While I do think a "vast number of errors and safety lapses" is unlikely to come out of a cult (note the word) of engineering which embraces ritual suicide as the cost of failure...
This is about human psychology, rather than reliability in the engineering sense. I truly believe it would lead to better safety, but not perfect safety.
The idea is that yes, all or most of the engineers involved in a nuclear accident of any significance would kill themselves. Not only would their knowledge be lost, their fellow nuclear engineers would carve their names on a black stone, bury it in the earth beneath their corrupted stain, and never mention them again. Their families would be rewarded only if they showed honor by staying to fight the nuclear corruption, and dying honorably when the disaster is contained.
This won't work perfectly, but it would let society as a whole live with the contradiction inherent in nuclear power: it sustains us, while running the risk of turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation.
This is also pure thought experiment: what would it take to have a culture of safety as serious as the threat of nuclear disaster? I'm not willing to pay this price, and yet, I'm thoroughly familiar with the mass balance equations governing extractable energy and haven't a clue how to post-carbon without at least some nuclear.
running the risk of turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation.
But here's the thing: we have already had two "nuclear accidents of any significance": Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Neither of those came even remotely close to "turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation". Nor will Fukushima. Yes, it's very bad for people near the plant, and for fishermen in the surrounding waters. But on a global scale, it's just not that big.
what would it take to have a culture of safety as serious as the threat of nuclear disaster?
Wrong question; the answer to it ask you ask it is that we already have a culture of safety at least that serious, with regard to nuclear power, because we treat nuclear power far more strictly than we treat other sources of power (like coal) that pose greater overall risk to humans. If we're going to effectively ban nuclear reactors because we're worried about radiation, we should also ban coal because we're worried about deaths from mining. And we should ban oil because of the risk of something like the Deepwater Horizon spill.
There isn't a simple solution to any of this; but a good start would be to be open and realistic about all the risks of all power sources.
Coal is much less dangerous for those who live near the power plant.
Oh, I should have added: this claim isn't really true either. The WHO estimates that a million people die each year due to air pollution from coal plants. This is many orders of magnitude higher than the annual average deaths related to nuclear energy.
The difference is, there isn't a worldwide push to ban coal because of this; instead, there's a push to scrub the plant emissions to remove the pollution. So again, nuclear is treated much more strictly than other power sources, relative to its actual risk.
Its like motor vehicle accidents Vs airplane crashes. More people die on car accidents but infrequent airplane accidents get a lot more press and strict government regulation.
>Coal is much less dangerous for those who live near the power plant
I don't believe so. Toxicity and Emissions of a coal-fire power plant does severely affect those in the neighborhood. Studies show that radiation dose is comparable. As and Se are found to have higher concentrations in soil samples.
Yes, but the coal plant won't suffer a catastrophic failure. It has negative effects, sure, but they're diffuse, not acute, like a nuclear meltdown is.
It has negative effects, sure, but they're diffuse, not acute, like a nuclear meltdown is.
So killing or having adverse health effects on far more people is OK, as long as the effects are diffuse? I'm not following the logic here. The number of people affected by Fukushima, even on the worst-case estimates, is less than the number of people affected in a year by the various aspects of coal plants that posters here have mentioned.
You're not following the logic because you're using a global perspective, while I'm using a local perspective, based on self-interest. I'm not arguing for or against nuclear power, except to say that the acute effects of a potential meltdown lead to a lot of NIMBY folks.
I'm using a local perspective, based on self-interest.
And I'm saying that this local perspective (which I understand might not be yours, you might just be trying to articulate the perspective of the NIMBY folks) is flawed, because it doesn't treat equal impacts on self-interest equally. It protests against nuclear plants, while not protesting at all against coal plants that have a greater impact on the same person's self-interest, simply because the impact of the coal plant is "diffuse": it pollutes their lungs over time, all the time, instead of bringing some probability of being in a Fukushima zone, but the total impact on expected years of life (or expected quality of life) for that person is still greater for the coal plant.
I understand that this perspective is common, but that doesn't make it right.
Furthermore, the risks of emphysema and cancer due to coal pollution are underrated. Coal causes much more deaths among people who don't live in coal plants than we like to pretend. (Conversely, nuclear is safer on the balance.)
The amount of radiation that comes out of a coal plant (mainly from Cesium 151) on a yearly basis far exceeds that of a nuclear power plant in its lifetime.
Does that mean you're not concerned about the deaths from coal mining? You're only concerned about the risks that impact you personally? That doesn't seem to be a common attitude: if it were, nobody would have complained about the Deepwater Horizon spill except people who lived on the Gulf coast. (And nobody would complain about nuclear power except those who had to live near a plant.)
>Does that mean you're not concerned about the deaths from coal mining?
No, it doesn't. It's a difference between risks taken willingly by the people who benefit from the outcome, and risks imposed on people who don't have a choice and don't stand to benefit. And it's obvious that it was meant that way. Don't be deliberately obtuse.
I imagine you've heard of the recommendation for pregnant women and small children not to consume too much fish in their diet.
The largest part of that mercury comes from coal-burning power plants. Coal power has contaminated the entire planet to the point where any food from the ocean has to be limited for vulnerable people.
There is no way you can possibly say that coal doesn't impose risks on people who don't have a choice and don't stand to benefit.
Coal is far more dangerous than nuclear by nearly every measure. The only reason it's more generally accepted is because that danger is spread out over a much wider area. Global coal power is analogous to a constant, ongoing Chernobyl, except instead of covering a small chunk of Europe, the same effects are diluted over the entire planet.
We all pay a measurable and fairly significant price for coal power generation in terms of shortened lives and increased chances of various disease. Nuclear power has not contaminated the planet to even remotely the same degree.
I personally think nuclear power can be made relatively safe, and that fears about accidents are exaggerated. I welcome disagreement there, but it's not possible to make a charitable comparison with coal in any way. The disparity in opinions and dangers between nuclear and coal is very real.
risks imposed on people who don't have a choice and don't stand to benefit
Huh? People do have a choice to move if they don't want to live near a power plant. And the plant is making the electricity they use, so they do benefit from it.
(That said, plenty of nuclear plants have been killed because the people who would have lived near the plant protested.)
Probably the majority don't. The poorer you are the less choices you have. If they can move its probably to another undesirable location. I doubt that those who live by power plants are wealthy.
No, the poorer you are the less attractive choices you have. But you still have the ability to weigh your choices and pick the one that poses you the least risk, all things considered.
> This is about human psychology, rather than reliability in the engineering sense. I truly believe it would lead to better safety, but not perfect safety.
The problem is that you have no idea how Process Safety works, or even what it is, judging by your posts. As the parent to this post explained, these major hazard events are probabilistic, not deterministic. That means that they can never be completely eliminated, only guarded against and reduced to the point that the benefit is understood to outweigh the risk. There will always be risk.
You suggest that the engineers responsible for designing the plant should commit suicide if this once in a million year event takes place. What about the businessmen who accepted the risk? Or the government who stipulated what the tolerable risk was? Or the people who moved nearby, aware of the risk? Or the workers on the plant who, knowing what the correct maintenance procedures were to keep the plant safely operational, ignored them because it was 'too hard'? What if the root cause was a vector of risk which was poorly understood by everyone at the time? Or the engineering specification was correct, but the materials vendor skimped on QA? Or were lied to by one of their plants? Or a subcontractor of the plant? Etc etc etc.
What you propose, even as a thought experiment, is futile. Because even if you could reduce the risk to only systematic errors made in engineering design, if there was a perceived need or benefit to design the plant, you could always find a group of engineers desperate enough, naive enough, or vain enough to take on the risk. And therefore society as a whole would not be safer.
As it happens there's a large body of engineering knowledge which goes into making dangerous plants 'safe enough' to outweigh the risks to their workers, owners, and society at large. It's not foolproof, but arguably it does a good job of allowing societies to benefit from the dangerous processes we seem so desperate to use. And don't kid yourself - just because these massive events incur a media feeding frenzy, doesn't mean smaller hazardous occurrences don't affect the lives of thousands of people every year. Should we kill everyone who could in some way be held accountable for another's death or injury?
In short, don't let fear guide you into silly knee-jerk reactions. There are massive problems inherent with dangerous processes, and most of them relate to the very human failures of laziness and greed. We're working to improve the situation constantly, but it's a long road and a constant battle.
This is about human psychology, rather than reliability in the engineering sense. I truly believe it would lead to better safety, but not perfect safety.
The idea is that yes, all or most of the engineers involved in a nuclear accident of any significance would kill themselves. Not only would their knowledge be lost, their fellow nuclear engineers would carve their names on a black stone, bury it in the earth beneath their corrupted stain, and never mention them again. Their families would be rewarded only if they showed honor by staying to fight the nuclear corruption, and dying honorably when the disaster is contained.
This won't work perfectly, but it would let society as a whole live with the contradiction inherent in nuclear power: it sustains us, while running the risk of turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation.
This is also pure thought experiment: what would it take to have a culture of safety as serious as the threat of nuclear disaster? I'm not willing to pay this price, and yet, I'm thoroughly familiar with the mass balance equations governing extractable energy and haven't a clue how to post-carbon without at least some nuclear.