just cools down.
If anything 'breaks' - no heavy water, no chain reaction.
I'm grossly oversimplifying, but you get the idea.
I suggest that if we actually put our minds to it, we could develop a kind of 'dumb reactor' that didn't require any kind of intervention at all, other than maintenance.
I also don't trust humans to handle nuclear power safely.
But the types of grids and storage systems needed for renewables are not quite on the horizon, and right now the alternative is fossil fuels which have a far worse track record than nuclear. Nuclear worst case is a localized area is poisoned for generations. Fossil fuels best case is the whole planet becomes a struggle for human life. Can't we hedge our bets?
In the mean time coal power plants kill more people than Chernobyl disaster every year.
"A United Nations study estimates the final total of premature deaths associated with the disaster will be around 4000, mostly from an estimated 3% increase in cancers which are already common causes of death in the region." - http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/)
"Air pollution from Europe's 300 largest coal power stations causes 22,300 premature deaths a year"
[Edit] I just took top results from Google, without much research. My point is that even though I fear nuclear disasters too, we should try and compare numbers and trade-offs.
Nuclear disasters are more permanent and thus a bigger risk, I live in a place where it rained on that day in -86, we still have not gone back to normal, fishing, hunting etc
One of the standard arguments of nuclear power supporter is that radioactive materials exist naturally in soil and rock, therefore the additional radiation caused by by nuclear waste is neglect able. Is there any reason why nuclear power supporters do not apply the same logic to other energy sources?
I would never make that argument nor have I even seen it before now, so please don't hold me to that standard. It's a completely ridiculous argument, false on its face, so not something even worth discussing.
Edit: in case the sporadic downvotes indicate some confusion, let me elaborate.
Certainly there is a common argument which involves comparing artificial radioactivity to natural sources. The infamous "banana equivalent dose" is an example of this. But that's fundamentally a quantitative argument about accepting small doses. It's not a general argument for neglecting the danger of nuclear waste in general.
The argument that you should, say, not worry about the dose you get from the americium in your smoke detectors, or the ocean contamination from Fukushima, can be made based on this. That argument is fundamentally sound. But it does not imply that you should go swim to the bottom of a spent fuel pool and hug the canisters, or that it would be a good idea to have a play in the mud next to Chernobyl.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with making similar arguments for coal. For example, if the amount of mercury contamination in seafood was small compared to the amount of mercury naturally present, it would be quite sensible to argue that coal is not a major problem when it comes to mercury pollution of the ocean. The problem, of course, is that it's simply not true: the natural level of mercury is pretty low, and the contamination from coal power is substantial. When the FDA recommends limiting the intake of seafood for young children and pregnant women, it's not because of the naturally occurring levels, it's because of contamination due to human activity, of which coal is the largest part.
No, in the normal case. Coal has trace amounts of radioactive elements (such as uranium and thorium), burning it in large quantities concentrates those elements and release them into the atmosphere.
And that's true even when you account for the risk of nuclear power plants and spent fuel. Coal ash is produced in gigantic quantities, and often stored in an open environment, while spent fuel is vitrified and far easier to contain.
So there are two extremes to radioactive waste / leakage.
One extreme is the "ideal dispersal" leak, like the Fukushima leaks into the ocean. In this case, the radioactive material does not "clump up" enough to be dangerous -- it's not that some cubic meters of ocean are fine and some contain deadly, deadly poison, it's that each cubic meter of ocean contains the same minuscule amount of radioactive material, too low to be a threat.
The other extreme is the "immobile clump" of radioactive material, like the Elephant's Foot at the heart of Chernobyl. Here you have enough radioactivity to cause serious harm or death if you get too close for too long. It's scary, but it's also pretty stationary. It's scary like a hole in the ground. You stay away, you warn people not to fall in, but it's not going to creep up on you without warning, like a sinkhole in Florida.
The really scary kind of radioactive waste isn't either of these two extremes, but a dangerous middle-ground: radioactive waste which is clumpy enough to give off deadly amounts of radiation, but mobile enough to get everywhere. You occasionally get this from reactor leaks (that's the primary reason for the exclusion zone around Chernobyl; on the other hand, they could never find any evidence of this sort of leak after Three Mile Isle). You also see it in non-power-plant nuclear accidents, like the Goiânia Accident, which involved a radiation source used in medical imagine.
You also worry about it in coal ash, because the ash can be blown and scattered but is clumpy enough that the radioactive particulate doesn't disperse.
The old myth was based on the incorrect assumption that base-load demand can only be supplied by base-load power stations; for example, coal in Australia and nuclear in France. However, the mix of renewable energy technologies in our computer model, which has no base-load power stations, easily supplies base-load demand. Our optimal mix comprises wind 50-60%; solar PV 15-20%; concentrated solar thermal with 15 hours of thermal storage 15-20%; and the small remainder supplied by existing hydro and gas turbines burning renewable gases or liquids. (Contrary to some claims, concentrated solar with thermal storage does not behave as base-load in winter; however, that doesn’t matter.)
It's true that coal kills more than Chernobyl ever did, but that vastly understates it. Coal kills more people each year than all nuclear technology has killed in its entire history, including the bombs dropped on Japan. Coal kills in the neighborhood of a million people a year. Granted, most of those deaths are from dirty plants in less developed countries, but on the other hand Chernobyl was not exactly a shining beacon of safe nuclear plant design either.
My point is that concern should be at least vaguely proportional to danger. Freaking out about thousands killed by nuclear accidents while ignoring millions killed by properly operating coal plants is not sensible. And if nuclear displaces coal, then it will save many, many lives.
I'm saying that discussion must stop cherry-picking and hiding variables at will. Like breast cancer rate increased for decades, value of wipping entire cities, billionary damage to economy, making the country easily vulnerable and a slave of security measures, agriculture and ecological problems. The only answer from this guys are "but coal is worse and sun can make you blisters", you don't care for guys that also die by X! and this is a red herring. Yes, everybody knows that cars kill a lot of people each year. Can we focus again in the elephant foot's problem?
What's being cherry-picked or hidden? I even tossed in casualties from nuclear weapons just to be generous.
Comparing with coal is highly relevant, since nuclear substitutes for coal. If coal is significantly more dangerous (as the numbers would indicate) then fear of nuclear power has ultimately killed a lot of people by preventing nuclear from further substituting for coal.
If you'd rather just talk about the dangers of nuclear power without that context, that's entirely fair. But that's a rather different complaint from what you've made so far. And if that's what you don't like, might I gently suggest just clicking the little [-] next to the comments that talk about coal? There's plenty of other discussion to be had here.
Banqiao Dam killed one hundred seventy one THOUSAND people, for anyone who's skimming past. If a nuclear plant killed that many it'd be the end of nuclear power.
But nuclear power can kill slowly over decades. Can we come up with the true number of deaths (or shortened lives) from radiation? Its hard to compare.
Estimates will range a bit, but we can say with complete confidence that all nuclear accidents thus far haven't come anywhere near that one dam failure.
> I see estimates from 1/10 to 10X the dam failure.
What? Banqiao Dam killed 171,000 people. There's zero reputable evidence (or even reasonable speculation) for nuclear accidents killing 1.7 million. Even Greenpeace caps out at 200k, and UN/WHO come in in the dozens-to-thousands range.
As I understand it, Banqiao Dam was primarily intended as a flood defence scheme. Even if China had abandoned hydroelectric power they'd still have had to construct the dam for that reason. If they'd used nuclear power (which I don't think existed back then) instead, you'd still have had all the deaths from the dam failure plus however many people they managed to kill from applying the same inadequate construction standards and mismanagement to nuclear power plants.
Wikipedia: "The total cost of the Shelter Implementation Plan, of which the New Safe Confinement is the most prominent element, is estimated to be around €2.15 billion (US$2.3 billion). The New Safe Confinement alone accounts for €1.5 billion."
"Hurricane Katrina caused $81 billion in property damages, but it is estimated that the total economic impact in Louisiana and Mississippi may exceed $150 billion"
Building anything that would be hazardous if destroyed on a below sea level area that is known to be hit by hurricanes was.
But you are somewhat right. Katrina is a better comparison with Fukishima which, to my knowledge, was a combination of being a poor location and repeated environmental damage that wasn't properly repaired or maintained. The 2015 Tianjin explosion is a better comparison with Chernobyl as that was human error and poor maintenance, not "act of god" weather.
Figuring out the actual time until Chernobyl is safe is pretty difficult as most resources are highly politicized (I wonder why...) and there are certain REALLY hot spots, but considering the high profile nature of it: even when it reaches safe and reasonable levels of radiation, people are going to be afraid of it.
For good chunks of it, it is safe enough for humans. Not great, but if there were a pressing concern, people could live there (keeping away from the remaining problems) comfortably (seriously, you would be amazed at background radiation levels in a lot of residential areas). But there is no pressing reason to, and there are definitely some spots you would want to stay the hell away from.
Fukishima, Three Mile Island, and Hiroshima/Nagasaki are cases where there IS a pressing reason for people to live there, so standards are much lower/more reasonable/whatever.
And we will keep doing this for the next 20,000 years or so.
The surrounding area will be safe long before that but the epicentre will be radioactive for a long time and there is nothing we can really do about it.
Within the next 20,000 years we'll get to the point where the improvement of technology and our desire to get rid of the goddamn stuff will overcome the incredible cost of blasting it out of the solar system for good.
- "Fukushima robot stranded after stalling inside reactor" [1]
- "the robot could remain ambulatory in the radiation field for only 50 minutes, and in fact the robot's lower portion was no longer responding to commands" [2]
The foot will be mined and processed into fuel within the next 20 years. At that stage the surrounding pristine wildlife haven that the countryside reverted to in the absence of humans will again degenerate into the usual suburban death zone, filled with humans, cats dogs, and almost nothing else.
Take the number of baseline gigawatts produced by nuclear over the last x years, for any value of x you care to pick. Divide by the total cost over the same period (under the same safety standards, or equivalently the same price per person killed - falling off a roof installing a solar panel can kill you just as dead as radiation can). Compare to any other power source you care to pick.
Nuclear power, at least in Europe, is only cheap as the nation states serve as insurers. The costs in the event of an accident are so high that noone wants to insure them.
And coal power is so cheap because everyone pays the price. Everyone everywhere. Coal electricity have enormous negative externalities: health, quality of live, the aggregated economic cost is enormous, and will increase exponentially.
If coal electricity users actually paid the real cost it would dwarf nuclear cost.
> Nuclear power is only cheap as the nation states serve as insurers
EDF, who are preparing to construct Hinkley Point's planned nuclear power station, have been guaranteed a minimum strike price of £92.50/MWh. The mean wholesale price is currently around £46/MWh.
Even disregarding the risk/cost of accident cleanup, nuclear power isn't necessarily cheap or unsubsidized.
Yes, let's use the worst possible example of reactor design and operation (negligence in both cases) as the exemplar.
Besides which, nobody said nuclear power was cheap (not lately), but it is safe. Even with Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power causes vastly fewer deaths per unit of delivered power than other methods, especially coal (one of the most common sources of power in the world).
Chernobyl could produce 4GW of power before the accident. Solar currently costs about $3/watt, so the equivalent solar installation would cost $12 billion, and that's ignoring the part where solar generates less in bad weather and nothing at night.
Traditional nuclear power plants are very expensive, but that's because they're huge.
> The first explosion from the steam inside the reactor was enough to send the 4-million-pound lid of the reactor assembly through the roof of the building.
4 million pounds? Is that right? Just for comparison, the maximum takeoff weight of a 747 is 735,000 pounds. Less than a quarter of the weight of this lid?
Let's see. 4 million pounds is around 1800 metric tons. Density of concrete is around 2 tons/m³, so 1800 tons is the mass of about 900 m³ of concrete. This is a volume of a disc about 1 m thick and 35 m in diameter. Seems plausible.
Also, from Wikipedia:
Explosive steam pressure [...] destroyed the reactor casing, tearing off and blasting the 2000-ton upper plate, to which the entire reactor assembly is fastened, through the roof of the reactor building.
My impression was that management rammed the test through because they wanted to be seen as effective, even as the on-site engineers warned about the risks.
security is where the feds should have been involved, the kremlin didn't know for quite a long time. and had they done the safety procedure it might not have happened.
Just… what? Do you have some kind of baffling misunderstanding of what was going on here?
It's perfectly possible to build systems such that they can be tested 'in production'. Indeed, in many cases I'd argue it's far more useful to informing the result of tests.
I completely reject the notion that 'health and safety' and 'box ticking' is responsible for the disaster at Chernobyl, when it's quite clearly the opposite: a lack of rigorous safety procedures, and those procedures which do existing not being followed.
"Two minutes of exposure and your cells will soon begin to hemorrhage;"
It is sad to see this level of sensationalism in first 3 lines of the article.
Not only cells CAN'T hemorrhage by definition (hemorrhage is blood escaping from the circulatory system, cells don't have blood inside them), but that claim is completely made up, not present in the NRC article linked. Any decent level of fact-checking would have caught that.
Making up fake definitions for precise medical terms for the sake of impact is really bad journalism.
And then it's followed by:
"During a routine test on April 26, 1986, reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced a power surge that triggered an emergency shutdown."
"If it hits ground water, it could trigger another catastrophic explosion or leach radioactive material into the water nearby residents drink."
Which is contradicted by the article itself:
"Oozing through pipes and eating through concrete, the radioactive lava flow from reactor Number 4 eventually cooled enough to solidfy[sic]."
To further point out, the test that caused the incident was not a 'routine test'. They had purposely disabled a large number of safety catches in order to perform a risky and ill-advised test.
The aim of this test was to determine whether cooling of the core could continue to be ensured in the event of a loss of power.
Far too often I see the test described only superficially or with the misleading political euphemism of "routine test". As you mentioned, it was a test of of the cooling system in the even of a power loss, but even that description softens just how insane the test was. I recommend this[1] description of the events that lead to the test and what happened during the test itself.
Thanks for posting that link. I was familiar with the general outlines of the test and how it went wrong, but I had no idea it was a standard test that had been falsely signed off during the initial commissioning. Just makes it even crazier.
It is sad how the loss of face and position was used as a cudgel to push ahead against protocol and notions of safety in what was supposed to be a workers republic.
Makes one wonder if the systems where more alike than different...
Personally I'm not terribly worried about meltdowns but rather terrorist getting hold of the waste and making dirty bombs but even that seems fairly unlikely (that is the pros outweigh the cons given todays technology).
Most interesting thing I learned is that the primary cause of death of the scientists who at that time were still researching the resulting decay, was from heart failure and strokes.
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[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadNot routine. Operators disabled numerous safety features to perform a turbine spin-down test before shutting down the reactor for scheduled maintenance. The power surge was due to putting the reactor in an unstable state before shutdown. The safety features they bypassed were designed to keep the reactor out of the unstable operating region.
I just don't trust humans to accomplish this for the next thousand years without fail. Even less if a nuclear power plant is run for profit. Even less if storage of nuclear waste does not give off any profit and safe storage needs to be ensured for thousands of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small,_sealed,_transportable,_...
Basically, the idea is that you remove the human factor where possible (and modern robotics/drone technology can handle where humans ARE needed... to a degree) and build it with the focus on protecting that valuable waste from bad folk.
There are definitely some concerns still, but this combined with much safer reactor technology gets rid of a lot of the concerns.
One of the big problems is that even a lot of existing tech is still very old because people are terrified of nuclear energy and don't want to build new stuff. Which leads to making do with old stuff and finding ways to retrofit. Which is basically NASA's problem just with fear instead of apathy leading to crap budgets.
They require heavy water to keep the reaction going. No heavy water, it just cools down.
If anything 'breaks' - no heavy water, no chain reaction.
I'm grossly oversimplifying, but you get the idea.
I suggest that if we actually put our minds to it, we could develop a kind of 'dumb reactor' that didn't require any kind of intervention at all, other than maintenance.
Plenty more can be found if you have access to read actual articles and not just wikipedia
But the types of grids and storage systems needed for renewables are not quite on the horizon, and right now the alternative is fossil fuels which have a far worse track record than nuclear. Nuclear worst case is a localized area is poisoned for generations. Fossil fuels best case is the whole planet becomes a struggle for human life. Can't we hedge our bets?
"A United Nations study estimates the final total of premature deaths associated with the disaster will be around 4000, mostly from an estimated 3% increase in cancers which are already common causes of death in the region." - http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/)
"Air pollution from Europe's 300 largest coal power stations causes 22,300 premature deaths a year"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/12/european...
[Edit] I just took top results from Google, without much research. My point is that even though I fear nuclear disasters too, we should try and compare numbers and trade-offs.
Edit: in case the sporadic downvotes indicate some confusion, let me elaborate.
Certainly there is a common argument which involves comparing artificial radioactivity to natural sources. The infamous "banana equivalent dose" is an example of this. But that's fundamentally a quantitative argument about accepting small doses. It's not a general argument for neglecting the danger of nuclear waste in general.
The argument that you should, say, not worry about the dose you get from the americium in your smoke detectors, or the ocean contamination from Fukushima, can be made based on this. That argument is fundamentally sound. But it does not imply that you should go swim to the bottom of a spent fuel pool and hug the canisters, or that it would be a good idea to have a play in the mud next to Chernobyl.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with making similar arguments for coal. For example, if the amount of mercury contamination in seafood was small compared to the amount of mercury naturally present, it would be quite sensible to argue that coal is not a major problem when it comes to mercury pollution of the ocean. The problem, of course, is that it's simply not true: the natural level of mercury is pretty low, and the contamination from coal power is substantial. When the FDA recommends limiting the intake of seafood for young children and pregnant women, it's not because of the naturally occurring levels, it's because of contamination due to human activity, of which coal is the largest part.
And that's true even when you account for the risk of nuclear power plants and spent fuel. Coal ash is produced in gigantic quantities, and often stored in an open environment, while spent fuel is vitrified and far easier to contain.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
One extreme is the "ideal dispersal" leak, like the Fukushima leaks into the ocean. In this case, the radioactive material does not "clump up" enough to be dangerous -- it's not that some cubic meters of ocean are fine and some contain deadly, deadly poison, it's that each cubic meter of ocean contains the same minuscule amount of radioactive material, too low to be a threat.
The other extreme is the "immobile clump" of radioactive material, like the Elephant's Foot at the heart of Chernobyl. Here you have enough radioactivity to cause serious harm or death if you get too close for too long. It's scary, but it's also pretty stationary. It's scary like a hole in the ground. You stay away, you warn people not to fall in, but it's not going to creep up on you without warning, like a sinkhole in Florida.
The really scary kind of radioactive waste isn't either of these two extremes, but a dangerous middle-ground: radioactive waste which is clumpy enough to give off deadly amounts of radiation, but mobile enough to get everywhere. You occasionally get this from reactor leaks (that's the primary reason for the exclusion zone around Chernobyl; on the other hand, they could never find any evidence of this sort of leak after Three Mile Isle). You also see it in non-power-plant nuclear accidents, like the Goiânia Accident, which involved a radiation source used in medical imagine.
You also worry about it in coal ash, because the ash can be blown and scattered but is clumpy enough that the radioactive particulate doesn't disperse.
In the mean time, solar/wind is just as cheap to build as coal whereas nuclear (when built safely) costs more.
Nuclear also benefits from government subsidized insurance (the nuclear liability cap).
The old myth was based on the incorrect assumption that base-load demand can only be supplied by base-load power stations; for example, coal in Australia and nuclear in France. However, the mix of renewable energy technologies in our computer model, which has no base-load power stations, easily supplies base-load demand. Our optimal mix comprises wind 50-60%; solar PV 15-20%; concentrated solar thermal with 15 hours of thermal storage 15-20%; and the small remainder supplied by existing hydro and gas turbines burning renewable gases or liquids. (Contrary to some claims, concentrated solar with thermal storage does not behave as base-load in winter; however, that doesn’t matter.)
Hydro can easily be used as base-load, as it is in Brazil and Switzerland.
My point is that concern should be at least vaguely proportional to danger. Freaking out about thousands killed by nuclear accidents while ignoring millions killed by properly operating coal plants is not sensible. And if nuclear displaces coal, then it will save many, many lives.
Comparing with coal is highly relevant, since nuclear substitutes for coal. If coal is significantly more dangerous (as the numbers would indicate) then fear of nuclear power has ultimately killed a lot of people by preventing nuclear from further substituting for coal.
If you'd rather just talk about the dangers of nuclear power without that context, that's entirely fair. But that's a rather different complaint from what you've made so far. And if that's what you don't like, might I gently suggest just clicking the little [-] next to the comments that talk about coal? There's plenty of other discussion to be had here.
I would rather have us running on 100 fukushima era plants than the stupidity of continually burning dinosaurs until we ruin the environment.
Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
Estimates will range a bit, but we can say with complete confidence that all nuclear accidents thus far haven't come anywhere near that one dam failure.
What? Banqiao Dam killed 171,000 people. There's zero reputable evidence (or even reasonable speculation) for nuclear accidents killing 1.7 million. Even Greenpeace caps out at 200k, and UN/WHO come in in the dozens-to-thousands range.
Tell me again nuclear power is cheap.
"Hurricane Katrina caused $81 billion in property damages, but it is estimated that the total economic impact in Louisiana and Mississippi may exceed $150 billion"
Tell me again dirty power is cheap.
But you are somewhat right. Katrina is a better comparison with Fukishima which, to my knowledge, was a combination of being a poor location and repeated environmental damage that wasn't properly repaired or maintained. The 2015 Tianjin explosion is a better comparison with Chernobyl as that was human error and poor maintenance, not "act of god" weather.
But I was specifically referring to the idea that Katrina was completely different as there was no human error involved in there.
Figuring out the actual time until Chernobyl is safe is pretty difficult as most resources are highly politicized (I wonder why...) and there are certain REALLY hot spots, but considering the high profile nature of it: even when it reaches safe and reasonable levels of radiation, people are going to be afraid of it.
But here is a pretty decent, if not overly scientific, resource to get an idea of things http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation-lev...
For good chunks of it, it is safe enough for humans. Not great, but if there were a pressing concern, people could live there (keeping away from the remaining problems) comfortably (seriously, you would be amazed at background radiation levels in a lot of residential areas). But there is no pressing reason to, and there are definitely some spots you would want to stay the hell away from.
Fukishima, Three Mile Island, and Hiroshima/Nagasaki are cases where there IS a pressing reason for people to live there, so standards are much lower/more reasonable/whatever.
The surrounding area will be safe long before that but the epicentre will be radioactive for a long time and there is nothing we can really do about it.
- "Fukushima robot stranded after stalling inside reactor" [1]
- "the robot could remain ambulatory in the radiation field for only 50 minutes, and in fact the robot's lower portion was no longer responding to commands" [2]
Poor robots, always being sent in to die alone.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/13/fukushim...
[2] http://phys.org/news/2005-12-mighty-mouse-robot-frees-stuck....
Today, we don't quite have the ability.
In the future, we will.
Nuclear power is cheap.
The costs are not visible to the user of the fuel but put on the nation states and future generations.
If coal electricity users actually paid the real cost it would dwarf nuclear cost.
Even disregarding the risk/cost of accident cleanup, nuclear power isn't necessarily cheap or unsubsidized.
Besides which, nobody said nuclear power was cheap (not lately), but it is safe. Even with Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power causes vastly fewer deaths per unit of delivered power than other methods, especially coal (one of the most common sources of power in the world).
Traditional nuclear power plants are very expensive, but that's because they're huge.
I don't think that's true. The corium had cooled down when they discovered the elephant's foot. It's still extremely radioactive, but not melting hot.
4 million pounds? Is that right? Just for comparison, the maximum takeoff weight of a 747 is 735,000 pounds. Less than a quarter of the weight of this lid?
The density of a plane is way lower than that of water, as Tom Hanks recently proved ;)
Also, from Wikipedia:
Explosive steam pressure [...] destroyed the reactor casing, tearing off and blasting the 2000-ton upper plate, to which the entire reactor assembly is fastened, through the roof of the reactor building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Experiment_...
The other was basically a giant pipe bomb.
this is the kind of scenario where the ticking off boxes mentality should not be welcome.
things should have been done the long way, i.e giving people a blackout while they were doing those tests.
they also gave the testing duties to the night shift because they ran out of time.
prime example not to test things in production, but also not test things for testing's sake (especially in production)
It's perfectly possible to build systems such that they can be tested 'in production'. Indeed, in many cases I'd argue it's far more useful to informing the result of tests.
I completely reject the notion that 'health and safety' and 'box ticking' is responsible for the disaster at Chernobyl, when it's quite clearly the opposite: a lack of rigorous safety procedures, and those procedures which do existing not being followed.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
I assume they also melt down completely, true?
For Chernobyl, we even have youtubers now!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kg4vVYKc90 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRHnApxVFQU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
It seems the fuel is still contained though.
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is ~1,000mi^2 ... this is 80% the size of the state of Rhode Island. "Nearby" residends?
Whole article is just kinda sloppy
"Two minutes of exposure and your cells will soon begin to hemorrhage;"
It is sad to see this level of sensationalism in first 3 lines of the article.
Not only cells CAN'T hemorrhage by definition (hemorrhage is blood escaping from the circulatory system, cells don't have blood inside them), but that claim is completely made up, not present in the NRC article linked. Any decent level of fact-checking would have caught that.
Making up fake definitions for precise medical terms for the sake of impact is really bad journalism.
And then it's followed by:
"During a routine test on April 26, 1986, reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced a power surge that triggered an emergency shutdown."
"If it hits ground water, it could trigger another catastrophic explosion or leach radioactive material into the water nearby residents drink."
Which is contradicted by the article itself:
"Oozing through pipes and eating through concrete, the radioactive lava flow from reactor Number 4 eventually cooled enough to solidfy[sic]."
The aim of this test was to determine whether cooling of the core could continue to be ensured in the event of a loss of power.
[1] https://leatherbarrowa.exposure.co/chernobyl#photo-group-938... (if the #photo-group-93861 doesn't work, see the heading "The Accident To End All Accidents")
Makes one wonder if the systems where more alike than different...
https://www.cfact.org/2011/03/17/nuclear-safety-reactors-tha...
Personally I'm not terribly worried about meltdowns but rather terrorist getting hold of the waste and making dirty bombs but even that seems fairly unlikely (that is the pros outweigh the cons given todays technology).
Most interesting thing I learned is that the primary cause of death of the scientists who at that time were still researching the resulting decay, was from heart failure and strokes.