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Comment by espadrine | Hacker News Reader

They definitely make press, but my opinion is that it is detrimental to public perception of risk.

Distributed systems are complicated beasts too, and have fascinating failure modes, but they get no press, because there are so many incidents and so many installations.

Centralized systems make a better scapegoat regardless of probabilities.

It reminds me of something Georges Charpak mentioned, paraphrasing: we can detect tiny particles, and now we are scared, but we cannot detect economic crashes, and we should be more scared of that.

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> but my opinion is that it is detrimental to public perception of risk.

This would positively affect my perception of the plant's operators. They handled the crisis, and now are laying out the post-mortem for the public in a transparent manner. A culture of secrecy conceals incompetence, and that can lead to disaster. See: Chernobyl

> but my opinion is that it is detrimental to public perception of risk.

The Finnish nuclear unit-nuclear watchdog had found that radiation levels had risen [1], the public does deserve to know and make up its own opinion about it.

Also, centralized systems are a lot more vulnerable and high-risk compared to distributed systems.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/finland-nuclear-incident/rad...

The initial reporting was misleading in that it was not clearly communicated that where the radiation levels had risen. So yes, radiation levels rose inside the primary cooling system. This is what triggered the automatic emergency shutdown. But the primary cooling system is anyway 100% isolated from the environment.

In particular, no change of radiation levels whatsoever outside the reactor building was ever detected. But initial reports did not make this quite clear.

Wait until it is common public knowledge that a distributed system failure can cause a loss of life. People like you and I may be interested in these postmortems strictly for the analysis, but the public at large is not.

On the other hand, they're very interested in things that can kill them.

I also wonder if there's more public attention paid to nuclear incidents in the region because of the proximity of a player who does not disclose or cooperate in nuclear incidents.

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