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Comment by october_sky | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I started watching HBO's new mini-series "Chernobyl", and she's now terrified of nuclear power plants despite my reassurances. I'll have to show this to her, but based on this anecdote, I suspect more voters who see this TV show will also be biased against nuclear power.

Anyone else hear friends/family talking about this show as "terrifying" or "concerning"?

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Not to underplay the seriousness of the event or heroism of all those involved in the aftermath, but the show does make it look scarier than it deserves. For me part of this is simply down to the Russian equipment - it just looks scarier seeing those guys in those green rubbery looking suits like something out of an alien movie, vs when you see guys at Fukushima in plain white protective gear.

It's worth pointing out that the RBMK reactor design used at Chernobyl has no comparison in the west. Not to mention they had no (none!) containment building on those things. The design of the RBMK was in part because it's simpler to build. It's a kind of evolution of the very early reactor "piles" used during the lead up to and through the Manhattan project. The pressure vessels used in western reactors are difficult to produce. (We apparently no longer have any iron works left in the US that could produce them, the last one closed down some time ago.) On top of being simpler to build the RBMK style reactor also has (IIRC) the benefit (for Russia) that it can be used to produce the right kind of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Something that in the west was done in dedicated military reactors because civilian designed light water reactors suck for that task.

The thing about the iron works is actually one of the main problems with scaling up nuclear power. Modern designs are very safe yes, but, building them requires steelworking ability that apparently only exists in (yes!) Russia and Japan. There is a multi-decade backlog of orders for the necessary metal, and learning how to work steel in the necessary way is ... not trivial. So it's not even like we could build tons of reactors if we wanted to, designs or no designs.

The windscale reactors the UK used for Pu production were open cycle air cooled. Pull in air from the outside, run it through the core, and out via the chimney. One morning in 1957 operators coming to work noticed thick black smoke coming from the chimney and thought "this can't be good" (it wasn't).

I am going to guess that people calling the show terrifying has nothing to do with the green rubber suits.

And even despite the many design flaws of these early reactors, the reason it blew up is because of the reckless behaviour of some local Homer Simpson.

Just tell them that the estimated number of TOTAL human deaths from Chernobyl (the worst nuclear accident in history) is 4k, in comparison to the 1.84 million above. Or with the 230,000 killed by the Banqiao Dam collapse in China.

Yeah, it probably won't work, but it's worth noting the comparisons.

4k? "They" can come up with any number they want to, some say it is as low as 28, counting only the dead firefighters.

I live in the worst fallout area in Sweden and our nature is still very radioactive. Cancer rates here are of course increased compared to the rest of the country. And of course, the worst is yet to come. I believe more than 4k Swedish people have died or have their lives drastically shortened due to Chernobyl.

https://www.thelocal.se/20070504/7200

4 Thousand is based on the WHO findings.

So, let’s toss on the 8k instances of cancer from your source, and the 41k cancer rates attributed to Chernobyl by International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, and we are still well short of the actual deaths caused by one dam failure.

Yeah, Chernobyl is a tragedy; but let’s not pretend its worse than all the other power generation disasters.

Humans are really terrible at doing math, especially long-term math. I've had so many opinions it was downright painful to change after someone showed me the real math.

It is terrifying when things go wrong. The "Chernobyl" series definitely shows that. For the circumstances, the number of deaths Chernobyl contributed to were much lower than the worst case it could have been.

It's not surprising the public responds trepidatiously in the aftermath of a large-scale disaster (see trends of nuclear plant operation in the aftermath of Chernobyl and Fukushima: https://sites.utexas.edu/mecc/files/2014/05/Worldwide-Reacto...).

Nuclear bombs also caused quite a public scare in the 40s-60s following WWII after images of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be seen. The magnitudes of destruction scared people enough to build fallout shelters.

While nuclear power has brought a lot of good, it has also brought a lot of bad. Witnessing the bad changes people. If things go wrong either intentionally or unintentionally, the negative response is going to exceed the positive response, and those responsible for the nuclear plant are going to get the blame for bringing disaster upon everyone else.

"Nuclear" is a tough sentiment to paint positively, when so many unspecialized members of the public think straight to disasters associated with "nuclear".

There's pros and cons to many different energy sources, whether fossil fuel, nuclear, solar/wind, hydro, geothermal, etc. Each decision means accepting the possible consequences that could happen. No one solution is an obvious panacea.

I think the challenge is the “fast acting” vs “slow acting” consequences of our energy choices. Coal and Gas fired generating facilities have long term consequences but a picture of 1000s of people affected with cancer doesnt have the same impact.

Dam failures are pretty fast acting, but people aren't afraid of dams.

Everybody understands (or think they understand, anyway) water flow and dams. Very few people understand radiation

Gas fired plants cause cancer?

Natural gas exhaust still has some particulates, carcinogens, and radioactive components, but is generally much cleaner than coal. Because it's in the gas / liquefied phase, the most harmful components of raw natural gas (sulphur and heavy metal compounds) can be largely processed out before burning.

With coal, these have to be scrubbed from the exhaust, which is more difficult and usually less thorough.

Gas-fired plants cause global warming.

I'm quite pro-nuke, so that's my bias, but I'm parsing the show as more about the consequences of normalization of deviance than anything.

I haven't heard anyone discuss how modern nuclear plants are terrifying. Only how the thought of being near Chernobyl would have been terrifying. The events would have been terrifying for the people there.

I can see how this show could cause an increase in fear of nuclear plants though.

Because hardly any modern plants are operating, by far most are 70-80ies era. On top of that, consider the cost of currently planned or built plants and their schedule overruns: They may be less terrifying (if you manage to cancel out the psychological effect) but then they are often not considered „worth it“.

People also seem to equate nuclear power accidents with nuclear bombs, like a Hiroshima bomb.

she's right to assume worst-case scenarios. We're too smug in the west.

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