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Comment by code_duck | Hacker News Reader

If Chernobyl had been a dam burst incident, people would be living in Pripyat right now.

What if a nuclear disaster like that happened next to say, Philadelphia, and left the area uninhabitable for 10,000 years?

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So, if you are allowed to use Chernobyl as an example of "typical" nuclear power installations, and come to the logical conclusion that all other nuclear reactor installations in the world carry the same risk, then can I similarly use the Banqiao Dam as an example of a "typical" hydroelectric dam, and declare that all dams in the world therefore carry the same risk?

You sure can. I think his point is still valid. Nuclear disasters are unique in that the damage from then tends to last FAR longer then the damage from any other type of disaster.

People still live near three mile island.

That accident was safely contained.

I agree, and even without nuclear disasters, no human society has ever lasted for as long as nuclear waste must be looked after.

Nuclear waste is a US only issue. It doesn't exist in any other country. Buy some CANDU reactors from Canada and you can burn your nuclear waste for energy.

You can't be serious... nuclear waste is a huge issue in pretty much every country that has nuclear power plants. Half of Germany goes insane every time there is a transport of nuclear waste from one temporary storage location to another.

The parent comment to yours is serious. CANDU reactors can run off fuel that is considered 'waste' from light water reactors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candu#Fuel_cycles

Every other nuclear power reprocesses their waste into fuel.

The reason the US doesn't is partly nimby-ism and partly strategic, waste contains plutonium and if we need to make more nukes to fight the commies we will be glad we didn't reprocess it all.

CANDU doesn't chemically re-process it (no purification). It just physically breaks it up into fuel rods that it can use. A CANDU reactor can run on unprocessed, raw (just-pulled-it-out-of-the-ground) uranium, which light water reactors cannot do without chemical reprocessing.

You can't accurately assess the total impact of the Chernobyl accident yet because the damage is still on-going and the exclusion zone will still be hazardous to human health long after you and I are in our graves. The presumption that knowledge of the nature of the danger and the geographical boundaries of the exclusion zone will be preserved and passed on to future generations for the entire duration that the area remains a danger to human health is rather dubious. History is riddled with examples of ancient civilizations whose secrets are lost to us. As members of the technical elite of our society, we tend to implicitly assume that knowledge will be preserved and technological progress will continue in an unbroken chain, but that doesn't necessarily make it so. Technological "dark ages" have happened before in which much that was known was lost. How can we be certain that anyone will still know the location of the exclusion zones and be aware of the radiation risk 500, 1000, 2000 years from now? If we're honest with ourselves, we will admit that we have saddled future generations with the burden of a booby trap that will likely still be causing much suffering and death when our present civilization is as ancient as the Parthenon is now.

I think he's trying to say Chernobyl was an outlier, a faulty design which melted down under completely outrageous circumstances, and due to today's safety standards it won't happen again. Therefore Chernobyl can't really be used to say nuclear power is unsafe.

The point is that the consequences of a disaster like Chernobyl are so nasty and so long-lived that, if we are to continue building and operating nuclear power plants, we have a responsibility to ensure that such "outliers" never happen unless the earth sustains a direct hit from an asteroid or the Yellowstone supervolcano is erupting (in which case, we're screwed like the dinosaurs anyway). If we can't do that then we have no business being in the nuclear power business. Failure is unacceptable. The situation in Fukushima is not the same as Chernobyl, but that doesn't mean that what is happening there is acceptably safe. We shouldn't be seeing news articles stating that "primary containment feared breached" or that the water level in the spent fuel pools is low (source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870389970457620...).

From the most pro-nuclear article I've seen thus far: "The earthquake which hit on Friday was terrifically powerful, shaking the entire planet on its axis and jolting the whole of Japan several feet sideways. At 8.9 on the Richter scale, it was some five times stronger than the older Fukushima plants had been designed to cope with." - excerpt from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/14/fukushiima_analysis/

The article spins this as though it is some magnificent testament to the quality of the engineering design. I read something like that and then look at this historical list of Japanese earthquakes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Japan) and the thought that comes to my mind is, "Why the fsck didn't they build it to withstand a 9.5 and a tsunami so they'd have some goddamn margin of safety?" Why is it considered sufficient to have a system where unavailability of power to run pumps is the single point of failure in all of the cooling systems except for the inadequate-to-do-the-whole-job 8-hour battery-powered system? Why haven't we come up with a completely passive system capable of cooling the reactor if all else fails? The bottom line is, if you want the public to put their trust in nuclear power, then build the reactor so that even a 9.5 earthquake + tsunami is a total non-event.

So in order to get the trust of the public, all we have to do is build a super safe prototype reactor and wait for a 9.5 earthquake and direct tsunami hit to come along and have the damn thing survive? Sorry, but that just means we'll be building more coal plants for at least the next 100 years.

If we managed to get a man to the moon, I think we can figure out a reliable system for backup power at earthquake and tsunami prone plants. And if that fails, add a couple more levels of containment. Some of the latest designs don't require external power for cooling, so once all the old reactors are decommissioned, we shouldn't run into this kind of problem again.

You don't have to wait for a 9.5 earthquake to come along to test a design. That's what computer models are for. How do you think they came up with the estimate of what magnitude of a quake the existing design could withstand (assuming that the statement that this quake was "five times stronger" than what the plant was rated to handle has some basis in fact and isn't just a number plucked out of thin air)?

And if Chernobyl had been a dam burst, it is likely a great many more people would have died, and much more quickly.

EDIT: Despite the downvotes, this is not a trivial point, and is precisely why the OP is getting so much attention.

What if a nuclear disaster happened in Hiroshima or Nagasaki? What would those cities look like today?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hiroshima_montage.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nagasaki_C1414.jpg

An accident at a nuclear facility is rather dfferent than the effects of a nuclear weapon. The radiation exposure produced is much more gradual. It's not as instantly lethal as a bomb of course, but the effects of Chernobyl are still lingering.

Obviously they didn't have to encase Nagasaki or Hiroshima in a concrete sarcophagus. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fairly small, and air burst vs. ground burst. The amount of radioactive material in the bombs is a tiny fraction of what was released at Chernobyl.

People are fond of saying you can't compare Chernobyl to other reactors, etc. but it's all we had until recently. I'm sure we'll have some better examples in the future, but for now, according to the IEAE: http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/features/chernobyl-15/cherno-...

"How does Chernobyl’s effect measure up to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

The accident at Chernobyl was approximately 400 times more potent than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima"

I assume things would look different in Japan if we had dropped a couple hundred of those bombs vs. one.

Haven't people been visiting Pripyat and finding it to be habitable to a lot of species of life? It won't be a wasteland for 10,000 years. And Chernobyl was so pooring designed it is not analagous to everything else (as was the damn that killed 50,000 people).

There is life, to be sure, but it's not 100% healthy. The area is still too radioactive for humans to dwell in without shortening their lives and it's not going away any time soon.

We'll see in the next 50 years how it goes having nuclear power plants operating in Africa, Indonesia, the Middle East, etc. New reactors are better designed, but I still don't trust 80% of the governments or corporations in the world to responsibly operate anything nuclear.

Are you joking? It's only 'habitable' in the sense that wildlife doesn't drop dead the moment it enters the exclusion zone. The animals are still receiving substantial amounts of radiation, and will continue to suffer for decades. The worst areas will be dangerous for centuries.

Towns like Picher, Oklahoma, will still be toxic when the sun goes out.

Radioactive Ceasium and Strontium are a pain for a few decades - lead, mercury and cadmium are for ever.

Non-sequitor. Just because something else is bad doesn't make this situation any better.

Oh my god they had a nuclear accident in Japan - we must shut down our nuclear reactors and instead pump out many millions of tons of dangerous radioisotopes and chemical poisons from new coal plants instead.

It's standard knee jerk procedure. We had a rail accident (the first in 10years) so the reaction was to close a bunch of inter city lines for months while they checked everything. Where did all those extra travellers go? onto the roads!

I hope the government doesn't hear about the problems with Toyota in america - they would then ban ABS and give everybody Tiger tanks to commute on.

I think most people who are opposed to nuclear are hoping governments and industry will seriously pursue more sustainable and non-toxic sources of power, not coal.

Radioactive metals are still toxic as heavy metals even when they're not radioactive, though. Uranium, for instance, is just as bad as lead, or worse.

Also habitable in the sense that a lot of people still live there, in ways extremely similar to how they did before, with (apparently) few ill effects. See http://outsideonline.com/adventure/travel-pf-201103-chernoby...

I'd like to offer you some prime property in Pripyat for your home. If you buy today, I'll even throw in a free well-drilling for your water supply.

So your argument is that as long as the asset or land is reusable then it does not matter if people died ?

So if you were driving a buick roadmaster and got killed in the car. the fact that they could hose of the dash and reuse the car is what matters ?

Or that in World War 2, when the tank crew of a Sherman tank was killed they could refurb it and send out a new crew, does that mean it is somehow better for the first crew ?

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