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Comment by forensic | Hacker News Reader

Whether you like it or not, the beliefs of most intellectual engineer types is that the nuclear power plant dangers have been solved.

It's inconceivable (cue sound clip from Princess Bride) to most of us that extremely extensive and effective contingency plans are not in place.

The nuclear risk is obvious, and so any nuclear construction's main emphasis must be on handling all possible contingencies... right?

If Fukushima does end up being a "Big Deal" that is going to forcibly shift the world view of many many engineers and hackers. It will represent a piece of data that is fundamentally at odds with our view of the world.

The facts will eventually win out, but for the short term, it is necessary that we go through these cycles of disbelief and then shock. Because that's just reality.

I will be shocked if Fukushima causes serious harm to humans because until now it has been inconceivable to me that people making nuke plants could possibly underestimate the risks. If my inaccurate beliefs are shattered by the harsh reality of nuclear related deaths then... that's just how it will have to be. I'll have to eat my hat. I'm not looking forward to it.

In the meantime I have to go with what I know. Which is that this should not be an issue that threatens human life.

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Is it even possible to handle all contingencies though? I don't know enough to do the maths, but when you've got

    four different reactors

    an earthquake

    followed by a tsunami

    followed by loss of electricity for the emergency pumps

    followed by parts of the plant blowing up

    followed by tons of dust getting in the way

    followed by possibly more aftershocks

    followed by possibly more tsunamis

    followed by possible injuries to the personnel needed to run these operations

    considering other equipment can break down

    considering political pressures to make certain decisions

    considering some of the physics/chemistry here may be entirely novel

    ...

Think of all the different permutations in those variables, just how many scenarios have been prepared for? It has to be more complicated than just 'if casing 1 fails, casing 2 will stop it, and if casing 2 fails, casing 3 is there'

It will not be possible ever, to keep handling cases of escalating complexity one of top of other. When things get complex beyond certain level, a kill switch should be triggered. The Kill switch should not depend on If-else cases ...

And your response indicates compelete ignorance of both the situation and nuclear reactions.

There is no kill switch, if they had a "kill switch" and executed it right now, you'd be condemning all the reactors to meltdowns, and you'd be condemning the US Western Coast to dangerous levels of radiation.

The content of the fuel rods take DAYS to become non-radioactive enough for them to not need to be cooled constantly. The very problem that's occuring now is occuring because either the radioactive cesium and iodine is either at risk of not being cooled which will lead to a meltdown and release of them into the atmosphere, or a containment breach with largely the same impacts.

That's the basic problem with nuclear power, isn't it? There's no kill switch. It stops when it's ready to stop, not when you need it to stop.

All current efficient power sources have associated risks. It would be silly for anyone to call nuclear power 100% safe.

Hmm. What do you envision a "meltdown" to consist of? The system still has a fallback system in the event of a core meltdown that is designed to cool and manage the core without radiation release. Meltdown definitely does not equal to "release of them into the atmosphere".

I'm not overly familiar with this specific reactor design; but usually what happens is they seal the containment as the core melts, flooding the sump (where the slag would collect) with water to cool it down.

Right now they are trying to avoid that because a) there is always a risk of radiation leak from the containment and b) because the cleanup bill would catch quite a few more zeroes. The point is; meltdown is the final failure scenario, if they get to it, well, they get to it. But there is no fallback if something goes wrong at that point; so it is potentially better to try and control it at this stage, while you still have a fallback to implement.

Please don't be overly dramatic ("and you'd be condemning the US Western Coast to dangerous levels of radiation"); this is a bad situation. But at the moment there does not appear to be a major risk to the US Western Coast. As you say, best not to comment in too much depth if you don't know the details.

>The system still has a fallback system in the event of a core meltdown that is designed to cool and manage the core without radiation release.

What do you think is failing and is the entire cause for all of this concern. The fallback system is pumping water into the reactor to keep it cool. Those are the systems that have been failing and have failed (during the explosions/fires) and have caused the (temporary-ish) meltdowns in the last few days.

A full meltdown has the potential to release a significant amount of radiation. A full meltdown increases in possibility as the reactors become harder to control and cool due to explosions and containment failure. It probably doesn't pose a significant risk to CA, but they will receive some radiation if it were actually to experience complete failure.

Meltdown isn't binary. They're experiencing meltdown right now. By definition. That's what the release of radioactive material is. The question is, can they keep it under relative control and prevent further exposure of the still proceeding fuel rods.

They're experiencing meltdown right now. By definition. That's what the release of radioactive material is.

Not really; in this case "meltdown" refers to the actual process of core melting, it is not entirely clear but it does not appear much or any of the cores have melted. Certainly not to the stage I would refer to as a meltdown. They are still in a "struggling to cool it down" stage.

The release of radioactive material is not equatable to a meltdown - all manner of things can lead to such a release, meltdown is just one of them.

If they actually have a full core melt (to the point it drops out of the reactor vessel into the dry well), yes, the risk of release of radioactive material is heightened. But probably not to the level you envision, and it is certainly not a case of "if it melts it's game over".

Explosions within the reactor shell are extremely unlikely, even in the event of a core meltdown, because the system is specifically designed to stop such an event occurring (which is one reason it has not so far happened :)).

Note; containment failure has not occurred, as far as we know, at any stage. The reactors are not being "controlled", the process is stopping by itself. The reactors simply have to be kept cool while that happens.

What do you think is failing and is the entire cause for all of this concern.

There is a different system in such a case (or, rather, a different approach). Essentially they just flood it with water.

With the best will in the world; it is worth reading some of the more technical explanations rather than just the media. They explain the process and the issues much better - even Wikipedia has reasonable material (and is at least a place to start with links)

This is now the second time you've accused me of not knowing what I'm talking about and yet your only difference of opinion is my terminology as to whether it's a meltdown or whether the process of "oh shit, dump water on it" is controlled or not. In fact, most of the information I have on this topic was from spending most of Sunday re-reading Wikipedia on nuclear reactors, but thanks for assuming I watch or read ANY mainstream news.

QUOTE: "A meltdown occurs when a severe failure of a nuclear power plant system prevents proper cooling of the reactor core, to the extent that the nuclear fuel assemblies overheat and melt, either partially or completely"

That has occurred. That's not in dispute, unless I'm just completely 100% off base here. A quick Google search reveals that fuel rods in both reactors were not only uncovered by water at various points, but were also "exposed" which I presume to be through a containment failure, AND there are numerous reports that the parts of the rods have in fact melted.

As I said earlier, this constitutes a meltdown and greatly increases the severity and danger of the problem at hand. It's not a total meltdown, I already "disclaimered" that repeatedly. Those rods melting pose a large risk to containment efforts. If they melt, they can escape much more easily and that means radiation exposure on a much greater level, even if only for workers at the plant.

I don't mean to sound patronising or rude, if that is what came across sorry.

Whilst mostly you're correct, there are some fundamental problems with what you are saying.

It's definitely stretching the definition of a meltdown to refer to this event as such. It's still pretty much unknown if any melting has occurred, and to what extent it has done. Generally a meltdown is as I described it; where the situation is unrecoverable with the standard cooling and you are facing the situation of simple containment.

I suppose technically this could be seen as a partial meltdown; but the truth is that this situation is at the very edge of the margin for such a problem. A meltdown is not a binary thing, but in this case it is not really a meltdown, and that was my main point.

Right now it is absolutely recoverable, and based on the latest data #1 and #3 reactors will be fine from this point on. Certainly if they survive the next couple of days it will all be fine.

but were also "exposed" which I presume to be through a containment failure

No. If this were the case there would be a much serious issue :) It simply means the coolant level dropped so far that they were exposed to the air inside the container.

If they melt, they can escape much more easily and that means radiation exposure on a much greater level, even if only for workers at the plant.

Potentially... but bear in mind that radiation expulsion so far is relatively unrelated to the core; the radiation released so far is included in the steam that is being vented (and then the explosions push it right out). In a proper meltdown situation the risk is that an explosion releases actual core material into the wild, that would be a magnitude worse than the current situation.

At the moment I don't believe the rods are melting, they are being successfully cooled (and for the most part have been).

I don't know, maybe you're right but I continue to see, more and more, evidence that they did melt. I continue to see more and more people placing this between TMI and Chernobyl in severity...

They had a kill switch and used it (the stopped the reactors as soon as the tsunami warning occurred).

That hasn't helped, though, because a nuclear reactor takes months/years to become "safe" (depending on exactly what you measure and consider safe)

In what sense is it true that "that hasn't helped"? Are you suggesting that if they'd kept the reactors running things would have been better?

Perhaps what you mean is "hasn't made the impact of a magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami zero". Honestly, I can't see that that's a reasonable thing to ask for.

It "hasn't helped" in the context of the post I was replying to.

The poster clearly thought that a kill switch would be some kind of magic button that would turn everything off and "make it safe". I'm pointing out that nuclear power stations don't work like that.

Clearly, it is a much better situation now than if they had been going when the tsunami hit.

The first 10 things you have listed there are entirely predictable. Indeed, the emergency procedures were designed to handle them and simply haven't coped.

They were unlucky that the tsunami was slightly worse than they had planned for, which washed away the diesel backup generators. Backups for those generators were quickly brought in, though.

OTOH, they have been very lucky that no aftershocks have caused any tsunamis (yet). If that happened right now then they are screwed.

I haven't seen any evidence of the last two occurring.

"what appears to have happened is the tsunami flooded the basements where these emergency diesel generator connections are at. So, even though they brought in mobile units, new emergency diesel generators, to hook them up to run the safety systems, the basements were flooded, where they needed to do the hook-up."

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/14/japan_facing_biggest_c...

I guess that was something that was pretty predicable too: a Tsunami floods basements - who would ever have thought of that!?

In their defense here though, I believe they got that pumped out pretty quickly.

Yesterday I heard somebody who was responsible for a nuclear power plant in Europe speak on the radio (in Europe too). He said they were prepared for a malfunctioning valve, power outage etc. (predictable events) but they weren't actually prepared for the case that everything happens at once.

I wasn't saying those things were unpredictable, I meant that in combination they could result in so many different scenarios, I wonder if it's even feasible to have a plan for all of them.

Absolutely. You work it from the other side.

The process of nuclear decay is well understood, so you can compute, given any mass of nuclear material, how much heat and for how long that mass will generate sitting in a pile by itself. You do that calculation in the presence of full moderation (all control rods inserted, below the critcial level) and without moderation (control rods out).

Now you design a thermal sink which can absorb that much heat indefinitely when either covered in soil or sitting out in free air (choose the option that has the worst heat conduction) Note that modern reactors like the Pebble Bed can't really do the whole core meltdown thing, but those that can you can design what is essentially a bucket of boron laced sand underneath them such that in the event hell breaks loose with the control rods out, the core will melt and diffuse into the sand which will drop it below critical and now you're solving for "non-critical pile turned off, how much heat from time 0 to n?"

Ok, now lets see what can cause this reactor design to cause any damage. Hmm, well its immune to anything that doesn't hit it directly and destroy the containment vessel.

So basically anything except a direct hit by an asteroid or perhaps a nuclear weapon.

Now if you look at Pebble Bed reactors they take the approach that the fuel itself is in self contained containment vessels, you can dump them out across the floor and they will cool off without doing anything else and without any radiation.

But to re-iterate what others have said, there is a security/hazard/value trade off, airplanes fall out of the sky all the time and yet people still fly, automobiles kill their occupants and yet people still drive, coal miners die trying to dig up coal and yet they keep mining.

Nuclear reactors are no different in this regard, they have a 'worst case' scenario (similar to a plane losing a wing at altitude but we're not all demanding that planes have a parachute under the seat cushion), if we only have to deal with worst case reactor scenarios during 9.0 earthquakes, I'm ok with that. I can understand if you aren't.

It's never been 'inconceivable' that nuclear plants would fail. Nuclear energy was a risk nations were willing to take to keep you plugged in, making this post right now. You're faulting engineering that predates the microprocessor, at a power plant scheduled to be decommissioned soon, for failing in the two worst natural disasters (earthquake + tsunami) in Japan's modern history.

I just wanted to make that clear.

If society considers the loss of life acceptable given the benefits, fine.

But I don't think it does.

It's not just engineers who are responsible, in any event.

Something like 40k deaths per year are from auto accidents. Is that worth it? 158k due to lung cancer, 86%of that smoking related. Worth it?

If society doesn't consider this comparatively small loss of life acceptable given the benefits, then society is stupid. But we already knew society is stupid, and terrible at risk analysis. If that weren't the case, we'd have many many more nuclear reactors, and no one would want to get in their cars, ever.

If anyone is stupid and terrible at risk analysis it's the people who still spew that party line. It was already stupid when there had been only one complete failure of nuclear plant safety, and it happened to the "bad guys" whom everyone could just assume must have been more stupid and careless than we "good guys" could ever possibly be. But fact is, people have acted stupid and careless handling nuclear plants everywhere, and a risk analysis that assumes all risks are foreseeable and perfect execution of safety measures is just incredibly idiotic.

Who claimed that nuclear safety and contingency planning handled every single forseeable risk? Who claimed that operators and officials react in a perfect manner during a crisis? I don't think anyone has. I certainly haven't. Putting words in other people's mouths is stupid (see, I can make oblique insults too).

The bottom line is that nuclear power is still safer than many activities/environments that regular people encounter on a daily basis, and is certainly safer and cleaner than other, much more prevalent sources of power generation. It's obviously not the safest or cleanest, but it's up there.

Are you familiar with the automobile?

Can you say how many lives have been saved because of the nuclear power plants over the past 30-40 years? This would include cleaner air in the meantime, costs which were saved and re-deployed to social welfare programs, cheaper power for individuals and businesses, meaning cheaper goods and more money available to feed and house love ones and spend on health care, and hell, even more money to spend on the expensive construction codes which undoubtably saved many thousands of lives during this tragedy.

I really can't say how many lives are enhanced or saved by simply being more efficient. And I can't predict the future, so neither do I know if nuclear power will ultimately be our downfall. But the question is far more complex than "society considers the loss of life acceptable." Society makes these choices to support and sustain better (and more numerous) lives.

Show me numbers, please.

Calculate, how many lives are already saved and will be saved in future by nuclear reactors in comparison to other sources of energy. Calculate how many lives will be lost in worstests scenarios. Multiple number by probability and sum up.

For example:

* nuclear reactor can save 1000 lives per year in 100 years of it life with 0.9999 probability;

* in worstest case, with 0.0001 probability, it can kill 10000 humans per year in 1000 years.

Result: 1000⋅100⋅0,9999 + −10000⋅1000⋅0,0001 = 98,99E3

0,0001 probability is too optimistic - we already have Chernobyl and few other smaller nuclear disasters while number of nuclear stations is much smaller than 1K.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...

  Energy Source              Death Rate (deaths per TWh)

  Coal – world average               161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
  Coal – China                       278
  Coal – USA                         15
  Oil                                36  (36% of world energy)
  Natural Gas                         4  (21% of world energy)
  Biofuel/Biomass                    12
  Peat                               12
  Solar (rooftop)                     0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
  Wind                                0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
  Hydro                               0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
  Hydro - world including Banqiao)    1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
  Nuclear                             0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

You are mismatched statistic with risk analysis. I asking for summary of risks multiplied by their effects.

PS. If something will blow up our Earth, it will be even safer than nuclear energy! (If we calculate number of deaths per TWh).

Not trying to be contrary, just sharing what I have heard.

I don't know what you consider 'Serious Harm to Humans', but as of Sunday, there were an assumed 160 people with radiation exposure (9 confirmed).[0]

From what I remember on the news the other day, the reason for the failures of the plants was the fact that they had not conceived of an earthquake and tsunami of this magnitude. PM Kan said that there were adequate protections in place for the facilities, but the earthquake was beyond the conceived scope of the protection.

Also, while 20km from site 1 have been evacuated, they've needed to extend the radiation-affected area to 30km. Unfortunately, it's too wide of an area to evacuate, so they have told people to stay in their homes.

[0]http://jp.reuters.com/article/mostViewedNews/idJPJAPAN-19971...

edited: edited "poisoning" into "exposure" edited: Added evacuation distances

This is a very consequential difference: 被ばく does not mean radiation poisoning, it means radiation exposure. You can have sub-clinical (i.e. no impact to health) exposure. For example, if you've ever had a dental X-ray, you've been hibaku'ed.

So far, the only report of radiation poisoning which I've heard is a SDF member who was on-site when one of the steam explosions happened.

Sorry, you are right. I actually don't know at what point exposure becomes poisoning.

I believe there were 3 SDF members who were hospitalized for radiation, but I could be wrong (also, I read it on the 共産党 site, so who knows)

Wikipedia has a table: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_poisoning#Exposure_le...

According to that, fatal poisoning starts at around 2 Sv. According to the BBC, levels in the surrounding area are 8 mSv per hour, so not enough for acute poisoning given the timings, though not at all good for you. For comparison, a chest x-ray is 60 µSv.

"Whether you like it or not, the beliefs of most intellectual engineer types is that the nuclear power plant dangers have been solved."

That reminds me of all the bragging about how the Titanic was "virtually unsinkable".

I thought we had learned better. Apparently not.

Hm, what are we supposed to learn? That everything might go badly? How can we apply that lesson to nuke reactors? By my count, 8 levels of failsafes have failed. How many more do you want? Reminds me of a Futurama episode where an oil tanker with 1,000 hulls crashes and spills. Fry exclaims, "Oh, if only we'd had the foresight to use 1,001 hulls, this would never have happened!"

I think the lesson the poster was implying is that nuclear power is not safe, and cannot be made safe.

Also, I'm not sure what you define as "failsafes", but the conventional measurement is number of containment levels. This reactor had 3, while I believe more modern reactors have 4.

I was including the power generators. After the reactor went into automatic cooling (which actually worked), the backup diesel generators were destroyed in the tsunami, and although the battery backup-backup power worked, it ran out before power could be restored. Also, venting the coolant helped a bit but not enough, and flooding the reactor with seawater helped a lot, I think that's the point when everyone got optimistic.

Does nature just keep jacking up the pressure to beat every security measure? Of course not. Nature doesn't do arms races.

Nature's effect is finite and measurable... earthquakes are easily predictable in the long term... the terrible cost of radiation leak is easily predictable.

Like most other human efforts, the goal posts are pretty clear. Make nuke plants stronger than the strongest that nature is capable of producing.

A tsunami + earthquake in japan is not a surprise to anyone.

What is a surprise is that the people running the reactor consider it a surprise.

The reactor was designed to withstand an 8.2 quake - very, very strong. It withstood an 8.9 quake with no damage! That's the 7th strongest quake ever recorded, and 700% of the rated strength! The tsunami physically washed away the generators, but the battery backup was sufficient for new generators to be trucked in. (The new generators could not connect to the old water pumps, but that's not the fault of the plant's designers.)

Actually it's been upgraded to 9.0 and 4th strongest now, which reinforces your point.

That's the 7th strongest quake ever recorded

I wonder where "8.2" came from in the engineering spec. and whether shooting for the ability to withstand a quake somewhere in the neighborhood of, say, the 10th largest is the right target. Maybe "the largest + 200%" is a better place to start? Of course, it costs more money.

but that's not the fault of the plant's designers

But it is a totally avoidable error. Not the plant's designers error, but a human error nonetheless. Why are we limiting our concerns over human error to just the people responsible for the original design? Surely there were organizations/contractors involved in developing replacement generators. Surely there are current plant safety and maintenance directors. Surely there is a complete nuclear regulatory agency.

I don't think we have anything that can stand a 9.7 quake (the biggest was 9.5 in Chile) and frankly it would properly cost so much money that it would be cheaper to produce the power by having humans run on threadmils.

It is also likely that the money could be better spend elsewhere (that is, it could same more lives) such as in improving road safety or to hire more police officers.

Perhaps when they built it (before the 1971, when the first criticality was reached) 8.2 was the `largest + 200%'? Does anybody have more data?

In 1963, only 3 quakes had been recorded bigger than this one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes#Largest_ear... (as SupremumLimit pointed out, analysis upgraded the quake to 9.0)

> Maybe "the largest + 200%" is a better place to start? Of course, it costs more money.

Consider two possibilities.

One: design the reactor so that a magnitude-9 quake leaves it completely undamaged. Let's say that makes it cost $4B instead of $2B.

Two: design the reactor so that a magnitude-8.2 quake leaves it completely undamaged and a magnitude-9 quake (which might affect it, let's say, once per 200 years on average) makes it fail in a way that takes 100 lives and requires it to be completely rebuilt (to the same spec, let's say) at a cost of $2B.

Cost of option 1: $4B now. Nothing more. Cost of option 2: $2B now. $2B and 100 lives in another 200 years.

Suppose your discount parameter is 0.5% per year (much, much lower than just about any real person or institution uses). Then $2B + 100 lives in 200 years = $740M + 37 lives now.

Can you save 37 lives for $260M? Why yes, you can. Far more than 37 lives, in fact. If you do anything reasonable with $260M you may well save more than 37 lives just by (say) making everyone a little better off. (Wealth correlates with health.)

Therefore, option 2 is probably better.

Turning from hypothetical examples to the real world: $2B/$4B is probably an underestimate (in which case, the advantage of option 2 over option 1 is greater) and 100 lives is probably an overestimate (in which case, again the advantage of option 2 is greater).

On the other hand, the earthquake happened improbably early in the life of the plant. It is not an error to do things that work out well in almost all cases but badly when you get unlucky, when the alternative is something that works out (relatively) badly most of the time but well when you get unlucky.

When was the most recent titanic?

Or more recently, oil rigs and tankers.

One spectacular outlier of a failure does not make a rule.

For the record, I wouldn't agree that all the nuclear power plant dangers have been solved, but they're a hell of a lot safer than most of the day-to-day activities most people engage in, and certainly safer (and cleaner!) than more prevalent electricity-generation schemes in use.

"One spectacular outlier of a failure does not make a rule."

If only that was the only spectacular engineering failure.

Unfortunately, history is littered with them: from Bhopal to Exxon to BP to the Hindenburg, and many many more.

For some more examples, see:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_accid...

I don't know what happened in Bhopal, but the captain of the Exxon was drunk (not an engineering failure) BP didn't maintain their crap (management failure) and filling the Hindenburg with hydrogen was stupid, but happened because of political moves that made it impossible to get enough helium.

"Whether you like it or not, the beliefs of most intellectual engineer types is that the nuclear power plant dangers have been solved."

This belief is basically it's own logical fallacy; the idea that because someone has figured out a theoretical solution to a problem, the issue is moot. I feel like I've posted this previously, but I can't find now so maybe not.

In the post-mortem this will probably be the lesson.

How many times are you going to hear:

"The issues were easily avoidable with proper upgrades, but it was decided that the cost of upgrading the plant was not justified given the low probability of an 8.9 earthquake"

A solution to the energy crisis is to unplug, but your anticipated response proves that's as viable as a solution as eliminating nuclear energy.

"The issues were easily avoidable with proper upgrades, but it was decided that the cost of upgrading the plant was not justified given the low probability of an 8.9 earthquake"

And that decision may very well have been correct. If I don't buy a lottery ticket but the numbers I would have picked come up, that doesn't mean I made a mistake.

Considering that this is going to set back nuclear energy for decades....

not a good decision

I fail to see in which way your analogy is relevant.

If anything, you are buying lottery tickets with other people's money and are not winning.

" It will represent a piece of data is fundamentally at odds with our view of the world."

Sadly that rarely changes anyones mind.

Indeed, and that goes both ways......just as several decades of extensive use of nuc lear power generation with practically no deaths in multiple countries has done absolutely nothing to quell some people's fears.

Any guess as to who understands the science better? But then, its not about science is it? And its certainly not about facts.

Not offering an opinion one way or the other, but just noting that there really are some facts here that are motivating people.

The piece that rationalist engineers (I am one of them) tend to gloss over is that the public has historically been lied to, by experts about the dangers and difficulties of nuclear power -- all nuclear technology, really. X rays for shoe sizing. Atmospheric weapons tests. Ed Teller. The downside to accidents is large, and there's not much trust anymore. Some, but not much.

These are the facts that are perhaps engaging people's fears.

Given this history, for some people, the bank of "expert credibility" is overdrawn already. The classic nerd technique of argument from expertise is ineffective.

...and none of this says anything about the facts that have been reported (most of which, you'll note, have not been pretty for pro-nuke advocates). Are the facts that have been reported wrong? If you don't have evidence that they aren't, this is just a "hunch", and not really worth serious consideration.

If we shouldn't argue from expertise, what should we argue from? Cast members of Jersey Shore? Berry diet fad producers? PR persons? Our personal feelings? A magic 8 ball?

Seriously if they won't listen to experts (assuming that we can agree on whom the experts are), that is perhaps the best argument against democracy that I have ever heard.

In my opinion, it's not an argument against democracy.

It's an argument against lying in the first place.

"Any guess as to who understands the science better?"

Ah, the glorious ad hominem. Here's one of your recent comments.

"In terms of real disasters, when measured in human deaths, [chernobyl] are tiny footnotes in history, statistically irrelevant."

Ironic isn't it, given my previous comment?

Or this,

"just as several decades of extensive use of nuclear power generation with practically no deaths"

What is the scientific definition of "several", or better yet, "practically no deaths"?

I would bet that coal mining has resulted in far more deaths than nuclear power plants, and yet we love to burn that stuff.

There are also gas power stations, which are much much cleaner than coal. Just saying.

> several decades of extensive use of nuc lear power generation with practically no deaths in multiple countries

That actually hurt me physically to read.

Take Chernobyl. All of those kids that have developed and will develop thyroid cancer, the firefighters that knowingly sacrificed themselves to get the fire out (thereby directly saving more lives), the plant workers who killed themselves in order to minimize the effects, the liquidation workers who contracted cancer in the process of building the sarcophagus, and the babies being born -- even today! -- in the surrounding area prematurely and dying before even being able to comprehend where they are (which some doctors from that region blame on Chernobyl). Yeah, those deaths aren't practical at all. How can you be so obtuse?

Nothing wrenches my gut more than a child dying before being able to speak a single word. I'm actually tearing up that you dismiss such things as impractical statistically, in order to further your argument that us laymen have no idea what we're talking about when it comes to nuclear episodes.

You take relative figures and turn them into an absolute. In multiple comments, you have denied that nuclear power has ever had a disaster, and that "practically" anybody has died (whatever the hell that means). You might believe strongly in nuclear power, but you cannot erase or modify history.

Nuclear power is safe. It can also go horribly wrong, and we learned a lot from Chernobyl. Why does it have to be polar with you? It can be both.

> And its certainly not about facts.

Such cruel irony.

> How can you be so obtuse?

Yeah, that always gets to me, too. And it is also funny how lots of these people try to downplay the effects of the Chernobyl disaster, if that's even possible. When it comes to the number of casualties they hurry up in bringing up the 4,000 mentioned in the IAEA report, which is like asking Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld of writing up about the effects of the Iraq mess.

Just today I was reading about how in one of counties of Romania (of which I am a citizen) the number of deaths caused by cancer is double the number of deaths caused by TBC (which used to be the number one killer before 1986) or diabetes. One might argue that this may be caused by a sudden change in the the conditions of living or anything related, but I can assure you that's not the case (if anything, heart-related deaths should have been on the number one spot). Of course, you won't see these cancer-related deaths taken into account in any of IAEA's reports.

I also have some sort of personal emotional involvement in all this, as one of my childhood playmates and best-friends died of leukemia in 1990. He was 5 when Chernobyl happened, but of course no-one can link his death to that disaster, can it? It doesn't matter that I can't even remember one case of my parents telling me about kids dying of cancer in the '50s or the '60s, because that just didn't happen (although child mortality was way higher back then). It all miraculously started to happen after Chernobyl.

bringing up the 4,000 mentioned in the IAEA report, which is like asking Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld of writing up about the effects of the Iraq mess

I wouldn't liken IAEA to Dick and Bush... It is the only credible international organisation assessing effects of nuclear energy and proliferation.

I think IAEA does superb job, unfortunately Japan haven't been very cooperative with them thus far.

Without nuclear power IAEA's "raison d'être" vanishes. Without the Iraq war Cheney and Rumsfeld wouldn't have won the 2004 elections.

But the nuclear power is already here and was for last 60 years. You can't put the genie back into bottle, unless we're going to have nuclear war and humankind will be reduced to stone age level, which incidentally is one of the things IAEA tries to prevent.

So we need to have responsible, transparent and safe nuclear power, and IAEA is the only organisation that tries to ensure that on a global level, IMHO.

That's what happens when a communist country plays with stuff that it has no business playing with. They never cared about the security because they assumed they could tell their slaves (ie. the soviet population) what they wanted to and because they controlled tv and radio. They only cared about the prestige for communism.

What happen in Chernobyl, while bad, cannot happen at these plants because we build them with the security measures that the communists should have built but didn't.

As for the radiation, normal power plants produce more every year than was released here (at least until yesterday).

And the number of people who died as a result of the quake is houndred of times higher than those who may die as a result of the radiation.

Who are most intellectual engineers ? I agree that most news seem to be conflicting, and very hard to understand for the layman, but I cannot possibly see how anyone can claim the issue has been solved when even the people with incentive to downplay the reality (Japanese gvt, TEPCO) say that the situation is increasingly worrying.

When you read nuclear news website (http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/), it seems the issue is potentially very serious, where the potentially become less and less uncertain rapidly. Given that this news website has the support of the world nuclear association, I would be inclined to trust them most than any general news channel out there (being tv/journals or of course Japanese gvt).

the beliefs of most intellectual engineer types is that the nuclear power plant dangers have been solved.

Not at all true for the intellectual engineer types I know. You may want to reassess how much of your certainties are cultural.

it has been inconceivable to me that people making nuke plants could possibly underestimate the risks.

That sounds so inconceivably naive to me that, out of the context of the rest of your post, I'd be sure it was meant sarcastically.

"until now it has been inconceivable to me that people making nuke plants could possibly underestimate the risks"

What I don't understand is why the walls meant to protect the plant from a Tsunami were too low.

The occurrence of radiation related deaths in this one instance isn't strong evidence that it is more dangerous than alternatives:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is...

While I believe your implication is correct, the public is not going to believe it.

When it comes to nuclear energy, perception is more important than reality.

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