Japan Nuclear Accident: Worse than Worst, Again
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Two things strike me as pretty weird sentences in the article.
>Worst-case scenario builders consistently underestimate the statistical probability of separate bad things happening simultaneously
There must have been more than three accidents at nuclear plants in the history of mankind. Yet three "misjudgments" make them consistently wrong?
>Actually, ever major nuclear accident has been worse than worst case, and that's a fact
How can something be worse than worst case? I don't understand what the article tries to claim that "experts" have deemed the worst case. Clearly Fukushima is not worse than worst case as there haven't even been a full meltdown or anything like that yet.
Second, what is "Every major nuclear accident". Have there only been 3 major nuclear accidents? What constitutes major?
I can see the sense, this reactor was designed 50 years ago even with upgrades it's old technology and there have been huge improvements in the past 50 years. So this shows that the designers 50 years ago didn't do a perfect job. This is what the author means I believe.
And a "major nuclear accident" is defined as a level 7 accident in the International Nuclear Event Scale[1], I have no idea if the author refers to it when he talks about major nuclear events but probably not since there has been only one level 7 accident and that's Chernobyl.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sca...
Easy, when anyone involved starts "giving 110%".
I see this as a huge success. Every fail safe in good design has held up and kept a serious leak of radiation from happening. We're currently only seeing neutrons being leaked, which is essentially a 'big fucking deal' level of seriousness compared to a leak of radioactive iodine or something similarly absorbable and storable by the body.
To say the plant suffered a hydrogen-oxygen explosion and didn't release fissile material, I would say is amazing.
I'd just love it if people knew that more people die every year from the radioactivity released from the burning of coal than have ever died due to actual radioactivity from radioactive materials and power plant failures. Factor in the amount of people who die annually simply due to soot produced by coal plants and you can easily factor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and still count it. Factor in the amount of third world miners who die annually and we might as well go nuclear and drop a nuclear bomb annually and it would still be safer for the global public.
I'm serious, it's psycho-bizarre that the dropping of a WMD would actually cause less deaths in a year than the usage of coal.
I'm all for nuclear energy, but we must not fool ourselves into thinking that we can prevent everything. There are natural and human forces that can compromise integrity of nuclear facilities which will result in major releases of radioactive material and contamination of large land and sea areas. This is simply inevitable.
I think it is time to declare the safety of nuclear when 1/25 plants only become dangerous after an 8.9 earthquake. Virtually 90% of the planet will never be hit by a similar level earthquake making a similar situation impossible outside of an earthquake zone.
FYI the Japanese government is worried of a partial meltdown in some rods in the reactor. This is in no way a meltdown. Also furthermore there's serious doubts in the nuclear community over whether a reactor can even achieve explosive criticality. Again, proper design inhibits the danger of these accidents. Three Mile Island for incidence had the same meltdown event as Chernobyl, but because of a better core design the corium never breached the core.
Given the Japanese precautions around nuclear technology I'd expect their core to hold up at least the same as Three Mile Island if not a lot better. Given they're only claiming a partial meltdown in a few rods, the risk of corium breaching the core vessel is extremely remote.