5 Responses so far

1. 1. damselfly on Dec 15th, 2004 at 3:19 pm

   “Of course, American reactors were never as dangerous as Cherynobl, the Russians had an older dangerous design”

   Chernobyl did have a dangerous design in that the reactor turned out to be a positive-amplification (in that if something went wrong, instead of things being damped they would be encouraged, as it were, and run riot). not a good thing, certainly. but chernobyl itself was not thought of as dangerous nor badly run. it went up, in the end, due to human mismanagement: trips were taken offline to test machines (a normal part of operating any facility), but then they were left offline as things got delayed, things got split over several shift changes which means information gets lost etc, and more trips were progressively turned off to stop the alarms annoying the operators… that, to my mind, was the worst part of chernobyl’s design: the failure to take into account that people will override things. designs today are beginning to consider this, but that’s a bit tardy, to my way of thinking >:]

   i’m simplifying things, of course; and i’m hardly an expert, although i do work in the safety engineering field atm. but i think it’s a common misconception today that chernobyl was a dangerous facility; by our standards, it arguably was. by the standards of the day, it wasn’t, and similar mismanagement could strike any facility, nuclear or otherwise. even today >;]

   there was an interview with a chernobyl survivor on new scientist a couple of months ago; did you see it? very interesting stuff.

2. 2. Tobias Buckell on Dec 16th, 2004 at 9:26 am

   The cherynobl survivor story was gripping, I linked it from my weblog, yes. It made me shiver.

   I basically agree with you, although everything I read about cherynobl seems to indicate the russian design was an older, rushed to construction design based on reactors from earlier in the reactor design stages, whereas other reactors around the world have better designs, which was a factor.

   Of course, superior design still didn’t stop 3 mile island.

   I still find it amazing the the big leap, pebble beds, are still unkown to most of the people I talk to.

3. 3. damselfly on Dec 16th, 2004 at 8:42 pm

   i won’t go into design specs, because i’ll get rapidly out of my depth and that would bore everyone to tears >;] besides, i don’t know about the rushed-to-construction part, so i can’t comment on that. suffice to say, the chernobyl reactors can be argued to be inherently safe in some important respects, and inherently unsafe in some other equally-important respects. the positive-feedback property of the reactors is the main argument for the lack of safety.

   but even a perfect design can’t take people into account. the people who design the plant are not the same as the people who run and operate it. also, people come and go these days, which means important knowledge about the safe way to operate these plants is leached away, until forty years down the track no one knows that pipe should never report a temperature over 50, say.

   as for pebble beds, *lol*, i work in the chemical engineering industry and i’ve not heard much about them to date. i think there’s a very big “don’t tell me about it” sort of attitude that permeates the general population in regards to hazardous facilities, and the nuclear industry in particular.

4. 4. Tobias Buckell on Dec 17th, 2004 at 2:06 pm

   as for pebble beds, *lol*, i work in the chemical engineering industry and i’ve not heard much about them to date. i think there’s a very big “don’t tell me about it” sort of attitude that permeates the general population in regards to hazardous facilities, and the nuclear industry in particular.

   Yeah, it’s a drag. And I think it needs to change. A safe and reliable system of nuclear plants with the materials recycling could be a good thing.

5. 5. Benjamin Rosenbaum on Dec 21st, 2004 at 1:15 pm

   One quibble: superior design actually *did* stop Three Mile Island from becoming another Chernobyl. TMI also melted down largely because of operator error — operators misinterpreting the error reports, etc. But due to good design, TMI failed relatively gracefully and released very little radioactivity to the environment (only when they intentionally vented some gases to relieve pressure). Containment was not breached, and the amount of extra radioactivity that people around the site got was about a milirem, which is one-sixth of a chest X-ray, or a hundredth of natural background radiation.

   cf. http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html

   Coal is indeed much worse, and not only is the radiation you’re exposed to living near a coal plant hundreds of times higher than the radiation from a nuclear plant, but whereas all the nuclear waste from nuclear power is accumulated under human control and could in principle be stored somewhere safe, the nuclear waste from our coal plants goes up the chimney into the atmosphere, so our exposure to its radiation is gradually increasing.

   The underlying problem with nuclear energy, as well as other forms of energy generation, is that power companies are private monopolies. Private monopolies are the worst form of social organization, really, far less efficient than either companies in competitive industries or (even) government agencies, since they have neither competition nor an electorate to answer to. Typically they make their money as a percentage of their costs, so their best strategy is to have justifiably high costs.

   One way they ensure this is, by policy, to hire stupid people. I kid you not. Power companies often make an explicit policy of not hiring executives with better than a C average in college. (Hiring people who got bad grades at respectable universities is not a perfect strategy for ensuring a combination of stupidity and docility, but it’s not too bad). I have no links to document this information, but it comes from my Dad, who worked with, and mostly against, energy companies for many years, as a deputy director in EPA and as a private consultant to state and local governments. He had a few power companies he liked — Duke Power was one — but most of them were entirely run by imbeciles and thieves.

   As an example, he once did a survey of guards at nuclear power plants, and I believe some nontrivial percentage of them turned out to be escaped (or parole-jumping) felons from other states? This story may be apocryphal, but gives you an idea of the general tenor of his comments.

   I expect nuclear power plants work in France and Switzerland as well as they do because they are run by the government. Government agencies are pretty inefficient and stupid, but nowhere near as
   inefficient and stupid as private bureacracies. This is what debates on “privatization” tend to miss — the interesting distinction is not between public and private — it’s between competition and no competition, or high public oversight and low public oversight.