Nothing like this will be built again (2002)
antipope.org
antipope.org
I also remember him gleefully describing how robust the containment shell was and just like the piece in the article, being able to easily withstand a fully laden jumbo jet crashing into it. My young mind couldn't comprehend why anyone might do that and how utterly unlikely it was that someone might use an aircraft as a weapon.
> in addition to the grid connection, there are four twelve megawatt diesel generator stations spaced around each corner of the plant -- each with two generators, any one of which is able to provide operating power to keep the reactor's safety systems working.
Unfortunately for Fukushima, all generators were flooded by a single Tsunami. What are the odds of an unknown event that will affect all generators? Think of EMP, contaminated fuel, a large cloud of C)2 suffocating the engines... All seem highly unlikely, but how do you plan for the unknown unknowns?
The most likely (and I think underestimated) risk for Nuclear plants is a systemic change due to a large (climate?) crisis and/or war. Think of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that definitely increased risk and reduced maintenance budget for a few Nuclear plants. Any significant sea level rise, drought or flood could very well trigger such events (even if the reactor is not affected directly, the society around it will be). That is why I think nuclear is a risky option to reach net-zero; every plant you build is a bet on the future stability of society for at least 75 years (time until the plant will be safely decommissioned by future generations). I would feel much safer in a world covered in solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines (and highly variable spot pricing) than in one with nuclear plants that require constant care by experts and that even in the best case incur a huge cost on society to safely decommission.
> In 2016 the European Commission assessed that European Union's nuclear decommissioning liabilities were seriously underfunded by about 118 billion euros, with only 150 billion euros of earmarked assets to cover 268 billion euros of expected decommissioning costs covering both dismantling of nuclear plants and storage of radioactive parts and waste. France had the largest shortfall with only 23 billion euros of earmarked assets to cover 74 billion euros of expected costs [1]
I want people to start imagining what innovation in Nuclear can look like again. If you want to compare current state to current state, then neither are going to move the needle enough. But let's imagine what can be possible, especially if we poured in the same tax dollars and incentives to Nuclear as we are with renewables. We don't have to imagine that we will be decommissioning the same honking reactors from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Let's imagine what's possible with next-gen plants.
All this is current tech for both. And honestly, solar panel and energy storage technology improvements are already coming down the pipeline whereas the next-gen nuclear has been "almost ready" for decades.
The picture for most renewables as a fossil energy replacement is much rosier, even considering the generation profile problems that some renewables present.
I'd be happy for there to be some amount of investment in new nuclear builds, just to maybe prove me wrong, but right now it seems like a good thing nuclear is not much of a focus.
Nuclear is going to stick around, but at best we can start building today’s designs and have them finished in a few years. It’s simply to late for any significant R&D effort to pay off, we needed better designs a decade ago for them to be proven reliable today and then ramp up production for 3-5 years from now. It’s not even just building nuclear stuff that’s slow, the Navy has a solid track record and trains people quickly but even that takes time.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Too_much...
We do. Modern nuclear plants (for example, Hinkley Point C in the UK) receive enormous subsidies. Far more than renewables projects (eg: offshore wind farms) get on a per-MWh-generated basis.
Or to put it another way, each $/£/€ invested in renewables generates a lot more clean energy more quickly than if that some money goes into nuclear.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be funding nuclear research and trying new things, but for now it’s hard to justify building new nuclear plants when better alternatives with better economics/ROI are available.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ASvupr8Zg
It's a massive logistics challenge and it would require an unprecedented level of cooperation between Saharan nations and given how unstable the region is as of current... I'm afraid it's not happening for another 30-50 years, when climate change will probably corner these countries or their rich neighbors living further north. That being said, Australia is a better candidate to this due to it being a single country and a very stable one at that...
Once Australia proves the concept, Africans can follow suit, and we'll build solar arrays over the oceans, and then we'll become a type 1 civilization.
For over 50 years now France has been corrupting those countries' elites at the expense of more than 90% of the population. For 50 years those countries' cooperation level with each other have been hindered and their industries dilapidated to keep them poor and dependent from Europe or outside aid. Dictators have already been put in place (like how can anyone even stay in power for 25 years with nobody batting an eye despite the country lagging behind in everything?) to pillage the regions economic resources and pollute their soil, especially uranium and other metals.
Do you really think it'd be internationally acceptable to commit a massive genocidal war after what Nazi Germany had done to Jewish Europeans eight decades prior?
Overthrowing the established governments is only going to make matters worse. Just see how much of a mess Libya is right now, 10 years after Gaddafi died. French civil aircrafts still won't even fly over it.
https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/ ?
(Give it time, it loads slowly. Maybe refresh after a minute, or so.)
https://www.dfat.gov.au/about-us/publications/trade-investme...
Another aspect that should not be ignored are the efficiency gains of producing electricity close to where it is used by e.g. roof top solar
A similar thing happens in Alaska. The largest grid there, the Railbelt grid, has an average power flow of just 600 MW.
Are they? I was under the impression they required some sort of subsidy and/or restrictions on natural gas production to be competitive.
The rest is Gas, which has become very expensive this winter. And Coal.
We would need to invest into power-to-gas like crazy if we wanted any shot of providing a base load.
But sadly it went slightly up from 24% to 24,5% in 2020 (don't have the source at hand right now for this second statistic).
https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e...
https://medium.com/enrique-dans/can-we-put-the-solar-and-win...
Renewables get exactly as much credit for what might happen in future as Communists or NFT sellers get for how awesome their plans are. Nuclear already delivered, in some places still does, winter heat. Its detractors are responsible for gas reliance.
It’s also not weather-independent. When the water temperature is too hot the power stations have to be turned off.
Further it’s pretty common that when one reactor has an issue others of the same type will get turned off too to check if they have the same issue.
Now, currently we are building solar farms in desert areas for ~1.5 cent per kWh. Including both CAPEX and OPEX. On-shore wind is built at ~3 cents per kWh and ~6 cents per kWh for off-shore.
This is where the explosion of renewables is coming from, they currently undercut the marginal cost of traditional power sources.
https://www.oeb.ca/consumer-information-and-protection/elect...
Also, I don't think passive safety of CANDU is what's meant by passive safety of HTGRs. The latter can survive losing cooling and everyone just walking away (in theory); I suspect the CANDU melts down in that situation, even if the chain reaction does stop.
Don't forget, either: Nuclear waste isn't just spent fuel. The reactor core remains radioactive after the plant is decommissioned.
That's one of the things that nuclear fusion proponents seem to forget. Even without the spent fuel problem, fusion reactors still produce nuclear waste.
> In December 1998, an INES Level 2 incident occurred after severe winds and sea spray disabled all four power lines to the site during the Boxing Day Storm of 1998. After multiple grid failures in a short period of time, emergency diesel generators failed to start. Normally, in the absence of power for the reactor cooling pumps, the reactor would be passively cooled. However, the emergency control system which would have initiated passive cooling failed to act, as it had not been reset. Reactor cooling was reinstated after four hours.
It seems the safety margin was twenty hours of no reactor cooling.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunterston_B_nuclear_power_sta...
So there was probably one or more valves that did not get switched, as the system somehow didn't think they needed to, due to something not being configured as they should.
- This wasn't just "a single Tsunami", it was the Tsunami resulting from the 4th largest earthquake ever recorded happening just a few hundred km away.
- The design of the plant was really old - construction began only 33 years after the death of Marie Curie, and the design was older than that.
The effects of the disaster are absolutely terrible, and we should definitely make sure it doesn't happen again - but we should also not ignore that more modern plants don't have the same design flaws, and that events with enough destructive force to shift the entire planet on its axis by 10-25cm are not common (and if they become so, we have additional problems).
That's the point, though, isn't it? One of the richest and most developed nations failed to decommission the plant in a timely manner, even under excellent conditions, in order to save costs. It's not the technology that's the problem.
I understand that single incidents are more visible than long-term low-level harm. But as a civilisation we really aren't paying enough attention to the overall cost of everything that's not nuclear.
That was sadly not an unknown at all. TEPCO was definitely aware of the possibility given that flooding in the generator rooms had happened before, and they deliberately ignored studies finding they were not prepared for a tsunami.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#Pri...
[0]https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2021-12/Futurs-Ene... in french
IMO, the reality is that these plants will never convert to anything other than natural gas and will eventually be shut down, still running on natural gas.
Hydrogen is not a fuel, it's an energy storage mechanism, and not a very good one at that. If you're going to store energy there's much more efficient and/or cheaper ways of doing it.
Natural gas is still a good fuel but I don't think anyone in the US at least is under any illusion that these will ever run on anything other than natural gas.
Edit: the problem I am remembering is that hydrogen actually degrades the metals used in pipelines (https://www.hollandsentinel.com/story/opinion/columns/2021/0...) so I don’t see how any of this infrastructure is useful at all for hydrogen.
You can walk right into one if you are not careful - which is why you might see people walking with brooms in front of them around hydrogen equipment. :)
The big problem with the hydrogen economy is not the conversion of the gas plants, it is having enough wind to generate the hydrogen in the first place. You need excess wind capacity to make hydrogen, and no private venture will invest into wind turbines that aren’t needed. Without a strong government hand shaping this market it will not happen.
If you are looking for a skeptical take, here’s a good one: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/06/new-eu-hydrogen-policy-...
The real problem is the fact that environmentalists tend to hate dams, especially large hydro projects, so there's a major political battle on top of finding funding for these kinds of capital-intensive projects.
...unless you go radical? https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...
Something like software engineering is a much safer career option, because the risk that your country will categorically ban it is pretty low. And because it doesn't tie you to a small number of possible employers or force you to live in a specific location.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
What's the percentage split for civilian vs military employment for nuclear industry jobs?
That's true of any political system, the problem with democracy is more that it's invariably fickle. A dictator may also be fickle, but there's a least a chance he has a long term vision with a late payoff that he pursues for a his lifetime.
We can make binding financial promises at least. It's entirely possible to grant nuclear workers each a personal 60 year annuity managed by a consortium of foreign banks, and requiring the worker to pick between working as an engineer, returning the annuity, or sitting in prison.
And making certain professions high-paying isn't as viable a strategy as you might think. Multiple factors go into that. Nuclear engineering isn't a popular thing, just like animal testing.
It's not only the loss of knowledge, it's also the higher security standards. The last reactor being built, Flamanville 3, was supposed to be ready by 2012, is still being built and not estimated ready before the end of 2022.
Then you read something like this and realize Asimov had a point!
> Then you read something like this and realize Asimov had a point!
And also wildly over-optimistic (as is typical for SF). In the books, I think it took something like 10,000 years to loose the technical knowledge. I bet we could do it in 100.
A complicated technology like present aircraft, nuclear energy, petrochemical refining, pharmaceuticals, etc. is resting on the shoulders of a few thousand 40-something-year-olds that have the book learning of the 25-year-olds coupled with the experience and judgement that makes the technology practical, and particularly the knowledge of how to go from zero to one multiplied across many many sub-problems.
If something puts a particular technology out of practice for 20 years, many of those now-60-somethings, while still alive, will have forgotten much of what they knew, and not be suitable to put the hard hats back on and get in the field.
And this is not accounting for the effects of whatever catastrophe put the technology out of practice to begin with.
It only took a few years for the Manhattan project to create nuclear bombs once physics advanced to the point where we realized such a bomb wouldn't need to be the size of an aircraft carrier. Only a few years after that (and a much smaller budget) to make a non-exploding power reactor. There is no reason society couldn't duplicate that if we wanted.
Now the tribal knowledge does help a lot, it you still have it you can take a lot of time off. However it isn't needed.
when it comes to rebuilding a thing, i think whats important to wonder is would you even build it the same way? I remember seeing an article on ars about the engines for the Saturn 5. They took over a thousand hours of weld time at a level of skill and quantity that was built up during that time period. And they got them working via experimentation. Building the now was done differently. They 3d scanned the parts and used modern additive and cnc machining and used way less welds (one can argue additive metal is just cnc welding but I digress). And then simulated it in the computer. I remember a discussion about the baffles in the nozzle to stop pulsing in the combustion, that was figured out in destructive trials of this incredibly difficult machine. You'd do that in simulation now.
I likely got details wrong.
But it's to say that part of "they don't build em like they used to" also means "they learned". Look at bridges, they don't look like Brooklyn or Eads anymore. They used to build them with waaay too much steel.
That said roman concrete is a thing they've been chasing for a while
Roman concrete isn't some magical substance that we're hoping to replicate - we already know how it works - it just would really suck for the type of building projects we have now.
http://engineeringrome.org/understanding-roman-concrete/#Anc...
We probably still have all the papers and journals and schematics and whatnot. What we don't have, however, is people with the appropriate training to make sense of those things. Without those people - without actual working knowledge of the technology - all that data is useless.
You can figure out what it does rather easily. Figuring out why it was done that way requires a lesson from the school of hard knocks in a lot of cases.
In the case of the nuclear industry those knocks can be rather significant.
In other unrelated news, safely maintaining the current nuclear electric power would have required a massive buildup starting 10 years ago (to replace the reactors that are currently arriving at the end of their life).
Though that sarcasm of mine is slightly outdated, a new promise (exploiting the recent high energy prices) is indeed to build some new reactors, postponing the previous promise of reaching 50% (from the current 75%) from 2025 to 2035 :
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Macron-says-Fran...
(Because it's not like the politicians aren't aware of these issues, it's just that it's rarely politically convenient to raise them.)
A few things stand out, like the old-tech ring binders and Windows 95 screensavers on CRTs. The safety focus was clear. Nothing was done without a risk assessment, and the young apprentice who was helping with our tour was given a telling off by the tour staff as he wasn't holding the handrails - as had clearly been drummed into them.
What really struck me was how many people were involved in running the plant. I don't know how it compares to similarly sized gas plants, but there were hundreds and hundreds of people employed - mostly in project management/safety roles. I wonder how it compares to how many folk are employed in renewables, we have a lot of wind power here now.
It's a shame that cracks have started to form in the reactors so the plants will be shutdown earlier than planned. It looks like tours are suspended for Covid, but go round if they open up again before shutdown!
So one and a tiny bit people. Plus occasional inspections i suppose.
Power generation is the one topic that makes thermodynamics crystal clear imo. Energy goes into steam, steam does work, lowering the steam temperature and pressure, heating and cooling at different point can increase efficiency. It’s a topic I wish I’d have learned about sooner!
I worked there one refueling outage while lazing about after college. Highlights include: sweeping river muck out of the empty cooling towers, scrubbing pipes for x-ray analysis, standing "fire watch" since doors were propped open, taking a smoke break on top of the Unit 2 control room building (that Unit 2), staring at the humongous, partially-disassembled turbine (they may have replaced it that year), spotlighting deer at the end of the island. I also remember a very strange feeling while listening to radiation monitors go crazy when the spent fuel was being removed... if you walked a few dozen feet past the warning tape you were probably dead.
I read somewhere that during the accident some insects were irradiated. One of the irradiated spiders later bit a man and that man mutated to be able to walk on walls, like a spider.
Do you know anything about this?
I feel the same about Accelerando. At one point I was in a clubbing phase and always took my paperback in my jacket pockets. Then, I never fully read it a second time because I can't get through Annette Benning, and I remember the flock of birds stuff at the end.
The linked text is pretty good, but Stross thinks too highly of himself re: his knowledge of science, and he presents his politics in a way that mildly annoys people who don't agree with his politics. Also, Accelerando ages as badly as Ayn Rand.
Disclaimer: no idea what his opinion of his work is.
Also, while I'm at it - I don't know how many times I've read A Colder War but the ending still gives me the creeps.
I feel like you want to move beyond being the "Accelerando guy". You have my best wishes on that.
They're both incredibly fun reads, but awful fiction. Both authors got significantly better at the craft with practice, although one of them still seems to have an ideological aversion to endings.
I've grown to tire over the "certain" people trying to analyze the science in this pandemic, on both "sides". (If you force it into a binary framing, it's the "holy shit this is bad" side and the "holy shit you guys are overreacting" side, both of whom have loud nutbags who are too confident in their assumptions.)
edit: fissile -> radioactive
ITER / DEMO / PROTO plants planned to eclipse everything previous in scale. And with nuclear fission now classified as green tech by the EU, maybe the political will is finally here ;)
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220109-europe-nuclea...
I'm not saying we should not keep investing in fusion research, but at the current state of things, it is still somewhat science fiction.
Probably an instance of many groups under one label acting disparately, but I get the sentiment :/
Especially to replace enough fossil fuel one would have to scale up the problems with mining, waste disposal, and risks of accidents or malicious interference. I know this isn't a popular idea here, but there also lots of physicists who don't believe in nuclear fission as a mid-term or near-long-term solution.
Doing anything at scale is difficult.
You can see it in this industry report graphic:
https://nawindpower.com/gwec-tier-one-turbine-suppliers-gain...
"Conventional drive" and "Direct drive - EESG DD" add up to 75.5% market share. These designs don't use permanent magnets.
And you don't have to handle them like the are, well, radioactive...
The radioactive problems as they are, they're still better than the chemical ones from coal plants, if we'd decided to change history in the 40's and replace all the nuclear plants with coal ones we'd have killed millions[0] more people more subtly.
[0]https://e360.yale.edu/digest/nuclear_power_has_prevented_184...
Even when trying to come to a conclusion if nuclear power is worthwhile, one has to realize how much more complex even the equation is. It takes so much more qualified engineers, a much more specialized and expensive supply chain, and then there are huge uncertainty factors with unintentional accidents and malicious interference. Waste storage is a recurring headache and not globally solved. All of this MIGHT be manageable for a first-world democratic country like France, but I really don't like to see China scaling up their nuclear industry, nor would I want to see much of the rest of the world to replace their fossil fuels by those headaches.
DEMO / PROTO will, if not cancelled, be absolutely monstrous, but generate no more power than a wee fission plant. Until they destroy themselves with their own neutron flux. (They should build them underground, so they will already be buried when it is time to abandon them.)
It is inconceivable that any such project will ever produce enough value to pay for the absurd level of capital investment and operational costs just to make them operate at all. Cost would radically exceed the same-capacity fission plant, and fission plants are already not competitive. All the while before ground is even broken to start building any, power generation cost is in free fall, with no bottom in sight.
ITER is an end even more dead than the AGR.
In and of itself that may be correct, but they could provide valuable stepping stones to future systems that are much cheaper, simpler, and more efficient, which could not exist without first creating these large expensive projects.
The value isn't in the project itself, but in the legacy it creates in terms of future iterations.
Neutron fission was discovered in 1938, ten years later we'd flattened two cities with it, and ten years after that we had working, profitable power stations. Theory to useful first-order application to useful second-order application in two decades.
Meanwhile, ITER started planning in the late 80s, began construction in 2007, and won't be fully operational until 2035, assuming no delays (hah). Even then, it won't do anything directly useful. That'll be figured out by grad students who haven't even been born yet, possibly.
This just isn't how healthy scientific and technological research looks like. If nobody expects anything of actual tangible value for 20 years, and there are billions of dollars of funding being thrown around, obviously you're going to get people riding the gravy train instead of getting real jobs. ITER is welfare for physicists.
Pretty much all space programmes prior to the commercialisation of space. We're only at the start of that, too: today imaging satellites and internet connections, tomorrow potentially heavy industry, solar power generation and mineral extraction. Who knows what else.
If we count the commencement date of that investment from 1960 or so, and assume the start of real returns on that investment hasn't arrived yet, the main second order benefits of space research and the associated feats of engineering will have taken 60+ years to appear. By the time any of the applications I mentioned above are realised, we might be at 80 or even 100 years.
Some things just take a really long time. I haven't studied ITER or any other fusion tech, but long timelines don't mean things aren't worth it. They can deliver things iterative processes might be unable to do.
Lastly, if you're concerned about the money going to the wrong place, it might be better to start with fossil fuel subsidies - diverting these to clean energy production and research would speed the transition immensely.
Those had *direct* benefits at the time, immediately: satellites of all kinds, classified military stuff, and the dickwaving pleasure of putting a man on the moon before the Soviets.
The comparison to space would make sense if we spent billions of dollars building a single large rocket starting in 1950, finally launched it in 1975, with a payload of nothing but styrofoam. Then tried to justify it by saying that by 1990 we'll have something useful.
Even then, the space programme was a decadent swamp of pork-barrel spending and vanity project scams like the Space Shuttle and the SLS. I severely doubt that the benefit to humanity outweighed the money spent and lives lost on that crap.
The problem with saying "the benefits just take a really long time to come about" is that it's completely unfalsifiable, at least within the lifetimes of the people who profit from the funding today. They can just dangle that "second-order benefits" carrot in front of the rest of us suckers until they retire.
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/spotting-vapor...
It is welfare for the otherwise mostly military contractors who get contracts for construction. It would be overwhelmingly cheaper to just pay the physicists, even if we supported tem times as many.
ITER steals the funding that might otherwise have got aneutronic FRC fusion working by now.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf
A 190MW(e) fission reactor would be considerably smaller. There is really no use case for DT fusion in space, especially if they have to make their own tritium.
Pretty much all space-faring SciFi, including "hard scifi", is basically garbage that you can toss out the window as far as expectations go. Think things are hard to cool on earth? Space leaves you with radiative cooling only. The least efficient (space x time x cost x performance) type of cooling in the known universe. Internally-powered propulsion in spacecraft is never going to happen with thermodynamics around.
1. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/16225/Ferranti-Argus-...
Mind you I did end up on an academic project that included modelling of Hunterston, so I got the "behind the scenes" tour there that Charlie got for Torness.
The Project Manager from Scottish Nuclear had worked on the construction of Torness and he lots of interesting stories.
2002 was 2 decades ago now ;-)
> The computer system consists of a network of computer nodes, based on the Ferranti Argus 700 range of computers, assigned to each reactor unit, except where common station facilities are required. For each reactor unit, the computer system provides both data processing and automatic control functions. For essential data capture, control and display to the CCR operators, the processor hardware is duplicated. These are termed Level 1 systems and are shown in Figures 1 and 2. Single processor systems which collect data not considered essential for continued unit operation are termed Level 2 systems. Figure 3 illustrates the Level 2 computer system for both units. Torness NFS probably has the most complex computer configuration of any operating nuclear power station. The auto control "supersystem" consists of, per reactor, ten input multiplexing computers ("muxes"), eleven control computers (CCOI, CCO2 to CCI 1) and a dual online/ standby supervisory computer ("CS"). Each of these computers is a node in the hierarchical control supersystem shown schematically in Figure 2.
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
But there's a class of refinery-specific disasters where I guess you have tens of seconds to get out, where looking for your missing keys could well mean the difference between escaping or now.
I learned a lot on that gig, and it's really helped influence the way I think about business "disaster planning", whether caused by floods, or data centres burning down, or a rogue sysadmin deleting backups, or whatever. That industry is 100% the opposite of "cowboy".
They're nuts about safety - and a good thing too, speaking as someone who lives relatively close-by.
Fantastic article. Well worth a read.
echoes of the Raspberry Pi camera flash reboot story, 13 years apart :)
https://hackaday.com/2015/02/08/photonic-reset-of-the-raspbe...
I do think they need to buy higher grade sticky labels to cover the window with though. :-)
Olkiluoto 3 is a 1600 MW reactor, so on paper it's a much bigger unit than the 600 MW reactor described here.
[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Demonstration-HT...?
"It's a weird experience, crawling over the guts of one of the marvels of the atomic age, smelling the thing (mostly machine oil and steam, and a hint of ozone near the transformers), all the while knowing that although it's one of the safest and most energy-efficient civilian power reactors ever built it's a a technological dead-end, that there won't be any more of them, and that when it shuts down in thirty or forty years' time this colossal collision between space age physics and victorian plumbing will be relegated to a footnote in the history books. 'Energy too cheap to meter' it ain't, but as a symbol of what we can achieve through engineering it's hard to beat."
The new Laundryverse book, _Quantum of Nightmares_, was released today.
Fully informed consent for the people working there with each lab spaced out to confine any unexpected high exposures to the people working on their own experiments. A certain portion of the population desires doing dangerous and risky things. Look at all the extreme sports these days. It would be great to create a way to allow them to take dangerous risks that are deeply meaningful, intellectually challenging, potentially financially lucrative, and productive for society at large.
That's the context of nuclear safety. Big, bureaucratic, lowest-bidder contractors, bosses that are most competent at career management, lax oversight, privatized profit cushioned by socialized risk, ineffective whistleblower protection.
Took him a few hours to get out.
"the anti-truck-bomb obstacles (on the entrance only -- no self-respecting truck bomber would ever think of driving in through the exit, would they?)"
This is the sort of thing that never stops to amaze me, usually when visiting some installation or other there is a detail like this that jumps out. The best example that I have of this was a perfectly sealed isolation ward in a hospital that merged both intake and exhaust of the isolation ward with the general wards because they ran out of budget for another air system so they plumbed it into what was already there. It totally floored me that this was done consciously as a cost saving measure, I'll leave the failure modes as a homework exercise ;)
They can be (at least were designed to be) refuelled online. An operator's dream - 100% uptime! And for the same reason, a security nightmare. So no exports.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Demonstration-HT...
While if you need to power down a huge reactor for maintenance, its backup must be of the same huge capacity.
Halfway down the article I could not stop thinking "how on Earth can he write all this from memory?"
I'm sure those engineers have a story or two to tell too... Great read, thank you.
I've heard that before, somewhere.
The combustion of fossil fuels regularly kills 4.2 million people per year, year after year and counting. The combustion of renewable biofuel kills 3.8 million/year (WHO numbers [1]).
Chernobyl directly killed between 60-80 with acute radiation syndrome and caused up to 4000 cancer deaths [2]. Fukushima radiation killed between zero and one person, depending who you ask [3]. TMI killed zero.
[1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1
[2] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html
[3] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/fukushima.html
So, running the numbers, you see that fossil + biofuel kill the entire death footprint of the entire commercial nuclear industry very 7.5 hours and counting. Thus, from a safety perspective, nuclear is a no-brainer, despite the fact that it seems overly hazardous due to the way the stories come out.
> the combustion of fossil fuels regularly kills 4.2 million people per year, year after year and counting. The combustion of renewable biofuel kills 3.8 million/year (WHO numbers [1]).
Your link is on air pollution, NOT fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are gross, dirty, and far-too-lobbied. However, even in your own link, there is reference to cook fires, and I would be willing to bet that a lot of that pollution is from industrial processing and lack of regulation as opposed to just fossil fuel.
> Chernobyl directly killed between 60-80 with acute radiation syndrome and caused up to 4000 cancer deaths [2]. Fukushima radiation killed between zero and one person, depending who you ask [3]. TMI killed zero.
The numbers you site are not in your link. It says 6,000 children with thyroid cancer, and I would be willing to bet the actual damage is way, way higher than reported. Esp due to the nature of the soviet union and the fallout and radiation spread across Eastern Europe cannot have a counterfactual for cancer rates.
The real issue is that the potential of Nuclear is to make whole swaths of the planet uninhabitable. This is also where your flight analogy falls apart. The upper bound of death for a single plane crash is ~300 people on the flight + (a few thousand, god forbid) if it hits something critical as it falls. The upper bound for nuclear is... unimaginable?
Edit/afterthought. In your profile, I saw that you are a nuclear scientist. I think you should disclose that career bias when you argue for this.
> if only because the upper bound potential for damage is so much higher.
Chernobyl was a nuclear excursion that blew the roof wide open and shot fuel out into the air. Air rushed in and ignited a nearly inextinguishable graphite fire that propelled the nuclear fuel high into the atmosphere. There was no containment structure around the core. And yet this killed 60+ people, caused up to 4000 early cancer deaths, and (yes) did cause a bunch of thyroid cancers. (Fortunately, thyroid cancers are usually treatable. Not saying they're ok, but not fatal like fossil + biofuel air pollution).
I would claim that Chernobyl is a reasonable example of a nearly-worst-case nuclear reactor accident. With modern reactors having containments, it's hard to postulate radiation releases of that magnitude. Case in point, Fukushima was 3 meltdowns and had much less radiation release and therefore health impact. I don't think saying nuclear reactor accidents are nearly unbounded wildly beyond Chernobyl is reasonable.
And again, fossil + biofuel kill a Chernobyl's worth of people every 7.5 hours...! The WHO numbers linked are due to the fossil fuel + biofuel. I'll link more detailed meta-analyses below.
Also, the area around Chernobyl is not really uninhabitable at all [1]
[1] https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...
As for thinking the UNSCEAR values on deaths are a sham, yeah I mean Greenpeace has been saying against all scientific consensus that the impacts are way higher for years. But the science does not support that. UNSCEAR is basically like the IPCC for nuclear.
I highly recommend listening e.g. to Gerry Thomas on this topic for details. [2]
[2] https://www.titansofnuclear.com/experts/gerrythomas
As for air pollution, see this [3] for more specific attribution to fossil fuel and biofuel.
> I am a nuclear expert who got into nuclear to help fight climate change.
I think that is very noble. I am thinking of eventually moving my career to solar or wind for the same motivations.
Chernobyl was partially contained, it could have gone far, far worse. IIRC only 1 of 4 reactors exploded? I suppose hypotheticals are not extremely useful, but what is the hypothetical upper bound on the most catastrophic nuclear scenario?
There are ~equally unlikely life-ending upper bounds of all energy sources. For example, you could have world-ending wars and famines from solar and wind if a superlarge volcano largely blocks out the sun for a few years. Or they could lead to world-ending land wars over sunny and windy areas.
Today, in reality, we have clear and present and known dangers like fossil and biofuel that are currently killing millions and also causing climate change. These things make 84% of our primary energy as a world today. Shifting away from these things to the things low on the ourworldindata graphic above (low carbon, low risk) is a net benefit. Worrying about exceedingly unlikely worst cases is not necessarily productive or useful. Considering them is well and good, sure. But IMHO one must dismiss them quickly based on 60 years of operational experience.
In other words, if someone is currently attacking you and you can pepper spray them, it's probably better to do so than to worry about whether or not the pepper will cause the house to combust.
I would phrase your argument as simple as: you estimate the world is much more likely to become uninhabitable if we don't use nuclear.
What's the worst case of not using nuclear? It's the same as the best case of using it. Best case, nuclear would enable us to entirely phase out fossil fuel energy production, reducing the world's CO2 production by 25%, reducing green house emissions to the point that large parts of the planet no longer become uninhabitable.
Despite that I think that both nuclearpower and hydropower are good and safe sources of electricity.
This bit made me chuckle
Torness is still operating though the other AGR plant in Scotland, Hunterston, recently closed down.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-59894688
If they bumped 1200 MW to 1210 MW they'd have the 1.21 GW they need to operate a Flux Capacitor.
> Just to point out that Stross's blog is running off an elderly PC in his office, so no surprise that when it makes the front page on HN (twice in two days now) it gets slashdotted.