Comment by x0x0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by x0x0 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't understand how people who keep bringing up that conventional power generation kills more people than nuclear ever has (yet!) get around having their nose rubbed in the fact that we haven't experienced a worst case nuclear incident yet and that we keep getting lucky and scraping past worst cases -- at least according to what I read about all those old fuel rods stored at Fukushima. People keep ignoring safety precautions and we keep getting lucky, but luck and hope is not an acceptable strategy when you can irradiate large chunks of countries as a worst case scenario.

@SuperChihuahua: I can't find the articles now, but just one failure case is there were pools with spent nuclear rods in them that required active cooling. Failure to do so produces a plume of radiation straight into the air. Of course you're never supposed to store that many fuel rods, yet somehow safety wasn't important and there we where with tons of fuel rods in pools that required active cooling and no real plan for what to do if, say, we couldn't actively cool them.

I didn't dismiss that argument, I simply said it doesn't have an empirical grounding despite the language that was used in the parent comment that made it appear otherwise.

(I don't agree with that argument though; we're going to have to figure safe nuclear out, because we can't keep dumping pollutants into the atmosphere).

What's the worst case nuclear incident in a modern reactor?

Someone steals Nuclear material and releases it over a large area. Or a design failure can lead to something about 20 times the size Of Chernobil and hundreds of times as deadly. Note Chernobil keep most of the radioactive material contained.

PS: Granted those are both vary unlikely, but if you want to talk worst case it can get really bad especially when you add in say a large earthquake on an unknown fault or a meter impact etc.

> Note Chernobil keep most of the radioactive material contained

And yet, compared to any other design still in use, it had virtually no containment. It had a concrete and steel lid for primary containment, but it's secondary containment was a corrugated tin roof, instead of the typical reinforced concrete that can take a jet impact (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25vlt7swhCM). On top of that, they disabled the safety systems deliberately because the reactor would normally not have allowed itself to be placed in the extremely unstable state that caused the disaster.

The Chernobyl accident can be compared to taking a car, replacing the crumple zones and roll cage with tin foil, cutting the brake lines, and then driving full speed into a wall in order to test the safety systems. Without using a crash test dummy. And then wondering why someone got hurt.

When people can do something as monumentally stupid and poorly engineered as Chernobyl and still keep most of the radioactive material contained, that really says something.

Which just goes to show if a safety system can be disabled it might be disabled. Brick walls on the other hand are hard to turn off.

That's exactly right, which is why you don't replace your crumple zones and roll cages (primary and secondary containment) with tin foil. That way, even if your brake lines are cut, you still have something protecting you.

Modern reactors are designed so that they will be passively safe. Even if the safety systems get shut down and the reactor core turns into a radioactive puddle of metal, it shouldn't be able to lose containment.

If a meteor hits, you have bigger issues than nuclear fallout, like tsunamis, earthquakes, vaporization of water for an ocean strike that leads to weeks of rain, dust from a land strike cooling the planet, etc.

It's all a question of size. A 1Mt impact outside a city would probably not be that bad unless it hit a nuclear power plant or other nasty target. Probably a 1 in 1+ trillion risk but if all your asking is what's the worst that can happen it's on the list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com