Few types of accidents speak as much to the imagination as those involving nuclear fission. From the unimaginable horrors of the nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, to the fever-pitch reporting about the accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, all of these have resulted in many descriptions and visualizations which are merely imaginative flights of fancy, with no connection to physical reality. Due to radiation being invisible with the naked eye and the interpretation of radiation measurements in popular media generally restricted to the harrowing noise from a Geiger counter, the reality of nuclear power accidents in said media has become diluted and often replaced with half-truths and outright lies that feed strongly into fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Why is it that people are drawn more to nuclear accidents than a disaster like that at Bhopal? What is it that makes the one nuclear bomb on Hiroshima so much more interesting than the firebombing of Tokyo or the flattening of Dresden? Why do we fear nuclear power more than dam failures and the heavy toll of air pollution? If we honestly look at nuclear accidents, it’s clear that invariably the panic afterwards did more damage than the event itself. One might postulate that this is partially due to the sensationalist vibe created around these events, and largely due to a poorly informed public when it comes to topics like nuclear fission and radiation. A situation which is worsened by harmful government policies pertaining to things like disaster response, often inspired by scientifically discredited theories like the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model which killed so many in the USSR and Japan.
In light of a likely restart of Unit 1 of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in the near future, it might behoove us to wonder what we might learn from the world’s worst commercial nuclear power disasters. All from the difficult perspective of a world where ideology and hidden agendas do not play a role, as we ask ourselves whether we really should fear the atom.
The TMI PR Disaster
What truly happened at the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear plant’s #2 reactor on March 28 of 1979? The technical explanation is that the main feedwater pumps in the secondary, non-nuclear, coolant loop failed, which led to a shutdown of the reactor as a whole. As a pressurized water reactor (PWR), the primary coolant loop is pressurized, the levels of which began to increase due to the failed secondary coolant loop and loss of cooling capacity. This triggered a pressure relief valve, which should have closed again when pressure normalized, but due to a technical malfunction it remained open.
The resulting open valve led to a loss-of-coolant situation in the primary coolant loop that went unnoticed in the control room. Due to missing and conflicting information, the operators undertook improper actions that ultimately led to the core overheating and the fuel rods partially melting. During this process, some radioactive gases escaped via the relief valve into the environment surrounding the plant, mostly xenon and krypton isotopes. The effect of this on the local population was estimated to be at most 1.4 millirem (14 µSv), effectively half of a chest X-ray and a fraction of the average annual natural background levels in the US of 3,100 µSv, or ~1% of the local background radiation.
Ultimately, the #2 reactor was quite damaged, and it was decided to decommission it rather than try to repair the damage. Reactor #1 operated uneventfully until 2019 until it was shut down for economic reasons. The lessons learned from the 1979 accident were pivotal for nuclear safety in the US, and is a big part of why for the past decades, nuclear power in the US has been among the safest sources of power.
Objectively considered, the 1979 TMI accident was a big financial loss for the plant owner and investors, but no physical injuries or worse occurred. The real harm of TMI came not from the accident itself, but from the bungled interaction with the press by the people in charge of the accident response. This is excellently detailed in a documentary created by Kyle Hill, who also contrasts the real accident with the imaginary accident dreamed up in the 4-part Netflix series Meltdown: Three Mile Island.
As anti-nuclear groups swooped in on Three Mile Island to amplify their messaging, and panicked citizens as far as hundreds of kilometers away worried about having to evacuate and potential nuclear fallout, or even the plant somehow turning into a nuclear bomb, the federal and local official response was weak and incompetent, further adding to the narrative of a terrible disaster unfolding with unwitting officials unable to prevent the apocalyptic events that would inevitably follow.
The TMI accident didn’t kill or harm anyone, of course. Despite it being assigned an INES 5 rating, it was inarguably less severe than the non-commercial accident at the SL-1 reactor, which killed three and caused massive contamination, albeit in a more remote location. SL-1’s accident was assigned INES 4 on this logarithmic scale. If anything, the only enduring legacy of the TMI Unit 2 accident was the toxic fallout of the PR disaster that still contaminates discourse on nuclear power to this day.
Substituted Soviet Reality
The one nuclear disaster that looms above all is of course that of Chernobyl, or rather the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP, today the Chornobyl NPP) with its accompanying city of Pripyat. The city of Chernobyl, now Chornobyl, is located some distance from ChNPP in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, and unlike Pripyat was not fully abandoned after the events of April 26, 1986 when a complete lack of safety culture in the 1980s USSR combined with a sketchy turbine spin-up experiment using residual core heat culminated in what in hindsight was a very much preventable accident.
With Soviet leadership choosing to override any engineering concerns and technical issues that might be inconvenient to the USSR narrative, issues with the RBMK reactor design were classified as state secrets already years before the ChNPP Unit 4 accident. This left plant staff both uninformed and untrained about what was to come. Yet despite of the horrors of the immediate aftermath of the ChNPP Unit 4 reactor’s steam explosion, graphite fire and subsequent radioactive cloud, the worst harm was caused by the denial by Soviet authorities that anything was wrong, which resulted in delayed evacuations, the lack of distribution of iodine tablets to prevent harm from radioactive iodine-131 isotope, and the consumption of radiologically contaminated milk and other foodstuffs in the surrounding area rather than these being destroyed.
Yet despite the RBMK reactor design as at ChNPP being at best a sketchy hybrid military/commercial reactor, the world’s unquestioned worst nuclear accident led to only a few dozen attributable deaths, mostly among the first responders who were fighting the raging graphite fire in the exposed core when radiation levels from short-lived isotopes like iodine-131 were at their highest. Cases of thyroid cancer likely increased due to the exposure to iodine-131, but it’s hard to quantify exact numbers here, especially amidst the statistical noise of forced evacuations and the resulting stress and substance abuse, as well as the breakup of the USSR only a few years later.
As a comparison, in the US, parts of the populace got regularly exposed to iodine-131 during the 1940s through the 1960s courtesy of nuclear weapons testing, but despite a lack of precautions at the time a causal effect is elusive.
Sadly, when HBO chose to make a series about the ChNPP nuclear accident, it leaned heavily into the sensationalist angle, with many analyses showing just how it plays it fast and loose with the truth to create a more exciting narrative. Despite what the series claims, there was no surge in birth defects, only elective abortions, and no surge in cancer cases.
Today, many people remain jumpy about anything to do with ‘Chernobyl’, leading to panicked headlines in 2021 about a ‘neutron surge’ at the ChNPP, which likely was just due to the New Safe Confinement (NSC) structure above the #4 reactor blocking rainwater intrusion. As water is a neutron moderator, this consequently is merely a logical and totally expected result.
Similarly, when during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine Russian forces rolled heavy equipment into the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), there was again panicked reporting about ‘elevated gamma radiation levels’. Although occupying forces destroyed much of the forensic evidence including much of the sensor network, it’s likely that the high gamma readings observed on the public radiation monitoring dashboard were spoofed or at least invalid values, rather than actual readings.
Ultimately, the CEZ was a thriving tourist attraction until the Russian invasion, with no radiological hazard if you take basic precautions in the worst affected areas. Back in 2019 discussions were already underway to reduce the size of the CEZ due to decreasing background radiation levels. Rather than a monument to the hazards of nuclear power, ChNPP is a testament to its safety even when used by a totalitarian regime whose idea of ‘safety culture’ involves the KGB and vanishings of those lacking in loyalty.
Japanese Unsafety Culture
When in March of 2011 a massive tsunami slammed into the coast of Fukushima prefecture after the 9.0 level Touhoku earthquake, it led to 19,759 deaths, 6,242 injured and 2,553 people missing but presumed killed and vanished with the water back into the ocean. There also were multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, after the tsunami’s water bypassed the inadequate tsunami defenses and submerged the basement which held the emergency generators.
The reactors all shut down as soon as the earthquake occurred, but required power for their cooling pumps. As external power was cut off and their emergency generators drowned in the basement, the first responders simply had to plug in the backup external power. Unfortunately, this procedure had never been practiced, they could not establish the physical connection, and the cores overheated, resulting in them melting and the corium solidifying in the core catchers. That’s when the lack of hydrogen vents in the spent fuel pools at the top of the buildings resulted in hydrogen – generated by the steam in the spent fuel pools reacting with the zirconium cladding – finding an ignition source and blowing off multiple roofs, spreading parts of the fuel rods on the plant’s terrain.
Some lighter radioactive isotopes were scattered further away from the plant, but ultimately nobody died or suffered injuries from radiation. Despite this, a large exclusion zone was established and thousands of people were evacuated for what turned out to be years. Government reports since 2011 have noted rampant mental health issues among these evacuees, as well as high rates of substance abuse and suicides. Meanwhile many questions have been raised about whether most of the evacuations and the in-progress top soil removal was ever needed.
Multiple cracks were found in the concrete of the plant, which allow for seawater to seep into the reactor buildings. This water consequently has to be pumped out before it is treated with ALPS (Advanced Liquid Processing System), which can remove all radioactive isotopes except tritium, as this is just a form of hydrogen and thus effectively impossible to easily segregate from hydrogen and deuterium.
The treated water has been released back into the ocean, which has led to much international outrage. This despite that the tritium levels in the treated and diluted water (as released) are lower than those of any nuclear plant operating today, and lower than the naturally produced tritium levels from the Earth’s atmosphere.
Ultimately, it was the botched evacuation and disaster response, per the 2012 Diet report, that led to hundreds if not thousands of needless deaths. The flawed messaging around Fukushima Daiichi brings to mind the PR disaster around TMI Unit 2, with anti-nuclear groups hijacking the conversation and drowning any sensible communication that could have occurred with stress-inducing FUD when a calm and objective approach was needed. Unsurprisingly, the biggest outcome for Japan was the complete restructuring of its nuclear safety model, with the newly formed NRA, based on the US’s NRC, turning a whole new leaf in Japanese safety culture.
Today, many of the nuclear reactors that were shutdown after the 3/11 event are now either already back online, or are in the process of getting the last safety upgrades needed before receiving an operating license from the NRA. Despite middling enthusiasm for nuclear power in Japan, there’s an increase in support along with a move towards new reactor construction.
Radiophobia
Radiophobia is defined as an irrational or excessive fear of ionizing radiation. It leads people to overestimate the health implications of radiation, suspect the presence of radiation where there is none, like microwaved food, and easily miss actual sources of radiation, such as taking an airplane flight, having a granite counter top, the presence of radon gas in the basement, inhaling cigarette smoke, or frequenting certain Brazilian beaches.
The TMI Unit 1 reactor restarting should be met with joy, as it means more reliable (95+% capacity factor) low-carbon electricity and well-paying jobs. The country to have suffered the worst nuclear disaster in history – Ukraine – is finishing construction on two nuclear plants today, and will be constructing many more. Japan is coming to terms with the reality of nuclear power, as it grapples with the economic cost of importing the LNG and coal that have kept its economy going since 2011.
If there is one thing that we can learn from nuclear accidents in this Atomic Age, it is that the fear of the atom has done more harm than respect for it. We can only hope that more people will learn this lesson.
Separating fact from fiction, indeed. No mention of the costs to date of the partial cleanups. Dismissing the deaths caused. No mention of the fact that Chernobyl and Fukushima are not really cleaned up but are left for future generations to solve with more costs yet unpaid. More broadly, overlooking the toxic waste dumps located at every nuclear reactor (except the French who haul around toxic radioactive waste). Failing to mention the toxic waste steam coming as reactors are decommissioned. Yes, the facts were separated …and buried, and the fictions were magnified.
On a simple estimation, nuclear accidents and their projected costs value on the order of 1% of the value of the energy they produce. It’s not an accurate analysis, but still shows that the benefits far outweigh the costs. Even on a deaths per MWh count, wind turbines kill more people than nuclear power plants all told.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-58768-4_7
Really? I could not find the reference to windmill deaths in the reference given. Seemed to be about social costs and did not relate deaths to MWh. Maybe I missed something. Mostly seemed to be an abstract
That’s common information.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Death rates measured based on deaths from accidents and air pollution per terawatt-hour of electricity: Solar 0.2, nuclear 0.3, wind 0.4, hydropower 1.3. Gas 2.8, Brown coal 32.7.
The reason why wind and solar get relatively bad numbers even though they’re basically harmless as technologies, is because they make relatively little energy for the amount of people-hours and manual labor they require to install and maintain. Whenever there’s more people involved, there’s bound to be more accidents.
Close to where I lived two workers were stuck in a wind turbine when there was a fire. They couldn’t climb down and one jumped and one burned alive if I recall.
People who install solar panels fall off rooftops all the time.
You need thousands of wind turbines for the same power as one nuclear power plant (not counting the need for energy storage).
If you fall off a roof top all the time, then you most likely deserve to fall.
Besides, a lot of the cost is due to the panicked and misplaced reactions to nuclear accidents.
Germany blew 100 billion Euros into the wind by accelerating the shutdown of nuclear power after Fukushima. Is that a cost of the accident, or the cost of hysteria?
The case of Germany is so hilariously bad that it is difficult not to consider sabotage
The problem is that when a nuclear plant starts melting down, you have no way of knowing how bad it’s going to get. So your only choice is to evacuate.
Even once things are brought under control, you need to check for emissions and for levels in the environment downwind of the plant. It all takes time.
In the case of Fukushima, they found dangerous levels of radiation in the evacuated areas. Particularly dangerous to children. Obviously families are not going to move back if their children can’t come, even if they believe that the adults will be safe. And even if they did, the value of all that property has been destroyed, and additional damage was done during the evacuation period when there was no maintenance being performed.
You can say with hindsight that maybe some areas could have avoided evacuation, but the reality is that when the reactor is melting you can’t know and as a government you can’t take the risk.
Even at their most hysterical, estimates for deaths and the amount of future generation cleanup are a fraction per kw/hr compared to coal. And renewables are still BS tech at the moment. And far more mature and safe reactor designs exist compared to cherno and even fukushima
“And renewables are still BS tech at the moment. ”
I think you forgot hydro. it has been powering 99% of Quebec for decades. It took a while but the government just realised wind coupled with hydro would work great. a 2.5GW park was announced that would be the second largest in the world. Another 7.5GW is planned.
There is China’s insane 8GW park – being upgraded to 20GW, geez you should warn them, they will feel silly when they realized they put that much money in bullshit tech!
/s
Renewables are growing rapidly and solar power is getting really cheap these days.
So while they have obvious disadvantages (availability depends on wind/sun…) in Germany for example in 2023 more than 50% of electrical power was generated from renewable sources.
0.40 euro/kwh!
Yeah.
Seriously, greenies want power to be so expensive you don’t use it.
Plan is working as intended.
‘How Dare You!’
If you’re watching a TV dramatisation expecting a hyper-accurate history lesson, you’re already on the wrong foot. The inaccuracies didn’t change the primary lesson we should learn from the event.
So you’re saying television documentaries should be sensationalist and false?
there is a difference between a documentary and a dramatization. the former is meant to inform and the latter to entertain.
that said tv documentaries have done nothing but undermine their informational value in the last 20 or so years. used to love watching discovery, history, etc. but then their standards fell through the floor. also doesn’t help that they are run by media companies who want to promote their own narratives.
Right … “Shark Week” and endless Ancient Alien BS offered as informational. Our sad option for getting science to the masses. No wonder so many have no concept of how vaccines and masks work. Hey, anti-[everything scientist say is a lie, I prefer to get my info from radio-show geniuses]: Are you OK with a surgeon working on your kid without a mask?
Have you met … people?
Which is that communism sux
Name ANY single example in world history of a legitimately “Communist” society, please, if you intend your use of the term to mean anything other than a red flag to signal your own ignorant bias?
You have an idiot’s book of philosophy.
We have history.
That makes you wrong…Commie.
PR is always going to be the biggest and hardest problem to solve with nuclear power. As with any engineering infrastructure, it comes with risks, and people simply do not understand risk. They constantly over- or under-estimate risks even when provided with accurate information. Coupled with the “invisible cancer monster” mythos surrounding radiation, and the fact that nuclear energy is also used for the largest weapons of mass destruction ever devised by humans, and you not only have people who are concerned, but easily frightened by any small amount of anti-nuclear propaganda.
And the nuclear industry has done themselves no favors on that score. They bulldoze ahead with plans declaring them as safe; meanwhile they whine about the decades of environmental impact analysis they have to endure. There’s no way for the general public to evaluate anything that’s been claimed; they can only see the final result where government people in white coats pronounce the project “safe”. With the loss of trust in our society (exacerbated by political machinations,) this is a harder to solve problem than safely containing the core!
There’s also the very visible problem of nuclear waste. It’s almost always stored on-site at the power plants because there’s no safe national site to bring it, and a lot of opposition to transporting it over the train tracks running through .
How do you build (or rebuild) that trust? The power companies are always seen as profit-driven, and are practically expected to be deceiving the public no matter what they say (a reputation that I can’t say they don’t deserve.) Government scientists are busy ducking and covering from political attacks by politicians who are too stupid or too uneducated to even pronounce “nuclear” correctly. And anti-nuclear activists are ready to yell “Chernobyl” and “Fukushima” over the top of any logical argument.
There is no easy solution.
The nuclear waste issue is a circular argument, because the opposition is what’s blocking the safe disposal of nuclear waste. The funds were already collected and everything was ready to go, but lobbyists said “no”.
Lobbyists says No already before the planning of the disposal sites and allocation of the funds. Nuclear energy is simple more dirty, dangerous and more complicated than renewables.
…Which have such a good track record in part because they don’t work at all
And moonlanding was faked because they used solar panel in apollo mission, which as you mentionned doesn’t work! There. Proof.
I’m guessing you mean DRAWBACK.
Yes technologies have drawback. It basically engineering in a nutshell. I don’t I’m teaching you anything right?
Yet the nuclear waste exists, and 2/3rds of it isn’t even from commercial power plants but residues from nuclear weapons programs. Something has to be done about it, because simply keeping it around forever is MORE risky than putting it away.
The “no solution” argument exists not because a solution truly doesn’t exist, but because implementing any solution would remove one of the best arguments against nuclear power. Maintaining the position requires double standards: nuclear disposal has to be done to remove the threat of nuclear waste, but you can’t dispose nuclear waste this way or that way because it’s not safe. It’s a sort of a political bomb vest – you don’t really care about the risk you’re arguing about – you’re sitting on a bomb for the political power it brings you.
That’s why the standards demanded of nuclear waste disposal or recycling are impossibly and unreasonably high.
It’s also thousands of times more efficient and reliable in producing energy.
You spelled “unrealiables” wrong.
“Lobbyists said ‘no’” because no one knows how to safely collect and dispose of spent nuclear waste. All the “solutions” kick the can down the road to future generations. But why even debate the waste problem when there are already cheaper solutions that we can recycle? And it is not a reactor, it is a nuclear waste dump with surplus electricity. Why build nuclear waste dumps that generate a little electricity?
No they don’t. That complaint comes from the impossible demands placed on waste disposal – that nothing should ever leak out on a scale of millions of years, and that any leakage should be below normal background radiation levels even after all that time.
It’s a complete red herring to worry about future generations digging up old nuclear waste from a five kilometer deep borehole in bedrock.
Because there isn’t. No technology to day actually works in a “closed loop” in terms of materials. Fossil fuel energy is used to produce the materials for wind turbines and solar panels, for technical and economical reasons: wind power is too expensive to use for making new wind turbines.
First reprocessing and reusing the useful parts of spent fuel would reduce the amount of waste to be dealt with. However we can’t do that in the US because of a law Jimmy Carter pushed through congress.
Secondly Vitrifying the waste is a proven solution for storage. Obsidian glass is found that is millions of years old.
Associating Cancer with nuclear radition is NOT a “mythos”.
We have a science called, “Medicine”…
MIGHT be kinda useful, in this context, to MAYBE review the parts on effects of various forms of radiation upon organic life-forms… MIGHT save you from sounding very much like you don’t know what you’re talking about… jus’ sayin’…
Excellent article! Really top quality discussion of points that need to be made, this should be put on the desk of every energy company boss, energy minister and envrionmental activist around the world! Really shows how panic tends to cause more harm than the actual “disaster” itself. The same can very much be said of the catastrophic response to a fairly mild new virus which emerged in late 2019. The same might also be said if we rush towards a net zero future without first taking a decent amount of time to get the technology, particularly in terms of building more nuclear power plants, fully up and running to the point that they can actually outcompete fossil fuels in a free market on their practical advantages alone (given enough time they definitely can, hydrogen cars are betetr than offisl fuels if the hydrogen pump infrastructure is up and running, green steel making can be cheaper than high emissions furnaces, nuclear electricyt can be too cheap to meter, and can power hydrogen electrolysis plants).
Aaaaand here we go … Nuclear Energy == Covid 19 == No Big Deal.
Alarmism! Conspiracy!
Look at the frickin LD50 on plutonium. (Which is at least 6 times higher in humans than test animals). Then look at its half-life and everything it emits — it’s not just nice alpha particles.
Then, while you’re at it look at the mortality numbers in the US for, say 2015 – 2024. Notice anything odd?
So so so sorry if you were somehow inconvenienced from “a catastrophic response” when 1 million more Americans died than would have been predicted by trends to that point.
Plutonium? Why produce plutonium? Which of the logical fallacies are you demonstrating?
Yes, catastrophic response to the Kung Flu. It was clear from the early numbers in Italy that children were immune and those under 30 nearly so. The US CDC death certificate data verified this continuously. Closing schools and shutting down business? The brief “flatten the curve” became insane paranoia and a complete shutdown of the economy and education.
He wasn’t saying that covid and nuclear energy were in any way linked. It looks like he was just drawing parallels in terms of how media-fuelled panic frenzy was more dangerous than the initial problem. Plutonium is very dangerous stuff, but in your typical nuclear accident there isn;t much of it around, remember the bulk of the fuel is Uranium, much safer, the only Pu present is fission products, and it didn’t seem to have escaped from the power station site (at Chernobyl ofcourse fuel and fission products did get out of the reactor itself though). Your typical nuclear accident, Chernobyl excluded, has only relatively low level stuff getting beyond the boundaries of the power station’s land. The Fukushima evacuation did cost more lives than the amount of escaped material ever could have, and don’t forget it only happened because the plant was hit by a full on tusnami. It was hit by a TSUNAMI and still all that happened beyond the site’s fence was some very low severity contamination, look at that for good quality safe engineering. Fukushima’s over-reaction cost more lives than the disaster ever could have.
Non sequiturs everywhere. Look at the LD50 for tetanotoxin, should we therefore ban iron? That’s another example of a non sequitur by the way.
How much plutonium do you realistically get from a nuclear power accident; that’s not really going to be a large part of the reactants or products, and it shows exactly the sort of ignorance which is common about the dangers of nuclear power… And it looks like the LD50 is in fact rather high all things considered.
I don’t know why coovid has to be brought up at all
👍
Nicely put. Brief and hits the key points.
Forgot about vc summer
But that’s more of a financial disaster rather than a nuclear one
Nuclear power plants are extremely save.
Here is a simple calculation for a total failure:
first nuclear power plant 1954
now 2024
years=2024-1954
numberOfNuclearReactorsWorldWide=440
extremAccidents=2 #Chernobyl, Fukoshima
probabliltyNuclearDesasterPerYear=extremAccidents/(yearsextremAccidents)
probabliltyNuclearDesasterPerYear_percent=probabliltyNuclearDesasterPerYear100
years = 70
numberOfNuclearReactorsWorldWide = 440
extremAccidents = 2
probabliltyNuclearDesasterPerYear = 0.014286
probabliltyNuclearDesasterPerYear_percent = 1.4286
So only 1.4% per year for a so called “Super GAU” ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents
The number of reactors is missing all the military reactors in ships, research reactors, etc. There are types of reactors that have aggregated thousands of years in operation as a group, and never had a serious accident, or an accident at all.
The issue is not the fact that reactors sometimes fail, but the fact that nuclear reactors are built too big to fail safely. This is due to the perverse politics surrounding nuclear power, which make it economical only at very large scales.
Huh? You know the military isn’t really renowned for their accurate reporting on accidents right? You might, just for giggles, want to look at their reporting history on Skull Valley/Dugway before believing everything they say about safety to the public.
And I believe there are at least a dozen old soviet nuclear powered subs that are either rusting out in a massively contaminated harbors or are sitting at the bottom of some body of water waiting for the containment chamber to crack.
And then there are the broken arrows … it’s more than 1 or 2.
It would be somewhat difficult to hide a nuclear accident, since there’s a whole global monitoring network to detect the slightest fart of radiation in the wind.
When it’s airborne and there’s a plume — it’s actually very hard to detect underwater and underground nuclear accidents unless there’s a big boom associated with it. Meltdowns and leaks generally don’t show up on seismographs. Thresher and Scorpion both supposedly sounded like a single broken light bulb on the monitoring system.
The detection network as it stands today is very very sensitive.
For example, in 2017 there was a radioactive leak traced to Mayak, Russia. The radioactive “cloud” was detected in 43 countries all over Europe thousands of kilometers away, and the source was estimated as the release of 1–3 grams of Ruthenium-106 isotope. The amount of material to be detected was mere atoms per cubic meter of air, if even that, but it did show up in the averages.
If a nuclear sub goes belly up and farts a bubble of radioactive xenon under the sea, we can detect that.
Aaaaand here we go … Conspiracy!
Lets not count Soviet stuff. They left lethal nuclear devices all over the place. You have seen how the military hardware is failing in Ukraine? Earlier Soviet equipment is much worse with important parts of any value sold, and hollow shells or plywood missiles and vehicles for parades. Only a few advanced jet fighters operational and moved around to do flyovers when officials visit, etc.
Don’t buy reactors from them.
Yeah, the ecological record of the Soviets tells a very sorry tale. Just ask the Aral sea
Broken arrow incidents show the dangers of nuclear weapons, not nuclear power. You should know better than to equate the two. Also, compare lives lost per megawattHour of power between nuclear and all other power types. Hydro power is particularly dangerous, on account of dam bursts, coal isn’t good because the ash coming out of the chimney (do not confuse with cooling towers) is bad for the lungs and infact more radioactive, due to traces of Uranium and other minerals present in the coal when mined, than anything leaving a nuclear power station site. Nuclear is extremely safe by that measure.
the seafloor may be the safest place to keep nuclear waste. its not like those isotopes are notoriously buoyant. neutron flux is easily blocked by water. absorption into sea water also causes a lot of dilution. you might argue a threat to sea life, but maybe ask the wildlife refuge forming around chernobyl about that one.
always thought disposal in subduction zones was a good idea. the geolgical processes happen on time scales long enough to allow isotopes to decay. the best use for high level wastes may be as nuclear fuel. people always ignore that the nastiest isotopes also have the shorter half lives. that’s what storage pools are for.
Just dig a super deep borehole in Nevada and fill it afterwards, it won’t be a problem
Had one, but not a bore hole. Cant use it for whatever reason. How about Nodak, not many people there either
1 fatality due to impalement not radiation in a military reactor in Idaho due to a stuck control rod. Rod pulled out manually by chain but too far as the sticking released suddenly. The rod then blew out as reactor went critical. Prior to 1977. They decommissioned and burried the whole reactor as I understand.
You’re missing a reference there – LNT model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model?useskin=vector
—–
I’ve not seen the video(!) created by Kyle Hill but I did see
“Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?” by Nickolas Means @ “#LeadDec Austin” in 2018[1]
which I highly recommend.
The Kyle Hill videos I did see left a bit of a “fishy” aftertaste. Can’t say why anymore – would need to watch some again – and I’m not saying he’s lying or spreading falsehoods but I don’t know… the videos seemed a a bit untrustworthy to me.
> … sketchy turbine spin-up experiment using residual core heat culminated in what in hindsight was a very much preventable accident.
The TMI accident could have been prevented with a microscopic amount of hindsight in any of many areas:
– not switching of the emergency cooling pumps.
– putting less relevance to the pressure in that secondary vessel with the water cooler sprayer thingy.
– valve status light indicating actual reality, not just what the computer send to the valve.
– useful alert light placement.
– an alert printer that can actually print alerts fast enough (not creating a backlog of hours I think).
– and probably many more…
Re: the HBO miniseries
Yes, thy lean slightly into dramatization / sensationalism but its not a documentary for F*§&%/§%&7’s sake.
It is a drama or mockumentary if you will and from what I can tell (English Wikipedia on the accident) pretty much all the technical/scientific aspects are accurate enough.
Many of the “complaints” of http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/chernobyl/ are just bonkers because the HBO series addresses the same questions in the last few minutes of every episode (“Elements of Chernobyl”).
The title of this article is just crap. Three events to separate fact from fiction?
And then finishing with this:
> If there is one thing that we can learn from nuclear accidents in this Atomic Age, it is that the fear of the atom has done more harm than respect for it.
???
Has the fear really done more harm?
Misinformation, lack of good communication and a lack of education has caused unnecessary fear which has done harm. And the article doesn’t state anything I see as wrong but you cant leave out incidents like the “Goiânia accident”[2] in a “Reviewing (of) Nuclear Accidents”… (or maybe the “Demon core”[3])
> We can only hope that more people will learn this(!) lesson.
We absolutely do not hope that. We(!) hope for better education and that more people will treat radiation with the appropriate seriousness and respect, not whatever wired half-baked-generalization-lesson this articles tries to do.
Maybe we need public Geiger counters in street lamp poles or something so everyone can get an idea what all the different radiation units (REM, Sievert, Roentgen, Rad) actually mean when an accident happens.
Like we all have an almost intuitive understanding of wind speeds or rain fall during storms but I’d guess most of us wouldn’t know what to do with any radio broadcast warning of some radiation fallout with a specific number+unit.
And on that not I guess I’ll finally order an “Atomik Vodka”[4] made “from crops harvested near Chernobyl” (I’m serious here).
Cheers! :-)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xQeXOz0Ncs
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident?useskin=vector
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core?useskin=vector
[4] https://www.atomikvodka.com/
The overall tone of this is a bit curious. I love nuclear power and all that but the article is pretty dismissive of the lay public’s fears and concerns, real or imagined. It reads, to me (and I’ve been way wrong before..) as pretty paternalistic.
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To cherry pick just one example, to say you can go to the Chernobyl zone with “basic precautions…” I don’t even know what that is and I’m a sciencey-type. And I’m guessing the vast majority or the public doesn’t know either.
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One other example, yes the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan were not “worse” than firestorms etc by many metrics but that is totally dismissing as irrational the fear that a single aircraft can wipe an entire city off the map, leaving an entirely unknown and invisible wake of destruction behind it. Especially if you consider the mindset of the typical Japanese citizen at that point in history.
The problem of nuclear power (nuclear fusion) are in fact not the individual accidents, even if these determine the perception of the media and the public.
The basic problems are the many still unsolved problems (e.g. disposal), the solution of which is left to future generations.
And nuclear technology is nowhere near carbon-neutral, as lobbyists claim it is – quite the opposite, if you look at the entire process from uranium mining and processing to the disposal of the power plants.
This is not a particularly intelligent or planned approach. We have experienced this on a smaller scale here in Germany over the last 150 years with coal mining – we will have to pay billions for the consequences for centuries to come. Here you can say “there had been no alternatives, without coal there would have been no industrialization” – right! But today we have alternatives.
But the technology that will win is the technology with the bigger *** LOBBY ***, as always.
It’s closer to carbon neutral than wind, solar, or hydro – all of which have the same issue arising from materials and resources. Nuclear just uses far less materials for the same amount of energy, so it puts out less CO2.
While using it, maybe. But when you factor in the building and the cleanup (which takes an awful lot of time and resources), it fares *very* poorly in comparison to other technologies
No, not really.
Nuclear power uses less materials in building, because the energy output per unit is so much greater, and the cleanup is normally a fraction of the cost of building it.
Accidents are costly of course, but rare, and most of that cost so far has been due to government incompetence and public hysteria rather than actual cost of the accidents.
Now don’t call me a conspiracy theorists, but it is now admitted that Soviet intelligence starting in the 50’s (maybe earlier) started financing very small, fledging anti-nuclear movements in an attempt to cripple western Nuclear programs which would have a negative effect on both nuclear weapons in the west. These Soviet programs lasted until the end of the Soviet Union and the offspring of them, radical anti-Nuclear groups persist to this day. So what does this mean? Well it might explain why the anti-Nuclear movement was as strong as it was and why it has lasted as long as it has, feeding even the stupidest monster and it will grow and even after you stop feeding it it will lumber on.
Thanks for the article, even if it’s brought a bunch of nonsense out of the woodwork. I don’t think we’re unfairly harsh about Chernobyl. What they did at the time is bad enough, even if we don’t know the exact truth – but the situation right now today isn’t good either. Any idiot can sneak in and collect and accumulate radioactive material from the surrounding areas to use for malicious or just inadvisable purposes.
In my opinion, the scary thing about nuclear is the ideas people have of saving costs and proliferating it by making it something that doesn’t require a large, secure, well guarded installation. I can’t help but think that in my old neighborhood, if there was an unmanned small reactor like the SMR concepts I’ve seen, one would be destroyed or stolen very quickly. If not by individuals, then by organized crime or foreign agents for whom it’d be an attractive target if any part of it was better than they could otherwise acquire. We can’t budge very much on nuclear’s expensive precautions, and we have a tradition of pretending we’re not handing fossil fuels an unfair advantage, but renewables aren’t usually so problematic in that particular way, so when they’re acceptable in others we can run with them instead.
I’m hoping that the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), which is seeing some recent reevaluation works out, but I’m also afraid it will arrive in 20 years, just like fusion power.
B^P
Oops, forgot the link!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
Good idea. China just commissioned one and India uses them.
For many people, talking about “nuclear safety” is like talking about “ethical satanism” – the word itself is a synonym for terrifying danger without limit. Into this perfectly circular reasoning, no useful discussion can be inserted. You can say it causes 1% of the harm of other existing energy sources, and the answer is “yeah but it’s NUCLEAR harm”.
We could treat this as a fact of life, and accept that despite how safe it is, nuclear power is simply forbidden, and forget about why. And if it makes everyone in Harrisburg live in fear, that is a material consideration whether it’s rational or not.*
(* as it happens, I grew up in Harrisburg. I’d say people there think about TMI maybe once every 2-3 years)
Only, it’s a source of /titanic/ amounts of clean energy. A golf ball of uranium replaces literal freight cars full of coal, and the only waste is a slightly different golf ball. One nuclear plant replaces literal counties full of wind turbines, 24/7, in a way that works with the actual existing power grid. It’s the single most serious answer we have to greenhouse emissions. We can afford to at least fix the way we /talk/ about it.
Right. The current situation of spewing ridiculous amounts of greenhouse gas into the environment is a frog in the pot of water problem whereas the downsides of nuclear solutions (accidents, dealing with the waste) are seen as bullet to the forehead type of problems.
It’s worth noting that the fukushima meltdowns could have been averted entirely even in the absence of electricity. There were isolation condensers (basically, big tanks full of water) that could have cooled the cores. These were even considered, but engaged far too late and the plant operators generally had no idea how and when they should be used. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_condenser
There were also various other misunderstandings by operator staff about what was actually going on inside the reactor cores which could have been remedied with better training (and in some cases, instrumentation).
It’s also worth noting that the Fukushima reactor complex started operation before the Chornobyl reactor complex even started construction.
Wasn’t at least one unforseen flaw to place the diesel generators in the basement where the tsunamu knocked them out pretty quickly, thus there was no power to keep the cooling system going?
To be fair, the TMI nuclear accident did harm a single person. Edward Teller blamed his heart attach to sensationalist commentary of the incident by Jane Fonda and various anti-nuclear journalists. One can make of this what one wants.
I would not classify Nagasaki and Hiroshima as an accident as the intro seems to suggest, or do I misread?
You misread. The comparison is merely to illustrate the irrational amount of attention and hype over nuclear-related (atomic bomb, nuclear plant) events rather than conventional (dam failures, Bhopal disaster, firebombing) events. How many people are even aware of the unmitigated disaster that’s Bhopal today, despite it happening two years prior to Chernobyl? Or the firebombing of Tokyo that razed that city practically to the ground?
I always make the analogy to airplanes.
Both airplanes and nuclear power plants are naturally dangerous and also very expensive. Early pioneers in flight and nuclear technology risked their lives. Planes can fall down like a brick and a high dose of radiation can kill. And both require a lot of money to produce.
Yet. Both of these technologies are the safest in their category. Why? Because of their scale!
Flight is the fastest way to go from one continent to another. There is basically no competition for large distances so it is economically viable to make them the safest form of transportation.
Nuclear power is the is the cheapest (fuel is very cheap per MWh), most reliable, and most dense form of power. Over its lifetime it will make back a lot more than its investment so it is economically viable to make it the safest form of power.
Solar and wind are the opposite. A solar panel is pretty safe yet every year people die from installing solar panels on rooftops. And people die during installing,maintaining and scrapping wind turbines. And you need a lot of either one to replace a single nuclear power plant.
I get a chuckle sometimes when people talk about radiation exposure. While it’s becoming more and more difficult to find the information online, my area’s estimated yearly radiation dose is over 600 mrem and a large contributor towards the inflated average background levels for the US taken as a whole. This is mostly due to having so much uranium in our soil that radon build-up in basements, crawlspaces, and even ground floors is a common problem.
To the best of my knowledge, the only nuclear accident in US history to result in actual deaths happened in Idaho in January 1961 (also covered by Kyle Hill) and though it apparently made national news at the time and came with a juicy scandal attached, it’s been almost entirely forgotten today.
I’m not surprised by how much the other incidents have been and continue to be played up, though. Soviet money gave a lot of anti-nuclear groups a good start in the 20th century, and sensationalist, yellow reporting has always been profitable.
I assume you live in a mountainous region, but I’m not going to take that for granite.
B^)
Define nuclear accident and wiki the demon core
Gen IV reactors and molten salt designs address much of the coolant loss issue. Nuclear is the only way to go green energy, and the waste heat can be used for any number of industrial processes. The chemical waste created by wind, solar, and battery production are significantly more than the waste products of current fission reactor designs. In fact all that lovely wasted fuel sitting in pools is perfect for the molten salt style reactors and can cut the amount of waste down to a fraction of the current amount and that waste is toxic for years, not centuries.
Gotta pick an energy source that’s efficient, clean, and reliable. Nuclear wins by a long shot.
Totally agree, except the sanity of the country must be weighed. In the US we are one future US Supreme Court vote away from it being legal for power companies to self-regulate, that no government agency has any authority to question what the companies are doing, and that anyone who questions the safety of power plants, or claims radioactivity is dangerous, can be sued for libel. (it’s in the Constitution, you just don’t know how to interpret is correctly).
The single biggest thing they could do for nuclear PR is stop using Sieverts and start using bananas as a unit of radioactivity.
Coal power plants have a similar problem with toxic waste, and coal ash is radioactive. Coal power produces far larger quantities of toxic waste than nuclear, when normalizing on power output. A 1 gigawatt coal power plant outputs around 300,000 tons of toxic waste per year, compared to a 1 gigawatt nuclear plant’s output of around 30 tons per year. Here in the US, coal power plants produce about 130 million tons of waste per year, compared to the 2000 tons of wasted produced by our nuclear plants.
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear-energy-factsheet#:~:text=Powering%20a%20one%2Dgigawatt%20nuclear,%25%20is%20high%2Dlevel%20waste.
https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel
Bottom ash is potentially uranium ore and is only not nuclear waste by act of congress.
Fly ash is just waste.
Ore, by definition is something that can be economically processed for one or more minerals.
Technology regularly turns dirt/rocks into ore.
I started readin the TMI accident and I did not go further : always the same mix up (or lie ?) with the nuclear industry. RADIATION IS DIFFERRENT FROM CONTAMINATION !!! YOU CANNOT COMPARE A RELEASE OF A RADIOACTIVE PRODUCT WITH A CHEST X-RAY.
no, no
there is a profit to be made
the billionaires and their politicians will get richer
so what if hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people die, we can always caste that as statistically insignificant, if we compare it to something that kills more
and a couple of dozen people will get jobs, yay jobs
I am sure that this time, corporate greed will put maintenance and safety before share dividends, not like every other time so far, let’s trust these guys, I am sure they have all changed
and, come on, radiation is invisible and we all know that if someting is invisible then it cannot hurt you
Until fusion is up and running, nuclear power is unsafe, japan is tectonically unstable, there is no safe place for them, corporations always risk manage by putting people lives at risk, nuclear waste is a huge problem and getting bigger every day, synrock was a solution but nobody wants to pay for it.
Bad article, bad propaganda, the authors should be ashamed of this obvious hack job.
You sound very confident about your opinion.
while i did not spend the time to read through every detail and link and comment… I will add a very simplified idea. We have safer and better ways to build nuclear. Decentralized small plants, buried under ground. A pilot program would be inexpensive, and could be placed nearly anywhere. We can engineer it to be safer, we already HAVE. The largest hurdle is political and financial. I agree that we should be safe.
The best way to generate stability and wealth is to generate free power, everything runs on power. When you flood the market with power, the cost goes down. A stable, clean, and safe nuclear grid that relies on several thousand small plants rather than one massive one, would make energy nearly free. The economic and quality of life implications are so high that this should be one of our primary goals as a country. seeing as how my electric bill for a tiny house was almost 200 dollars last month for no more than a/c and a fridge and a computer, we NEED affordable power. Sorry to say it, but ‘renewable’ or ‘green’ energy is just not there yet. I do think we need multiple inputs and a diversified portfolio, however, ignoring the most stable and beneficial because we screwed it up in the past is not a good strategy for growth and well being of the general populace. If we wanna get rid of ‘dirty’ power, we need nuclear. We just need to utilize better, newer, smaller deployments.
The really impressive ones go prompt critical. SL-1 did it, and the steam explosion propelled the reactor into the ceiling of the containment building, and left one of the bodies stuck up there, where they could not find him at first.
The Demon Core was meant to be the third military atomic bomb. It went prompt critical twice, and killed two physicists in separate events, once after it was brought too close to neutron reflectors, and again when the hemispheres were held apart with a screwdriver, and it fell out.
Strong book recommendation for @Maya: Atomic Accidents, James Mahaffey.
Covers the civilian ones, and most of the known military ones.
Author actually has doctorate and 40 yrs work in the sector.