[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.

[roenxi]

If you think someone is misreading your comments, my advice is to either shrug and accept that not everyone understands or try to explain yourself more clearly. Paranoia is a bad mindset. And energy policy is, fundamentally, about economics. We've regulated a lot of industries out of existence for no particular reason and, while that annoys me, the damage is slight compared to the huge societal costs of the crazy energy policies the Western powers have been adopting.

1980s standards of safety aren't really an acceptable option in the modern era, and you are the person laying down 1980s and 1990s reports as something to be referred to. That isn't a very good strategy IMO, we should be aiming for higher standards than they could achieve then. We have much better tech and science now. The issue is that the regulations have gone waaay overboard, we're pushing huge costs onto the nuclear industry for next to no benefit to anyone.

> And you advocated for regulation to be loosened to oversight.

I still am, the amount of oversight the nuclear industry has been subjected to is silly.

However, and this is a point I thought was going to be obvious to everyone, 1980s USSR standards are also silly. Not as silly as the modern standard, in principle, but nevertheless I think we can do better.

I'm thinking that society can maybe be talked down off the ledge and accept airline-industry levels of safety. Then we can have cheap power and historically outstanding safety and an order of magnitude less environmental damage than coal, and cheaper power prices. It'd be a great equilibrium. Regressing to the 80s is not really something I'm tabling as an option here. If the plan was to do that then the anti-nuclear people would have some respectable points.

[hef19898]

Airline industry levels of safety? So real six sigma? I am all for that! Just as a heads up, that includes all those incidents that never make to the news. You know, a crack here, corrosion there. A failed sensor, a insignificant coolant leak...

And you know why the Chernobyl reports are so significant? Because to date it is the worst nuclear accident, also the most thoroughly investigated one. And specifically because of all the fuck ups, it allows us to see a lot of risks and issues in one single report, not spread across a half dozen or so. Added bonus, everyone knows about Chernobyl.

After all, I read it, multiple times actually. I also read some of the public reports on the 737 Max, and the basic parallels in behaviour of people and organizations are astonishing.

Just im case so, I am not saying coal is better, we absolutely should leave existing nuclear plants online as long as sofely possible. Building new ones is just not economically feasible anymore, for almost a decade so. Wind and solar are simply cheaper, and hence more profitable fprninvestors, and the environment. And until tue transition is complete, nuclear and some gas plants for covering peak demand short notice, is a viable way to go.

By the way, regarding 80s and 90s safety regulations, you do know from when most of the current nuclear fleet dates, right? And there is so much retrofitting you can do...

[bumby]

>HN has a really problem with quantifying risks.

Humans, in general have a real problem quantifying risks, especially risks involving low probability events. I don't think this is unique to HN (although, it seems like there may be a disproportionate amount of confidence discussing these risks).