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Comment by illiarian | Hacker News Reader

- "one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material"

- "Look for the Tricastin plant I don't know enough to answer precisely but it has leaked recently and a few years ago. Of course it doesn't leak uranium"

So, your original statement was an untruth. Or "alternative facts"

> of micro-breaches caused by maintenance decades ago. That's actually a sign of proper management, but a counter-argument to reliability.

So you mean microbreaches were made decades ago, the plant has operated for decades with no issues, and you call that unreliable?

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This thread is a great example of how the meanings of words can be taken differently by different people. "Unreliable" is less of a description and more of a flag. Either it is or isn't. But the original commenter's threshold for unreliable = true is much much lower than most people's as illuminated in this discussion.

It seems like this is a daily occurrence online and in person.

I'm guessing "micro breaches" refers to hydrogen-induced cracks. Media likes to talk about it in bigly, threatening terms such as "THOUSANDS OF CRACKS FOUND IN REACTOR VESSEL" - of course anyone with half a brain starts to wonder "aren't these PWRs?". Much like people like to write headlines such as "HUNDREDS OF NUCLEAR INCIDENTS AT NPP XYZ", where "nuclear incident" means "reported event", which includes such dramatic incidents as "a backup valve in some secondary circuit had to be replaced because it was stuck" or "a bird flew into the transformer, tripping protection and taking a block offline".

Reminds me of the hysteria surrounding microplastics. I saw an article that once that said there are X many thousands of microplastic particles in a cubic meter of seawater at certain locations. They were actually counting individual particles! Why? because expressing plastics as a % of total mass or volume makes it so negligible as to not be a headline.

That's like reading headlines about TESLA RECALLS every time they do an OTA update that fixes a minor compliance issue.

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