It was a partial meltdown that cause 2 billion dollars in inflation adjusted damages.
While it harmed the public perception of nuclear, it was really the cost that slowed down investments in US nuclear which then had knock on effects long term. The best way to think about it is power companies had other investments they could make that had less risks even if they had lower returns. Thus the cost is balanced not vs 0 returns but in comparison to the added benefit from nuclear.
Fewer investments meant losing knowledge of how to build the things which further reduced nuclear’s advantages. Until today when nuclear just can’t compete successfully and anyone that tries sees vast cost overruns.
That is what happened, but I can't pass by without highlighting how irrational the response was.
I've been watching a livestream of Reykjanes in the vague hope of seeing some magma. Somewhere globally needs to be evacuated every year or so. Going from base rate to base rate +1 per 2 decades or thereabouts is a perfectly acceptable deal. Nobody is going to die (which is more than can be said about coal). We'd get cheap clean energy.
And instead people decided that the best plan was to panic and we end up with the gently building energy crisis that has been rolling on for a few years now. It is entirely plausible we see the bloodiest war in human history as a result of the Western derailment of the transition to nuclear power. It was really foolish.
Who cares that the US government are incompetent? Yeah they're incompetent. They've been incompetent for a long while. They still snuffed out one of the most (arguably the most?) promising technologies of a generation out of fear and ignorance.
2) lacks the skills to properly independently evaluate the scope of (99% of the public doesn’t own a Geiger counter, and 99.9% would be unable to quantify risks even if they did)
3) is potentially lethal
And the authorities the are supposed to be able to do #1 and #2 are caught repeatedly and obviously lying about the hazard.
It’s perfectly rational for people to get ‘irrationally’ scared. All they know is the folks who are supposed to be protecting them from this actual threat are not credible! And there is an actual threat (probably)!
You basically summarzied the reasoning of a Soviet working group investigating Chernobyl. The investigation is needed, because people, being occupied with the clean up, are reasonably scared and have no reason to believe government claims without a proper investigation.
Yes, I spent some time today reading official reports on Chernobyl, again. Hell, even the Soviet reports are damning for their own nuclear industry, calling out organizations, people and structural defficiencies. As is the IAEA. And none of those groups can even remotely be accussed of being anti-nuclear.
Couldn't you say all of the same things about coal? The risks are largely invisible, people can't assess them, and people definitely die due to its use.
Maybe there needs to be another criteria. Something like, "when the hazard comes with a scary label"?
Acid rain is pretty obvious (and easy to measure with ph strips, which are easy to find).
Nasty smog is pretty obvious.
Plumes of gunk from smoke stacks are obvious.
Now, co2 and fine particulate contamination (like say radioactive contamination from ash), yes. Those take decades to be noticable (if at all). There have been big issues because of it, statistically. But those are not well known/accepted either by the public. And certainly not the most common 'acute' problems.
Something like a release of radiation from a nuclear power plant can (and usually is), completely invisible. As is things like ingesting fallout. It usually kills years or decades later.
If you can see radiation, you're pretty much a dead man walking already.
A reactor melting down is a sudden acute incident that can release massive amounts of completely invisible radioactive elements that won't kill anyone for decades - or in weeks/months, if really bad.
By the time something has obviously gone wrong from the outside (like the core blowing up in Chernobyl, or the reactor building blowing up due to Hydrogen explosion in Fukushima), massive releases are essentially guaranteed. But still usually invisible. Cherenkov radiation 'sky beam' from chernobyl excepted. [https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1142309/Chernobyl-dis...]
And with a little avoidance, a lethal dose might be easy to not have! If you have good data. Without good data, it's a crap shoot though.
You lead with a questioning No - but then about half way through your post you came to a certain yes. The threat of governments not protecting us from nuclear radiation is smaller than the actual costs of governments not protecting us from coal.
And the idea that there is a risk we can't detect is silly, we radiation is easy to detect. The issue is we can't detect a threat because there appears not to be one. The risks aren't quantified because the threshold for a paniced response has been set far too low, so there is panic without a problem. And the population doesn't own Geiger counters because they are canny with their money and they don't have a reason to own one. If there was a risk, it'd be easy to make measuring devices generally available. You can buy one for less than $100.
That's exactly my point, though. Lots of people die from coal mining as an industry. That is largely invisible.
The health effects on the population at large are also significant, but largely invisible. Radiation? Also measurable, but largely invisible.
But often the same people who are fine with coal will tell me how terrible three mile island was and that it is evidence that we shouldn't expand nuclear.
Oversight that is explicitly called out throughout the repoets on the Chernobyl desaster, by both the IAEA and the USSR. Always funny how the hardest nuclear proponents can't even bothered reading the executive summaries of incident reports prepared by the nuclear industry itself.
Am I going to get push-back for saying economic policy makers should hold USSR reports with suspicion? Their ability to make rational decisions was so hopeless their civilisation collapsed. Doing the exact opposite of their economic recommendations is a strategy that is legitimately on the table.
And oversight is different from strangulation. If we could dial back the regulations to mere oversight I'd go find something else to talk about.
Who talked about "economic recommendations"? The IAEA INSAG-7 report, an update on the initial Chernobyl report INSAG-1, is a quick read (I just did it in the last 20 minutes or so).
That report, which includes official translations of two USR incident reports, is all about safety and technical aspectsbof RBMK reactors, nowhere do they talk about the future use and deploymant of nuclear power plants. After all, all those reports were written by the people being as pro-nuclear as you could be in the late 80s... Granted, people back then wrote long form documents not published on social media.
I linoed to the report elsewhere, ypu honestly should read it. Including the truely damning ones the Soviets wrote regarding safety, regulation and oversight at, and around, the Chernobyl power plant, especially affecting the extension units incl. rwaczor No. 4 which ultimately exploded.
Humans are inherently bad at estimating risk when it comes to low probability events. The fact that there was an irrational response shouldn’t surprise anyone.
That irrational response was heavily fueled by fear mongering from environmental activists and financed by oil producing hostile countries.
In the 70s and 80s leftists couldn't much keep pushing socialism (like they are now) since the horrors of their ideology was quite visible to everybody in the example of USSR. So they embraced environmentalism - just another way for them to fight capitalism and consumerism.
Russia (through the KGB) was quite happy to finance their cause. It meant Western countries (and especially Western Europe) stayed dependent on them for their energy. The folly of our strategy became quite apparent during the last few years with the Ukraine invasion and revelations of EU politicians fully paid and owned by the Russians.
Together with infiltrating the Western Academia, this was probably one of the most successful undercover secret service operation ever.
This view is extremely US centrict with regards to what socialism is. It also ignores decades of history when it comes European relations with the USSR and Russia later. Mixed with some red-scare level fears it turns into pure dilussion at the end...
Funny enough I was born, grew up and I currently live in the Eastern Europe.
I could tell you so much about our history and relations with Russia. From my own experience before '90, from my parents' during communism horror years and from my grandparents' during the War and the soviet occupation after.
But all that info is freely available in books and online - for naught. You can't change the mind of the Western leftists who never had to live through an actual implementation of their pet ideology. They dream about Norway, Sweden and Denmark while never even visiting Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.
Communism isn't socialism. Cuba is as close to old school communism as you get nowadays, Venezuela is cleptocratic, deeply corrupt regime ehixh has not much to do with either socialism or communism. And North Korea, well, what can I say, is just North Korea.
It was a partial meltdown in a pressurized water reactor, it cannot be compared to Chernobyl, it's a completely different technology. PWRs can't explode like what happened in Chernobyl.
The containment vessel held, and most of the radiation released was in the form of xenon and krypton gas vented from the reactor.
“ It was later found that about half the core had melted, and the cladding around 90% of the fuel rods had failed,[21][76] with 5 ft (1.5 m) of the core gone, and around 20 short tons (18 t) of uranium flowing to the bottom head of the pressure vessel, forming a mass of corium.[77] The reactor vessel—the second level of containment after the cladding—maintained integrity and contained the damaged fuel with nearly all of the radioactive isotopes in the core.”
Definitely not Chernobyl, but it was a significant amount of damage to the reactor. It was totaled.
There is a lot to be said for big, strong containment vessels. Fukishima's was too small and overpressure broke it open. Chernobyl didn't have one. Three Mile Island had a good one.
Many of the "small modular reactor" schemes say they don't need a big, strong, expensive containment vessel because, reasons. You can read those arguments for NuScale in NRC documents. The prototype was going to be built at the Idaho National Laboratory, formerly the National Reactor Testing Station, which is in outer nowhere, just in case.
If I remember correctly, part of the issue has been supply chain - the equipment necessary to forge the large steel parts necessary for these containment vessels are few and far between - and now all foreign.
PWR is a "Pressurized Water Reactor" using (light) water under pressure as the primary coolant. The Chernobyl block #4 RBMK-1000 was certainly a PWR.
While the precise mechanism by which the #4 reactor in Chernobyl was destroyed in 1986 was rooted in the flawed design combined with unsafe operation, this does not mean that other reactor designs cannot fail catastrophically with loss of containment and release of radioactive material. Particularly when operated outside of their specification through operator error, accidents or a combination thereof.
RBMK is not considered a PWR because it is graphite-moderated. Most reactors are classified first by their moderator. PWRs and BWRs are both LWRs, moderated by light water, as opposed to HWRs moderated by heavy water, or graphite-moderated reactors like RBMK, or fast reactors which have no moderator at all.
Any reactor can fail and any can be operated safely. The reactivity coefficients of RBMK made it harder to control, perhaps, than a PWR. Modifications made after the Chernobyl accident have improved this.
The main issue with Chernobyl 4 was its lack of a containment building. Even so, the response was an over-reaction that made the situation worse.
RBMKs are not PWRs, full stop. You're completely wrong. These terms have clear, precise established meanings, you cannot redefine them willy nilly to suit your rhetorical needs.
> PWRs can't explode like what happened in Chernobyl.
No, sadly.
PWR's sure can explode (due to hydrogen, vapor...).
The root causes will not be identical to Chernobyl's causes, and the containment will probably limit leaks for a while (theoretically at least a few days), but they sure can explode.
It also happened at Fukushima.
Some protective measures are PACs and containment, however nothing can guarantee that an explosion won't happen, nor that dangerous radionuclides won't leak outside the plant.
To be fair, the show over dramatized the KGB angle. But yes, the Soviets knew RBMKs were not the safest design, reactor 4 was built violating safety standards, operators for the test were not properly trained and then safety procedures were ignored during the test. The official incident report is a fascinating read, and should be mandatory reading for everyone studying with goal of having the word engineer in his future job title.
What with regards to the effect of graphite tipped control rods was, IMHO, as bad as having a dramatic KGB effort to keep it secret: it was forgotten. In 1983, there was an incident in an other RBMK reactor, the HBO series claims the KGB kept it secret, in reality this happened (from the INSAG-7 report and the cited USSR investigative reports):
>> The SCSSINP Commission (Annex I, Section 1-3.8) reports that, after discov-
ery of the positive scram effect at Ignalina in 1983, the chief engineering organiza-
tion informed other organizations and all nuclear power plants with RBMK reactors
that it intended to impose restrictions on the complete withdrawal of control and
safety rods from the core. Such restrictions were never imposed and apparently the
matter was forgotten.
That means in the fact it coupd explode was known, but ignored. Ignored by everyone in the Soviet scientific establishment and nuclear authorities. I don't what's worse, a secret police intervention or a whole science and industry community ignoring safety concerns until it is too late.
> Ignored by everyone in the Soviet scientific establishment and nuclear authorities. I don't know what's worse, a secret police intervention or a whole science and industry community ignoring safety concerns until it is too late.
“Whole .. community” is a stretch here.
Keep in mind that information spread is different in ussr. Kgb had people recruited from all over the place (from factory workers to politicians; 0.1% of population were in kgb). Also, lot of institutions had party representative present (officially, not hidden).
Press did not report accidents or significantly under-report casualties, and of course various good metrics were inflated a lot, even to comical levels.
In this environment, somebody using his influence in kgb or party to stop certain restrictions (because they would point to design flaw and would delay stuff) is very believable, and probably common.
If the HBO show had the science somwhat correct, then the operators did everything they could to make it go boom. In failure modes already defined and warned about.
That, and the fact that it wasn't was not communicated. The necessary assessments have not been done during Chernobyl No. 4s commissioning, hence not counter measures have beem defined and put in the procedures. The RBMK chief engineering org wanted to adress the incident in Lithuania, and informed operators and authorities about that intention. Chief engineering didn't follow up so, and nobody bothered asking where the announced measures and procedures were.
In the end the operators of Chernobyl No. 4 were the fucked ones, their procedures were incomplete, sometimes dangerously wrong. Leadership, incl. Dyatlov, failed to put a safety culture in place. The reactor design was not well understood, operating characteristics at below 50% capacity were never even analyzed or modelled, and inheretly unsafe (missing sensors, bad control rod design and operating procedures...). And the night shift wasn't even briefed on the test to be conducted.
One of the conclusions of INSAG-7 was, that the accident could even have happened with properly designed control rods, coolant failure could have led to the same accident. If your equipment is so inherently unstable and fragile, operating procedure, training and operators have to compensate. None of those measures was taken.
Heck, in some circunstances RBMK operators had to conduct up to 1,000 manual operations per hour (!) to keep the reactor stable. And by the way, the RBMK design didn't even meet Soviet design and safety requirements applicable in 70s when those reactors were designed.
A complete clusterfuck. The circumstances allowing said clusterfuck still exist everywhere, in all countries, industries and organisations to this day.
No one has mentioned yet (what I find to be) the most important fact: radioactive gases were vented in a populated area without any consent, review, or approval. (inb4 the nerdsniping about how and why it had to be done,it's irrelevant to my point). If you lived in the area, your community was exposed to radioactive substances, and thats where the incident really crossed the line and got people worried.
Compared with the constant deaths from coal, yeah, it's a much better bet. Thankfully moot these days, but the overreaction to these problems set us back generations at solving climate change.
While it harmed the public perception of nuclear, it was really the cost that slowed down investments in US nuclear which then had knock on effects long term. The best way to think about it is power companies had other investments they could make that had less risks even if they had lower returns. Thus the cost is balanced not vs 0 returns but in comparison to the added benefit from nuclear.
Fewer investments meant losing knowledge of how to build the things which further reduced nuclear’s advantages. Until today when nuclear just can’t compete successfully and anyone that tries sees vast cost overruns.