[sjwright]

I can't see how anyone could describe nuclear power as 'problematic'. At best you could argue that the shitty reactor designs from the 1960s don't always endure outrageous levels of incompetence and systemic corruption.

Chernobyl was an onion of layered stupidity and incompetence. (Fun fact: eleven reactors of the same core design as Chernobyl are still operational today. Eleven. Today.)

In the case of Fukushima, it took a one-two punch of the largest earthquake in Japan's recorded history and an absolutely catastrophic tsunami in order for TEPCO's incompetence to become a problem.

Though it may not seem it, you can make a statistical case for nuclear power being among the safest forms of electricity production per unit of energy. Burning fuels for power kills tens of thousands of people every year. Hydro dam failure has the blood of hundreds of thousands on its hands. Workers fall off wind turbines and rooftops -- rarely, but it's statistically significant compared to the unit output.

[rsync]

No, I would argue that the shitty reactor designs from the 1960s (and 1950s, actually) never endure even normal levels of competence and systemic corruption. Given a long enough time horizon, those bad designs will fail. They are designed to fail.

Going further, they are designed to fail in the face of "normal accidents"[1] which we can expect to happen. Every single one of the failures will have some kind of unique dramatic human-discerned narrative, just like the two you narrated above, but they will all have their failure in common.

I think we should be in favor of nuclear power in general. I think we should be marching in the streets in protest of the standard model of nuclear plant currently deployed around the world. Like you said, there's 11 more chernobyls out there just waiting for their own "normal accident".

[1] Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow, 1984 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents

[sjwright]

> No, I would argue that the shitty reactor designs from the 1960s (and 1950s, actually) never endure even normal levels of competence and systemic corruption.

That is a statistically impossible assertion. Plenty of these shitty designs managed to endure normal levels of competence and systemic corruption for the entirety of their planned life span and have been decommissioned without catastrophe.

[thaumasiotes]

> In the case of Fukushima, it took a one-two punch of the largest earthquake in Japan's recorded history and an absolutely catastrophic tsunami

How is this a one-two punch? It sounds like a one-punch to me; the tsunami wasn't visited upon Japan by a vengeful god. You might as well complain about the "one-two punch" of getting hit by both fingers when a guy with three missing fingers punches you.

[vpeters25]

It was an one-two punch because either one by itself unlikely would have produced the disaster: the earthquake not only produced the tsunami, it also sunk the coastline about 4 feet rendering tsunami barriers useless.

I read somewhere their tsunami barriers where just high enough to stop the tsunami but the coastline sinked. No engineer could have predicted that.

[thaumasiotes]

> It was an one-two punch because either one by itself unlikely would have produced the disaster

But that's what I'm saying! Tsunamis can't happen by themselves. They're caused by earthquakes (or volcanic eruptions, nuclear explosions, or other literally earth-shaking events). The odds of a record-breaking earthquake co-occurring with an extreme tsunami approach 100%. Similarly, it's not at all surprising for the coastline to sink in an earthquake.

[sjwright]

You're arguing over an analogy?

You do realise that two fists tend to be attached to one person, right? A one-two punch can (and often does) represent two attack vectors in quick succession originating from the same cause.

[thaumasiotes]

Seriously, saying "this plan required two different rare events to coincide before it failed" is very different from saying "this plan required a rare event to happen before it failed". The implications are not the same.

And while a boxer may want to hit his opponent with both hands, hitting with the left definitely doesn't cause hitting with the right. Most punches are not one-two punches. Tsunamis (or, as wikipedia would have it, "seismic sea waves") are generated by earthquakes, not by some mysterious root cause that might or might not also put off earthquakes.

[ams6110]

Earthquakes frequently do not cause tsunamis. Or the tsunami strikes an area where it does minimal damage. So yes, an earthquake WITH a tsunami that also happened to strike a nuclear reactor is a combination of rare probabilities.

[sjwright]

I think the intent of my original words is sufficiently clear. Aside from not liking my analogy, is there an underlying point you're trying to make?

[pessimizer]

I think the objection to your point was sufficiently clear. Your implication is that Fukushima was so safe that it took the simultaneous occurrence two statistically unlikely events to cause it to fail catastrophically i.e. unlikely x unlikely.

The objection was that this was actually a single unlikely event, because one was very likely to follow from the other i.e. describing someone squeezing a trigger as an independent event to the bullet leaving the barrel is incorrect.

Two independent unlikely events occurring at the same time is extremely unlikely. Unlikely events themselves are common.

[sjwright]

I'm not trying to impart the implication you assert, I'm not suggesting that the combination of the two events is unlikely. A one-two punch isn't "two statistically unlikely events", it's the same opponent hitting you twice.

Not all catastrophic earthquakes are followed by catastrophic tsunamis in the same area. Not all catastrophic tsunamis are preceded by catastrophic earthquakes in the same area.