Comment by immibis
18 hours ago
The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills as many people right here and makes as much land uninhabitable right here as coal does in our enemy countries within its normal expected operation.
Except for Russia, where else have deaths + land issues happened?
Not a commercial reactor but US lost 3 people trying to hand operate a small reactor with minimal safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
“On Tuesday, January 3, 1961, SL-1 was being prepared for restart after a shutdown of 11 days over the holidays. Maintenance procedures required that rods be manually withdrawn a few inches to reconnect each one to its drive mechanism. At 9:01 pm MST, Rod 9 was suddenly withdrawn too far, causing SL-1 to go prompt critical instantly. In four milliseconds, the heat generated by the resulting enormous power excursion caused fuel inside the core to melt and to explosively vaporize.”
The industry didn’t just randomly get so risk averse there where a lot of meltdowns and other issues over time.
Do stupid things and stupid things will happen. There are plenty of similarly stupid accidents on stupidly run construction sites and chemical plants all the time. Also lots of accidents with trains, lots of accidents with temperamental chemicals.
Take this stupid accident, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Galactic#2007_Scaled_Co...
> In July 2007, three Scaled Composites employees were killed and three critically injured at the Mojave spaceport while testing components of the rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo. An explosion occurred during a cold fire test, which involved nitrous oxide flowing through fuel injectors. The procedure had been expected to be safe.
N2O is very good oxidizer + it's a molecule that can fall apart (and turn into N2 and O2) in a very exothermic way if you look at it wrong.
Oops.
Back to SL-1. Nobody was killed by radiation. They were killed by things hitting them hard from the explosion.
> The effort to minimize the size of the core gave an abnormally-large reactivity worth to Rod 9, the center control rod.
> One of the required maintenance procedures called for Rod 9 to be manually withdrawn about four inches (10 cm) in order to attach it to the automated control mechanism from which it had been disconnected. Post-accident calculations, as well as examination of scratches on Rod 9, estimate that it had actually been withdrawn about twenty inches (51 cm), causing the reactor to go prompt critical and triggering the steam explosion.
and:
> At SL-1, control rods would sometimes get stuck in the control rod channel. Numerous procedures were conducted to evaluate control rods to ensure they were operating properly. There were rod drop tests and scram tests of each rod, in addition to periodic rod exercising and rod withdrawals for normal operation. From February 1959 to November 18, 1960, there were 40 cases of a stuck control rod for scram and rod drop tests and about a 2.5% failure rate. From November 18 to December 23, 1960, there was a dramatic increase in stuck rods, with 23 in that time period and a 13.0% failure rate. Besides these test failures, there were an additional 21 rod-sticking incidents from February 1959 to December 1960; four of these had occurred in the last month of operation during routine rod withdrawal. Rod 9 had the best operational performance record even though it was operated more frequently than any of the other rods.
That is insane.
2 replies →
Our enemy countries are West Virginia and Pennsylvania?
Meltdowns aren't physically possible if we're building newer types of plants, so there can't be a new Chernobyl or even Fukushima if we're using modern types of passively cooled plants.
There’s generally significant costs and asterisks around such claims.
You’re much better off paying attention to site placement than trying to design something to safety handle getting covered in several meters of volcanic ash Pompeii style.