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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.
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.
We should replace old reactors, but not with new ones. The costs are too high, and it takes many decades to return the land to a usable state anyway.
As an aside, they are looking at building a sarcophagus for Fukushima. The damage from multiple meltdowns and the difficulty of cleaning it up means that just leaving it for future generations might be the only option.
The whole area is starting to look like a complete write-off.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This "study" doesn't even appear to make any comparison to the loss of life and property from reduced electrical power output from taking these nuclear power plants off line or any comparison to the loss of life and property from producing the electricity from sources other than nuclear power. The reason they do not do this is obvious to anyone that has seen the death rates to energy produced for the energy sources in common use.
Nuclear power is the safest energy source we have available to us.
This is a bunch of fear mongering which serves only to make future deployment of nuclear power more expensive and therefore cause more deaths. Again, nuclear power is the safest form of energy we have and therefore anyone that opposes nuclear power is lobbying for more people to die.
Here's another thing, when it comes to our "carbon footprint" there is nothing that produces more energy with less carbon in the air than nuclear power except hydro. We've run out of rivers to dam up so if we want to even maintain the energy output we have now and not increase our carbon footprint then we need to build more nuclear power plants. If global warming is going to kill us all, and even assuming this "study" has even a grain of truth to it, then the answer is more nuclear power.
Anyone that claims man made global warming is a problem and opposes nuclear power is either completely ignorant or completely stupid.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.