Hacker News Reader

Comment by sratner | Hacker News Reader

I suspect any engineer in a position of sufficient power did know about this, but no orders were given to upgrade the process appropriately, or, gasp!, take the reactor offline; doing so would be equated to admitting defeat of the Soviet nuclear physics program, a result that was very clearly unacceptable.

And let's not forget that a large fraction of casualties after the Chernobyl accident is attributable to the fact that the general public was not informed for an entire day after the accident, in fact not until a powerplant in Sweden reported heightened radioactivity levels. This, with Kiev, Ukraine's multi-million capital, only 100km from Chernobyl.

View on HN

I appreciate the information everyone - thanks.

The thing about nuclear power is that errors such as these have more serious consequences than for other sources of power. Or so it would appear.

But all this is relative: if nuclear power is the safest source of power, is there another source of power that is more dangerous than it?

Here's a nice list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Comparison_w...

Several of those disasters, of scales arguably larger than Chernobyl, were caused by attempts to generate power. And although I do not have any evidence to back this, I suspect the total number of casualties resulting from burning fossil fuels over the past century far exceeds that from nuclear power related accidents.

The one aspect of nuclear accidents I'd be willing to concede is the long-term contamination of the area, but while rendering chunks of land unusable, it is not a direct threat to life.

Thanks, informative. Hydroelectric power sounds very clean and safe, but dam failure is catastrophic.

I'm sure you're correct on the fatalities for fossil fuel vs. nuclear, but fossil fuels are also much more widely used (I imagine by several orders of magnitude).

Making land unsafe is a less dramatic aspect of safety, but actually destroying usable land is an amazing feat of destruction. I guess if reactors were located on land that was already unusable (eg. desert, esp Antarctica) it wouldn't matter so much. But I think (present-day) electrical transmission requires them to be close to the power consumers?

> but fossil fuels are also much more widely used (I imagine by several orders of magnitude)

True. Also consider the relative efficiency of the generation methods. Supplying the world's demand for energy with nuclear power would probably require far fewer powerplants than doing so by other means.

> I guess if reactors were located on land that was already unusable (eg. desert, esp Antarctica)

Except for the melting of the Antarctic ice and all that, in case of an accident :) Most technology seems to involve a trade-off of evils.

OK, you may have me there :). All power sources are dangerous, but we need fewer of a more efficient one.

New dangers with nuclear power may be discovered (like those that those German researchers did), but that seems to be true also of new technology in dams and oil transport etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com