[quasirandom]

Some problems that Fukushima had: 1950s vintage design, active cooling system, backup power at sea level in a seismically active area. This kind of failure was not just predictable, it was predicted.

People travel to Japan from around the world to learn how to build earthquake resistant structures. Their nuclear engineers are top-notch. It was the bureaucracy that failed, not the talent.

In short, the problems were human not technical. People get complacent and greedy. They use every procedural tool they have to delay upgrades, maintenance, and improvement. I think that is at the core of most nuclear skepticism. Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades? Or will they neglect basic maintenance and upgrades?

[philipkglass]

I think that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is world-leading. They identify problems proactively and require operators to phase in safety upgrades even for plants built 50 years ago. I live near an operating nuclear reactor and I prefer it over any form of fossil plant. Power reactors operating in the United States are reliable, safe, and have extremely low life cycle emissions of greenhouse gases.

Unfortunately, one of the most common refrains from nuclear boosters is that nuclear power is over-regulated. I don't want American nuclear plants held to the same lax safety/environmental standards as fossil plants. If we used taxes to internalize the costs of pollution from fossil-fired plants, low cost natural gas plants probably wouldn't be pushing reactors into early retirement. But leveling the playing field by slashing nuclear safety/inspection down to the low standard expected of fossil plants is the wrong way to go.

I am open to specific proposals for reducing regulations in the nuclear sector if there are regulations that impose additional process overhead, don't actually serve a purpose, and survive only from inertia. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there are some of these. But I've been discussing nuclear power for 20+ years, starting back on Usenet, and specific proposals are much less common than generic "get rid of red tape" bluster.

[credit_guy]

Here, I'll come up with a proposal. If Congress is serious about climate change, then they can ask (and allocate the budget) the Department of Energy to procure and operate a bunch of naval nuclear reactors. With whatever internal regulations they have, the US Navy has not had a single incident in their entire history of operating nuclear reactors. They are also quite cost effective, for example the cost of the 2 reactors A1B [1] that power a Gerald Ford carrier is about $1 BN. That comes to about $2BN/GW, which is about a tenth of what a civilian reactor costs. The US Navy builds about 1 carrier every 4 years so that comes to 1 reactor every other year. If the DoE gets the Congressional mandate to procure a few reactors per year, the cost is going to surely come down. Also these reactors don't need refueling for about 2 decades, while civilian reactors are refueled every 1.5 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1B_reactor

[sir_bearington]

This is not a very good idea for several reasons. Naval reactors require fuel that is much more enriched than normal reactors. They also produce significantly lower electricity. The Palo Verde facility produces 3GW of electricity and cost $11B in 2019 dollars. Each of the A1B reactors generates 125 MW. Life span of the reactor is not specified, but it's predecessor the A4W had a 23 year life span. By comparison, new nuclear plants are slated to last 50-80 years.

The net cost per GWh of electricity of the naval reactor is significantly worse than commercial plants. This is to be expected, because naval reactors are built to be compact and withstand the rocking of a ship at sea. Commercial reactors can leverage the efficiency of larger scale, and are built to be much more long lasting.

[credit_guy]

An A1B generates 125 MW electricity, but also 260 MW of additional thermal power used to power the propellers. If you convert the latter one to electricity at a 45% efficiency (typical efficiency for a generation IV nuclear power plant steam turbine), you get 117 MW, for a total of 242 MW. Two reactors could produce then about 0.5 GW. At a $1 BN cost, that's $2 BN / GW.

Palo Verde was brought online more than 30 years ago. If you look at Vogtle 3-4 (to be brought online in the next 2 years... if we are lucky) or Hinkley Point C, you'll see projected costs of respectively $25 BN for 2.5 GW and $32 BN for 3.2 GW. In both cases that comes at $10 BN/ GW. That is 5 times more expensive than the naval reactor.

Now, as you said, the cost of a naval reactor is very likely inflated by the exacting demands of its military usage. It needs to be compact, to work on a rocking ship, presumably it needs to be able to survive a certain amount of abuse that's to be expected if a ship/boat actually participates in combat, and I'm sure there are 100 other things that I'm missing here. All these factors make military devices absurdly expensive compared to the same devices intended for civilian use.

The logical conclusion is that if DoE wants to repurpose naval reactors for civilian use, then it can achieve significant cost savings. What I'm saying is that even not factoring these savings in, you still end up 5 times cheaper than the civilian reactors that are currently being built.

Edit: The lifespan of a Gerald Ford-class carrier is expected to be 50 years. The Nimitz aircraft carrier was launched 49 years ago. They do not replace their reactors. So, a naval reactor is designed to work for at least 50 years.

[sir_bearington]

You also need to build a secondary containment vessel for the reactor, which is a significant expense. Because the cost of this containment is a function of surface area and generating capacity is a function of volume it's better to increase size. You also need to build steam turbines, heat exchangers, transformers, etc. The cost of the reactor is only a portion of the cost of the whole nuclear plant.

> Palo Verde was brought online more than 30 years ago. If you look at Vogtle 3-4 (to be brought online in the next 2 years... if we are lucky) or Hinkley Point C, you'll see projected costs of respectively $25 BN for 2.5 GW and $32 BN for 3.2 GW. In both cases that comes at $10 BN/ GW. That is 5 times more expensive than the naval reactor.

And by comparison you have the Taishan plant built for $7.5B with 3.5 GW generating capacity. If we want to go around cherry-picking examples we can also cherry-pick the cheap plants.

We have already tried using maritime nuclear reactors for grid generation. The first nuclear plants brought online for grid generation were maritime reactors repurposed for grid production. Larger purpose-built reactors won out.

[epistasis]

Vogtle and Hinckley aren't cherry picking expensive plants, it's cherry picking middle of the road.

VC Summer is expensive, many billions spent and nothing to come of it ever.

Where do your cost numbers from Taishan come from? How do you come to costs that are believable from massive Chinese construction, or at least a cost that might be transferable at all to the rest of the world?

The history of nuclear is very clear: keep on increasing costs throughout construction, just enough that, taking into account the sunk cost fallacy, it makes sense to soldier on. VC Summer overshot that, and had massive corruption in the auditing of all parts of the project. Somehow Vogtle continues.

We literally do not know how to build nuclear in a cost effective manner any more. We can't structure contracts in the right way, we can't perform engineering to a high enough degree to make constructive plans. At Vogtle they literally poured the wrong concrete, and had to go back and get the design recertified with the NRC, because the original design was impossible to build, and on site they just plowed ahead with what they thought they could build. This is the level of incompetence, ball dropping, and bad contract structure.

Perhaps this sort of thing is fixable, but not on any reasonable timeline. The management is rotten from the top, so there's nobody that we can even order a nuclear reactor from.

Suppose you had $7.5B and wanted 3GW of nuclear at one of the many sites in the US that would welcome nuclear and its jobs. Who do you even bring that money to in order to build it? Rosatom? Are they going to meet NRC standards?

[bob29]

Great by the same logic you should use a commercial reactor over a naval reactor, you should also just use a different power source over nuclear.

[sir_bearington]

What other power source generates carbon-free energy without intermittency or geographic dependency?

[lostlogin]

The construction, fuelling and cleanup of a site is far from carbon zero. There is also a geographic dependency, or should be.

Nuclear power puts out more CO2 than solar or wind according to Nature (hydro isn’t mentioned for some reason).

“carbon emissions ranged from 1.4 grammes of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour (gCO2e/kWh) of electricity produced up to 288 gCO2e/kWh. Sovacool believes the mean of 66 gCO2e/kWh to be a reasonable approximation.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/climate.2008.99

[epistasis]

Solar + wind with storage and a grid. The parts are all there, and it's cheaper than nuclear today.

[imtringued]

Nuclear power plants are thermal power plants and that means they need cooling. The power density of nuclear power plants is so high that most of them can't be placed near rivers because rivers have a variable flow rate.

If the flow rate is too low you risk killing aquatic life in the river ecosystem so instead the nuclear plant is turned off. You can avoid this by placing the nuclear power plant near the ocean. That's what the Japanese did with the Fukushima power plant even though it's a tsunami prone area.

[bob29]

So you can build nuclear in a tsunami zone? in a seismic zone? in an area without cooling?

So you can mine and enrich uranium without carbon?

Nuclear does none of the things you fantasize it to do really.

[philipkglass]

The US stockpile of HEU would be depleted a lot faster this way, but enrichment could start again. I don't see major downsides to this proposal. Thanks for providing a specific and plausible idea!

[Hammershaft]

Thats a great idea. I'm trying and failing to find gotchas.

[credit_guy]

There is a potential gotcha: proliferation potential. The naval reactors use highly enriched uranium; if it falls in the wrong hands, you can end up with someone being able to build a bomb. That's why I said such a program needs to be run by the Department of Energy, the same department that has to maintain the nukes. I don't have a personal objection to this, but a lot of people would be unhappy with an essentially military program to be established for a problem that is not military in nature.

[obelos]

Hopefully the DOE will continue to be led by a person who didn't previously campaign on disbanding it!

[zepearl]

> I think that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is world-leading.

Comparisons are irrelevant - Japan's regulations weren't the worst in the world when Fukushima happened => something similar could happen anywhere else (a lot of factors influence a lot of decisions/policies - the past years demonstrated that even the US nowadays isn't the most stable country).

> They identify problems proactively... even for plants built 50 years ago.

Maybe they do "now" (I'm not a "pro" in this area therefore I cannot confirm nor deny that) but in any case there are never guarantees about the future. Additionally that "even for" sounds ugly - that MUST happen as long as such a plant exists.

> I live near an operating nuclear reactor and I prefer it over any form of fossil plant.

It's well-known that fossil plants are the absolute worst => such a change isn't a great improvement from my point of view.

> Power reactors operating in the United States are reliable, safe...

So far, and the terms are flexible - incidents did happen with civilian & military reactors, Wikipedia has a lot of nice-to-read articles with timing summary, analysis etc... .

> ...and have extremely low life cycle emissions of greenhouse gases

Correct - basically almost 0 (don't know, probably the truck that delivers the uranium stabs does generate some gases, maybe as well the mine&plant that create them, but not a lot compared to gas&oil&coal). But then... that's it? No other remark about maybe what is generated and where to put it and how to take care about it for the next 10000 years?

I'm definitely not/never going to approve any measure to deregulate a sector which has a near-infinite potential impact when something breaks and/or something is not properly taken care of.

[hanniabu]

Sorry but I don't trust any nuclear plant in the US to put safety over profits over the long term, especially after all the illogical deregulation done the last 4 years.

There's also already some questions on safety in regards to current plants. They're constantly loosening tolerances and changing the way tests are performed to make otherwise failed tests fall within acceptable limits. Plus the plants are already operating 2x their engineered lifespan. Yeah, no thank you.

[gbrown_]

How much are loosening regulations a concern for nuclear in the US?

Obviously recently general utilities haven't fared well as of late (Texas) or nuclear in the past (e.g. Rocky Flats). But as a foreigner who thinks as far as nuclear power is concerned, the DOE seems to being an OK job as of late. Could you share the specifics of the tests you are referring to?

[hanniabu]

This first link makes me absolutely furious. There's too much to quote from here, but this succicnt excerpt touches on the water test. It goes into more detail in another part of the article. The post has numerous example of very concerning issues.

> When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43455859

> The proposal comes as most of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s or 1970s, are reaching the end of their original 40- to 50-year operating licenses. Many plant operators have sought licenses to extend the operating life of their plants past the original deadlines, even as experts have warned that aging plants come with heightened concerns about safety.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspe...

> The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on safety inspections and rely instead on plants to police themselves. The NRC “is listening” to this advice, the Associated Press reported last month. “Annie Caputo, a former nuclear-energy lobbyist now serving as one of four board members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump, told an industry meeting this week that she was ‘open to self-assessments’ by nuclear plant operators, who are proposing that self-reporting by operators take the place of some NRC inspections.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/153465/its-not-just-pork-tru...

[gbrown_]

Thank you for the detailed and insightful reply!

[philipkglass]

The Union of Concerned Scientists has posted a great blog series "Role of Regulation in Nuclear Plant Safety." It's written by Dave Lochbaum, a degreed nuclear engineer who worked at American nuclear plants for 17 years. I think it's a better overview of NRC action and plant safety than any one incident. I've collected all the links here.

Series introduction: https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/role-of-nuclear-regul...

Flooding at Nine Mile Point: Regulation and Nuclear Power Safety #1 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/flooding-at-nine-mile...

Three Mile Island Intruder: #2 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/three-mile-island-int...

Empty Pipe Dreams at Palo Verde: #3 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/empty-pipe-dreams-at-...

Yankee Rowe and Reactor Vessel Safety: #4 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/yankee-rowe-and-react...

Flooding at a Florida Nuclear Plant: #5 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/flooding-at-a-florida...

Containment Design Flaw at DC Cook Nuclear Plant: #6 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/containment-flaw-at-d...

Pipe Rupture at Surry Nuclear Plant Kills Four Workers: #7 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/pipe-rupture-at-surry

Anticipated Transient Without Scram: #8 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/anticipated-transient...

Naughty and Nice Nuclear Nappers: #9 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/naughty-and-nice-nucl...

Breaking Containment at Crystal River 3: #10 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/breaking-containment-...

Fatal Accident at Arkansas Nuclear One: #11 https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/fatal-accident-at-ark...

[DennisP]

I'm fine with rational regulation and good safety inspections. Here's an example of a regulatory framework that needed reform:

Several years ago I got to attend a meeting between a bunch of people from advanced nuclear startups, and a former head of the NRC. The startup people said their biggest problem was that the NRC required near-complete blueprints before they would even look at the design. Then they would give a flat yes or no. If yes then you still had just a paper reactor, and if no then you were out of business.

Getting to that point required several hundred million dollars. That's a pretty difficult environment for investors. They said just a more phased process would help a lot. The NRC person was unsympathetic, said it wasn't the NRC's job to help develop new nuclear technology, and was uninterested in climate change.

Fortunately Congress has gotten involved since then and things seem to be improving.

[dtwest]

I live near one too, I'm not sure if I should be impressed that disaster was averted in 2002 or if I should be concerned how close things got:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Po...

It would be nice to hear from someone who is more knowledgeable on the subject than myself.

[partingshots]

If an accident almost happened in 2002, then the probability only increases as time goes on.

I personally wouldn’t feel safe, in the long run, buying a house or living near an aging nuclear power plant.

[akiselev]

> I am open to specific proposals for reducing regulations in the nuclear sector if there are regulations that impose additional process overhead, don't actually serve a purpose, and survive only from inertia. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there are some of these. But I've been discussing nuclear power for 20+ years, starting back on Usenet, and specific proposals are much less common than generic "get rid of red tape" bluster.

Some specific proposals would be to put a minimum nuclear fuel limit on the existing nuclear power plant regulations and create a new class with loosened containment requirements for active reactor designs that are passively safe by nature. Existing regulations are written around reactor designs that hold thousands or tens of thousands of kilograms of nuclear fuel that they have to moderate and keep in check. This is clearly not a viable option for nuclear long term against natural gas and renewables due to the overwhelming cost of manpower and materials which scales poorly. The regulatory overhead, transportation, and storage costs on that much radioactive fuel alone is prohibitively expensive, so we really need to focus on making progress in powered nuclear fission reactors which are impossible under the current regulatory regime.

Designs like the nuclear lightbulb - studied and tested by UTC under a NASA Mars program contract in the late 60s/early 70s - take tens of kilograms of fuel and heat & compress it till it reaches criticality at hundreds of atm and thousands of degrees. Any failure in the system causes a loss of pressure and the core returns to subcritical; even in a worst case scenario like a conventional bomb exploding in the reactor chamber, it would be a minor incident on the level of Three Mile Island. There are many tweaks that have been theorized but untested that would make the reactor even safer. However, any design like this requires regular maintenance of the reactor and completely different levels of containment that are either prohibitively expensive or impossible right now.

[WalterBright]

There was a long list of engineering failures at Fukushima. The idea with airplanes is not "design this component so it cannot fail" but "design the system so it can tolerate component failure". Fukushima had a list of failures it could not tolerate.

You mentioned one, the vulnerability of the backup power to the seawall being overtopped. The generators could have been put on a raised platform. There were others:

1. the hydrogen was vented into an enclosed space

2. no way to add water to the cooling system with a gravity fed device

3. critical machinery should not be located in the reactor core building

4. no way to bring in electric power from elsewhere

[earthboundkid]

The problem with fault tolerance is that it allows the normalization of deviance, since something is always failing, but it's okay because there is always a backup (until there isn't).

The bigger issue with nuclear power is that we can trust humans to keep up the level of effort to keep it working without a fault for a few decades, maybe centuries if we're lucky, but there's no way you can operate a plant for a millennia without a catastrophic accident, but accidents take much more than a thousand years to clean up. So it's all totally imbalanced unless you just assume we'll have fusion in fifty years, so nothing matters. But I don't think we can assume that anymore.

[WalterBright]

> The problem with fault tolerance is that it allows

We do that with airplanes. Think about it - you're flying at 30,000 feet, 500 mph, 50 degrees below zero, no land in sight over the North Atlantic, in a tin balloon loaded to the gills with fuel and two flaming engines.

And yet you're perfectly safe.

How did that come about? Tolerance of failure.

[earthboundkid]

The machines are designed to tolerate fault, but the FAA is designed to not let you take off unless you do a checklist that proves all the engines are working, not just the one you need for a crippled landing. So the system as a whole requires that the FAA not give in to the pressure from industry to sign off on less fault tolerance. It's a difficult issue for systemantics.

[WalterBright]

Um, there isn't a backup if the backup isn't operable before you take off.

[AdamN]

That's their point. If the FAA didn't mandate it you can be sure budget airlines would be taking off and doing routes with one engine broken :-)

[nine_k]

Airplanes are highly standardized. Dozens and hundreds of essentially the same model are built. A few of them are built specifically to test in various ways and even crash and burn, and make sure they behave reasonably in such situations.

Civilian nuclear reactors are mostly built by a handful, rarely by a dozen. This makes learning from past mistakes and taking preventative measures across the fleet hard.

I think France has partly solved it exactly by having a small number of standardized reactors, and a number of nuclear plants which can be run in a reasonably uniform way.

[WalterBright]

> Airplanes are highly standardized.

Not really. Every one coming off the line is different. They are constantly being improved. Every part on the airplane is carefully tracked, from manufacturing lot to which airplane each is installed on. Everything is designed by engineers, not custom made on the spot by a mechanic.

[natmaka]

Yes, French nuclear powerplants were standardized and built in batches ("séries", in French). This does not magically creates conditions for a perfect design and building process. See for example https://theecologist.org/2016/sep/29/sizewell-b-and-27-other...

Planes aren't perfectly safe (my brother was killed when SR111 crashed in 1998 after failures).

Anyone preferring not being exposed to a plane crash can abstain to travel in planes. Anyone preferring not being exposed to nuclear reactors boo-boos and hot waste has no real way to do so.

[interestica]

The failure points aren't always the aspects engineered by anyone related to airplane manufacture. Swiss Air 111 may have come down due to a fault/failure in wiring for its add-on entertainment system.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/electrical-fire-downed-swissair...

[lmm]

Not just tolerance of failure. Also strict incident investigations and reporting requirements, including for "near misses"; also a strong safety culture made possible by strong unions and strict seniority-based promotion rules; also...

[WalterBright]

> a strong safety culture made possible by strong unions and strict seniority-based promotion rules

??

[lmm]

Pilots can't get ahead by cutting corners, and (to a somewhat lesser extent) it's hard for maintenance people to be pressurised to sign off on unsafe work.

[silvestrov]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missing_aircraft#2001–...

[WalterBright]

Look at how few of them there are, despite millions and millions of flights.

It's an absolutely incredibly good safety record. You're much safer flying across the Atlantic than driving to the airport.

[aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA]

Hundreds of millions in the U.S. alone, over that 18-year span.

[willyt]

I think we need to look at what France is doing. They seem to have a good safety culture as a society, 90% of their power is nuclear and has been for decades they’ve never had a serious accident. Other examples, they have also never had a serious high speed train accident. They seem to be able to build these things considerably cheaper than we are able to in Britain and way cheaper than you can in America. They are a first world country with equivalent living conditions to the UK so unlike comparisons with China where many people blame poor working conditions and under regulation for cheapness, you can’t make the same argument against France. By the way I don’t know if that’s true about regulations in China (who does) but it is an argument that many people make that is a lot more easily refuted by just comparing with France instead.

[baq]

Complex systems should be assumed to run in a partially broken state. Accidents are more things getting broken quicker than failsafes and operators can react to.

That’s not to say I like nuclear power - IMHO opportunity cost is too high. I could build, operate and decommission a renewable solar or wind plant in the time it takes to plan a new nuclear plant.

[numpad0]

Part of the reason why some fault tolerance measures were neglected was because discussing backup plans was seen as a sign of weakness and were leveraged often by oppositions.

“You sound like you’re looking forward for some disaster coming with those plans” worked in Japan in those times. Still do to some extent.

[epistasis]

I'm going to need some of evidence of this claim, because it seems quite a bit counter to the timeline I'm familiar with.

Opposition to nuclear's safety did not start until well after construction had started on the US's reactors. And for nearly all US reactors, the utilities had already realized that they had over-ordered nuclear reactors in the 1970s, and that there were far too many construction delays and cost-overruns for nuclear to be cost effective.

This is detailed in a 1985 Forbes cover article, Nuclear Foibles, which is not anti-nuclear, but is withering about the mismanagement of nuclear in the US. Here's the only reprint I have found, which has a weird rant about Gore at the top that can be ignored:

http://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-r...

The idea that designs from the early 1970s refused to plan for failure because of some theoretical opposition, when there was basically no opposition to our greatest period of building nuclear reactors, doesn't make much sense to me.

[numpad0]

Sorry I was trying to discuss Japanese climate but my writing wasn’t best. As for the evidences, it’s hard to find a well compiled list but Fukushima did have a number of safety issues unaddressed for reasons other than budgetary causes.

Off-site center for disaster control built 5km(3mi) off site, effectively on-site, all backup generators being at basement levels, and recently discovered issue of emergency vent lines terminating inside the containment building comes to mind.

[zepearl]

Not sure about that interpretation - usually "fault tolerance" just means "additional costs"... .

[weaksauce]

> The idea with airplanes is not "design this component so it cannot fail" but "design the system so it can tolerate component failure".

that's not true. yes a lot of systems on airplanes are redundant but also there are plenty of you die if this breaks so we build it N times stronger than we can imagine it every happening... also, teach pilots not to do things that would bring that to be more possible. on a helicopter they have a single jesus nut that if it breaks the rotor is gone.

In rock climbing as well there is redundancy where there can be but some things are built strong to the point where under most foreseeable conditions the component will not break. (the most common dynamic ropes for lead climbing twins and half ropes aside, belay device, belay loop, belay carabiner, harness are all built for worst case without redundancy.)

[WalterBright]

> there are plenty of you die if this breaks so we build it N times stronger than we can imagine it every happening

That's simply not true. Every component is redundant. Nothing is built "N" times stronger. The safety factor is 50% stronger than the maximum anticipated load.

(I worked for 3 years at Boeing designing flight critical systems for the 757.)

> are all built for worst case without redundancy

Why I'm not going rock climbing.

[weaksauce]

is the jesus nut redundant? is the jackscrew nut for the elevator redundant?(one famously stripped and caused inverted flight for 30 min to try and save it but eventually crashed into the ocean)... they improved the design from that but it's still one mechanism and one screw. there are simply no completely reliable planes and helicopters without some form of single point reliability being required.

[WalterBright]

> is the jackscrew nut for the elevator redundant?

Yes. (It's for the stabilizer, not the elevator.) First off, the jackscrew is hollow and has a rod running through the center to keep it together if it cracks through. Secondly, the nut rides on steel balls in grooves. If the nut cracks and all the balls fall out, there are solid ice scrapers attached to the nut at each end that fit in the grooves, but don't contact them under normal operation. The ice scrapers peel any ice off the grooves so it doesn't jam the nut. But the scrapers are also strong enough to hold the nut in place if the balls fall out.

This is on the 757. I don't know the setup on the McDonnell-Douglas bird that crashed due to nut failure, except it's a much older design. I don't know if it had the ice scrapers on it, for example.

BTW, the jackscrew is made by Saginaw Gear. It's made from the finest steel forging money can buy, and Saginaw has been making them for a long time and knows what they're doing.

After the first trim gearbox assembly arrived, Boeing's test group had the job of applying the ultimate load, 150%, to it to see if it would buckle, crack, or bend. The test guys told me they were going to bust it. They put a big old steel I-Beam pinned at one end and my poor little jackscrew gearbox pinned at the other end. A hydraulic ram was applied to the I-beam, and the test guy cranked up the pressure.

The I-beam bent into a bow.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAAA I love Saginaw Gear.

> there are simply no completely reliable planes and helicopters without some form of single point reliability being required.

Helicopters, you're right. They won't survive losing a blade. Planes, you're incorrect.

[WalterBright]

P.S. My very first assignment at Boeing was to determine the size of that jackscrew needed to carry the load. I panicked, and went to my lead engineer. He laughed, and said "you know how to do column buckling calculations, right?" I said yes, and he said go to it.

After 3 years of working on the gearbox I knew everything there was to know about it, including all the failure modes anyone could think of. I was also fortunate to have a couple of Boeing's best engineers mentoring me.

It's redundant.

[HPsquared]

Is the main spar counted as a single component?

[WalterBright]

The main spar structure is redundant.

[HPsquared]

It's tolerant of random failure of individual components, yes, but the entire spar could fail under an overload condition. For this failure mode, the only way to ensure a suitably low failure rate is by setting an appropriate safety factor.

[nicoburns]

And it seems likely that with enough operating plant, there always will be engineering failures. Aeroppanes sometimes fail catastrophically too of course.

[nawgz]

Do they? I can't really recall an instance of catastrophic airplane failure over the last decade outside of 737 MAX certification / regulatory capture issues

I also think the amount of airplanes that exist is higher than the amount of nuclear reactors we'd need for it to be a strong power source, and I also suspect that airplanes face slightly more volatile conditions

[nicoburns]

> outside of 737 MAX certification / regulatory capture issues

Well there's one example! Why would you discount it?

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's a key example, and is the same failure mode nuclear power has.

Nuclear power could be engineered to be at least as safe as (most) commercial flight.

But it won't be - and this is absolutely predictable. Because of politics and money.

There is no answer to this, except to fix politics and money and make them as safe as commercial flight.

That's a whole different scale of problem to fixing climate change.

IMO this isn't a utopian fantasy, it's absolutely critical for species survival. But it doesn't look as if we're going to be starting the process any time soon.

Exporting the same problems to Mars or upload space or wherever won't solve them either.

[nawgz]

Right, fair question. I read "engineering failures" above, so I want to highlight that this isn't so much an engineering failure as it is a capitalistic failure driven by incestuous relationships in US aerospace.

I do totally agree this is a real risk for any domain, especially energy which has so much money flowing, but I just don't think "engineering" is actually the issue which these things fail under

[WalterBright]

> it is a capitalistic failure driven by incestuous relationships in US aerospace.

What do you call Chernobyl? A socialistic failure driven by inept bureaucracy and central planning?

[WalterBright]

> Aeroppanes sometimes fail catastrophically too of course

It's become extremely rare.

[nicoburns]

Well sure. But while extremely rare is fine for aeroplanes, it's less clear that it's fine for nuclear reactors. So far we've been lucky that none of the big incidents have affected a major metropolitan area.

I'm not completely anti-nuclear. But it seems clear to me that it should be seen as a stepping-stone technology on the way to a renewables + storage future rather than a long-term solution.

[sir_bearington]

> Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades?

Seeing as they have done so for 70 years, yes. I don't just think it, I observe that it has safely managed nuclear power. All of the plants have run safely, save for Three Mile Island. And even in that case, safety measures worked and the secondary containment prevented large scale contamination.

I don't think it's infallible. But it's aware of its own fallibility and enforces measures like secondary containment.

[jhayward]

> I observe that it has safely managed nuclear power.

This is not a correct statement. You cannot assert, for instance, that the pressure vessel head corrosion issue at Davis-Besse[1] was a 'safely managed' power plant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Po...

[sir_bearington]

I'm not sure I follow. The vessel head corrosion was detected, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had the plant shut down. How does a story of a safety issues being detected, and operations ceased accordingly indicate unsafe management? It demonstrates the opposite.

[jhayward]

The vessel head had corroded completely through the 6.63" steel pressure head, and the pressure vessel was relying only on the inner cladding to contain pressure. They were just a transient away, for years, from a steam explosion that would completely disassemble the pressure vessel and core and would place maximal stress on the containment building itself.

The issue was only "detected", after being covered up for years by falsified reports, when the engineer doing inspections decided to turn himself in.

There is no way this condition can be regarded as safe operation, and if that is what you are arguing there can be no question that it is flat wrong.

There are many, many of these kinds of situation where, just by the grace of whatever, we dodged a bullet and didn't have the catastrophe. You can't count those situations as adding to a cherry-picked "safe operation record".

There is a huge different between "didn't explode today", and "can't explode ever". We have spent too many days, months, years, in the former, rather than the latter. The so-called safety record is a lie.

[sir_bearington]

> steam explosion that would completely disassemble the pressure vessel and core and would place maximal stress on the containment building itself.

This venturing into the realm of hyperbole, at best. Nothing in your link mentions an explosion that would "completely disassemble the pressure vessel". Stress on the containment building isn't mentioned at all. These statements seem to be of your own invention.

Can you substantiate your claim that a pressure vessel failure stood to compromise the containment building?

> There is a huge different between "didn't explode today", and "can't explode ever"

Again, we set up our safety measures such that the danger is contained even if a meltdown occurs. Even the most scrutinized designs may fail. Humans are never perfect. You're right: no plant can guarantee that it can't fail. That's why safety measures are built to withstand failure.

[quesera]

I know nothing about DOE/NRC inspection requirements, but..

> The issue was only "detected", after being covered up for years by falsified reports, when the engineer doing inspections decided to turn himself in.

Is it really policy that the same inspector can be responsible for successive inspections accumulating to years? That would be stark raving insanity for any critical systems.

Financial businesses have a traditional 2-week enforced vacation for critical systems employees. This is not an aggressive work-life balance effort. :)

[HPsquared]

It's down to luck that the corrosion was detected before a serious incident occurred.

[godelski]

While there are a lot of human faults in this disaster (I think it is hard to deny that generators in the basement were a bad idea) it is also a complicated problem. One factor that isn't frequently brought up is that the Tōhoku earthquake was the 4th largest ever recorded and the largest in Japan (9.1) (second largest recorded was an 8.5 in 1896 and the second largest theorized was an 8.9 in the year 869. Remember this is not linear growth). Fukushima wouldn't have happened with an 8.5. A big reason this is important is because it really sets this event apart from that of Chernobyl, which I'd argue was much more dependent upon human error and bureaucracy.

But that means that the problem was both human and technical. What was considered good enough regulation was the issue because it is hard to predict earthquakes and even harder to estimate for earthquakes we've never seen before. No one thought a 9.1 magnitude earthquake would hit Japan and Nuclear safety is typically magnitudes of safety above what is needed (see radiation dosages) and this is a good thing (even though many that are pro nuclear, but never worked in the industry, claim that we're too strict).

But you are right that there is infighting between the scientists/engineers and the bureaucrats. But that's been true for every industry I've been a part of. I'm just trying to say that the story of why Fukushima happened is substantially more complicated than I see in the general discussions here on HN, Reddit, or elsewhere.

[RealityVoid]

I just think that people need to out things into perspective. The tsunami that cause Fukushima was dar more damaging than the nuclear event, but people seem to only remember the nuclear event. I think in our mind we make these events far far more serious than they were. Not that they were not serious but every thing in life is a tradeoff and you need to look what you are trading and what you are getting.

[hrktb]

No. The tsunami was extremely damaging and the death count was shocking. But it’s over.

The nuclear event had fewer immediate deaths, but the whole area is still unlivable, the sea is still getting more polluted every second, nothing is over, and won’t be for at least hundreds of years if we ever engineer a way to deal with the core of the reactor.

[merb]

> The tsunami that cause Fukushima was dar more damaging than the nuclear event, but people seem to only remember the nuclear event.

because we still live with the nuclear accident, while the tsunami damages are mostly repaired? Do you want to swim in the water in front of the plant? I probably wouldn't.

[godelski]

I think what bugs me more is the armchair expertise, or rather the confidence behind this. It is the people whose argument essentially boil down to experts being idiots and not seeing things that are clearly obvious. I don't see these people significantly different from anti-vaxers. Both do real harm to society and make it substantially more difficult to solve the issues at hand because we're distracted by misinformation and often radicalizes others. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that people are researching and learning. I like that people question authority and expertise too. But there is a balance here. You can say things with confidence if you have only read a few wikipedia articles on it, but if someone disagrees with you don't pull out a baseball bat. I find this behavior frequently common on places like HN and Reddit. I often find that the real answers are buried in a thread because they are complicated and nuanced, or non existent. I don't think I'm immune to this behavior either, but I do try to use the Murry Gelman Amnesia affect as a metric to check myself, and I think there are other good strategies that we should utilize and encourage. But I don't think our society encourages honesty over simplicity.

[andrewla]

The reason why I find this logic faulty is that none of the "known defects" were sufficient to shut down the plant. It's not a question of bureaucracy -- rather, the bureaucrats are on the other side. To cover their asses, they issue constant statements of imminent danger, and since those dangers never manifest, nobody believes them anymore.

If anyone took the warnings seriously the plant would have been shut down ages ago. And that's the problem with tail disasters -- they happen so infrequently that the system is assumed to be redundant to all of them, so even a "failure" as predicted would be met by a failsafe.

That's why I personally have turned against nuclear power. It's too complicated and the risks live out on the tail, and they are large (though not "fat" in the Taleb sense -- they're still bounded geographically).

[smartmic]

> In short, the problems were human not technical.

I disagree. Problems have been in both human and technical realm and, even worse, there is no way to clearly disentangle those two factors. Good arguments are given in Charles Perrow classic work "Normal Accidents" [1]. It is worth citing the tree main conditions which will result in an accident probability of greater than acceptable

1.The system is complex

2.The system is tightly coupled

3.The system has catastrophic potential

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents

[7952]

I agree with the point about technical vs people. On HN people are more familiar with how the applies to software. It may be technically possible to write bug free safety critical code in C. But in the real world we are all human and make mistakes and we don't have any choice about that. The existence of a hypothetical perfect solution is not a good defense.

[chefkoch]

It's not only that, but also nuclear plants run by for profit organisations, where cutting corners will at some level be appreciated to ensure the bottom line.

/edit: it's funny that here many are calling for tougher regulation, while in other post many who are pro nuclear complain about toomuch red Tape and top much security.

[WalterBright]

> nuclear plants run by for profit organisations, where cutting corners will at some level be appreciated to ensure the bottom line

How does that explain the inept handling of Chernobyl?

[wongarsu]

Cutting corners was appreciated to meet arbitrary plans and quotas. The failure mode wasn't that different.

[petre]

Personal profit, zealotry, career seeking, incompetence, design flaws, political agenda. This also includes the design phase. The RBMK reactor was an irresponsible design from the onset, even without the unknowns.

Graphite moderated reactors are prone to graphite cracking, as also evidenced by UK's AGR reactor fleet. Maybe pebble bed reactors are safer, because new pebbles are continuosly fed in and the spent ones are extracted for reprocessing. We'll se how the HTR-10 and the HTR-PM fare.

[chefkoch]

From what i know about this accident, the profit in this case was not to loose face for the higher ups running the plant.

[WalterBright]

Good luck designing and operating a complex, dangerous system with purely altruistic, utterly selfless people.

[chefkoch]

> Good luck designing and operating a complex, dangerous system with purely altruistic, utterly selfless people.

I know you're beeing sarcastic, but you just have to run it by the book. No need to be a saint.

[WalterBright]

What I'm saying is a proper organization takes advantage of peoples' base motives, instead of trying to defy them.

Free markets work so well for that reason.

[nullserver]

Did “profit” just get redefined?

[chefkoch]

I know nobody likes the wiseass but

Profit = to gain an advantage from something: profit from sth/doing sth I profited enormously from working with her.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/prof...

[ClumsyPilot]

The handling, as in, the reaction once the top officials actually understood the magnitude of the situation, was nothing short of spectacular.

No expence was spared cleaning up the mess, removing top layer of soil at a massive scale and enclosing the failed reactor in sarcofagus. This expence and reputation damage contributed considerably to bringing the end of USSR.

You've got to keep in mind how little was known about lethality and handling of radiation back then, compared to today. In fact good chunk of today's knowledge comes from Chernobyl.

[bluGill]

While we learned a lot from Chernobly, the culture back then was already very fearful of nuclear.

[ClumsyPilot]

I mean more like having tools and equipment to handle the situation that previously simply didn't exist.

From hazmat suits to robots, what was avaliable was extremely basic.

[Aunche]

It's not a universal rule that all for profit companies will "cut corners." Airplanes are vastly safer than other forms of transportation. When the public found out that Boeing cut corners with their design of the 737 max, their share price dramatically plummeted, signaling that this was the wrong decision.

Also, cutting corners isn't necessarily worse for nuclear than other energy sources. More people die from wind turbine accidents than nuclear power.

[sigstoat]

> run by for profit organisations, where cutting corners will at some level be appreciated to ensure the bottom line

as though government bureaucrats and congressmen don't like coming in under budget, future consequences be damned.

[chefkoch]

Comming in under budget seems like a rare problem with building nuclear plants.

While in operation, i think congressman and bureaucrats don't even know about the real costs.

[ncmncm]

> the problems were human not technical..

The logical conclusion is that if we are to continue building nuke plants, we need to keep humans out of picture.

We have no technology to ensure that huge institutions handling existentially hazardous technology do not become corrupt and irresponsible. The solution we know of is to avoid handing over such technology to the control of readily corruptible institutions.

Corruption is arguably the chief purpose of almost any past nuclear power initiative. A public works project that involves tens of billions of dollars almost inevitably devolves into a nest of corruption, whether it's a nuke plant, a new urban tunnel (cf. Big Dig, NY 2nd Ave), or US military procurement. There is a reason why small and portable nuke generation has not been able to compete: there is little scope for corruption in small nukes.

Wind and solar power are not subject to such systemic failures, and are also quite a lot cheaper than nukes, and getting cheaper every year. To prevent failures, we just need to shut down the nuke plants and replace them with solar and wind power. The only remaining question around renewables concerns storage of peak power output for dead times. But power storage is low-tech, thus low-risk, with numerous alternatives--gravity, pressurized-air, chemical--vying simply for the title of cheapest.

[mathgladiator]

The challenge is ownership at core, and we don't do well in having organizations not trend toward bureaucracy. As much as people hate bureaucracy, they love the order and predictability they produce.

It's probably why nuclear power has a ways to go, and it isn't the tech that needs upgrade; it's the people and the philosophy.

[titzer]

It's worth pointing out that essentially the entire US navy is powered by nuclear reactors that service lives in the 3+ decade range, and it's worked astonishingly well. It's not completely without incident, but wow, yeah, civilian nuclear power could really work if held to military standards of engineering and maintenance.

[fallingknife]

It's worth pointing out that US civilian nuclear power plants with service lives in the 3+ decade range have worked astonishingly well. It's not completely without incident, but wow, yeah, military nuclear power could really work if held to the same standards of engineering and maintenance.

[petre]

Naval reactors are different, their scale is two orders of magnitude lower. One could make other safety guarantees at that scale. They also use enriched uranium which means no refuelling is needed during the service life of the reactor. SMRs can also make some of these safety guarantees.

[titzer]

They do refuel naval reactors [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refueling_and_overhaul].

Given the (relatively) small size of these reactors, why can't they put 100 of them on site at a NPS?

[petre]

> Given the (relatively) small size of these reactors, why can't they put 100 of them on site at a NPS?

That's what companies developing SMRs aim to do. For instance NuScale has a design using up to 12 modules of 77 MWe each in a separate stainless steel lined concrete pools of water. The modules are quite innovative and incorporates passive safety features such as natural circulation, redundant passive decay heat removal, gravity driven safety systems.

https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/safety-features

[at-fates-hands]

> Their nuclear engineers are top-notch. It was the bureaucracy that failed, not the talent.

This.

All of the articles I've read about the disaster, all continually scapegoated the engineers as the reason for the failure, allowing the politicians and government to get a free pass. I'm not sure why this was the case considering Japanese engineers are some of the best, but the vilification of them never sat well with me because then it cast a negative cloud over every Japanese engineer unfairly.

[chungus_khan]

TEPCO dropped the ball pretty massively too, although IMO it should be the government's responsibility to assume that power operators are going to and not allow them to.

[NoOneNew]

I can't find the article for the life of me. From what I can remember, it was soon after the disaster, something came out about another plant that was "hit" by high waters as well. The difference was, their seawall was stupid high. One of the civic engineers during development fought tooth and nail to build the excessively high wall compared to what the gov building code was. If I remember correctly, it ended up being only a two or so meters taller than the tsunami that hit them. The engineer had a really baller statement in the article about how bureaucrats are useless and shouldn't have an opinion when it comes to life safety. I wish I could find it.

[samizdis]

This one, maybe?

https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2012/08/how_tenacity_a_wa...

[NoOneNew]

How the hell did you find it so quick?

I'm surprised I remembered it relatively well. Though, 1 meter buffer between the tsunami and seawall and the politician quote is better in his words:

>"Matsunaga-san hated bureaucrats," Oshima said. "He said they are like human trash. In your country, too, there are probably bureaucrats or officials who never take final responsibility.

[samizdis]

Divination via DuckDuckGo :-)

From words in your comment, I used this search string: japan nuclear plant saved engineer battle high sea wall

The result was third in the returned list. (Settings - safe search off, global region selected.)

Edit to amend: words and concepts in your comment. Also, I'm chuffed to have been able to be of use.

[NoOneNew]

You... you're beautiful. Thank you. You may have just made me a convert to DDG.

[samizdis]

Aw! The beautiful person in this effort was Karen Spärck Jones [1], who gave us tf–idf [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Sp%C3%A4rck_Jones

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_document_frequency

But thank you.

[garmaine]

> Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades? Or will they neglect basic maintenance and upgrades?

Objectively, yes. There hasn't been a major nuclear reactor leak in the ~75 years the nuclear industry has existed in the USA. Even Three Mile Island, the worst disaster the US ever saw, was fully contained due to regulator-forced safeguards.

[retrac]

I'm not sure why you're downvoted.

After 50+ years of routine operation generating a nontrivial proportion of energy, we can look back at a decent amount of data. And what we see is that nuclear has been remarkably safe. Up here in Canada, coal mine disasters alone have killed far more people. When you start adding in air pollution and other such nasties, it's an enormously vast gulf in lethality.

A cynical take. Estimate how many people would have died from air pollution due to a coal power plant generating the same amount of electrical energy as the reactor at Chernobyl that blew up. Estimate how many died from Chernobyl. The reasonable estimates of the high end of the former, and low end of the latter, are overlapping. It's not entirely preposterous to suggest that replacing unscrubbed coal plants with shoddy reactors that simply explode after 20 years of operation could actually save lives in net.

[virtue3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

We got super super lucky. And there's some debate about how bad the accident was with regards to NRCs monitoring.

Frankly, the whole plant was a disaster in the making. There was tons of warning lights and other systems but they were essentially useless because they constantly flashed and for poorly understood reasons.

3mile island is an excellent engineering study of what not to do with monitoring. We got very VERY lucky it was as small as it was.

[garmaine]

Sure, all of which are problems which we've since fixed. But the core point is that there wasn't a major release of radiation like Chernobyl, and the reason why is because there were a regulator-imposed safeguard in place: the containment building.

There were a lot of things that went wrong in 3MI. Many of the lessons learned from that were incorporated into future designs. But one thing that went very right was that there was defense in depth, so that a N different things would have to go wrong to create a nuclear disaster. And in this case the number of failures was less than N. That's an engineering and regulatory success story.

[ncmncm]

"Wasn't a major release" meaning what?

A large amount of radioactive krypton gas was "vented", meaning it was released to spill down to the river and gas anyone who lived nearby. There was no tracking, so we don't know who or how many were exposed, or how much.

[garmaine]

We can certainly ballpark estimate how much gas was vented--we knew the pressures and duration of the vent.

But this is a night-and-day comparison with, say, Chernobyl where the core was exposed and burning unmitigated for nine days. Many more orders of magnitude more release of radiation.

[sir_bearington]

There was no luck about it. It was a meltdown, and the pressure vessel was compromised. Secondary containment saved the day. Three Mile Island didn't become a Chernobyl not because of luck, but because the US didn't cheap out and skip building concrete condom over the reactor like the Soviets did.

[Covzire]

Even if Chernobyl would have had a containment vessel, what would have been the best case scenario? I'm not an expert but the blast threw the multi-ton slab of steel and concrete lid into the night sky, surely the containment vessel would have had a giant hole in it, albeit saving some of the radiation from the atmosphere of course but not all of it. One reason I think Three Mile Island wasn't as bad is because nobody in the west was crazy enough to build an RBMK.

[sir_bearington]

The whole point of the containment building is to contain a pressure vessel failure. American containment buildings are built to withstand impact of a fully loaded passenger airliner. That's why the containment vessels are reinforced concrete more than a meter thick.

If Chernobyl had secondary containment, the burning fuel rods would not have been exposed directly to atmosphere. Basically, if you have a fire emitting toxic soot it's a lot better to have this fire happen in a concrete dome versus totally exposed.

[mixmastamyk]

False, see my SSFL links elsewhere in the thread. Direct link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348051

[lambda_obrien]

The US Navy does a really safe nuclear power program, but it costs a lot. If you could combine the organizational fortitude of the Nuclear Navy to manage the plants and the maintenance with a reasonable cost, I think that would be sufficient to ensure safety, as long as the designs are also done well. Personally, I think nuclear power is too risky for commercial use, i would put my money in HVDC links, pumped hydro storage, geothermal, and overbuilding renewables as the best path to reducing emissions, and continue to use natural gas for emergency generators for hospitals and stuff.

[cameldrv]

There is also a human element. Unit 1 had been retrofitted with an Isolation Condenser, which is capable of cooling the core and preventing a meltdown without needing the pumps that couldn't run due to lack of power. This is exactly the type of upgrade people often suggest.

Unfortunately, for reasons that are still murky, this system wasn't activated, and Unit 1 melted down. The problems at Unit 1 also contributed to the problems at other units, causing radiation hazards, diverting personnel and attention, etc.

In fact, a larger version of this system is touted as one of the major safety features of the newer AP1000 plants, because all it requires is that you open a couple of valves, and the reactor can be safely shutdown as long as you add water every couple of days. Unfortunately at Fukushima, they didn't open the valves.

All of that said, the absolute damage from the accidents at Fukushima was tiny in comparison to the other damage from the tsunami, and much less than the damage of operating coal plants with no accidents whatsoever in Japan.

[dheera]

Also from my understanding the earthquake wasn't really much of an issue for most of Japan. It was the tsunami that we don't yet have good protections against.

Why do humans of the 21st century love building delicate structures on the shoreline at sea level? Historical civilizations generally avoided building on the coast, very likely for good reasons, both for disaster resistance and for military reasons. Most ancient cities of the world are not located on the oceanside, but rather along inland rivers or smaller bodies of water, or at least within some safe distance of the coast.

Recent modern cities seem to love building on the coast -- New York, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Dubai -- all these had relatively little history or at least were nothing more than small towns until the past couple hundred years, and are all terrible places to build a city in terms of tsunami resistance.

[not2b]

Moving goods by sea is vastly cheaper than by land: for all those cities, being a port is why they are significant economic engines. And power plants need cooling and can use sea water for that purpose.

[cbhl]

Ancient cities needed to drink the freshwater from the rivers.

Now we have man-made reservoirs and aqueducts to deliver drinking water to the coasts.

Japan certainly seems to have cities along its rivers, but it also has a lot of costal cities (presumably because it's a small island nation, unlike, say, European civilizations).

For Fukushima in particular, I was under the impression they were using the ocean water to cool the plant itself. (Under non-meltdown conditions, you can transfer heat without contaminating the water itself...)

[mixmastamyk]

Los Angeles was founded pretty far from the coast, and at a decent elevation, roughly 77m / 253feet. It just expanded in every direction. Santa Monica is protected by cliffs as well. Farther south isn't so lucky.

[piannucci]

Wouldn’t the plant have been located where demand and cooling capacity were co-located?

[fallingknife]

And yet only 1 person was killed when it melted down. But somehow, it gets more attention than the 10's of thousands that were killed in the tsunami.

[7952]

Human death is not the only dimension that matters. The cleanup could easily cost over $500 billion. That is a massive opportunity cost.

[ncmncm]

Only 1, unless you count the rest.

[Spooky23]

> People get complacent and greedy. They use every procedural tool they have to delay upgrades, maintenance, and improvement.

That is the core argument for a meaningful regulatory regime.

Large-scale base load generators only work from a business sense with predictable, steady demand. The price of that guaranteed demand is a near-fixed, managed return on assets and tight regulatory oversight.

[dfgdghdf]

This is arguably worse than an engineering failure though... In an engineering failure we can identify a concrete reason for the failure and integrate that into our engineering knowledge. On the other hand, we will never be able to eliminate the human / bureaucratic element.

[theropost]

Bureaucracy destroys - regulation is useful, if applied effectively, however the ever growing bureaucracy, and laziness of average people tends to happen without constant pressure or growth. Working as a programmer in Government has made me realize this.

[colordrops]

All problems are human and not technical though when it comes to engineering failures.

[tryitnow]

That's the problem I have with nuclear, it's not the technology, it's that our species is not necessarily well-suited to managing the risks associated with nuclear (with some exceptions, maybe France?).

[merb]

not so sure about that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Accide...

france often hides minor stuff, which often results in these more severe events. well france also has only 3 reactors as far as I know that were built in the 2000s.

btw. it's also my take. as long as they are operated to turn a profit or in a way that somebody might gain something, it will be basically impossible to have "safe" nuclear power. humans are dangerous.

[petre]

The French were just a more responsible than the Soviets and don't have to deal with earthquakes and tsunamis as much as the Japanese. The also invested a lot in several nuclear designs, comitted to nuclear power and are therefore quite experienced.

[chefkoch]

I can't find any specifics about the partial melt down in 1980 at Saint-Laurent, but it seems a serious accident could bankrupt france in an instand.

https://www.businessinsider.com/potential-cost-of-a-nuclear-...

[sigstoat]

> Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades?

if US institutions can't manage nuclear power, what else can't they manage?

[earthboundkid]

- a global pandemic

- a war that lasts longer than 1 month

- media legitimacy

- global financial system

[ericb]

Capitol security?

[bliteben]

Of course nuclear plants would not be safe if “the president” ordered citizens to attack them.

[AniseAbyss]

That is an interesting idea. What would happen in a civil war? Would the engineers stay at their post safely shutting down the reactors?

Nuclear energy demands a level of civilization that we simply cannot guarantee.

[opo]

>...Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades?

All indications are that much was learned by industry and the NRC after TMI: "...The NRC said the TMI accident also led to increased identification, analysis and publication of plant performance information, and recognising human performance as “a critical component of plant safety”. Key indicators of plant safety performance in the US have improved dramatically. Those indicators show:

• The average number of significant reactor events over the past 20 years has dropped to nearly zero.

• Today there are far fewer, much less frequent and lower risk events that could lead to a reactor-core damage.

• The average number of times safety systems have had to be activated is about one-tenth of what it was 22 years ago.

• Radiation exposure levels to plant workers have steadily decreased to about one-sixth of the 1985 exposure levels and are well below national limits.

• The average number of unplanned reactor shutdowns has decreased by nearly ten-fold. In 2007 there were about 52 shutdowns compared to about 530 shutdowns in 1985."

https://www.nucnet.org/news/three-mile-island-led-to-sweepin...

No one ever promised that there would never be a nuclear accident - that would be unrealistic for any power source. But historically nuclear power has been much safer than all the alternatives that have been available. If only other power sources were as safe:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so many people have an understandable misperception that it is more dangerous than other sources of power. 200 thousand people had to be evacuated in CA a couple of years ago because of a lack of maintenance on a hydroelectric dam could have let to catastrophic failure. We got lucky that time as the rains stopped just in time, but how much did the media cover that story? How much would the media have covered that if 200 thousand had been evacuated because of a nuclear power plant?

A recent Harvard study shows that pollution from fossil fuels is much worse than previously thought and they estimate that it is responsible for more than 8 million people yearly. We need to move away from burning fossil fuels and we need to use all the tools that are available.

https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/02/deaths-fossil-fuel...

It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Texas has shown us what happens with even a small disruption of energy. If it came down to a situation where you were forced to choose, would you prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?

[justatdotin]

> the intermittent nature of wind and solar

is kinda dependent on your region.

where I live, wind is pretty unreliable except at a narrow band of latitude.

but solar is -very- reliable. more like regular than intermittent. So we have two kinds of storage requirements: short term buffers for 15 mins of passing cloud cover, and overnight. Because of this manageable profile our economy is swiftly ramping up solar not just for current demand but in pursuit of 10x cheap new power to drive new industry.

[opo]

It isn't as easy as you are implying. Trying to rely only on intermittent power sources has huge storage requirements due to weather along with daily/seasonal variation. If grid energy storage was a simple problem it would have been done decades ago.

For example, one estimate is that for Germany to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is literally 183 times their current capacity: >...Based on German hourly feed-in and consumption data for electric power, this paper studies the storage and buffering needs resulting from the volatility of wind and solar energy. It shows that joint buffers for wind and solar energy require less storage capacity than would be necessary to buffer wind or solar energy alone. The storage requirement of over 6,000 pumped storage plants, which is 183 times Germany’s current capacity, would nevertheless be huge.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5...

There is a large variation in daily electrical usage (particularly in summer months). For example in the US: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

Contrary to what advocates claim, people have been looking at grid energy storage for decades and it isn't as simple as they claim. As Bill Gates said in an interview: "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need...

Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.

[justatdotin]

> It isn't as easy as you are implying.

I'm not saying it's easy, I'm saying it's happening.

[opo]

>...I'm saying it's happening.

Hopefully someday, but it's not happening yet. Those big battery farms installed by Tesla (et al) are used primarily for grid stabilization. Most current grid storage is pumped hydro and that has limited potential to expand. Like I said, it is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Texas has shown us what happens with even a small disruption of energy. If it came down to a situation where you were forced to choose, would you prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?

[justatdotin]

I'm no power engineer, I'm just assuming that the people pouring literally $billions into huge-scale solar infra in my region know what they're doing.

[Krasnol]

Yeah, it is always some human who fails but in the case of this tech, the failure becomes a catastrophe.

So we either take out the human factor or the technology out of the equation. Right now we can only do that with the tech.

[mpweiher]

No, even with the biggest failures, nuclear is still vastly more safe than the alternatives.

What is catastrophic is the news reporting, particularly in Germany.

For example, Fukushima was caused by a Tsunami.

Death Toll

   Tsunami:    15,899
   Fukushima:       1



  —> OMG FUKUSHIMA!!!!  <—

If you looked at the press coverage, you would think it was the other way around, that there was this Tsunami but it wasn't a big deal and there was the huge "catastrophe" of Fukushima. And many people do believe, fervently, that this is the case, that it was the other way around.

But it wasn't.

In fact, in Germany Fukushima is considered a "Super-GAU", with a GAU being the "Größter Anzunehmender Unfall", the largest potential accident. So "GAU" itself is already the superlative, but no, we have to rhetorically top the superlative, make it the superest largerest.

And that's for an accident that has caused a single death (a worker recently passed and it is considered likely it was an effect, before the death toll from the accident was zero).

The only thing that's a Super-GAU is the hyperbole of the hyperventilating press coverage.

[Krasnol]

How is it that you consider only the immediate deaths from the event and neither the follow up casualties, the evacuation measures and everything else which hangs on this? Do your really think your opposite is so stupid? And yes, I did look at the press coverage a lot since I was in Tokyo at that time. But I also looked at it later on and no, I did not think it was the other way around however I'm also not that blind to ignore all the other consequences this catastrophe had for the region and the people who lived/live there.

[mpweiher]

Because I also only considered the immediate deaths from the Tsunami. And actually, the 1 death is a follow-up casualty, it wasn't immediate. So if we really only count immediate deaths, that number is 0. Zero.

--> OMG FUKUSHIMA!!! <--

What the long-term death rate is going to be is very unclear.

Now to the evacuation.

"Many deaths are attributed to the evacuation and subsequent long-term displacement caused by mass evacuation that was not necessary for the most part"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

The same happens to be true for Chernobyl, where the health-effects due to the evacuation far exceed the health-effects due to radiation. Whereas for example the wildlife in both exclusion zones is doing just swimmingly.

So:

Fear of nuclear is killing more people than nuclear.

This is generally true, because the use of nuclear energy has saved over a million people from premature death and will (or would) save millions more:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...

But somewhat surprisingly, it is also true when nuclear goes wrong, when there are accidents. Check out the decennial Chernobyl reports by the WHO, they are absolutely fascinating. Spoiler alert: with each report, so every ten years, they massively reduced their estimate of how many people would die as a result, usually by an order of magnitude.

Now that doesn't mean that there should not have been any evacuation, but it in both cases it was both to widespread and way too long.

[Krasnol]

You completely missed the message here. I wonder if it was intentional. Let me repeat it again:

It's not only deaths if it comes to say what a "safe" technology is. A technology to leads to whole regions being evacuated including every economical, social and environmental fallouts resulting from that, IS NOT SAFE.

[mpweiher]

Hmm...you appear to have missed: "caused by mass evacuation that was not necessary for the most part"

What leads to whole regions being evacuated is the exact irrational fear and panic-mongering you promulgate.

Once again: irrational fear of nuclear kills way more people than nuclear.

[0xy]

Considering NASA recommends that nuclear power be "significantly expanded" despite its drawbacks, I think they are sound enough. The US has a pretty squeaky clean record when it comes to nuclear safety and storage protocols.

Also, the current status quo of "look we built all this renewable energy! just ignore all those gas peaking plants propping them up!" has to end.

Nuclear is green. Renewables + gas is not renewable, not sustainable and not green.

[bob29]

>The US has a pretty squeaky clean record when it comes to nuclear safety and storage protocols.

One single nuclear site is consuming 10% of the DoE's budget, and its still leaking. https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article228...

[mixmastamyk]

Allow me to introduce you to the relatively unknown Santa Susanna Field Laboratory meltdown/explosion, due to extensive cover ups over decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment

Still not fully cleaned up.

[jdsully]

The Hanford site is a WWII era nuclear weapons facility and is not at all comparable with nuclear reactors for power generation.

[sigstoat]

while the comment you're replying to didn't make a distinction, i'll make the distinction that that was a nuclear weapons production facility (run by the federal government). further, some of it was constructed during WWII for the manhattan project.

so... not great handling, true. strong evidence about how nuclear power plants will be operated in the future? no.

[opo]

The NRC does not regulate defense nuclear facilities.