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There's A 50% Chance of Another Chernobyl Before 2050, Say Safety Specialists (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via MIT Technology Review: Spencer Wheatley and Didier Sornette at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Benjamin Sovacool at Aarhus University in Denmark have compiled the most comprehensive list of nuclear accidents ever created and used it to calculate the chances of future accidents. They say there is a 50:50 chance that a major nuclear disaster will occur somewhere in the world before 2050. "There is a 50 percent chance that a Chernobyl event (or larger) occurs in the next 27 years," they conclude. Since the International Atomic Energy Agency doesn't publish a historical database of the nuclear accidents it rates using the International Nuclear Event Scale, others, like Wheatley and co, have to compile their own list of accidents. They define an accident as "an unintentional incident or event at a nuclear energy facility that led to either one death (or more) or at least $50,000 in property damage." Each accident must have occurred during the generation, transmission, or distribution of nuclear energy, which includes accidents at mines, during transportation, or at enrichment facility, and so on. Fukushima was by far the most expensive accident in history at a cost of $166 billion, which is 60 percent of the total cost of all other nuclear accidents added together. Wheatley and co say their data suggests that the nuclear industry remains vulnerable to dragon king events, which are large unexpected events that are difficult to analyze because they follow a different statistical distribution, have unforeseen causes, and are few in number. "There is a 50% chance that a Fukushima event (or larger) occurs in the next 50 years," they say.
There is a 50% chance of a world war in that period as well. Which one will kill more?
First off, the article is dated as "April 17, 2015". So, "Not News".
The headline says "Chernobyl" (a stupid set of human errors leading to meltdown). The summary says "Fukushima" (the results of old tech meeting an extreme natural disaster". The article's own summary says it's a 50:50 chance of a "Three-Mile Island" (where no one was harmed). Or are we just talking an expensive incident? Or an actual meltdown?
I'm an abject Slashdot apologist and I'll confidently say that this submission is crap.
To me it does mean that we should invest more to replace old reactors and replace them with newer models which are not subject to the same kind of failure with those consequences. Better yet we have to invest on LFTRs.
On other news "there's a 50% chance (probably higher) the article is full bollocks.
I'd say there's a better than 50% chance of that.
Without a reliable data source, the confidence in that number is highly suspect.
That is an understatement. They intentionally decided to ignore all the officially recorded data and come up with their own list of what they think was an accident, and they used things like newspaper articles and anti-nuke sites to create their base list of data. These so called 'experts' don't actually appear to have any background in nuclear power generation or knowledge of nuclear plant safety analysis. I guess anyone can be an expert these days.
The scariest thing about Chernobyl -- and this is coming from someone who studied nuclear engineering at the graduate level -- is that it was a RMBK reactor, which allows for a positive feedback loop. On a largeish scale, that's just an insane design as it means that the reactor has the potential to go critical unless there is active human intervention.
In contrast, just about every other reactor design has a built-in negative feedback mechanism of some kind. That is, while you can actively screw up the reactor -- slam the control rods full open and override the automatic emergency shutdown system for example -- and cause a problem, you can also more or less just walk away from the controls and the reactor will slowly shut down by itself after some hours or days with zero chance of a meltdown.