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Nuclear Safety Push To Be Softened After US Objections
mdsolar writes with news that the U.S. objects to a proposal to amend the Convention on Nuclear Safety put forward by Switzerland. The United States looks set to succeed in watering down a proposal for tougher legal standards aimed at boosting global nuclear safety, according to senior diplomats. Diplomatic wrangling will come to a head at a 77-nation meeting in Vienna next month that threatens to expose divisions over required safety standards and the cost of meeting them, four years after the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Switzerland has put forward a proposal to amend the Convention on Nuclear Safety (CNS), arguing stricter standards could help avoid a repeat of Fukushima, where an earthquake and tsunami sparked triple nuclear meltdowns, forced more than 160,000 people to flee nearby towns and contaminated water, food and air.
They need to find a way to keep stupid people from running the plants. Fukushima's problems were severe, but the meltdowns were all preventable. That's the dirty little secret that Japan doesn't talk about. Any competent nuclear plant operator could have shut down Fukushima safely.
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I can't think of a reason ANYONE would want the nuclear power generation industry to be less safe than it possibly could be,
How about this one: where the increased 'safety' would mostly be theater and cost so much that it would raise the expense of the already known to be far safer nuclear power plants to the point that people burn more coal, which is known to kill hundreds of thousands a year from mining accidents and pollution. That's before you get into global warming.
Germany's building coal power plants to replace their nuclear and satisfy additional demand(presumably at night).
I don't read AC A human right
Others have already pointed out two reasons. One, making it a billion times safer than carrots also makes it cost a million times as much as it already does, and two, if it's more costly than coal, people will just burn coal instead. I'd like to point out two more reasons.
Suppose you make $60,000. You can only spend that $60,000 once. If you pay $100 more on your electric bill to make your power even more safe, that's $100 you don't have to spend on having your car a bit safer - two more airbags, perhaps. Spending your safety budget on the wrong things gets people killed, because any money from your pay check that ends up paying for safer energy is money that can't be used for traffic safety, food safety, etc. So the way to have the safest LIFE is to spend your safety budget where it does the most good, which probably isn't energy related.
Secondly, have you ever worked at a place that makes you change your password monthly? Pretty much everyone there increments their password, so all passwords end with two digits. Ever seen a highway with a speed limit posted that's clearly much too low? Everyone ends up speeding, but by vastly varying amounts since there's no reasonable guidance on how fast you should be going. Excessive rules are counterproductive because they just get people in the habit of ignoring the rules. If you wnt people to follow the rules, you need a) rules that are reasonable and b) people who understand why the rules they are handed are reasonable.
So the proper set of safety rules, the most effective are:
Carefully selected for maximum effect per cost, keeping the safety budget in mind.
Reasonable to follow.
Well explained, so people understand WHY they are reasonable rules that should be followed.
If you went to build anything these days with 1970s era thinking, 1970s era technology and 1970s era safety standards you would be denied commercial insurance.
The problem is not that the numbers look bad, its that the numbers are horrendously skewed compared with knowledge of nuclear power generation. It's like saying cars are incredible death traps and thus refusing to build new cars with crumple zones, seat belts, and air bags.
The process / power industry has evolved, the designs have evolved, but nothing has been built. So any statistics you use about x number of meltdowns out of x reactors basically need to be adjusted for 1970s era thinking. And we did a lot of mistakes back then across all industries.
I reject the notion that if you built a nuclear reactor now that is has a 1.33% of catastrophic meltdown over 40 years.