Nuclear Power Professionals Are Serious About Joking | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear Power Professionals Are Serious About Joking

nautil.us

118 pointsdnetesn29 comments

This reminds me of an excellent talk on paramedic work at motorcycle road races in Northern Ireland given by the late Dr. John Hinds [1]. These guys crash into things at up to 200mph with unsurprisingly grisly results, which makes Dr. Hinds's calm technical descriptions and gallows humor all the more fascinating. What's especially crazy is that the paramedics have to ride motorcycles at 180mph+ to get to the crashed riders! (Northern Ireland didn't have helicopter ambulances at the time of the presentation).

I highly recommend the video. Hinds was an excellent speaker with an excellent sense of humor. The technical details of motorcycle injuries and their treatments are very interesting, but I think the coolest part is the proximity of the riders and doctors to catastrophe and how it leads to an integration of the morbid and the banal.

[1] https://youtu.be/MsZBXlTHPCg

(edited out repetitive phrasing)

> 180mph+

That's rather excessively fast. It might end up with some tricky recursion issues where other paramedics will have to fix the first ones on even faster motorcycles.

I watched the talk, more time today, sorry the man died :(.

The stark dark humor is just a way to cope with the crushing seriousness of reality. For instance, our undergrad reactor thermohydraulics class's professor was notoriously strict because there's just no tolerance for failing to do the math for cooling a reactor. But one of the very few ways he would be humorous would be to call a meltdown an "uncontrollable rearrangement of geometry" with a wink and a nod precisely to both convey the seriousness of the issue and to use the needlessly absurd technical language to make us more empathetic to the common person, and therefore make us more readily internalize the seriousness.

I once sat through a presentation by a county medical examiner. Flipping through his slides, he made a remark that has stuck with me 20 years later: "this man died of what we in the industry call 'acute lead poisoning.'"

The individual was a gunshot victim.

My favourite euphemism comes from the Simpsons: "Meltdown?! No that's one of those buzz words. We like to call it a temporary fission surplus."

Not too far off from "power excursion"

Is nuclear safety actually dependent on individual people not making calculation errors? Because that might be the scariest thing I’ve ever heard. I’d hope that many people would have to screw up in the same way for a mistake to cause real-world harm.

These things happen regularly.

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

http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1445_web.pd...

http://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Fairewinds_...

a datacenter exploded due to fume build up in the backup power fuel tanks and we called it a rapid expansion of air

Doesn't Elon Musk refer to it as a RUD - Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly - event whenever a launch vehicle opts out of existence?

I love these euphemisms.

Not just Elon Musk, that's a fairly common "euphemism" in the world of rocketry.

In my line of work - subsea handling equipment - the going phrase when things go really, really bad appears to be "EEE - Entropy-Enhancing Event"

Looks much better in the post mortem reports than the equivalent "Sh-t just blew up on us!!!"

Actually, that's how an explosion is defined in the dictionaries, it's a rapid expansion of air.

No, I actually looked at a few and Air is not part of the definition. Which is reasonable as a supernova is a large explosion without Air being involved.

I've noticed (aircraft) pilots are the same --- or at least the few I've met. Very very serious at work, but the exact opposite outside.

I seem to recall something called a WCA Whole Core Accident back when I worked in the Nuclear group at BHRA :-)

> our undergrad reactor thermohydraulics class's professor was notoriously strict because there's just no tolerance for failing to do the math for cooling a reactor.

How is this different from calculating any other design?

Because, in a "normal" case of a large suspension bridge failing, you might kill 20-30, if a bus was going over as it failed. Fixing it might cost $Bs.

In the case of a nuclear meltdown (or "temporary fission surplus") you might acutely impact 10-100s of million people and significantly shorten the lives of several 10s of thousand (see Chernobyl). Costs might range into the many $100Bs.

Zero loss of life is considered acceptable in any non-military field of engineering or design that I'm aware of. (With the possible exception of automotive and highway design, where we have a huge blind spot, but that's a topic for another day.) Bridge collapses and nuclear accidents both tend to produce non-zero loss of life, and be considered shall-we-say "bad." So they are treated exactly the same by their respective fields; namely, zero such incidents are tolerated, allowed or expected.

Which means your example doesn't demonstrate a difference or answer the question "How is this different from calculating any other design?" Nobody allows collapsing a bridge just because it "only" kills 30 people. (By the way, the Golden Gate is about 8,000 feet long, a car is about 25 feet long, let's say 30 including buffer space, and there are 6 lanes. So if traffic is bumper-to-bumper, everybody is in their car alone, and there are no trucks or buses, that means there are about 1,600 people on the bridge. More if there are buses and carpools, less if there are trucks.)

If you wanted to show a difference, you would have to pick a field of design where catastrophic failures are tolerated and calculation accuracy isn't such a big deal, such as the shitty web apps we all work on. Unfortunately you picked structural engineering, where as far as I know they require 6 years of school, 4 years of mentoring and two all-day exams just for licensure, at least two engineers have to sign off on every design, and both of those engineers are held personally liable (read financially and professionally ruined) for any negligence resulting in an accident. It's a non-illustrative example.

How many bridge failures are likely to dirrectly affect people in another state or country with different laws and standards for construction without their knowledge? Which nuclear accident affected all of Europe?

How many bridge failures are there per year? How many people die on average? Can you name one with greater than 150 casualties?

Let me help: https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

Now if you want to talk about tsunami, that's a different topi, but it's pretty clear why the design, review, and construction of nuclear power plants are more restrictive than even the largest and most expensive bridges (or other civil engineering projects with the possible exception of dams).

As I tried so hard to point out, "which accident is worse" is not the point. They are both unallowably bad. You are correct that a serious nuclear accident is likely worse than a bridge collapse. The question was how and whether mistakes in nuclear design are treated differently from other engineering fields. You brought up bridge collapses, which is a bad example because mistakes aren't tolerated in bridge design either. Or in structural engineering in general, which includes the design of nuclear plants by the way.

You now bring up frequency of bridge collapses per year, which doesn't seem relevant either. Or if we somehow decide it's relevant, it's actually a counter-indicator to your point. Because if it's a low number, that means the bridge field probably takes mistakes very seriously and ferrets them out successfully. And if it's a high number, that starts to weaken your point about "which is worse." But the number would have to be pretty big to compete, and we would stop building bridges long before reaching it, and again it's not about which is worse.

You finally address the point in the last line. Educate me about those design/review/construction restrictions if you like.

I am not certain you will find the equivalent of the NRC, the IAEA, the NEPIO, or various international treaties involving most (any?) other construction projects.

https://www.iaea.org/topics/construction-and-commissioning-o...

Why wouldn't you want a random state, local, or national business design and regulate a unique nuclear power plant? What could possibly go wrong? LOL!

To be clear the number of unique (because looks are important) bridge designs proliferates and the suppliers change regularly while every new nuclear reactor is a close derivative of one that has been built and tested for decades. That's not because it's the easiest or highest profit, but because international regulation and public fear are real.

If structural engineering were a relaxed and informal field with a lot of trial and error and no entry requirements, your example we be a good one.

I've always enjoyed dark humor. Though not because I have higher intelligence. It's fun to get away from cliche and melodrama with any type of humor. And dark humor seems to be fitting for possibly bad situations. I wouldn't joke about death at a funeral but I might when someone talks about possible doom and gloom and death is abstract ways.

I kept waiting for the author to use the term gallows humor. I was a little surprised when I got to the end and the phrase was never used.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallows_humor

Same thing for doctors. I was at a party with a ton of doctors and it was the funniest and also most gruesome party I have ever been to.

I worked at a nuclear consulting co. where network hostnames were Simpsons’ characters and people backed into parking spaces out of habit.

My grandfather, a Norwegian, was a nuclear engineer for GE his whole career and helped build Hanford.

He was also the funniest person in my family.

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