none of it has been enough to actually harm anyone.
And we know that for certain - how?
There have been no reported initial radiation injuries other than among some of the plant workers, but that surely doesn't mean that there have been no health effects. It's just that they're going to be long-term and difficult to measure.
3) Fukushima: a Tsunami induced beyond design basis accident
People keep repeating that phrase "beyond design basis" as if it's some kind of positive thing.
All it means is that the designers got their design basis dead wrong as it didn't reflect the actual real-world conditions.
Since the designers in this case weren't some fly-by-night Soviet outfit but General Electric, who built a whole load of reactors based on the same flawed design basis, and neither the company nor the nuclear industry as a whole nor any of the international nuclear regulatory agencies called them on this...... the only valid conclusion to be drawn is that there has been ongoing systemic under-estimation of design basis risk across the entire international commercial nuclear power community for at least the last 40 years. And the same people who systematically under-estimated the risk back then, are still running the industry today.
This is not a comforting realisation, and it's not one that counts in the nuclear power industry's favour.
Well then, the fact that I've recommended Kant's Critique of Pure Reason indicates that I'm fucking brilliant. And since I "recommended" Jeff Gordon: Nascar Driver (Ferguson Career Biographies) [Hardcover] ISBN-10: 0816058857 I am qualified to win the Daytona 500.
I see you are well-read. But have you recommended On The Electrodynamics of WWE vs NWO and À la recherche du temps rapide à Haute Ridgemont?
Every few months, we hear, this HMI or this controls software has these vulnerabilities and can be owned this way or that. Properly designed controls systems do not touch the internet or extend beyond the controls world.
Restarted as a syllogism:
1. Properly designed HMI control systems are perfectly safe, since the manufacturers make sure they don't touch the Internet. 2. HMI control systems manufacturers appear incapable of proper design, since they release vulnerable code every month. 3.... Prepare for unforeseen consequences.
but hey. it isn't my project and it is a free distro so it isn't my place to bitch.
Er, what? Whyever would it be "not our place" to talk to others about our experience using a particular piece of software and why they might choose to use or not use it?
Are free software developers some kind of new aristocracy who are somehow immune from all criticism by virtue of it being their project, while we the mere users must silently obey and revere all their decisions?
Surely one of the first freedoms of Free Software must be the freedom to talk about the software?
Where are the tons of water they are pumping in every day going?
Don't worry, I'm sure it's nowhere important!
By the way, and in completely unrelated news, I've got a great deal for you on Japanese sushi. Really really cheap. You won't believe how tasty it is! Really puts a "zing" in your day.
Risk management isn't voodoo. We just need to design things right from the start, and focus on continuous improvement based on lessons learned.
It would be great if we were actually doing either of those.
Problem is, even in software development, I don't see us doing that.
Design things right from the start? Nope. We inherit broken designs, kludge them more, then turn them into half-baked "industry standards" we can never get rid of.
Continuous improvement based on lessons learned? Nope. We take the things which are working, throw them away, and "innovate" horrible new ideas. We keep reinventing old technology because we forget why we needed it the first time around.
Because it wasn't a failure. The reactor performed as it should have.
That's the argument you're going with? Seriously?
"Yes Mr President, three reactor buildings exploded, the core in #1 was completely molten, it spewed radiation into the air, ground and fisheries, and necessitated the evacuation and possible sacrifice of farmland and towns in a 20 km radius... but it's okay, you see, because that's exactly what this reactor was designed to do! It performed completely 100% within specifications and we're all just so proud! Here, have another five near your town!"
a 'solution' that dumps even more toxic pollutants into the environment BY DESIGN than nuclear does even in accidents.
It's a pity no such thing as a "scrubber" exists or could ever be attached to any coal-fired power station, ever. No amount of research or engineering could ever improve that technology. It's just not possible.
Nope, the only way forward is to invest the billions of dollars we could have put into a mythical "safe coal" into experimental fast breeder and pebble bed reactors, which are perfectly safe by design and can never have any problems, ever!
Failed wind turbines can be extremely dangerous, destroying buildings and killing people.
Yes, and when a wind turbine broke in a tornado in South Dokata in 1986, it contaminated the entire state with wind-active oxygen with a half-life of 30 years. No corn can grow there now for a century.
What this failure points out is a critical failure in site planning and design for site specific conditions.
That's not an argument in your favour. Why was that critical failure allowed to happen when the people overseeing the construction of the site were nuclear experts and should have known better? And claimed to be doing their homework, but obviously weren't? Who was overseeing the overseers, and why did they also fail in their job?
To me that proves that at the time the Mark 1 BWRs were deployed, the organisations deploying them were not competent to do so and were misrepresenting the risks involved.
I'm not confident that today's nuclear organisations are any more competent or honest than they were in the 1970s, and that's why I don't trust them to build out a new wave of hotter, more experimental reactors.
Yes absent a Fukushima type disaster, coal is in many respects dirtier than nuclear, particularly on a climatic level.
Because it's absolutely impossible to invent and add any kind of emission scrubber to a coal plant?
Even though the research and technology to do so is far cheaper than designing and building new experimental nuclear reactors, which would need exactly the same kind of emission protection except on a far more heavy-duty scale?
Sorry, not buying the "coal is dirtier than nukes" angle. It seems like saying "smoking has killed more people than radium watches, so lick your paintbrushes all you like."
Nuclear is only "safe" - so far - because insane amounts of money have been poured into trying to make sure the darn things don't melt down all the time, because we haven't fully accounted for the total lifecycle costs of fuel disposal yet and site decommissioning yet, and even then they seem to have "once in a thousand years" scale accidents about once every quarter century.
People don't seem to say this was a failure of management or engineering in these discussions.
Why do you suppose that is?
First, because the commercial viability and public acceptance of nuclear power hinges on the claim that in nuclear plants, management and engineering are exact sciences which can reduce danger to practically zero. It is not good for PR to accept the fact that management and engineering can fail - even worse, that it can fail while claiming to succeed.
If we knew that the engineering of the GE BWR Mark 1 was stuffed up? They would never have been built. If we knew that TEPCO's management was stuffed up? We would never have let them run the plant. But we didn't. Why didn't we? Possibly because we don't have the capability to tell whether any given implementation of management and engineering in any field is, in fact, working fine or is a walking molten disaster heap waiting to happen. And if so, that should scare us.
It seems similar to the absurd security situation we see in software patching at the moment, and in the financial meltdown. In both cases we have products riddled with vulnerabilities which claim to be the product of strict, scientific, automated environments - and yet, the parties releasing the products into the wild don't appear to have done basic due diligence on how and whether they will fail. In every instance of a vulnerability, there has been a clear failure of both engineering and management but even worse, these failures appear to be systemic and ongoing and not self-correcting. We just walk away from each predictable disaster, pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, and keep doing the same things.
This tendency towards self-deception is going to bite us all across the spectrum, in every part of our industrial interlinked society. Not just in nuclear.
What I seem to be hearing is that it's dangerous, but the danger can be managed.
Yes, that's the line we've been fed by the nuclear power industry for 60 years. "The danger can be managed." Problem is, Fukushima is only the last of a long line of accidents which should never have happened according to the probability scenarios used to manage the danger.
a single incident at a 40 year old plant, due to extreme circumstances, with no deaths
This is the big problem with nuclear accidents: they release toxic substances into the environment which remain toxic for centuries and kill slowly over time. Each time one of these happens, it contaminates land and water, and that contamination doesn't go away.
This is why nuclear reactors are scary to people who have some imagination and can think beyond the bounds of "normal operating scenario" into "what if something goes wrong which should never go wrong?" territory.
is going to set back production of new plants
Yes, that would be a positive outcome if you're not convinced that new nuclear plants are a net long-term win to humankind.
As far as explosions go, there's just as much danger from too much fertilizer being stored in one place as there is from any plant, nuclear or not.
The point is its not just photogenic Hollywood explosions that we're talking about. It's toxic leaks of long-term radioisotopes accumulating in the environment. Not nearly as easy to measure or as exciting to report, but once it gets out of the bottle, you can't put it back in.
The interesting thing is that a power reactor meltdown, small and benign as it might look compared to a nuclear bomb, can actually release more radionucleotides into the environment than an outdoor nuclear test. Plus, it does it in a location much closer to inhabited cities and farmland.
How dumb and naive would they be if they *did* trust their employees?
Well, they'd be consistent with the ideology of openness if they did. As it is, Wikileaks appears to be morphing from an open-source intelligence collective into something midway between an independent journalism organisation and a private intelligence agency in the style of "Global Frequency". While either of those are possibly not a bad thing to have, it is a bit depressing to see that the desire for openness evaporates when it faces real secrets with real consequences.
a huge waste of power to produce, embrittles every damn metal it touches, leaks out of everything and is in general a huge pain in the ass to work with.
Great, so hydrogen will be the perfect companion to nuclear fission.
Mmm, the book that tells employees we should be happy to be treated like laboratory animals forced to run endless booby-trapped mazes for inscrutable Others, and possibly with a nice spot of vivisection lined up at retirement.
Capitalism is ALL ABOUT anti-competitive. Its not about being nice to your competition, its about driving them out of business.
Why do people have this retarded idea that businesses are all supposed to be nice to each other?
From the Reagan Revolution, where the rollback of social compassion was considered "morning in America" and naked greed was supposed to turn everyone into moral paragons via the magic of the Invisible Hand.
Ronnie and his mates put a happy smiley face on the backstabbing. That's why kids today think that a no-holds-barred economic war of all against all and the enslavement of the poor by the rich means "freedom" and will even preserve "traditional values" - even though that's logically contradictory.
Yes, I sound like an angry Marxist. Maybe I am. I'm no fan of Stalinist central bureaucracy, that's just aristocracy by another name, but I'm tired of the lies that make people think unchecked capitalism can coexist with friendly competition. It can't. You either choose to maximise your profit at any cost (some people today think that it's even a moral duty of a corporation to make money!) or you choose to treat your fellow humans as sentient beings.
It doesn't always pay to do the right thing, and we've known that since Biblical times, but maybe we shouldn't evaluate everything by a min-max formula and use our hearts and minds instead.
This isn't capitalism.... Why is Apple able to dictate the wholesale price of books to retailers other than Apple?
Because they can. The nasty little truth of capitalism is that it is self-contradictory. It preaches "eternal competition" but the process of competition destroys itself, creating oligopolies and cartels, which devolve into rent-seeking, landlordism and its spoiled child, hereditary feudalism. Capital seeks profit, not freedom, and the American experience from Columbus to Lincoln should have taught everyone that rational self-interested profit-seeking is perfectly compatible with literal chattel slavery. Only those meddling liberals stopped the "free market" doing what it wished in the 1860s, and good lord did they catch hell for it ever since.
Slashdot Mirror
Much of this is TEPCO's fault, and specifically the fault of their CEO
And what of the nuclear regulatory agency which allowed them to operate? Any blame due there?
(Y2K was pretty benign death-wise, and is the worst collective catastrophe from the CS field)
Well, if you don't count the PSN outage...
none of it has been enough to actually harm anyone.
And we know that for certain - how?
There have been no reported initial radiation injuries other than among some of the plant workers, but that surely doesn't mean that there have been no health effects. It's just that they're going to be long-term and difficult to measure.
3) Fukushima: a Tsunami induced beyond design basis accident
People keep repeating that phrase "beyond design basis" as if it's some kind of positive thing.
All it means is that the designers got their design basis dead wrong as it didn't reflect the actual real-world conditions.
Since the designers in this case weren't some fly-by-night Soviet outfit but General Electric, who built a whole load of reactors based on the same flawed design basis, and neither the company nor the nuclear industry as a whole nor any of the international nuclear regulatory agencies called them on this... ... the only valid conclusion to be drawn is that there has been ongoing systemic under-estimation of design basis risk across the entire international commercial nuclear power community for at least the last 40 years. And the same people who systematically under-estimated the risk back then, are still running the industry today.
This is not a comforting realisation, and it's not one that counts in the nuclear power industry's favour.
(Hell, the real thing was called "Operation Neptune Spear!")
Cue Aladdin/Little Mermaid crossover sequel in three, two...
Well then, the fact that I've recommended Kant's Critique of Pure Reason indicates that I'm fucking brilliant. And since I "recommended" Jeff Gordon: Nascar Driver (Ferguson Career Biographies) [Hardcover] ISBN-10: 0816058857 I am qualified to win the Daytona 500.
I see you are well-read. But have you recommended On The Electrodynamics of WWE vs NWO and À la recherche du temps rapide à Haute Ridgemont?
Every few months, we hear, this HMI or this controls software has these vulnerabilities and can be owned this way or that. Properly designed controls systems do not touch the internet or extend beyond the controls world.
Restarted as a syllogism:
1. Properly designed HMI control systems are perfectly safe, since the manufacturers make sure they don't touch the Internet. ... Prepare for unforeseen consequences.
2. HMI control systems manufacturers appear incapable of proper design, since they release vulnerable code every month.
3.
but hey. it isn't my project and it is a free distro so it isn't my place to bitch.
Er, what? Whyever would it be "not our place" to talk to others about our experience using a particular piece of software and why they might choose to use or not use it?
Are free software developers some kind of new aristocracy who are somehow immune from all criticism by virtue of it being their project, while we the mere users must silently obey and revere all their decisions?
Surely one of the first freedoms of Free Software must be the freedom to talk about the software?
Where are the tons of water they are pumping in every day going?
Don't worry, I'm sure it's nowhere important!
By the way, and in completely unrelated news, I've got a great deal for you on Japanese sushi. Really really cheap. You won't believe how tasty it is! Really puts a "zing" in your day.
Risk management isn't voodoo. We just need to design things right from the start, and focus on continuous improvement based on lessons learned.
It would be great if we were actually doing either of those.
Problem is, even in software development, I don't see us doing that.
Design things right from the start? Nope. We inherit broken designs, kludge them more, then turn them into half-baked "industry standards" we can never get rid of.
Continuous improvement based on lessons learned? Nope. We take the things which are working, throw them away, and "innovate" horrible new ideas. We keep reinventing old technology because we forget why we needed it the first time around.
And we're supposed to be the "smart" industry!
This makes me worried about the rest of society.
Because it wasn't a failure. The reactor performed as it should have.
That's the argument you're going with? Seriously?
"Yes Mr President, three reactor buildings exploded, the core in #1 was completely molten, it spewed radiation into the air, ground and fisheries, and necessitated the evacuation and possible sacrifice of farmland and towns in a 20 km radius... but it's okay, you see, because that's exactly what this reactor was designed to do! It performed completely 100% within specifications and we're all just so proud! Here, have another five near your town!"
a 'solution' that dumps even more toxic pollutants into the environment BY DESIGN than nuclear does even in accidents.
It's a pity no such thing as a "scrubber" exists or could ever be attached to any coal-fired power station, ever. No amount of research or engineering could ever improve that technology. It's just not possible.
Nope, the only way forward is to invest the billions of dollars we could have put into a mythical "safe coal" into experimental fast breeder and pebble bed reactors, which are perfectly safe by design and can never have any problems, ever!
have to make compromises to deliver product at a price that doesn't include a safety premium.
"It's practically guaranteed to horribly kill you and everyone you love... but it's cheap!"
Failed wind turbines can be extremely dangerous, destroying buildings and killing people.
Yes, and when a wind turbine broke in a tornado in South Dokata in 1986, it contaminated the entire state with wind-active oxygen with a half-life of 30 years. No corn can grow there now for a century.
What this failure points out is a critical failure in site planning and design for site specific conditions.
That's not an argument in your favour. Why was that critical failure allowed to happen when the people overseeing the construction of the site were nuclear experts and should have known better? And claimed to be doing their homework, but obviously weren't? Who was overseeing the overseers, and why did they also fail in their job?
To me that proves that at the time the Mark 1 BWRs were deployed, the organisations deploying them were not competent to do so and were misrepresenting the risks involved.
I'm not confident that today's nuclear organisations are any more competent or honest than they were in the 1970s, and that's why I don't trust them to build out a new wave of hotter, more experimental reactors.
Yes absent a Fukushima type disaster, coal is in many respects dirtier than nuclear, particularly on a climatic level.
Because it's absolutely impossible to invent and add any kind of emission scrubber to a coal plant?
Even though the research and technology to do so is far cheaper than designing and building new experimental nuclear reactors, which would need exactly the same kind of emission protection except on a far more heavy-duty scale?
Sorry, not buying the "coal is dirtier than nukes" angle. It seems like saying "smoking has killed more people than radium watches, so lick your paintbrushes all you like."
Nuclear is only "safe" - so far - because insane amounts of money have been poured into trying to make sure the darn things don't melt down all the time, because we haven't fully accounted for the total lifecycle costs of fuel disposal yet and site decommissioning yet, and even then they seem to have "once in a thousand years" scale accidents about once every quarter century.
I have heard reports about how quickly people were evacuated from the exclusion zone
Sure.
Ever wonder how long it will be before people can safely come back into the exclusion zone?
When a coal plant explodes, it doesn't tend to contaminate 400 square miles of farmland for decades.
People don't seem to say this was a failure of management or engineering in these discussions.
Why do you suppose that is?
First, because the commercial viability and public acceptance of nuclear power hinges on the claim that in nuclear plants, management and engineering are exact sciences which can reduce danger to practically zero. It is not good for PR to accept the fact that management and engineering can fail - even worse, that it can fail while claiming to succeed.
If we knew that the engineering of the GE BWR Mark 1 was stuffed up? They would never have been built. If we knew that TEPCO's management was stuffed up? We would never have let them run the plant. But we didn't. Why didn't we? Possibly because we don't have the capability to tell whether any given implementation of management and engineering in any field is, in fact, working fine or is a walking molten disaster heap waiting to happen. And if so, that should scare us.
It seems similar to the absurd security situation we see in software patching at the moment, and in the financial meltdown. In both cases we have products riddled with vulnerabilities which claim to be the product of strict, scientific, automated environments - and yet, the parties releasing the products into the wild don't appear to have done basic due diligence on how and whether they will fail. In every instance of a vulnerability, there has been a clear failure of both engineering and management but even worse, these failures appear to be systemic and ongoing and not self-correcting. We just walk away from each predictable disaster, pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, and keep doing the same things.
This tendency towards self-deception is going to bite us all across the spectrum, in every part of our industrial interlinked society. Not just in nuclear.
What I seem to be hearing is that it's dangerous, but the danger can be managed.
Yes, that's the line we've been fed by the nuclear power industry for 60 years. "The danger can be managed." Problem is, Fukushima is only the last of a long line of accidents which should never have happened according to the probability scenarios used to manage the danger.
a single incident at a 40 year old plant, due to extreme circumstances, with no deaths
No dramatic and initial deaths. That's not quite the same thing.
This is the big problem with nuclear accidents: they release toxic substances into the environment which remain toxic for centuries and kill slowly over time. Each time one of these happens, it contaminates land and water, and that contamination doesn't go away.
This is why nuclear reactors are scary to people who have some imagination and can think beyond the bounds of "normal operating scenario" into "what if something goes wrong which should never go wrong?" territory.
is going to set back production of new plants
Yes, that would be a positive outcome if you're not convinced that new nuclear plants are a net long-term win to humankind.
As far as explosions go, there's just as much danger from too much fertilizer being stored in one place as there is from any plant, nuclear or not.
The point is its not just photogenic Hollywood explosions that we're talking about. It's toxic leaks of long-term radioisotopes accumulating in the environment. Not nearly as easy to measure or as exciting to report, but once it gets out of the bottle, you can't put it back in.
The interesting thing is that a power reactor meltdown, small and benign as it might look compared to a nuclear bomb, can actually release more radionucleotides into the environment than an outdoor nuclear test. Plus, it does it in a location much closer to inhabited cities and farmland.
We don't really want a lot more of those.
How dumb and naive would they be if they *did* trust their employees?
Well, they'd be consistent with the ideology of openness if they did. As it is, Wikileaks appears to be morphing from an open-source intelligence collective into something midway between an independent journalism organisation and a private intelligence agency in the style of "Global Frequency". While either of those are possibly not a bad thing to have, it is a bit depressing to see that the desire for openness evaporates when it faces real secrets with real consequences.
a huge waste of power to produce, embrittles every damn metal it touches, leaks out of everything and is in general a huge pain in the ass to work with.
Great, so hydrogen will be the perfect companion to nuclear fission.
Mmm, the book that tells employees we should be happy to be treated like laboratory animals forced to run endless booby-trapped mazes for inscrutable Others, and possibly with a nice spot of vivisection lined up at retirement.
That's very, um, inspiring.
Shouldn't that be, "Don't put all your business in one apple."
Don't put all your worms in one apple?
Capitalism is ALL ABOUT anti-competitive. Its not about being nice to your competition, its about driving them out of business.
Why do people have this retarded idea that businesses are all supposed to be nice to each other?
From the Reagan Revolution, where the rollback of social compassion was considered "morning in America" and naked greed was supposed to turn everyone into moral paragons via the magic of the Invisible Hand.
Ronnie and his mates put a happy smiley face on the backstabbing. That's why kids today think that a no-holds-barred economic war of all against all and the enslavement of the poor by the rich means "freedom" and will even preserve "traditional values" - even though that's logically contradictory.
Yes, I sound like an angry Marxist. Maybe I am. I'm no fan of Stalinist central bureaucracy, that's just aristocracy by another name, but I'm tired of the lies that make people think unchecked capitalism can coexist with friendly competition. It can't. You either choose to maximise your profit at any cost (some people today think that it's even a moral duty of a corporation to make money!) or you choose to treat your fellow humans as sentient beings.
It doesn't always pay to do the right thing, and we've known that since Biblical times, but maybe we shouldn't evaluate everything by a min-max formula and use our hearts and minds instead.
This isn't capitalism. ... Why is Apple able to dictate the wholesale price of books to retailers other than Apple?
Because they can. The nasty little truth of capitalism is that it is self-contradictory. It preaches "eternal competition" but the process of competition destroys itself, creating oligopolies and cartels, which devolve into rent-seeking, landlordism and its spoiled child, hereditary feudalism. Capital seeks profit, not freedom, and the American experience from Columbus to Lincoln should have taught everyone that rational self-interested profit-seeking is perfectly compatible with literal chattel slavery. Only those meddling liberals stopped the "free market" doing what it wished in the 1860s, and good lord did they catch hell for it ever since.