Hacker News Reader

Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

Fukushima and Chornobyl happened directly for a lack of paranoia, regulation and lobbing. I hope that we don't commit the same mistake again.

View on HN

Fukushima happened in a highly regulated (and correspondingly expensive) environment. Improving the regulation doesn't necessarily just mean adding more of it or tightening targets far beyond any useful range. Also, arguably the evacuations as a response to Fukushima caused more harm than the radiation would have, an example of paranoia as opposed to effective regulation.

(Chernobyl also happened because of paranoia but that was largely the Soviet's obsession with saving face to the point of hiding a design flaw from the operators).

Though, I will push back on the idea that this is exclusively why it's so expensive: Nuclear has plenty of other issues with cost beyond excessive safety targets.

> the evacuations as a response to Fukushima caused more harm than the radiation would have

This is a convenient opinion, not a true fact. Not different than saying, "I broke my leg after running from a tiger, so not running from a tiger would had been safer".

People try to convert that opinion on truth by the procedure of repeating it again and again, but we are still waiting to see the facts and the logical thinking that sustain this claim.

The radiation could have done a lot of harm, and nobody in march 2011 knew if the plant could be stabilized. They toke the 120% correct choice with the available data. And would be still the option taken in 2026 under similar circumstances. Everything else is reckless negligence.

To those that repeat in 2026, "but the plants never exploded". remember that they didn't had the luxury of knowing this at the time. Also that the inconvenient facts (like cancer ratio increasing, or newborns with troubles) were hidden under the rug and ignored for as much time as they could, so any comparison is biased from the start.

But now you're using older designs to argue against not building newer ones.

The explosion at Chernobyl wasn't actually a nuclear reaction. It was that the reactor got hot enough to separate the cooling water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then you can get a hydrogen explosion.

If the primary coolant is water. And the reactor is designed in such a way that that can happen.

Meanwhile you can use other primary coolants or other designs where that isn't a thing. There are designs that don't explode even if you lose power entirely. At which point the cost of an evacuation that the design doesn't require you to do, isn't a cost that you have to pay.

No they didn't. Data was available to jot do rushed forced evacuation and for older people evacuation literally led to death. Even if Fukushima was as bad as Chernobyl (which would be a wild statement considering it has containment), those ppl would have died from age earlier vs cancer. It was absolutely idiotic decision in this regard.

There is a fair argument for the uncertainty at the time affecting that call. And I think we can agree that avoiding what happened at Fukushima is a core part of nuclear safety. My main point, though, is that people often think that nuclear safety people spend most of their time and effort on 'make the reactor not blow up', but actually the regulations and practical reality is that they spend most of that instead on avoiding trivial amounts of radiation exposure to their workers and the public, perhaps to the expense of effort that could be spent on 'not having a massive disaster' or (assuming you somehow fix the other bits of nuclear that are really expensive) 'not having a climate that's too hot'. I'm not arguing that there should be no regulation, I'm arguing that even from the point of view of safety outcomes more regulation is not intrinsically better.

The problem is that if we don't find an exit, climate change will come with its old friend, war. War for the resources. And we didn't even globally agree in a minimum ruleset.

We are being promised about how much safe will be this new plants in a normal context while we do that, this context is vanishing. New possibilities opened and now we must deal with the possibility of a nuclear plant versus 1000 drones that want to destroy it, or that will keep coming for months until destroying it. Each energy plant is now a target, guided by AI.

Too much people in power are plutonium grade unstable, and is just a question of time that at some moment new "smart robot soldiers" will be asked to do unstable things also

So... how can you convince us, and guarantee that this is not just planting bombs under our own bedrooms?

> Nuclear has plenty of other issues with cost beyond excessive safety targets.

What are they?

The physics of nuclear reactors push you towards making them big, and that means that there are correspondingly few of them, and they are all big civil engineering projects that are a little bit different from each other. This is a recipe for expensive and slow construction. The whole reason people are trying to make SMRs a thing is to try and get around this but it's not obvious there's an intersection between what the physics is happy to make efficient enough and a scale where you can actually get some learning rates and economies of 'scale' (which is more economies of unit volume than just in total how big something is).

Lot of health impact of Chernobyl disaster was also because of Soviet's obsession with saving face.

The biggest radiation dose to the population was not from breathing air filled with radio-nuclides, but from drinking locally produced milk and eating milk products and leafy vegetables. In the first days after explosion Iodine-131, with half-life 8 days, is the biggest source of radiation dose.

Had the Soviets informed the population not to eat local milk, leafy vegetables for 3 months, the health impact would be much smaller (also distribution of Potassium Iodide would help). In case of Fukushima accident, health protection was implemented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission_product#Iodine

The human impact of those is a fraction of fossil-fuels. So it’s not fair to judge nuclear for being expensive if we don’t hold other fuels to similarly rigorous standards

Reply on news.ycombinator.com