[roenxi]

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.

[lazide]

When the hazard is one that;

1) the public cannot see

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)!

[hef19898]

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.

[_ea1k]

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"?

[lazide]

No?

Coal fires are pretty obvious.

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.

[roenxi]

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.

[lazide]

Nope.

My ‘yes’ was for long term, persistent exposure. Not an acute accident.

Panic tends to happen in acute accidents because people don’t have time to prepare or do any of those things you’re talking about.

When the folks who are in charge during a crisis are clearly either incompetent or lying, and it’s one of those acute situations where people don’t have time to get all those things, that’s when it’s perfectly rational to be ‘irrationally worried’.

When there is a history of that kind of thing happening, that’s when it’s perfectly rational to be ‘irrationally worried’ long term.

[_ea1k]

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.

Radiation is somehow scarier.

[lazide]

Coal mining deaths are very, very visible. Coal mining is also clearly filthy and dangerous. If you don’t see it, it’s only because you’ve never seen coal mining or been to a coal mining town.

No one who mined coal - ever - was unclear on how bad for them it was. Even long before we had x-rays or modern medical anything.

Mining uranium kills people in ways that aren’t so obvious, and in proportions that didn’t make any sense even based on radiation models.

It turns out radon gets easily carried in on dust, and miners were getting 300x the radiation exposure that their Geiger counters or dosimeters showed was possible.

They also were ingesting/breathing in trace amounts of things like Polonium, which also weren’t showing up.

Radiation is scarier because it’s not obvious when it’s there, or how bad it’s going to be for someone until way after it’s too late. And it’s hard to figure out - like you really need a solid physics degree AND a medical degree to understand becquerels (or curies) vs rads vs rem, and what that actually means for a random human somewhere in a mine.

The unknown is always scarier.

Coal dust is not confusing anyone, and requires zero degrees to understand how shitty it is to breath.

[hutzlibu]

"Who cares that the US government are incompetent? Yeah they're incompetent."

I care, if they are responsible for overseeing the safety of the nuclear reactors.

[hef19898]

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.

[roenxi]

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.

[hef19898]

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.

[roenxi]

Are you suggesting we should roll nuclear safety back to 1980s USSR standards? That is a lot more extreme than what I'm comfortable with, and sounds like it is bordering on recklessness. Those were the goons that caused Chernobyl.

I'm saying we should accept some level of accidents, not that we want to purposefully try to cause nuclear meltdowns. It is tolerance, not a target. Nobody is advocating ignoring 50 years of improvements in safety tech and understanding, we just shouldn't be bankrupting nuclear companies in pursuit of impossible goals.

The standard for damage should be similar to coal.

[hef19898]

Are you intentinaly misreading my comments? Sure seems so.

If anything, Chernobyl shows us that, regardless of how low regulatory and safety standards are, economic and career interests always push people and organizations to violate them. Hence, the point would be to put even stricter regulations in place.

On the other hand, you took official incident reports as, to qupte, economic recommendations. And you advocated for regulation to be loosened to oversight.

Generally so, HN has a really problem with quantifying risks. In FMEAs, the detectability, propability and severity of a failure mode are combined to calculate a risk value. If a risk is potentially disastrous, and if nuclear accidents are disastrous they really and truely are, the underlying failure modes have to be mitigated rigirously. There is no thought of "some accidents have to be accepted for the greater good" in developing systems that can, and have, killed people. This attitude shows in each and every discussion around aerospace accidents as well... And it is the main rwason I have a hard time accepting software devs as part of the greater engineering community.

[mschuster91]

> I'm saying we should accept some level of accidents, not that we want to purposefully try to cause nuclear meltdowns. It is tolerance, not a target.

The problem is: what are you willing to tolerate? Here in Bavaria, many decades after Chernobyl, you still have to scan wild game meat and shrooms for radioactivity. You can't even assume that a dead zone around a disaster site will be kept secure - the Ukraine war proved that, with uneducated Russian troops disturbing the radioactive dust layer as they moved around and entrenched themselves around Chernobyl. The only place where it's really feasible to have a nuclear accident site contained reasonably well is the continental United States, everything else is way too much at risk for third-party interference.

Nuclear radiation is among the worst issues you can have... you can't see it, people aren't aware of how radiation sources look like, and it's way WAY too easy to cause serious incidents the more widespread its use is - the "orphan sources" wikipedia article is pretty damning, and a lot of that is the relatively small amounts that are used in radiotherapy devices. As a species, we can't even have these secured and protected from theft and incompetent idiots - how anyone can ask for even more usage of nuclear energy is beyond me.

[bumby]

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.

[nickpp]

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.

[hef19898]

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...

[nickpp]

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.

[hef19898]

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.

[nickpp]

It's never "true communism", of course. That has never been tried. Yeah, right.

[hef19898]

Who talked about true communism? Communism was tried, didn't work. Your own words by the way.

There is a very important difference between communism and socialism, because the latter has been tried multiple times and worked comparatively well. You even named some of the poster child countries yourself. As I said, it is a truely US thing to equate socialism with communism, followed by touting Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea as negative examples of it.