| I'm quite familiar with the Banqiao Dam disaster, and posted a longish comment regarding it on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927596 Borrowing from that: The worst power plant accident of time, not a nuclear power plant failure, but a hydro station in China, Banqiao Dam. It's instructive several ways: Any number of fairly simple methods would have hugely alleviated the impact of the disaster. Much as with major nuclear disasters, it was a cascade of failures, starting with poor management and a dysfunctional culture, amplified through poor design, adverse conditions, poor communications, delayed or absent warnings, and little or no disaster response. Many of the deaths were attributed to starvation and disease, not drowning or other physical impacts. A useful thing to keep in mind, though, is that after a dam break is done being a a massive disaster area, which typically resolves in a few hours to a few weeks, the land is no longer a glowing radioactive mess. It can be re-settled and populated as structures and infrasctructure are rebuilt. Zhumadian City, the region surrounding Banqiao, has a present population of over 7 million. The disaster area is also contained. Chernobyl threatened vast regions of Asia and Europe, putting a population of over 400 million at risk, and certainly ill at ease. Or look up the story of the Johnstown Flood, worst dam break in US history (by deaths), which saw the emergence of the Red Cross, of national response to disasters, and changes in liability laws. (Excepting Johnstown and Banqiao, dam failure mortality falls off rapidly, with another 8 disasters of 1,000+ lives. Wikipedia gives some 908 notable dams, and 137 hydroelectric facilities of 1GW+ net capcity.) There are other questions, notably whether or not "deaths per GWh generation" is the most appropriate measure of risk. Particularly for a technology whose risk tail spans not years, decades, or even centuries, but millennia. Or longer. Last I checked, there were few human institutions with lifespans of similar scale. Technical or otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhumadian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2awjj2/thought... https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/283sz1/key_fac... |