I live less than 100 km away from Olkiluoto nuclear plant, and I have never been worried about its safety. I wonder why this incident ever got any publicity outside Finland. Even here it faded away very quickly.
They definitely make press, but my opinion is that it is detrimental to public perception of risk.
Distributed systems are complicated beasts too, and have fascinating failure modes, but they get no press, because there are so many incidents and so many installations.
Centralized systems make a better scapegoat regardless of probabilities.
It reminds me of something Georges Charpak mentioned, paraphrasing: we can detect tiny particles, and now we are scared, but we cannot detect economic crashes, and we should be more scared of that.
> but my opinion is that it is detrimental to public perception of risk.
The Finnish nuclear unit-nuclear watchdog had found that radiation levels had risen [1], the public does deserve to know and make up its own opinion about it.
Also, centralized systems are a lot more vulnerable and high-risk compared to distributed systems.
The initial reporting was misleading in that it was not clearly communicated that where the radiation levels had risen. So yes, radiation levels rose inside the primary cooling system. This is what triggered the automatic emergency shutdown. But the primary cooling system is anyway 100% isolated from the environment.
In particular, no change of radiation levels whatsoever outside the reactor building was ever detected. But initial reports did not make this quite clear.
Wait until it is common public knowledge that a distributed system failure can cause a loss of life. People like you and I may be interested in these postmortems strictly for the analysis, but the public at large is not.
On the other hand, they're very interested in things that can kill them.
I also wonder if there's more public attention paid to nuclear incidents in the region because of the proximity of a player who does not disclose or cooperate in nuclear incidents.
> but my opinion is that it is detrimental to public perception of risk.
This would positively affect my perception of the plant's operators. They handled the crisis, and now are laying out the post-mortem for the public in a transparent manner. A culture of secrecy conceals incompetence, and that can lead to disaster. See: Chernobyl
It's indeed weird, INES 0 events are rarely reported... even levels 1 and 2 rarely are. Just yesterday there was one INES 1 anomaly here in Spain and 2 in France... that said the reading was super interesting, I get why it is on HN.
I think that at least within Finland, worries were mostly related to communication delays in informing relevant organizations about a potential nuclear incident. I.e. if this had turned out to be a more serious incident, the response would have been delayed. Glad to see it wasn't serious.
It was reported about it in the German press. I'm an opponent of nuclear power, but in this case I can only shrug and conclude that everything worked as expected, the issue was identified and dealt with.
Perhaps I am being pedantic, but this strikes me as a strange position to announce. Nuclear power is a broad category of things which includes fission, decay and fusion, all of the above can be used to generate heat.
If you look at a pie chart of how the electric power is generated in your country, and you see "nuclear power", which of "fission", "decay" and "fusion" are you going to think about?
Yes, that's why I qualified my comment. My point is that opposition is more effective when directed at specific design issues. It's about the quality of technical discourse. Just like you wouldn't say you oppose the internet if you have an issue with Facebook etc.
Fusion is a work in progress and it is likely what will power our civilization in the future.
In the meantime there are new types of fission reactors being developed (small modular such as Nuscale, advanced fission deployed in China) and they aim the address shortcomings of older designs.
The problem with current generation of fission plants is that they were primarily designed to be integrated into military-industrial complex that produces fuel for nuclear weapons. You can have safer fission plants by focusing on power generation only.
P.S. Not sure what's up with downvotes, but whatever.
Because nuclear bad. If it was a coal plant accident that killed 15 it would not make headlines outside of the country, but a 0-casualty nuclear accident makes it to the front page
No, it's because a nuclear reactor has a small but real risk for a Chernobyl or Fukushima like event. We are not good at managing risks of this impact size: it's a slippery slope if small disturbances are not taken seriously. It's not unlike the reporting of near misses in aviation.
Both events killed like less than a hundred people directly in total, maybe a few thousand if all externalities are accounted for. Meanwhile dam failures have killed several hundred thousand people. I've always wondered why anti-nuke people weren't also adamant anti-hydro as well.
"154,000 residents evacuated from the communities surrounding the plant due to the rising off-site levels of ambient ionizing radiation caused by airborne radioactive contamination from the damaged reactors." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_di...
Most studies seem to suggest that the evacuation ended up being much worse than doing nothing at all, no?
For example:
> “With hindsight, we can say the evacuation was a mistake,” says Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management at the University of Bristol and leader of a recent research project on nuclear accidents. “We would have recommended that nobody be evacuated.”
The Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant [1] is located on an island off the west coast of Finland. A problem was identified during an inspection on Dec 10th:
> When the pump of the cooling system was stopped, one of the valves was broken. For this reason, the repair work took longer than planned, about two hours. During the prolonged repair work, hot process water was able to enter backwards longer than planned into the filters of the cleaning system of the reactor due to a difference in pressure.
> the heated up water dissolved substances from the filter into the reactor water. The substances were activated as they passed through the reactor core. Consequently, the activity levels (radiation levels) of the steam moving through the main steam lines momentarily rose to about 3 to 4 times higher compared with the normal activity level.
Elevated radiation levels require an explanation and this clear and timely communication fits the bill. Three Mile Island [2] has taught us that the pipes, pumps, valves, and gauges making up the mundane plumbing in the system can fail and have cascading effects. Kudos to the operator for their transparency.
"In emergency preparedness actions at a nuclear power plant, the worst end result is always prepared for until proven otherwise." Yet they don't mention why they didn't notify the local and national authorities immediately when they noticed the disturbance, which delayed the authorities' preparedness. Do we have a culture where the plant operator tries to hide some things from the authorities in case "it was nothing"?
> ...the activity levels (radiation levels) of the steam moving through the main steam lines momentarily rose to about 3 to 4 times higher compared with the normal activity level. The momentary increase of the activity level in the main steam lines caused the automatic isolation of the containment, the so-called i-isolation. This is one of the safety functions of the plant, and it's job is to isolate the reactor's containment and the reactor so that no radiation can reach the environment. The i-isolation is designed to operate in the case of an internal pipe leakage or significant fuel damage. In this case, the cause was neither. The i-isolation automatically initiates water spraying in the containment and a reactor trip, among other things. As a result of a reactor trip, all the control rods automatically go inside the reactor, and the chain reaction stops.
The way I read this is--there was a very brief rise in the radioactivity of the steam in the pipeline, which kicked off the shut down of the plant. There was no indication of a larger issue, no indication that lives were in danger. In other words, the professionals on the scene had reason to believe it was nothing--and they were correct.
While the public certainly have a right to know if they are at risk, plant operators in this situation have an obligation to communicate in very careful manner. After all, in the era of social media, one hysterical politician could set off a mass panic via twitter. Far better, if the situation is in hand, to get things into an easily explainable safe state before communicating with the excitable non-experts.
I was talking about notifying the authorities. The plant started emergency procedures but somehow informing the authorities wasn't part of it at first. Nuclear power is allowed to operate only because of official oversight and it should not be up to the operating company to decide whether the officials should hear of an exceptional situation and after which delay.
In aviation, the relevant phrase is "aviate, navigate, communicate", in that order. I wonder if the design here is that you ascertain facts and follow a protocol promptly, before communicating their results?
It seems to me that big issue right now is that things inside of plant that are usually dry were exposed to water.
I also wonder if particles of dissolved filter can be filtered out or got stuck onto the walls of the plumbing system and could cause issues at later time with sensors or cause another radiation spike.
> Yet they don't mention why they didn't notify the local and national authorities immediately when they noticed the disturbance, which delayed the authorities' preparedness.
It took several hours for some local authorities (the local city is the one named in article). National radiation safety authority received the notification in about half an hour (12.22 situation happened, 12.32 company initiated their emergency procedures, STUK received the information around 13.00, first public notice went out at 13.28).
It's also not very clear who was responsible for notifying other authorities. If it was operator, STUK should probably also add a confirmation step on their process ("Have you informed X, Y, Z?").
My point exactly: they don't mention any of this. I would very much like to hear how it takes half an hour to make a phone call, send a text ("We have an exceptional situation here although we believe it's nothing significant. Will tell you more in 30 latest.") or whatever to alert the authorities so that they can finish their lunch or whatever it takes to start their procedures and be prepared to hear more.
35 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 79.7 ms ] threadDistributed systems are complicated beasts too, and have fascinating failure modes, but they get no press, because there are so many incidents and so many installations.
Centralized systems make a better scapegoat regardless of probabilities.
It reminds me of something Georges Charpak mentioned, paraphrasing: we can detect tiny particles, and now we are scared, but we cannot detect economic crashes, and we should be more scared of that.
The Finnish nuclear unit-nuclear watchdog had found that radiation levels had risen [1], the public does deserve to know and make up its own opinion about it.
Also, centralized systems are a lot more vulnerable and high-risk compared to distributed systems.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/finland-nuclear-incident/rad...
In particular, no change of radiation levels whatsoever outside the reactor building was ever detected. But initial reports did not make this quite clear.
On the other hand, they're very interested in things that can kill them.
I also wonder if there's more public attention paid to nuclear incidents in the region because of the proximity of a player who does not disclose or cooperate in nuclear incidents.
This would positively affect my perception of the plant's operators. They handled the crisis, and now are laying out the post-mortem for the public in a transparent manner. A culture of secrecy conceals incompetence, and that can lead to disaster. See: Chernobyl
Perhaps I am being pedantic, but this strikes me as a strange position to announce. Nuclear power is a broad category of things which includes fission, decay and fusion, all of the above can be used to generate heat.
If you look at a pie chart of how the electric power is generated in your country, and you see "nuclear power", which of "fission", "decay" and "fusion" are you going to think about?
In the meantime there are new types of fission reactors being developed (small modular such as Nuscale, advanced fission deployed in China) and they aim the address shortcomings of older designs.
The problem with current generation of fission plants is that they were primarily designed to be integrated into military-industrial complex that produces fuel for nuclear weapons. You can have safer fission plants by focusing on power generation only.
P.S. Not sure what's up with downvotes, but whatever.
I would argue that it is precisely this type of incident that should be well publicized to demonstrate how things work when they're working correctly.
What was the impact of the nuclear reactor there?
For example:
> “With hindsight, we can say the evacuation was a mistake,” says Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management at the University of Bristol and leader of a recent research project on nuclear accidents. “We would have recommended that nobody be evacuated.”
https://www.ft.com/content/000f864e-22ba-11e8-add1-0e8958b18...
CAUSE NUKELEEAR IS BAAADD!! <- some uneducated reactionary, probably.
> When the pump of the cooling system was stopped, one of the valves was broken. For this reason, the repair work took longer than planned, about two hours. During the prolonged repair work, hot process water was able to enter backwards longer than planned into the filters of the cleaning system of the reactor due to a difference in pressure.
> the heated up water dissolved substances from the filter into the reactor water. The substances were activated as they passed through the reactor core. Consequently, the activity levels (radiation levels) of the steam moving through the main steam lines momentarily rose to about 3 to 4 times higher compared with the normal activity level.
Elevated radiation levels require an explanation and this clear and timely communication fits the bill. Three Mile Island [2] has taught us that the pipes, pumps, valves, and gauges making up the mundane plumbing in the system can fail and have cascading effects. Kudos to the operator for their transparency.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
I can't find a good reference in English, but here (towards the end) they mention how it took several hours before the local authorities were informed: https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/1...
Some more details of the physics and chemistry in the disturbance can be found in this memo of the authorities (in Finnish): https://www.stuk.fi/documents/12547/1285302/Esittelymuistio_...
The way I read this is--there was a very brief rise in the radioactivity of the steam in the pipeline, which kicked off the shut down of the plant. There was no indication of a larger issue, no indication that lives were in danger. In other words, the professionals on the scene had reason to believe it was nothing--and they were correct.
While the public certainly have a right to know if they are at risk, plant operators in this situation have an obligation to communicate in very careful manner. After all, in the era of social media, one hysterical politician could set off a mass panic via twitter. Far better, if the situation is in hand, to get things into an easily explainable safe state before communicating with the excitable non-experts.
I also wonder if particles of dissolved filter can be filtered out or got stuck onto the walls of the plumbing system and could cause issues at later time with sensors or cause another radiation spike.
It took several hours for some local authorities (the local city is the one named in article). National radiation safety authority received the notification in about half an hour (12.22 situation happened, 12.32 company initiated their emergency procedures, STUK received the information around 13.00, first public notice went out at 13.28).
https://www.stuk.fi/-/olkiluodon-hairiotilanne-laitos-on-vak... https://www.stuk.fi/-/hairiotilanne-olkiluodon-ydinvoimalait...
It's also not very clear who was responsible for notifying other authorities. If it was operator, STUK should probably also add a confirmation step on their process ("Have you informed X, Y, Z?").