

Japan Nuclear Accident: Worse than Worst, Again - arman0
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/japan-nuclear-accident-worse-than-worst-again

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ique
This article seems thin on facts and big on sensations.

Two things strike me as pretty weird sentences in the article.

> _Worst-case scenario builders consistently underestimate the statistical
> probability of separate bad things happening simultaneously_

There must have been more than three accidents at nuclear plants in the
history of mankind. Yet three "misjudgments" make them consistently wrong?

> _Actually, ever major nuclear accident has been worse than worst case, and
> that's a fact_

How can something be worse than worst case? I don't understand what the
article tries to claim that "experts" have deemed the worst case. Clearly
Fukushima is not worse than worst case as there haven't even been a full
meltdown or anything like that yet.

Second, what is "Every major nuclear accident". Have there only been 3 major
nuclear accidents? What constitutes major?

~~~
dialtone
I interpret the "worse than worst case" as "What the designers thought was the
worst case in reality was not" so we are now faced with a case that wasn't
predicted and the outcome is unknown.

I can see the sense, this reactor was designed 50 years ago even with upgrades
it's old technology and there have been huge improvements in the past 50
years. So this shows that the designers 50 years ago didn't do a perfect job.
This is what the author means I believe.

And a "major nuclear accident" is defined as a level 7 accident in the
International Nuclear Event Scale[1], I have no idea if the author refers to
it when he talks about major nuclear events but probably not since there has
been only one level 7 accident and that's Chernobyl.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sca...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale)

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borism
wow, what a flamebait article...

~~~
electromagnetic
Ditto. While I don't doubt this accident will be used by the anti-nuclear
groups to further dig us into the pit of coal, oil and gas (seriously, I think
the whole green movement might as well be funded by the oil industry for all
they've made us rely further on it over the past several decades) while it
takes another decade for renewable energy to even become viable for supporting
a nation.

I see this as a huge success. Every fail safe in good design has held up and
kept a serious leak of radiation from happening. We're currently only seeing
neutrons being leaked, which is essentially a 'big fucking deal' level of
seriousness compared to a leak of radioactive iodine or something similarly
absorbable and storable by the body.

To say the plant suffered a hydrogen-oxygen explosion and didn't release
fissile material, I would say is amazing.

I'd just love it if people knew that more people die every year from the
radioactivity released from the burning of coal than have ever died due to
actual radioactivity from radioactive materials and power plant failures.
Factor in the amount of people who die annually simply due to soot produced by
coal plants and you can easily factor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and still
count it. Factor in the amount of third world miners who die annually and we
might as well go nuclear and drop a nuclear bomb annually and it would _still_
be safer for the global public.

I'm serious, it's psycho-bizarre that the dropping of a WMD would actually
cause less deaths in a year than the usage of coal.

~~~
borism
I don't think the time is right to start declaring safety or unsafety of
nuclear energy as the meltdown is reportedly underway at two reactors.

I'm all for nuclear energy, but we must not fool ourselves into thinking that
we can prevent everything. There are natural and human forces that can
compromise integrity of nuclear facilities which will result in major releases
of radioactive material and contamination of large land and sea areas. This is
simply inevitable.

~~~
electromagnetic
Japan just got struck by an 8.9 (some saying 9.1 making it one of the worlds
most powerful earthquakes ever recorded) and 1/25 reactors had a problem. They
only had a problem because they lost backup power, which is quite simply the
easiest fix that can be applied to all power stations essentially rendering
this an impossibility for happening again.

I think it is time to declare the safety of nuclear when 1/25 plants only
become dangerous after an 8.9 earthquake. Virtually 90% of the planet will
never be hit by a similar level earthquake making a similar situation
impossible outside of an earthquake zone.

FYI the Japanese government is worried of a partial meltdown in some rods in
the reactor. This is in no way a meltdown. Also furthermore there's serious
doubts in the nuclear community over whether a reactor can even achieve
explosive criticality. Again, proper design inhibits the danger of these
accidents. Three Mile Island for incidence had the same meltdown event as
Chernobyl, but because of a better core design the corium never breached the
core.

Given the Japanese precautions around nuclear technology I'd expect their core
to hold up at least the same as Three Mile Island if not a lot better. Given
they're only claiming a partial meltdown in a few rods, the risk of corium
breaching the core vessel is extremely remote.

