The Windscale Fire: Britain's 'Chernobyl' (2019)
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These reactors weren't build for nuclear power or anything, they were built to create the right kind of nuclear materials for weapons. They were essentially a couple of bloody great big nuclear bonfires!
He also along with Ernest Walton developed the Cockcroft-Walton multiplier, which is a clever arrangement of capacitors and diodes that produce a very high voltage from an AC source. Initially these were used in "atom smashing" cyclotrons, but came to be used in every CRT television you've ever seen.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1224/ML12248A021.pdf
The Cockcroft-Walton scheme was not for cyclotrons, but rather for a simple linear potential drop accelerator. Cyclotrons build up the energy of particles over many iterations, so they don't need that high a voltage.
Windscale Piles: Cockcroft's Follies avoided nuclear disaster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558045 - Nov 2014 (15 comments)
The worst case of this was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera , a foreshadow of the "weapons of mass destruction" excuse for attacking Iraq.
The typical way to raze building involves just knocking them down; these are actual disassemblies. They'll go up and unbolt and slice off pieces, and carefully lower them, where they'll be examined and tagged and bagged for onwards disposal. It's a really expensive way to remove a building. There are sections of the site where he's been told "do NOT stop walking in front of THIS building". There are rooms (and maybe entire buildings) for which the records of what radioactive fun went on in them have been lost. There are dangerously radioactive (provenance unknown) things effectively dumped in ponds that have to be removed carefully, a piece at a time, possibly involving underwater disassembly. Possibly including a car that sucked up a big dose of something it shouldn't and needed to be made relatively safer, quickly.
The only saving grace is that when you have to disassemble things so slowly, the handful of people hired to do it can literally only be paid so much per day. It's going to cost orders of magnitude more than just knocking a building down, but spread over decades and decades.
They will have a cumulative exposure meter, this measures a total amount of dosage over a period of time and is how official things like monthly/yearly/lifetime limits for radiation workers are calculated. This meter is for things like "oops you went 2% over your yearly radiation dose and it's only November you have to stop working until January or you increase your lifetime cancer risk by .94%"
They will also have an acute meter, this is basically a tiny geiger counter which alarms above specific levels. This is for situations like "oh shit that pipe you just stepped next to has a leak and if you don't leave the room in the next 60 seconds, your never going to have any kids (or much worse)."
In some highly critical locations, it's possible for people to wear multiples of each of these, especially the cumulative meters because they are cheap and there might be multiple stakeholders who each have a process for ensuring compliance (e.g. your employer requires one, the facility requires one and the government requires one) -- this is rare bureaucratic nonsense but happens.
For the acute meters you might have multiple just for redundancy. It would really suck if you don't find out you're getting an abnormal dose until your friend walks into the room you've been standing in for an hour, or worse, when your cumulative meter is read days/weeks later.
Nitpick: probably better written as either 0.94% or as 1% — it is too easy to see 94% when skimming or unfamiliar (94 feels big, and percentages plus decimals are a little bit more complicated). Certainly I did a double-take.
He told us, among other things, of working at a facility where they had to wear some sort of dosimeter, and were not allowed to leave the base without treatment if the card turned black, or something like that.
Then he mentioned one of the workers who turned up too hot to get IN to the base.
Turned out, he'd acquired some old aircraft instruments that used radium paint for nighttime visibility, and had been messing around with them.
Fun times!
It's an amazing story.
I wonder how much of the workplace health and safety processes from the blitz were still somewhat in force here. For instance there was a mid-blitz technique of soaking unexploded bombs in liquid oxygen to cool and pause a battery in the anti-tamper device that otherwise made the bomb impossible to defuse. But golly, that's an unhealthy sentence to type in a 2020s not-at-war part of the world.
Years ago I used to naively assume the Japanese were very safety conscious and then I read details post-Fukushima that made me realise that the corporate managerial mindset rules there as well.
Maybe it's because of the 'fraternité' in 'liberté égalité fraternité; they have very strong culture of public solidarity and very low income inequality compared to say Britain or the US.
And maybe that's why it doesn't cost a fortune to build high speed rail there as well; because there is a moral element to it that means you don't rip off your fellow countrymen.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t...
That's not how most other countries handled their nuclear power architecture and I think it's one of the main reasons why France has had major success with no issues. There's nothing flashy about how their nuclear reactors operate but they're very easy to staff and maintain long-term.
While this has been a real problem and got them into some supply tight spots over winter it definitely speaks for their approach to safety.
(more seriously, the French nuclear industry has avoided major disasters but at the cost of some expensive repairs as the fleet is aging together. At least they didn't skimp on the repairs.)
Edit: none of these seem to be "missing". I think they meant that there are a number of unrecovered (in some cases even intentionally scuttled) nuclear submarine wrecks.
To me, it appears to be a niche technology with a host of problems (fuel mining, decomissioning and fuel reprocessing are dirty and expensive) that is completely incapable of competing with renewable power on cost already, and current trendlines (plant vs. wind/solar/battery costs) are absolutely NOT favorable.
I encounter this highly (and IMO irrationally) favorable view of nuclear power very frequently on HN and would really like to understand why this is so prevalent...
For example MSR's can operate at very high temperatures, can recycle nuclear waste, don't use fuel-rod's and can be made to be smaller and more economical than the older pressurized water reactors that you're referring too.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/spotlight-on-innovation...
And that makes the economics just wishful thinking-- to back them up, we would need first a finalized, commercial design, then to actually build it in some numbers, and verify cost effectiveness. And this is a point that renewables already reached a decade ago, while still getting cheaper...
Nuclear power in general also suffers from the big problem that it becomes even less attractive the more cheap intermittent power is available, because all the costs are fixed; just turning these on when there is no wind/sun makes the already bad cost efficiency even worse...
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-failure-...
They have "dark doldrums" and have to revert to natural gas and diesel power plants (which is why BP and American energy companies push wind and solar). On top of that you can't just cover the entire countryside in massive wind turbines or solar panels. You've got protected species and you've got NIMBY. Why push the endless political pissing matches when you could easily develop nuclear power too? Do both. Let nuclear power handle the doldrums.
According to https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm, current german electricity mix is ~50% renewable since beginning of the year. Used to be 35% in 2018. So the "unreachable" target of 80% in 2050 seems completely trivial; just keep doing things at a similar rate and that target is in reach within a single decade (!!).
Intermittency of renewable sources is a problem that has multiple perfectly viable solutions, namely overprovisioning, storage, grid connectivity and peaker plants. Finding the most cost effective mix of those (and adjusting it over time as technology evolves) is a problem that the free market is perfectly equipped to solve.
Area consumption is not a big issue, neither for solar nor for wind, because roofs and agriculture (and the off-shore option in the case of wind).
Nuclear power is a bad mix with renewables because it's already too expensive and building it for peak loads makes that drastically worse since it's all fixed cost basically. Gas powered plants are super attractive with renewables because of the very same dynamics (cheap installation costs and variable costs that largely depend on actual utilization).
In the extremely unlikely case that battery technology fails completely it would always be possible to use hydrogen as energy storage in combination with refitted gas peaker plants. But that scenario appears unlikely to me.
Also note that renewables have already overtaken nuclear power in the US, too; given recent experiences with the nuclear industry it seems EXTREMELY unlikely to me that this trend would ever reverse.
That is not "extremely unlikely" it is 100%ly inevitable. Luckily hydrogen as energy storage is already happening now.
Batteries that buffer about a week of household electricity (100kwh) are already affordable enough to be installed in cars, and the whole sector is still improving rapidly.
(I think the main problem is purely political in that nations don't want to depend on others for energy, and outside of a few exceptions that would probably be necessary if storage was to be minimized).
The political problem is also not something you can dismiss. It will kill off most of the plans for global connectivity. And in fact this is a good thing as dependency on another country for energy is a bad idea (see Europe's dependency on Russia energy).
So in the end, you really can't get away from hydrogen. It is simply too good of an idea and the alternatives are either impossible or totally unacceptable.
At this point I don't think nuclear is the way; I think it's got too many hurdles and we don't have enough time to figure it out in a safe way, if we ever can get the costs down and improve safety at the same time. But it's undeniably attractive as a nearly carbon-free energy source.
Deciding that anyone with a different opinion than yours on a complex topic must be some kind of shill for big oil is doing yourself a disservice.
Nuclear is base load - it takes days to change power levels - and cannot be a substitute for fast-reacting power sources
If I had a penny for every HNer who opens their mouth to pontificate about how turning off nukes means a less reliable grid or "we'll need fossil fuel plants to make the grid reliable", I'd be a very rich person.
I'm pro-nuclear and share your optimism about small modern reactor designs. But any nuclear proposal that doesn't include safety and transparency as core values that take priority over all other considerations deserves to be rejected. There's a reason that people have grave doubts about the integrity of the nuclear industry, and it's not technical but social. There are way too many nuclear proposals that lead off with happy talk about the benefits, and defer discussion of safety, transparency, cost and so on until those issues are raised as objections. It's a PR strategy and I automatically distrust it, because that 'good vibes only' mindset is likely to embed itself in the subsequent management of the plant and lead to cover-your-ass style decision-making.
tl;dr I like nuclear technology, it's the operators I don't trust.
Of all nuclear accidents, these are easily the least concerning. For one, only two western nuclear submarines have ever been lost and those were well publicized, nobody should be surprised by those. The Soviets/Russians lost quite a few, which I don't think many people would find surprising, but it's really not a big deal anyway from an environmental perspective. Sea water is excellent shielding, the wrecks are now used as habitats for all kinds of sea life which is unfazed by the radiation. As for heavy metal pollution, ocean water already has several billion tons of uranium and other heavy metals dissolved in it, naturally. A few more tons from a few reactor cores is nothing.
Quite frankly, we should view deliberately dropping old nuclear reactors into the ocean as a practical and economical method of disposal. In fact, the Soviets and the UK have deliberately done this several times and (the US and Switzerland did too, to a much lesser extent.) There is no evidence that any of this has caused any harm to the environment.
Imagine the optics! If this is a good solution it would most certainly have to be done by governments in secrecy.
Tragedies are tragedies, and only scoundrels compete on the scale of tragedies.
But in fairness, this accident was small compared to Chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
https://www.ichec.ie/news/revisiting-1957-windscale-nuclear-...
Source: Mahaffey, "Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters"
However, in all such discussions, one needs to be aware of the strong interest of the British government to keep all things around it's nuclear weapons program secret. So maybe the public figures are fake.
In hard drives or networks, errors are tolerable below a certain threshold. It's a different story once unrecoverable errors start to occur (data loss, system crashes, perhaps errors getting caught by higher-level things like exceptions).
I'd expect DNA, cells and biological systems are probably similar. The error correcting mechanisms can probably handle some errors up to a threshold (which probably itself varies between individuals).
I would like to just remind everyone of safety context, where the WHO is currently estimating 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions from fossil and biofuel combustion energy sources.
Despite several high-profile and memorable nuclear accidents, nuclear fission remains among the safest and cleanest ways we know to make electricity. Plus it's low-carbon to boot.
a) the British state has a very, very long track record of lying about domestic nuclear, so the public finds any safety claims hard to take seriously.
b) the main issue with nuclear power in the UK is economic - the public have had to take on genuinely enormous liabilities in pensions and cleanup liabilities from every previous attempt, so do not take the cost projections for future sites at face value. And quite rationally so. But if we assume that liability overruns from the taxpayer were to happen at the same rate, the economic case for nuclear versus renewables on a small, windy, rainy island with a lot of tides disappears.
Every now and again people remember this when looking at Iran, Ukraine, Taiwan etc.
d) the last UK agriculture impact of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster were lifted in 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cumbria-18299228
What the UK has a long long track record of, is CND and Greenpeace misrepresenting or outright lying to the general public about all aspects of nuclear power and often conflating it with nuclear weapons. I trust scientists over Doris, 63, from Derby, who doesn't like nuclear power 'for reasons'.
b) All Western countries have an economic problem with nuclear power because the government has been involved since day one for obvious military reasons, limiting the ability to commercialise it and hence reduce costs. SpaceX launches cost 10% of government launches because they've been allowed to commercialise rockets.
No, the cost advantage of SpaceX is that they're allowed to fail. This cannot apply to the nuclear industry.
b) it seems like the high costs are less a function of government inefficiency than the fact that reprocessing for weapon production is difficult and dangerous, which adds to the cost. Commercial endeavors don't have or want to produce plutonium, but if you think that private industry is somehow immune from the creation of negative externalities, corner-cutting, or cover-ups then I've got an incredible new cryptocurrency opportunity just for you.
Does this include emissions from stuff like motor vehicles, kitchen stoves etc? Or just emissions from power plants which could reasonably be replaced with nuclear?
Car fossil can be reasonably replaced with nuclear through electric vehicles. Same with stoves.
Great that the alternative in 2023 are renewables and not fossil fuel then!
Traditional biofuels are being replaced with renewables at an incredible pace since it allows for distributed power generation, and a better life, globally.
Modern biofuels are one alternative among others, including synthetic fuels, likely to be used for long-distance air travel and ocean-crossing commercial shipping. That is an incredibly tiny source of pollution today and one that we will very easily regulate to handle potential particle emissions in the future.
What are we optimizing for here? Impact or through any means possible justifying nuclear?
Given that it's just a technology choice, and that there are much cheaper [1], faster, options available I wonder why?
This is done at least by some in order to attempt to get funding redirected away from solar and wind and storage projects and research into the money pit of nuclear power plants and research. They do this because they actually care about having to rely on fossil fuels for as long as possible.
This is why a lot of conservatives in Texas believe their winter storm horrors were caused by wind turbines, which they often call "windmills" for some reason, even though if you call a magazine "a clip" they will rip your head off and complain that you shouldn't be allowed to make policy about something you don't understand.
That is a fact, right? Not some right wing propaganda.
So if we know this is a fact, how can we address the fact that renewables dip below what we need from time to time? How do you handle the baseload? I don't think that's "cherrypicking" - more like a fundamental issue that as far as I can see has only couple ways of being addressed - either have plants that run on fossil fuels, or.....nuclear power. Out of the two, nuclear wins easily when it comes to environmental cost, no?
Like....is literally anything I said in any way controversial?
> there are days when they make so much energy they have to export it
"Oh no! Our power generation is making so much energy that we have to sell even more of it and make even more money! What a disaster!"
You do get that power companies want to make money, right?
Does that answer your question?
""Base load" is not a good thing, it's a "this is useless for anything else, so all we can use it for is base load" thing."
Surely you want a base load capacity to always exist, no matter what, no? Covering for spikes is one thing, but your grid has to have an always-on level of generation that is always there, for various technical reasons.
>> hydro (seconds)
Genuine curiosity - what kind of hydro reacts in seconds? I literally used to live next to a hydro dam and the numbers they used to give visitors were around 10-15 minutes minimum to spool up the turbines and start delivering to the grid. We also had a hydro storage facility on top of a mountain nearby, similar thing - it takes time to open the sluices, it takes time for water to hit the turbines, it takes time for the turbines to spool up and get to the operational parameters before they can start sending power to the grid.
And finally I'm still not sure why you'd say that people who are cheering for nuclear power are only doing so to prelong the fossil fuel dominance?
Hydro: "Cruachan power station can respond within 26 seconds to sudden demands for electricity." https://www.secret-scotland.com/place/cruachan-power-station
I live in Scotland.
The nuclear fans are prolonging fossil fuels through their false claims that renewables can't achieve what they are already achieving. Scotland used to get 85% of its electricity from fossil fuels. That figure is 10% today. Nuclear fans keep pushing for a hugely expensive solution that will take at least a decade to start producing. It's a delaying tactic. I don't mean that anyone who is pushing for nuclear is a shill, I just think they've fallen for the narrative.