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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

The only appreciable release of radiation was a result of the Soviets playing fast and loose with shoddy infrastructure followed by higher ups attempting to rectify the situation by burying their heads in the sand is good enough for me.

Compared to oil spills ("oops, we grounded our tanker") and dam failures ("maintenance, lolwut?") a lot of different things needed to come together for the Chernobyl disaster to happen and the runners up, (3-mile, Fukushima) are downright benign by comparison.

As long as we don't get complacent and half-ass things I have no problem with nuclear power.

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I'm a strong supporter of nuclear power, but calling Fukushima benign is counter productive. Thousands have lost their homes and there are dangerous amounts of radiation leaking into the ground. The site will remain a money sinkhole of ongoing mitigation measures for a long time. But besides these direct effects, the handling of disaster showed that the responsible parties were trying very hard to cover everything up and thus permanently destroyed any confidence you might have had in them, proving the "human factors make nuclear unsafe" crowd right.

Unfortunately the human factor is exactly the problem with these types of systems. I don't think humans can ever be considered to be safe stewards of anything where a seemingly remote cascade event can wipe out life on the planet.

Look at the disaster of Long-Term Capital Management from the financial industry as an example, where a presumed ten sigma event almost wiped out the whole western financial system.

http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.fi/2007/05/11000000000000...

These nuclear reactors are built with the same underlying principles and risk-management profiles. There's always the element of human error; you can't over-engineer something you did not foresee. In addition to that you have the enormous profit incentives from running nuclear power. These incentives can overwhelm the incentives for safety, or lead to disregard of warnings where profit potential would be compromised if warnings were attended to.

It's human, therefore it's hard to ever sleep completely sound knowing that these constructions are running on the planet.

Fukushima didn't just happen because one mistake was made either. It happened because a long string of mistakes and disregard of safety happened. Want to bet it doesn't happen again? It's hard to bet against human nature...

http://carnegieendowment.org/files/fukushima.pdf

No single plant failure can wipe out life on the planet. Not even if all plants fail simultaneously and dump their entire cores into the atmosphere you'd wipe out all life on the planet. So please don't overstate the risks.

Now, obviously no catastrophic event in a nuclear power plant (or any other system engineered for safety) happens because of a single mistake. If it did that would be a huge error in the systems design. For a catastrophe to happen, several layers of safety systems need to fail at the same time.

I think its possible to engineer systems that are safe enough even in the presence of human factors. Modern reactor designs for example are a lot safer than what we had in Fukushima. But convincing you of this would probably take a lot more text than fits in HN discussion, so let's just disagree on this point.

>presumed ten sigma event

How are financial people even calculating that kind of rarity?

I remember seeing a recent article here on HN about a guy that lost a ton of (someone else's) money playing with oil contracts. He went on about how he diligently planned for "huge" failures, such as a drop of up to 30 percent in the price of oil.

I don't think it's fair to bring in finance. Natural disasters and nuclear reactors are far more well behaved and understood.

> How are financial people even calculating that kind of rarity?

They don't properly, and that is the problem. A lot of it had to do with creating models that do not reflect reality. They worked fine until extraordinary circumstances occur under which they break down. A well known mistake is assuming a normal distribution for financial returns. In reality this greatly underestimates the likelihood and magnitude of extreme moves that can cause catastrophic losses. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book "The Black Swan" discusses this in great detail. The bottom line is essentially that a move more extreme than what you anticipated is going to happen eventually.

LTCM made the mistake of neglecting the impact of changing correlations. The thought they had outsmarted the market by eliminating risk from their portfolio. But in times of financial turmoil, correlations of risky assets tend to increase. If your carefully constructed and hedged portfolio does not take this into account, you may be exposed to much more risk than you intended. This is precisely what happend to them. The fund was bailed out by a group of large banks, and their bets did eventually pay off, but the temporary losses were far beyond what their models had anticipated.

> a seemingly remote cascade event can wipe out life on the planet

What is this cascade event?

> anything where a seemingly remote cascade event can wipe out life on the planet.

Seriously? This ludicrous hyperbole does not belong in a thread where others are discussing the issue in good faith.

"cascade event can wipe out life on the planet"

That is like saying that exploding all the ice cream factories would lead to continents being covered in continental ice sheets.

Yes, there are some risks - but they are very local, and do not last a long time. I would claim a lone oil tanker is an equivalent environmental risk to a nuclear plant. And look how much oil production we have operating in the oceans.

I think it's fair to say, we've accepted certain level of risk to get our power.

Please don't overstate risks. We are living on a planet whose oceans are dying, whose atmosphere is being clogged by CO2 ... nuclear power is mostly a benevolent technology. It creates very little waste, whose side-effects we can control. Unlike, say ,CO2. Or an oil spill.

Yes, there are sometimes mistakes - but please understand - no matter how the media spins it (because disaster new sell) they really are not that horrific when compared to other things that happen constantly.

The world is already radioactive: People are constantly bombarded by radiation. Like a poster below already mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

Let's put this in perspective.

15,894 people died as a result of the earthquake and tsunami.

By all accounts, Fukushima was a relatively benign event.

Well, that's not by all accounts. That's by one account: direct deaths, which isn't the worst part of a nuclear catastrophe.

Only 31 people died during the Chernobyl meltdown, according to its wiki page.

The nice thing about an earthquake or tsunami is that they kill and then go away.

"The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has no confirmed casualties from radiation exposure, though six workers died due to various reasons, including cardiovascular disease, during the containment efforts or work to stabilize the Earthquake and Tsunami damage to the site.[15]"

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

> direct deaths, which isn't the worst part of a nuclear catastrophe.

And the definitely largest impact in indirect deaths with Fukushima came from the emotion-based decision to shut down other nuclear reactors, even if there was nothing wrong with them. This lead to electricity shortage and lack of air conditioning, which killed dozens or hundreds (mostly elderly people in hospitals or similar care, who suffered heart attacks in the summer heat).

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-07-12/heatstroke...

Chernobyl was much, much worse than Fukishima. Chernobly rained down radiation on many hundreds of thousands of people. Parts of the surrounding area are intensely radioactive to this day. Fukishima is nothing like that.

Total deaths from Chernobly, including cancers is expected to be around 4000. That represents approximately a 3% increase in cancer risk to some 600,000 people.

> Parts of the surrounding area are intensely radioactive to this day. Fukishima is nothing like that.

Outside of the capped reactor building itself, nothing around Chernobyl is "intensely radioactive".

As long as we don't get complacent and half-ass things I have no problem with nuclear power.

As if that will ever stop happening.

On a less snarky level: in a complex system (like basically any large-scale power generation scheme) we can't separate the underlying technology from the petty failings and foibles of the luckless human beings (quite often largely or entirely non-technical) saddled with the awful responsibility of having to manage it. And most especially not their time-tested propensity to sweep things under the rug and cover one's ass at the first sign of trouble (or even undue complication).

That's why we need to choose technologies which are resilient to human failure - not, implicitly, reliant and utterly dependent on human perfection to keep them from tipping over.

Have we ever trid asking a private insurance for a coverage? We often have the problem that the state tries to play the insurance role, whereas if every damage were to be paid for by an insurance, they'd "gide us" through respecting the procedures. Like we personally press charges and bankrupt you for life if you don't shut down the plant for every indicator that goes mildly not-green on this panel. Then we'd know the real cost of insuring for nuclear. Our problem is that the state is trying to make the nuclear investment itself.

I think the reason we don't have private insurance is the worst case risk is too significant for a single enterprise to absorb. Which is why the state is involved.

Your point remains valid, I just wish our governments were better at avoiding regulatory capture so we could trust them to do their job at this.

> As long as we don't get complacent

You and, going by Chernobyl's fallout distribution, everyone else within a radius of roughly 2000 km.

Looking on a map, for me this includes Chernobyl itself, the fallout of which is still measurable around here and contaminates dozens of forests to the point that mushrooms and game from there is considered inedible, and everything else between such stable, wealthy nations as Estonia, Tunisia and Syria.

No, I can't really say I'm confident in peoples' abilities to keep nuclear reactors out of harm's way.

"Considered inedible" is not the same thing as "actually unsafe".

> the fallout of which is still measurable around here

The radioactivity of granite mined decades ago and used to build buildings is still measurable using modern sensing devices. "Measurable" is a pretty bad threshold to use.

> contaminates dozens of forests to the point that mushrooms and game from there is considered inedible

"Considered" by whom? What are the actual levels? How do they compare to the radioactivity of other foods?

From what I can tell, the vast majority of the damage from nuclear accidents is not caused by the accident itself but the radiation-paranoid overreaction to it.

> "Considered" by whom?

German and EU authorities.

> What are the actual levels? How do they compare to the radioactivity of other foods?

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/hohe-radioaktive-werte-wil...

Legal levels are <400 Bq/kg for baby food and 600 Bq/kg for other foods; contamination in these cases ranges from 1000 to 10000 Bq/kg.

A banana hangs out at ~30000 Bq/kg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

Allowable intake levels are different for different isotopes. Potassium has a biological half life of a few hours, Caesium (the isotope in question here), of several weeks.

The FDA apparently doesn't even bother with regulating allowable Potassium-40 levels due to this.

Which is why you shouldn't use Bq/kg and instead use Sieverts. It's not that bad, human body can get rid of caesium-131 etc. pretty well via kidneys. The main problem was radioiodide which accumulates in thyroid and parathyroid glands and super heavy isotopes which are chemically dangerous, e.g. plutionium and uranium - but these do not disperse far at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert - Recommended reading, has a handy table. Fukushima doesn't even register as dangerous in there, equivalent to about 3 full CT scans.

Data from Chernobyl is scarce, but I'd suspect 4x that value due to more retained isotopes.

The US FDA thinks 1000 Bq/kg for Cs-137 is just fine.[1] Browsing around, I have seen other sources that go higher. I am not knowledgeable enough to know if one or both of those limits is overly conservative. Considering my experience with other food safety limits, I would say they probably are.

[1] http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/ComplianceManuals/CompliancePolicyG...

> The US FDA thinks 1000 Bq/kg for Cs-137 is just fine.[1]

"Fine" in the sense of "just below the limit of 1200". Even by FDA standards, 10000 Bq/kg Cs-137 is extremely high.

The panic around every non-Chernobyl nuclear incident is insane. I've mentioned before that if Japan would legally allow it I'd immediately move next to the Fukushima reactor as a kind of publicity stunt. It's probably worth pursuing further.

It would be a great way to buy a house in a very private setting for a trivial sum. It's kind of like buying a house near high-tension power lines. Enough people with kooky beliefs will lower real estate prices.

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