Correct. I know individuals whose expenses related to abandonment of their homes in the region (such as temporary housing, replacement of household goods, etc.) far exceeded ¥1 million. The original amount, much less the reduced compensation, didn't seem appropriate in light of the experienced abandonment-related damages.
I don't know enough about the ¥8.5 million calculation, and what damages it is meant to cover, to conclude whether it is a reasonable sum or not.
I used to be pro-nuclear, but here in South Africa, we can't even keep our coal plants running - nevermind nuclear. Last week a 930MW nuclear turbine at Koeberg went down because the cooling pump filters had not been cleaned in years and was filled with fish and jellyfish.
Small-scale, independent solar producers and perhaps geothermal or CSP (molten salt) seem to be the only strategies that can work.
There will always be corruption, war and fraud. To be pro-nuclear, you have to guarantee political stability for 100+ years, and I don't think many places could guarantee that.
> There will always be corruption, war and fraud. To be pro-nuclear, you have to guarantee political stability for 100+ years, and I don't think many places could guarantee that.
Indeed. This is the crux of it. Nuclear run by the US military? Very safe. Nuclear (as a power source, not talking munitions) run by the rest of the world as a commercial operation? Fraught with peril. I'm not anti-nuclear; I'm anti-humans-running-nuclear-for-profit.
It's time to move to renewables, batteries, and transmission networks, full steam ahead.
To produce electricity as part of a state-planned economy. It turns out governments are just as capable of cutting corners and making poor decisions like having a positive void coefficient, combined control/catalyst rods, and a lack of secondary containment.
Given that we have heard about safety issues from the nuclear establishment in the US, and we have heard about all kinds of ship issues from the Navy, I feel confident that if there were problems we would have heard about them.
False negatives are what they are, but the preponderance of the evidence is on the side of safety. Can we say the same for fossil fuels? Is it really worth staying on them because of some hypothetical beyond-top-secret problems that probably don't exist?
So you trust the military (which wouldn't do this directly anyway, they would just contract to a for-profit company), an institute which is purpose-built to kill other humans on the orders of the state, over a private company that merely seeks to turn a profit? Militarism has always been about profit and greed, more so than any company. And unlike companies, they are basically above the law.
Yes. US Navy nuclear engineers are military service members, not contractors, and are therefore part of the chain of command. There are consequences for failing to follow protocol.
I see you've never personally experienced the US military...
Kidding aside, while many service members do uphold their oath honorably, there's plenty of non-compliance and outright malfeasance without accountability.
And to the grandparent, the military does run reactors outside of ships (but typically for research as far as I know)
> I see you've never personally experienced the US military
I see you haven't bothered to actually look at the record. The U.S. Navy has decades of operating many nuclear reactors on ships and submarines with no incidents.
> there's plenty of non-compliance and outright malfeasance without accountability
Not in the U.S. Navy's nuclear program. Even what would be considered minor infractions in other parts of the military are grounds for immediate dismissal. I saw that happen once while I was in the Navy and stationed at a shipyard. A minor administrative irregularity got the reactor officer of a ship fired; he was off the ship the same day and never came back.
I don't know if you took that personally, but it was an obvious tongue-in-cheek comment.
If you look at one of my earlier replies, I acknowledged the relatively good (but not pristine) record of Navy warships but also linked to a list of a surprising number of military mishaps (both facility and weapons related).
To be fair, the list dwindled as the timeline became more recent.
The Navy has the advantage that they don’t have the same cost pressure a civilian reactor has. I am pretty sure their MW/$ cost is much higher than would be acceptable for a nuclear power plant.
> The MW/$ delta between a military and commercial reactor is the risk premium for safe operation.
No, it isn't, since we also have many, many civilian reactors that have operated for decades safely.
What's more, even if we take into account all of the harm done by all the nuclear accidents that have ever happened, including Chernobyl and Fukushima, the harm done by nuclear energy per unit of energy generated is still orders of magnitude less than the harm done by fossil fuel energy per unit of energy generated. And that is only actual harm that has already occurred--it doesn't take into account potential future harms (such as climate change--I personally don't think that's a very significant component of the harm done by fossil fuels, but I'm not arguing that point here, because what I've said is true even if any such potential harm is ignored--any potential future harm to the climate from fossil fuels just makes them look even worse than they already do).
The price premium paid by the military for nuclear power is for operational flexibility, not safe operation. The Navy's capital ships need to be able to steam anywhere in the world without having to worry about fuel. The Navy's submarines need to be able to operate submerged and undetectable for months at a time. Nuclear power is a necessary enabler for those operational capabilities, so the Navy simply can't tolerate any deviation from proper procedures since it would jeopardize those capabilities. The fact that this approach also leads to much increased reactor safety is a benefit, to be sure (and in the early days of Navy nuclear power, when much less was known about reactor safety than is known now, this benefit was indeed a key selling point for allowing the Navy to operate nuclear ships and subs), but it's not the primary purpose. If the greatly increased operational capability had not been there, the Navy wouldn't have bothered with nuclear power in the first place.
Size and the need to operate reliably at widely varying power levels. A reactor that's powering a ship has to be able to go from, say, 10% power to 100% power rapidly if the captain wants to go from ahead slow to flank speed, and also the reverse (the reverse case, 100% to 10% rapidly, is actually even more challenging). A civilian reactor has much less demanding requirements for changing power levels.
Those were what the Navy calls subsafe incidents, not nuclear incidents. There was no problem with the reactor. The problem was what one of my Navy instructors called "water in the people tank"--a flaw in the welds that seal the interior of the ship or structure against water pressure from the outside. The Navy took major steps to improve the QA on those welds as a result of these incidents; when I was in the Navy we did three different types of nondestructive tests and a single flaw, no matter how minor, meant you had to redo the entire weld.
The original comment was about the "US military" and not just the Navy. I'm assuming you're speaking from personal experience and that's why you mention the Navy specifically. The Navy does a great job, especially as it pertains to complex industrial systems. However, each branch and each unit has a unique culture and from my personal experience, the closer one gets to combat arms, the less bureaucratic and more "flexible" people tend to get with procedure.
Maybe your criteria is different for what constitutes a mishap, but the Navy has had what I think from a safety engineering standpoint would count as mishaps or at the very least close-calls. From just one decade:
December 12, 1971 – New London, Connecticut, US – Spill of irradiated water
During the transfer of radioactive coolant water from the submarine USS Dace to the submarine tender USS Fulton 500 US gallons (1,900 l; 420 imp gal)
were spilled into the Thames River (USA).
1975 – location unknown – Contamination
Radioactive resin contaminates the American Sturgeon-class submarine USS Guardfish after wind unexpectedly
blows the powder back towards the ship. The resin is used to remove dissolved radioactive minerals and particles
from the primary coolant loops of submarines.
October 1975 – Apra Harbor, Guam – Spill of irradiated water
While disabled, the submarine tender USS Proteus discharged radioactive coolant water. A Geiger counter at two of the harbor's
public beaches showed 100 millirems/hour, fifty times the allowable dose.
May 22, 1978 – near Puget Sound, Washington, United States – Spill of irradiated water
A valve was mistakenly opened aboard the submarine USS Puffer releasing up to 500 US gallons (1,900 l; 420 imp gal) of radioactive water
Maybe you were only considering nuclear reactor incidents? I can understand that perspective even if it probably doesn't meet safety engineering principles.
The numbers are greater if we use the OP's scope of "US military" and greater still if we count National Laboratories doing military funded work. I don't say this to disparage the military's competence, I actually think they are very good at managing complex systems. My main point is that I'm not convinced it's necessarily a byproduct of organizational structure of "chain of command" as the OP said.
> The original comment was about the "US military" and not just the Navy.
Yes, but it was about the military in the context of handling nuclear reactors and nuclear materials, and the US Navy is the only service that does that. (The Army did during WWII because it ran the Manhattan Project, but that was a one-time event and not representative of long-term practice.) So the Navy is the only relevant service.
> I'm assuming you're speaking from personal experience
Yes, as I've mentioned several times in various posts in this discussion (not all in response to you).
> Maybe your criteria is different for what constitutes a mishap
I was speaking specifically about reactor incidents, which is what Fukushima was. If you include releases of radioactive material that do not involve any issue with a reactor, yes, there have been incidents, some of which you note. A similar statement to the one I made about reactor incidents also holds for those: the total harm done by all such incidents involving radioactive materials is orders of magnitude less than the total harm done by releases of materials connected with fossil fuels (oil spills, coal ash, chemical spills, etc.; coal ash, btw, is more highly radioactive than many types of radioactive waste from nuclear reactors).
> I'm not convinced it's necessarily a byproduct of organizational structure of "chain of command"
I think the primary factor is simple unwillingness to tolerate any deviation from proper procedures. The existence of a military chain of command might not be essential for that, but it certainly makes it a lot easier. It would be very difficult for a civilian organization to justify summarily firing a high-level official over a single administrative error, as I saw done with a Navy officer (I mentioned this in another post elsewhere in this discussion).
Thanks for taking the time to respond and add relevant personal experience to the discussion.
> handling nuclear reactors and nuclear materials, and the US Navy is the only service that does that
That's not entirely true. I'd be willing to bet the Navy has the most experience in this regard, the Army still runs reactors and the Air Force handles nuclear material. Both investigating implementing reactors in future plans:
"Fast Burst Reactor (FBR) — The FBR is an unmoderated and unreflected cylindrical assembly of uranium and molybdenum alloy. The FBR produces high-yield pulses of microsecond width, as well as long-term, steady state radiation, to closely simulate the neutron radiation environment produced by a fission weapon"[1]
"The Defense Department is looking to develop miniature nuclear reactors to supply power to domestic military bases in an emergency, and later to power expeditionary forces"[2]
The other services are also heavily involved in National Laboratories that do a lot of the nuclear research for the federal government.
>the total harm done by all such incidents involving radioactive materials is orders of magnitude less than the total harm done by releases of materials connected with fossil fuels
Point noted and I don't know enough to disagree. But the issue wasn't which form of energy was the most safe, it was whether the military is inherently better at managing such systems because of their organizational structure. The military may foster accountability but I don't personally think this is attributable to a chain of command, but rather due to the emphasis on leadership principles and mature processes. There's plenty of civilian organizations that have a well-structured chain of command.
>I think the primary factor is simple unwillingness to tolerate any deviation from proper procedures. The existence of a military chain of command might not be essential for that, but it certainly makes it a lot easier.
Agree 100%. Out of curiosity was that officer actually fired (discharged/loss of commission) or reassigned? Reassignment is pretty common on the civilian side when people show themselves incapable of executing duties appropriately.
I wasn't aware that they were currently running any. You are right that I left out that the Army did used to have a small program, though--none of their reactors were more than about 10 MW, IIRC--but I thought it was shut down in the 1970s and they never had many reactor-years of operation.
> the Air Force handles nuclear material
Yes, fair point, the Air Force does handle nuclear weapons and associated materials.
> Both investigating implementing reactors in future plans
Yes, true. I've thought for a while that the obvious way for the US government to encourage nuclear power as well as generate some revenue independently of taxes would be to build a reactor for every US military base and sell the excess power generated back to the grid.
> the issue wasn't which form of energy was the most safe, it was whether the military is inherently better at managing such systems because of their organizational structure
If you left out "because of their organizational structure", I would agree with your description of the issue. I don't think organizational structure is the only relevant factor.
> Out of curiosity was that officer actually fired (discharged/loss of commission) or reassigned?
Reassigned, to a different command (not a ship), to duties not involving nuclear in any way. (I may have said "fired" in one of my posts describing this, but in military lingo that means "reassigned". Actually discharging someone requires a court martial, and the rules for when that can be done are much stricter.)
> Reassignment is pretty common on the civilian side when people show themselves incapable of executing duties appropriately.
But the definition of "incapable of executing duties appropriately" is very different in the civilian world. A minor administrative error wouldn't qualify. (By "minor administrative error" I mean an error of the order of "a single document was not filled out correctly", not an error of the order of "many things over an extended period of time were not done correctly". The latter might get you reassigned in the civilian world; the former won't.)
Few people who support nuclear power are against renewables, they are against fossil fuels. Coal mining is dangerous/destructive, burning coal is poisoning the oceans and has killed many, many people. For example, even with the advanced air pollution controls on coal plants in Europe, an estimate is that over 20,000 deaths are caused per year due to burning coal. I am not sure how many of these deaths Germany is exporting every year to countries downwind, but it isn't zero.
Long term, coal usage is also obviously a big driver of climate change. What many don't realize is that natural gas, it might be as bad for climate change as coal due to methane releases during the extraction and transportation of n
History will not look kindly on those who want to shut down nuclear power and keep coal and natural gas.
Unfortunately trying to rely only on intermittent power sources has huge storage requirements due to weather along with daily/seasonal variation. If grid energy storage was a simple problem it would have been done decades ago. For example, one estimate is that for Germany to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is 183 times their current capacity:
>...Based on German hourly feed-in and consumption data for electric power, this paper studies the storage and buffering needs resulting from the volatility of wind and solar energy. It shows that joint buffers for wind and solar energy require less storage capacity than would be necessary to buffer wind or solar energy alone. The storage requirement of over 6,000 pumped storage plants, which is 183 times Germany’s current capacity, would nevertheless be huge.
Exactly. For equal investment dollars and resulting real generating capacity, compare the time each will take to reach that goal, as against the very real climate threat. Real-world investors made their decision long ago.
Even neglecting the never-resolved waste problem, it's a no-brainer. Until the Sun quits, renewables are safe, clean, and unlikely to create any more disasters.
They might be better solutions but the coal industry and the general populace are pushing against them for now. While the people's opinions will likely change, we shouldn't expect any positive shifts from the coal moguls. Considering the fact that they're lobbying hard, is there that much we can do other than educating friends and family?
The energy density of uranium is such that the amount of waste generated is extremely small. The entirety of the nuclear waste generated by the US nuclear power industry could fit in a football field with a depth of 10 yards [1]. Put it in a concrete casket and bury it underground. Nuclear waste is a tiny sliver of the amount of industrial waste produced every year.
It's a mistake to think of Chernobyl as anything near worst case, there were absolutely huge containment efforts that took place after that disaster that might not take place after a similar future disaster.
I think the comment's material point is, why put a nuclear plant in arms reach of such groups? It's a good point.
I would argue that most people are not talking about putting a nuclear plant in, say, Somalia. I think most people realize there have to be some preconditions met before you can really even think about using nuclear power. For the most part, if you are able as a nation to construct such a plant, you likely have the security infrastructure to secure the place. In fact, you likely have one of the more powerful security infrastructure buildouts in your region.
A hydroelectric power station is a far bigger risk if that's your threat model. A you have a relative eternity to get people out of harms way if a reactor goes pop compared to if a dam bursts.
Actually, when the alternative is fossil fuels (and it frequently is), you only have to understand that, even if your nuclear reactor goes kaboom, it will still kill less people than your fossil fuel plant that does not blow up.
And please don't give me "we should all use less energy." Even if we should all use less energy, it's still better to generate this less energy from nuclear, as long as we're using fossil fuel now.
This isn't really the criticism that the OP is making. Coal may kill more people, but it doesn't irradiate the surrounding area for hundreds of years if something goes wrong.
Personally, I agree that nuclear is probably not anti-fragile enough to be a widespread solution. Political instability is the norm, not the rarity, throughout history.
The problem with this kind of comparison is that nuclear can cause one-time incidents resulting in massive social disruption and economic issues for a period of time. COVID-19 shows that, as a society, the world in general is not prepared for stuff like this; even the initial Chinese quarantines started causing supply chain issues that reverberated around the world.
It is much easier to ask people to reduce tuna consumption, than to relocate 100,000+ people, as happened in Fukushima.
>Coal may kill more people, but it doesn't irradiate the surrounding area for hundreds of years if something goes wrong.
Actually, coal irradiates the surrounding area when it is working properly, and it adds to global warming at the same time, it can do both!
To be clear, the major concern with nuclear disaster is ground water contamination. That is, the reactor melts through and the corium gets into the groundwater, contaminating it with radiation.
After initial evacuation, most of the elements that spread have a relatively short half life and decay quickly. The heavy elements are too heavy to get blown around, but they can irradiate other things (like water) that can get around fairly easily.
Chernobyl was a special case because they actually blew up the reactor, and their graphite moderator caught fire, so you got lots of radioactive smoke. Most plants use water or heavy water as a moderator, so at least it doesn't catch fire in a disaster (the steam cloud isn't that great either, but at least it doesn't stick to stuff).
Anyway, agree with your anti-fragile opinion in terms of the current (ancient) reactor designs. We really need a new design if it is going to be viable over a longer term.
Given the choice; the vast majority of humans prefer to live in cities with population densities that are high. Given the choice & language not being a barrier, I'd prefer to live in Hong Kong at density 6,300 people/sq.km.
I'm not sure that irradiating the surrounding area for hundreds of years is as big a blocker as people believe; the earth is huge and we have a surplus of land in places people don't want to live. Most of the earths surface is already practically uninhabitable for humans and we are doing just fine.
Ironically, the places where it does matter (island nations like Japan) are almost forced in to nuclear because they have no space. They are probably doing more damage long term going back to fossil fuels than Fukushima did.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, millions of people moved to industrial centers like London, Manchester (U.K.) and Pittsburgh (USA) for work. These cities were extremely polluted, often to the point where you couldn't see the sun during the day. The exact same thing happened over the past few decades in China.
It seems pretty absurd to suggest that anyone neutrally "chose" to live in such miserable surroundings. Clearly they moved there for lack of economic opportunities elsewhere.
I'm impressed but also confused that the calim nobody would chose to do something is being supported only with evidence that millions of people chose to do that thing despite exposing themselves to the negative effects you cite.
This is how powerful the draw of cities are. People will happily sacrifice seeing the sun for an opportunity to live and work in a city - if the alternative was living in the country.
And I think it is pretty obvious that between city-no-sun, country and city-sun the ranking is going to be:
1) City-sun
2) City-no-sun
3) Country
By the numbers, nobody chooses to live in the country. Your counterargument is essentially that people have good reasons to live in the city - yeah, that is obvious. That is why they are making the choice that they are. I dunno what this 'neutral choice' concept is but I don't believe it is a real thing. Yeah they move for economic opportunities. That is why sterilising large areas is irrelevant. People have been tested and nobody cares about the environment when the economy is on the line; they are all going to be crammed together in cities.
Prior to the modern age, it was considered more desirable to live in the country.
> By the numbers, nobody chooses to live in the country.
Again, by the contemporary numbers. Contemporary trends cannot be translated into broad sociological statements about human beings. This is basic historical knowledge. In the US alone, the return to cities is a fairly recent phenomenon. Cities were considered undesirable and suburbs were heralded as having a better quality of life as recently as the 90s.
Historically, movement to cities has been driven almost entirely by economics. No one wanted to live in a cramped city slum and there was no "choice" between two equal options, one in the city and one in the country. It was more a choice of continued rural poverty, bordering on starvation, or a polluted, miserable, economically-better existence in a city.
Actually coal plants are a huge emitter of radiation already. The radiation emissions of one coal plant might not compare with one full-blown nuclear plant disaster, but it certainly a noteworthy emission on average.
Coal power plants produce hazardous byproducts called "coal ash". [1] The US generates 200 million tons of this highly toxic sludge and most of it just gets dumped in a landfill, contaminating the area for decades. [2] Nuclear is far cleaner, even if the byproduct is radioactive.
Interesting. I think the opposite. Just the fact that we've spent tens of billions on Yucca mountain alone to have it go nowhere makes me think differently.
If I was a contractor faced with solving the coal ash problem or the nuclear waste problem, I'd avoid the latter like the plague even if just for the political difficulties, notwithstanding the engineering part of the problem.
The only reason trillions of dollars haven't been spent cleaning up the byproducts of burning fossil fuels is because we just dump it into the environment instead. If the fossil fuel industry were held accountable for the waste, it would be much more expensive than the boondoggle that is Yucca mountain. (Particularly if CO2 emissions are properly considered...)
Yucca mountain is the wrong solution. We can reprocess nuclear fuel waste easily already, reducing this issue by quite a lot. As a policy issue the United States does not, so you end up with much more “spent fuel” than necessary.
Radioactive byproducts (steel and such) are a bigger issue, but hopefully you only see a lot of that when you are actively decommissioning a plant.
As you alluded to, I think it's the policy/political problems that are more difficult to overcome compared to the technical issues. That's the main reason I was assuming it would be easier to solve the coal ash problem
If the energy industry had to follow the regulations of the nuclear industry - we'd be back in the stone age. Nuclear is the only way we can reach our co2 targets in time. I think renewables and nuclear need to be implemented at the same time.
> even if your nuclear reactor goes kaboom, it will still kill less people than your fossil fuel plant that does not blow up.
increased cancer rates in Belarus (especially in Mogilev and Homel regions - the regions which took the brunt of Chernobyl and where the breast cancer rate for example is double) produce several thousand extra deaths per year. I wonder how a natural gas power plant - the present day alternative to nuclear - would be able to kill so many people.
Chernobyl is not the gold standard for comparison, it was a completely different design (far more dangerous, honestly) from the BWR/PWRs that were built everywhere else.
Fossil fuels produce an estimated > 4 million deaths per year [1]. This isn't even considering the hundreds of millions or more that are at risk of displacement due to climate change, and the conflict that will likely be associated with this displacement.
Also, can you substantiate your claim of several thousand extra deaths per year? I'm reading an estimated 5,000 additional cases of cancer (not all of them fatal) in all of Europe over the span of 20 years [2].
I'm pro-nuclear myself, but going to play devil's advocate here. Chernobyl was bad, but it could have been much worse. Also, Chernobyl did actually kill people, and displaced many more. Fossil fuel plants put some stuff in the air, that according to some models do some other stuff that if you squint hard could make you believe that some bajillions of people died. But people don't actually die because there's ash in the air or mercury in tuna fish. It's models that are squeezed like lemons in search for an argument.
So, no, nuclear disasters did actually kill people and objectively more than coal power plants.
When you go to Chernobyl disaster's wikipedia page, it says:
> Deaths: 42 acute and delayed (several months), less than 100 at present, possibly several thousand long term extra cases of cancer
In other words, if you just count people killed at the site, Chernobyl killed less people than Nigerian oil pipe explosion of 1998, or 2000, or 2003, or 2006. (Damn, why does Nigeria have so many disasters?) Hardly nobody remembers them, because fossil-fuel deaths aren't newsworthy, unlike radiation deaths.
Of course, if you count the number of extra cancer deaths attributable to Chernobyl, it becomes much higher - maybe thousands, which is basically what you called "according to some models do some other stuff that if you squint hard..."
Compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, and nuclear always comes out safer.
> it will still kill less people than your fossil fuel plant that does not blow up.
given how concentrated energy output from nuclear power plants is there are significant other considerations like terrorism, or sabotage, in particular in regions like Africa and Asia which is really the only place where massive expansion of nuclear energy still makes potential sense.
There's also the economic costs in case of catastrophy. Depending on the source Fukushima has costed Japan several tens but more likely several hundreds of billions, devalued private property and land or has made it unusable, and so forth.
The reasoning is probably that individuals have individual problems that are in addition to being evacuees from the disaster.
Problem is, you can't separate that from the disaster. Problems combine. If you have two problems A and B in your life, the impact isn't simply A + B. It could be as much as A x B.
If B is the fault of someone who caused an accident, there should be some room to go after more than just B-sized compensation.
But, anyway, this seems to illustrate the court system at work. It's not simply the case that one side gets everything that they want. That's why you have to sue for more than you're willing to settle for; ask for a pie in the sky, settle for a muffin.
Seems like this isn't so true now with the COVID crisis. Lots of talk about giving everyone checks. Lots of companies continuing to pay workers who aren't working. What drives your statement?
"The Tokyo High Court on Tuesday ordered ¥1 million in additional damages be paid each to some 300 evacuees from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, down by two-thirds from the amount awarded by a lower court ruling."
"Additional damages" vs "down by two-thirds"
If it's down by two-thirds, it's not additional, its a reduction.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadWe thought about and figured that was very possible.
So ¥9.5 million, or ~$88,000 total
I don't know enough about the ¥8.5 million calculation, and what damages it is meant to cover, to conclude whether it is a reasonable sum or not.
Small-scale, independent solar producers and perhaps geothermal or CSP (molten salt) seem to be the only strategies that can work.
There will always be corruption, war and fraud. To be pro-nuclear, you have to guarantee political stability for 100+ years, and I don't think many places could guarantee that.
Indeed. This is the crux of it. Nuclear run by the US military? Very safe. Nuclear (as a power source, not talking munitions) run by the rest of the world as a commercial operation? Fraught with peril. I'm not anti-nuclear; I'm anti-humans-running-nuclear-for-profit.
It's time to move to renewables, batteries, and transmission networks, full steam ahead.
https://pvbuzz.com/renewables-capacity-overwhelms-coal-gas-o... (US: Over the next three years, renewables will add nearly 50,000-MW of new capacity and be more than a quarter of total, while gas, coal, oil, and nuclear will drop by 4,200-MW)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/12/wind-and... (Wind and solar plants will soon be cheaper than coal in all big markets around world, analysis finds)
Chernobyl wasn't run for profit.
Are you sure? Would we know?
"they have amassed over 5700 reactor-years of safe operation."[1]
[1]https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/fact0604...
Edit: On second thought, there seems to be more than I was expecting, especially early in the atomic era:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...
False negatives are what they are, but the preponderance of the evidence is on the side of safety. Can we say the same for fossil fuels? Is it really worth staying on them because of some hypothetical beyond-top-secret problems that probably don't exist?
https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/NNPTC/
Kidding aside, while many service members do uphold their oath honorably, there's plenty of non-compliance and outright malfeasance without accountability.
And to the grandparent, the military does run reactors outside of ships (but typically for research as far as I know)
I see you haven't bothered to actually look at the record. The U.S. Navy has decades of operating many nuclear reactors on ships and submarines with no incidents.
> there's plenty of non-compliance and outright malfeasance without accountability
Not in the U.S. Navy's nuclear program. Even what would be considered minor infractions in other parts of the military are grounds for immediate dismissal. I saw that happen once while I was in the Navy and stationed at a shipyard. A minor administrative irregularity got the reactor officer of a ship fired; he was off the ship the same day and never came back.
If you look at one of my earlier replies, I acknowledged the relatively good (but not pristine) record of Navy warships but also linked to a list of a surprising number of military mishaps (both facility and weapons related).
To be fair, the list dwindled as the timeline became more recent.
No, it isn't, since we also have many, many civilian reactors that have operated for decades safely.
What's more, even if we take into account all of the harm done by all the nuclear accidents that have ever happened, including Chernobyl and Fukushima, the harm done by nuclear energy per unit of energy generated is still orders of magnitude less than the harm done by fossil fuel energy per unit of energy generated. And that is only actual harm that has already occurred--it doesn't take into account potential future harms (such as climate change--I personally don't think that's a very significant component of the harm done by fossil fuels, but I'm not arguing that point here, because what I've said is true even if any such potential harm is ignored--any potential future harm to the climate from fossil fuels just makes them look even worse than they already do).
The price premium paid by the military for nuclear power is for operational flexibility, not safe operation. The Navy's capital ships need to be able to steam anywhere in the world without having to worry about fuel. The Navy's submarines need to be able to operate submerged and undetectable for months at a time. Nuclear power is a necessary enabler for those operational capabilities, so the Navy simply can't tolerate any deviation from proper procedures since it would jeopardize those capabilities. The fact that this approach also leads to much increased reactor safety is a benefit, to be sure (and in the early days of Navy nuclear power, when much less was known about reactor safety than is known now, this benefit was indeed a key selling point for allowing the Navy to operate nuclear ships and subs), but it's not the primary purpose. If the greatly increased operational capability had not been there, the Navy wouldn't have bothered with nuclear power in the first place.
Those were what the Navy calls subsafe incidents, not nuclear incidents. There was no problem with the reactor. The problem was what one of my Navy instructors called "water in the people tank"--a flaw in the welds that seal the interior of the ship or structure against water pressure from the outside. The Navy took major steps to improve the QA on those welds as a result of these incidents; when I was in the Navy we did three different types of nondestructive tests and a single flaw, no matter how minor, meant you had to redo the entire weld.
Scramming and then having no procedure for a rapid restart, yes. But that's not a reactor safety incident.
Maybe your criteria is different for what constitutes a mishap, but the Navy has had what I think from a safety engineering standpoint would count as mishaps or at the very least close-calls. From just one decade:
December 12, 1971 – New London, Connecticut, US – Spill of irradiated water During the transfer of radioactive coolant water from the submarine USS Dace to the submarine tender USS Fulton 500 US gallons (1,900 l; 420 imp gal) were spilled into the Thames River (USA).
1975 – location unknown – Contamination Radioactive resin contaminates the American Sturgeon-class submarine USS Guardfish after wind unexpectedly blows the powder back towards the ship. The resin is used to remove dissolved radioactive minerals and particles from the primary coolant loops of submarines.
October 1975 – Apra Harbor, Guam – Spill of irradiated water While disabled, the submarine tender USS Proteus discharged radioactive coolant water. A Geiger counter at two of the harbor's public beaches showed 100 millirems/hour, fifty times the allowable dose.
May 22, 1978 – near Puget Sound, Washington, United States – Spill of irradiated water A valve was mistakenly opened aboard the submarine USS Puffer releasing up to 500 US gallons (1,900 l; 420 imp gal) of radioactive water
Maybe you were only considering nuclear reactor incidents? I can understand that perspective even if it probably doesn't meet safety engineering principles.
The numbers are greater if we use the OP's scope of "US military" and greater still if we count National Laboratories doing military funded work. I don't say this to disparage the military's competence, I actually think they are very good at managing complex systems. My main point is that I'm not convinced it's necessarily a byproduct of organizational structure of "chain of command" as the OP said.
Yes, but it was about the military in the context of handling nuclear reactors and nuclear materials, and the US Navy is the only service that does that. (The Army did during WWII because it ran the Manhattan Project, but that was a one-time event and not representative of long-term practice.) So the Navy is the only relevant service.
> I'm assuming you're speaking from personal experience
Yes, as I've mentioned several times in various posts in this discussion (not all in response to you).
> Maybe your criteria is different for what constitutes a mishap
I was speaking specifically about reactor incidents, which is what Fukushima was. If you include releases of radioactive material that do not involve any issue with a reactor, yes, there have been incidents, some of which you note. A similar statement to the one I made about reactor incidents also holds for those: the total harm done by all such incidents involving radioactive materials is orders of magnitude less than the total harm done by releases of materials connected with fossil fuels (oil spills, coal ash, chemical spills, etc.; coal ash, btw, is more highly radioactive than many types of radioactive waste from nuclear reactors).
> I'm not convinced it's necessarily a byproduct of organizational structure of "chain of command"
I think the primary factor is simple unwillingness to tolerate any deviation from proper procedures. The existence of a military chain of command might not be essential for that, but it certainly makes it a lot easier. It would be very difficult for a civilian organization to justify summarily firing a high-level official over a single administrative error, as I saw done with a Navy officer (I mentioned this in another post elsewhere in this discussion).
> handling nuclear reactors and nuclear materials, and the US Navy is the only service that does that
That's not entirely true. I'd be willing to bet the Navy has the most experience in this regard, the Army still runs reactors and the Air Force handles nuclear material. Both investigating implementing reactors in future plans:
"Fast Burst Reactor (FBR) — The FBR is an unmoderated and unreflected cylindrical assembly of uranium and molybdenum alloy. The FBR produces high-yield pulses of microsecond width, as well as long-term, steady state radiation, to closely simulate the neutron radiation environment produced by a fission weapon"[1]
"The Defense Department is looking to develop miniature nuclear reactors to supply power to domestic military bases in an emergency, and later to power expeditionary forces"[2]
The other services are also heavily involved in National Laboratories that do a lot of the nuclear research for the federal government.
>the total harm done by all such incidents involving radioactive materials is orders of magnitude less than the total harm done by releases of materials connected with fossil fuels
Point noted and I don't know enough to disagree. But the issue wasn't which form of energy was the most safe, it was whether the military is inherently better at managing such systems because of their organizational structure. The military may foster accountability but I don't personally think this is attributable to a chain of command, but rather due to the emphasis on leadership principles and mature processes. There's plenty of civilian organizations that have a well-structured chain of command.
>I think the primary factor is simple unwillingness to tolerate any deviation from proper procedures. The existence of a military chain of command might not be essential for that, but it certainly makes it a lot easier.
Agree 100%. Out of curiosity was that officer actually fired (discharged/loss of commission) or reassigned? Reassignment is pretty common on the civilian side when people show themselves incapable of executing duties appropriately.
[1] https://www.wsmr.army.mil/testcenter/dir/Pages/Survivability...
[2] https://www.airforcemag.com/pentagon-working-on-mini-nuclear...
I wasn't aware that they were currently running any. You are right that I left out that the Army did used to have a small program, though--none of their reactors were more than about 10 MW, IIRC--but I thought it was shut down in the 1970s and they never had many reactor-years of operation.
> the Air Force handles nuclear material
Yes, fair point, the Air Force does handle nuclear weapons and associated materials.
> Both investigating implementing reactors in future plans
Yes, true. I've thought for a while that the obvious way for the US government to encourage nuclear power as well as generate some revenue independently of taxes would be to build a reactor for every US military base and sell the excess power generated back to the grid.
> the issue wasn't which form of energy was the most safe, it was whether the military is inherently better at managing such systems because of their organizational structure
If you left out "because of their organizational structure", I would agree with your description of the issue. I don't think organizational structure is the only relevant factor.
> Out of curiosity was that officer actually fired (discharged/loss of commission) or reassigned?
Reassigned, to a different command (not a ship), to duties not involving nuclear in any way. (I may have said "fired" in one of my posts describing this, but in military lingo that means "reassigned". Actually discharging someone requires a court martial, and the rules for when that can be done are much stricter.)
> Reassignment is pretty common on the civilian side when people show themselves incapable of executing duties appropriately.
But the definition of "incapable of executing duties appropriately" is very different in the civilian world. A minor administrative error wouldn't qualify. (By "minor administrative error" I mean an error of the order of "a single document was not filled out correctly", not an error of the order of "many things over an extended period of time were not done correctly". The latter might get you reassigned in the civilian world; the former won't.)
https://news.mongabay.com/2013/06/burning-coal-responsible-f...
A NASA estimate is that the use of nuclear power has saved approximately 1.8 million lives in the years 1971-2009.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/
Long term, coal usage is also obviously a big driver of climate change. What many don't realize is that natural gas, it might be as bad for climate change as coal due to methane releases during the extraction and transportation of n
History will not look kindly on those who want to shut down nuclear power and keep coal and natural gas.
Unfortunately trying to rely only on intermittent power sources has huge storage requirements due to weather along with daily/seasonal variation. If grid energy storage was a simple problem it would have been done decades ago. For example, one estimate is that for Germany to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is 183 times their current capacity:
>...Based on German hourly feed-in and consumption data for electric power, this paper studies the storage and buffering needs resulting from the volatility of wind and solar energy. It shows that joint buffers for wind and solar energy require less storage capacity than would be necessary to buffer wind or solar energy alone. The storage requirement of over 6,000 pumped storage plants, which is 183 times Germany’s current capacity, would nevertheless be huge.
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5...
Even neglecting the never-resolved waste problem, it's a no-brainer. Until the Sun quits, renewables are safe, clean, and unlikely to create any more disasters.
https://qz.com/568450/fossil-fuels-kill-more-people-every-ye...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclea...
I am very pro-nuclear in the US (and the EU etc.), but I think the concern about nuclear in potentially unstable nations is absolutely valid.
I would argue that most people are not talking about putting a nuclear plant in, say, Somalia. I think most people realize there have to be some preconditions met before you can really even think about using nuclear power. For the most part, if you are able as a nation to construct such a plant, you likely have the security infrastructure to secure the place. In fact, you likely have one of the more powerful security infrastructure buildouts in your region.
And please don't give me "we should all use less energy." Even if we should all use less energy, it's still better to generate this less energy from nuclear, as long as we're using fossil fuel now.
Personally, I agree that nuclear is probably not anti-fragile enough to be a widespread solution. Political instability is the norm, not the rarity, throughout history.
The worst nuclear disasters pale in comparison to what we did with fossil fuels.
It is much easier to ask people to reduce tuna consumption, than to relocate 100,000+ people, as happened in Fukushima.
Actually, coal irradiates the surrounding area when it is working properly, and it adds to global warming at the same time, it can do both!
To be clear, the major concern with nuclear disaster is ground water contamination. That is, the reactor melts through and the corium gets into the groundwater, contaminating it with radiation.
After initial evacuation, most of the elements that spread have a relatively short half life and decay quickly. The heavy elements are too heavy to get blown around, but they can irradiate other things (like water) that can get around fairly easily.
Chernobyl was a special case because they actually blew up the reactor, and their graphite moderator caught fire, so you got lots of radioactive smoke. Most plants use water or heavy water as a moderator, so at least it doesn't catch fire in a disaster (the steam cloud isn't that great either, but at least it doesn't stick to stuff).
Anyway, agree with your anti-fragile opinion in terms of the current (ancient) reactor designs. We really need a new design if it is going to be viable over a longer term.
I'm not sure that irradiating the surrounding area for hundreds of years is as big a blocker as people believe; the earth is huge and we have a surplus of land in places people don't want to live. Most of the earths surface is already practically uninhabitable for humans and we are doing just fine.
Ironically, the places where it does matter (island nations like Japan) are almost forced in to nuclear because they have no space. They are probably doing more damage long term going back to fossil fuels than Fukushima did.
Moving to cities for economic opportunities is not a neutral choice in any sense. I’d question that most people actually prefer crowded cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London
https://popularpittsburgh.com/darkhistory/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_China
It seems pretty absurd to suggest that anyone neutrally "chose" to live in such miserable surroundings. Clearly they moved there for lack of economic opportunities elsewhere.
This is how powerful the draw of cities are. People will happily sacrifice seeing the sun for an opportunity to live and work in a city - if the alternative was living in the country.
And I think it is pretty obvious that between city-no-sun, country and city-sun the ranking is going to be:
1) City-sun
2) City-no-sun
3) Country
By the numbers, nobody chooses to live in the country. Your counterargument is essentially that people have good reasons to live in the city - yeah, that is obvious. That is why they are making the choice that they are. I dunno what this 'neutral choice' concept is but I don't believe it is a real thing. Yeah they move for economic opportunities. That is why sterilising large areas is irrelevant. People have been tested and nobody cares about the environment when the economy is on the line; they are all going to be crammed together in cities.
> By the numbers, nobody chooses to live in the country.
Again, by the contemporary numbers. Contemporary trends cannot be translated into broad sociological statements about human beings. This is basic historical knowledge. In the US alone, the return to cities is a fairly recent phenomenon. Cities were considered undesirable and suburbs were heralded as having a better quality of life as recently as the 90s.
Historically, movement to cities has been driven almost entirely by economics. No one wanted to live in a cramped city slum and there was no "choice" between two equal options, one in the city and one in the country. It was more a choice of continued rural poverty, bordering on starvation, or a polluted, miserable, economically-better existence in a city.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_coal_ash
2. https://www.sierraclub.org/wisconsin/coal-ash-pollution
I'm not sure that point is a very strong one.
If I was a contractor faced with solving the coal ash problem or the nuclear waste problem, I'd avoid the latter like the plague even if just for the political difficulties, notwithstanding the engineering part of the problem.
Which is pretty much only going to happen if you invest a lot of money into nuclear facilities dedicated to this. 1GJ is about 280 kilowatt-hours.
Radioactive byproducts (steel and such) are a bigger issue, but hopefully you only see a lot of that when you are actively decommissioning a plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing_and_radio...
If the energy industry had to follow the regulations of the nuclear industry - we'd be back in the stone age. Nuclear is the only way we can reach our co2 targets in time. I think renewables and nuclear need to be implemented at the same time.
I don't think there can be any doubt about this.
increased cancer rates in Belarus (especially in Mogilev and Homel regions - the regions which took the brunt of Chernobyl and where the breast cancer rate for example is double) produce several thousand extra deaths per year. I wonder how a natural gas power plant - the present day alternative to nuclear - would be able to kill so many people.
Also, can you substantiate your claim of several thousand extra deaths per year? I'm reading an estimated 5,000 additional cases of cancer (not all of them fatal) in all of Europe over the span of 20 years [2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Cancer_asse...
So, no, nuclear disasters did actually kill people and objectively more than coal power plants.
How much worse could it possibly have gotten?!
> But people don't actually die because there's ash in the air or mercury in tuna fish.
Just because it doesn’t go out and visibly stab them to death doesn’t mean people don’t die from them.
> Deaths: 42 acute and delayed (several months), less than 100 at present, possibly several thousand long term extra cases of cancer
In other words, if you just count people killed at the site, Chernobyl killed less people than Nigerian oil pipe explosion of 1998, or 2000, or 2003, or 2006. (Damn, why does Nigeria have so many disasters?) Hardly nobody remembers them, because fossil-fuel deaths aren't newsworthy, unlike radiation deaths.
Of course, if you count the number of extra cancer deaths attributable to Chernobyl, it becomes much higher - maybe thousands, which is basically what you called "according to some models do some other stuff that if you squint hard..."
Compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, and nuclear always comes out safer.
given how concentrated energy output from nuclear power plants is there are significant other considerations like terrorism, or sabotage, in particular in regions like Africa and Asia which is really the only place where massive expansion of nuclear energy still makes potential sense.
There's also the economic costs in case of catastrophy. Depending on the source Fukushima has costed Japan several tens but more likely several hundreds of billions, devalued private property and land or has made it unusable, and so forth.
But genociding your engineers is probably not best idea.
I wonder what is the reasoning behind this.
Problem is, you can't separate that from the disaster. Problems combine. If you have two problems A and B in your life, the impact isn't simply A + B. It could be as much as A x B.
If B is the fault of someone who caused an accident, there should be some room to go after more than just B-sized compensation.
But, anyway, this seems to illustrate the court system at work. It's not simply the case that one side gets everything that they want. That's why you have to sue for more than you're willing to settle for; ask for a pie in the sky, settle for a muffin.
"The Tokyo High Court on Tuesday ordered ¥1 million in additional damages be paid each to some 300 evacuees from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, down by two-thirds from the amount awarded by a lower court ruling."
"Additional damages" vs "down by two-thirds"
If it's down by two-thirds, it's not additional, its a reduction.
And then later another ruling for additional damages by a lower court, and then a higher court reduced the additional amount.