SL-1: The only fatal nuclear reactor accident in US history
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passingstrangeness.wordpress.com
A lot was learned about reactor safety as result of that disaster.
Fifteen minutes later they found Legg, also dead—he had been impaled to the ceiling by one of the plugs used to seal the unused control rod channels
That's pretty metal, I've got to say.
Is that really true?
'“Nobody died at Three Mile Island” — unless you count babies.'
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/27/cancer-and-infant-mor...
This is one of the former. It's a very small set.
Deaths from radiation poisoning, which is the deadly thing most strongly associated with nuclear accidents, tend to number among the latter, because it's the radiation, a consequence of the accident, that kills those victims, not the accident, itself.
Again, it's a debatable distinction, but it's the one we've chosen to make. You conflate them either out of ignorance, or because you're fearmongering.
It's a valid argument that people die because of multiple nuclear accidents in the USA.
In a car accident if someone dies two days after in hospital as a result because of injuries (a consequence of the accident), people say that they died of a car accident.
Radiation poisoning is obtained as a result of a nuclear accident. In exactly the same way as injuries obtained as the result of other accidents.
To draw a distinction, and claim there is a difference is being ambiguous. Many people will misunderstand the difference because it makes no sense, and is not the way everyone else uses the language.
To claim people understanding the statement in a sound way are fearmongering or being ignorant is silly.
The headline is misleading.
ps. "only fatal reactor accident in US history" claim, apart from the other deaths within the USA, the recent (and still ongoing) Fukushima accident used a General Electric design from the USA.
Yes, exactly. We say they died of a car accident.
Not in one.
See the difference?
IMO, nuclear power generation in the U.S. is an overly secretive industry running obsolete on arrival technology that is a public health hazard. Just like coal, the industry enjoys a very cozy relationship with government that enables it to weasel around their pretty obvious risks and problems they bring.
But when the alternative is coal, nuclear power is less polluting, less radioactive and less likely to kill you.
Base load is ideally handled by an energy-dense approach that produces a very stable level of power. Peak load can be handled with more variable sources of energy, but at the end of the day these are usually backed up by gas-fired plants that can be quickly spooled up to match demand.
The problem with photovoltaic solar is that its capacity undergoes a significant level of variance on both an instantaneous and a medium-term scale (time of day). As such it's best treated as a peak source. Otherwise you need enormous, enormous batteries to try and smooth the load. Using electric car batteries and so on is a good idea from the perspective of the utility, but it's a raw deal for the consumer. The lifetime of a battery is limited by charge/discharge cycles as well as time, and they're stealing your cycles. A replacement battery is an enormous chunk of change, it's about the same cost as replacing an engine.
Note that this is not true of all solar techniques. For example, there's a solar-concentration technique that stores heat in molten salt, which helps to smooth out short-to-medium variation. When you lose the sun, you get a smooth curve that deteriorates over a period of hours to days rather than an instant dropoff. This is suitable for use as a base source.
Perhaps it eventually will be, but there are still some bugs. E.g. Ivanpah[1]:
"15 months after starting up, the plant is
producing just 40% of [its expected more
than a million megawatt-hours of electricity
each year], according to data from the U.S.
Energy Department."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#P...
I wouldn't say I don't want it, but it's a toss-up at the moment whether solar in the long term will be safer than nuclear.
Rooftop solar kills far more than nuclear per unit of energy thanks to installation accidents (put lots of people on roofs => some proportion falls off and dies)
Larger solar plants may turn out to be safe enough, but they too have accidents from everything like mining the sand and other components for the photovoltaics to installation accidents and accidents during maintenance.
We'll see whether or not as volume ramps up that rate remains low enough to be "competitive" with nuclear.
Typical arguments will be something like that nobody has ever died as a result of a nuclear energy accident. More people have died falling off of roofs installing solar panels, falling into the concrete during the construction of hydro dams, choking on chicken bones while operating natural gas plants, etc.
The increased cancers and infant mortality after Three Mile Island are either waved away or "not directly caused by an accident". The shitshow regarding safe disposal of radioactive waste is conveniently ignored.
Even in the case of coal, which is an awful fuel for a variety of reasons, at least you're dispersing a known quantity of radioactive material and we can plan around that or set long term expectations. It's a known high risk/known impact phenomenon. What happens if incompetence, natural disaster or malicious actor disrupts the cooling ponds where radioactive waste products are stored? You have a low risk/very high impact event that could produce a long term public health crisis.
The bigger health threat from coal is not radioactivity, but general degradation in air quality that is hazardous to human health. This is a not only high risk but guaranteed phenomenon with very high impact. Deaths due to nuclear accidents are generally estimated to be several orders of magnitude less than those due to coal in terms of deaths/KWH [1]. Even if we assume that these figures are off by 10000%, nuclear is still drastically safer than coal, even in the countries that have laws like the US's Clean Air Act which "plan around" the pollution of coal (let alone places like China with no such regulation). We have so much leeway here that we can add nuclear accidents becoming 5x more common per plant to the 10000% error and still be competitive with coal.
[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-vs...
100 years from now, when the Indian Point reactor will have long stopped producing electricity, there is a reasonable probability that dangerous waste materials will still be sitting in a questionable state of security just off a riverbank 40 miles north of NYC.
As a society, we're not really equipped to work with that kind of risk horizon.
And even if we develop good CO2 containment methods, the comparably experimental technologies being investigated for Generation IV [1] nuclear reactors promise similar benefits without losing the other advantages of nuclear (relative abundance of fuel, etc.). For example, closed fuel cycles currently in development produce only non-radioactive waste.
One hopes that "pro-nuclear" people (or pro-anything people) are still capable of being intellectually honest and admitting the existence of evidence on both sides of an issue -- despite having concluded that one side is the better one.
Not that HN is a paragon of virtue in this regard, but it's certainly better than most internet forums.
I said that conflating deaths in nuclear accidents and deaths from nuclear accidents was. If you want to take a position on the distinction, that's one thing. Not even seeing it — or, worse, ignoring it for intellectually dishonest purposes — is something else entirely.
Yes, it's 'debatable' that way too.
Yeah, there's no discourse going to happen here, is there?
So yeah, you kinda headed off the prospect of civil discourse a bit there...
My uncle had an interesting experience in this vein. It was well understood that high voltage power lines caused all manner of health issues, from cancer to various degenerative diseases. He understood that EM radiation from the lines really shouldn't be very dangerous, though, and didn't think much of the leg of a line tower in his back yard. Then one day the power company came through to clear out the underbrush growing around the base of the line's tower. In just two days after the spraying all vegitation was thoroughly dead. Turns out they spray an Agent Orange-like chemical to keep the towers maintained from plant overgrowth. You can bet he moved shortly after noticing that. (This was some years ago, and likely has been (hopefully) rectified.)
The definition you're citing says, "Any device in which a controlled chain reaction is maintained", emphasis added.
First of all, the Demon Core wasn't a "device", but a shaped lump of plutonium, which briefly — and accidentally — went super-critical. (Yes, twice. And, yes, subsequently deliberately.) A "reactor" is the entire assembly, not just the "hot" stuff.
Secondly, it wasn't exactly designed for controlled criticality.
EDIT: corrections.
tl;dr: prototype warhead core, on which people were doing very risky experiments, which underwent some criticality events by accident, releasing lots of radiation which killed some of them. It was eventually detonated in a weapons test in 1946.
> In the split second it took for the rod to travel the remaining 8.3cm, the reactor spiked to 20 GW, 6300 times its safe operating capacity.
(Up from that days' configured power output of 3 MW, happened while operator was lifting a control rod)
Prompt neutrons are emitted on a very very short timescale and so if the power were controlled solely by them it'd be impossible to control a reactor because any change in the control rod position would cause an extremely rapid change in the power. Instead, reactors are designed to be subcritical considering only prompt neutrons and then be made critical via the remaining delayed neutrons. This extends the reactor period (time it takes for the power to change by a factor of exp(1)) from milliseconds to minutes.
However, if there isn't enough control material in the core that the proportion of prompt neutrons is enough to make the reactor critical by itself then it goes "prompt critical" and exactly what happens in the article occurs. Reactors are supposed to be operated with enough margin that this won't ever happen (which isn't that difficult), but it sounds like they were deliberately operating right on the limit, which scares me.
However, I think you made a mistake (probably a typo but I think it's worth noting it to avoid confusion of other readers) in that sentence: “However, if there isn't enough control material in the core that the proportion of FAST neutrons is enough to make the reactor critical”.
Prompt neutron (short time between fission and neutron emission) should not be mistaken with fast neutron (high kinetic energy, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_temperature)
Likely reactors are run with enough margin these days because of the lessons learned at places like this - it was an experimental reactor, the goal of which is to learn stuff.