> If you thought Bhopal and Exxon Valdez were bad, wait until some CEO decides to juice The Atomic Corporation's Q4 earnings by skipping a few safety inspections
Perhaps things are different now, but when I was going through the Navy's cram course for the [chief] engineer exam after two years of pretty-intensive sea duty, we worked through some what-if scenarios that they hadn't exposed us to in the year-long basic nuclear-propulsion course. That experience was a real eye-opener — especially coupled with having seen shipyard workers in "action" during my ship's in-port maintenance periods.
I still remember the exact moment in the cram course — sitting in a conference room at a Navy base on a gorgeous San Diego day — when I thought, oh, s__t, civilian workers shouldn't be running nuclear-power plants that are located anywhere near civilization. This was about a year before Three Mile Island and about eight years before Chernobyl.
To be clear, I was comfortable with the Navy's operating practices, which — thanks to the Rickover culture — were ferociously focused on safety and on second-checking everything in sight.
Supposedly there are inherently-safer civilian reactor designs out there now that are less vulnerable to human f*-ups; I haven't kept up and wouldn't be competent to judge.
> thanks to the Rickover culture — were ferociously focused on safety and on second-checking everything in sight.
So true. This also explains why France never had any major mishap degenerating into a severe accident.
There is an old joke: "1 worker opens some valve, 10 workers check that the valve is indeed open, 30 engineers study causes, consequences and ways to cope with this process".
However nothing is perfect, and a major accident may also be triggered by some terrorist/desperate mind/military/... action.
There are other parameters: hot waste, geo-strategic challenges tied to uranium, lowering ore grades inducing more and more polluting extraction processes...
Moreover we don't know how to build reactors anymore upon a decent schedule and budget: 9 out 10 of those built since the 2000's are late and overbudget, and most other ones are opaque projects.
Three Mile Island however was probably in part caused by the operations team on duty at the time being former Navy nukes: their instincts for what they needed to prevent going wrong were completely mismatched to the difference of design and scale - a 50MW navy reactor has basically no decay heat, whereas a 1GW electricity station is still putting out about that much in thermal energy even after its "shutdown" - which is proposed as an explanation for why they were so willing to keep overriding various automatic reactor cooling systems, since they just didn't internalize how much heat was actually still being produced.
Not necessarily: It depends on the power level the reactor was run at, and for what period of time. [0]
> they just didn't internalize how much heat was actually still being produced
It's not apparent that this was actually the case. I found this explanation, which makes sense to me (although I stress I have no particular knowledge of the incident): "... the [TMI] plant crew’s response was guided by wisdom received from another domain [i.e., Navy submarine plants]. ... They were under strict guidelines to never let the pressurizer go solid [which can be catastrophic in a submarine], and yet it was. The internal stress to meet this guideline was so severe, they left the rails and violated another guideline (shutting down the ECCS)." [1]
This actually reinforces my basic point above about the undesirability of putting pressurized-water reactors near civilian population centers: Human error is inevitable, and it's undesirable to have a system where such errors would be catastrophic if compounded — and human error can indeed come in multiples, with each error compounding the effects of earlier ones.
Here's a follow-up piece from the same author, about the effect confirmation bias at TMI and Fukushima (quoting another person): "Every reading that was true and really bad, they thought of as erroneous. Every reading that was erroneous but really good, they relied upon. That’s a trend that I always see in emergency response. Operators want to believe the instruments that lead them to the conclusion they want to get to." [2]
> Not necessarily: It depends on the power level the reactor was run at, and for what period of time. [0]
Yes it does - but the TMI plant was producing about 6% of its output power when it was put into shutdown, which is about 50MW - i.e. the full power of a much smaller Navy reactor.
> the TMI plant was producing about 6% of its output power when it was put into shutdown, which is about 50MW - i.e. the full power of a much smaller Navy reactor.
Are you taking heat density into account? An analogy comes to mind from summer outdoor-grilling season: A tiny chunk of glowing-hot charcoal doesn't produce nearly as much heat as does a bonfire, but the chunk of charcoal will still burn your hand pretty catastrophically.
Perhaps things are different now, but when I was going through the Navy's cram course for the [chief] engineer exam after two years of pretty-intensive sea duty, we worked through some what-if scenarios that they hadn't exposed us to in the year-long basic nuclear-propulsion course. That experience was a real eye-opener — especially coupled with having seen shipyard workers in "action" during my ship's in-port maintenance periods.
I still remember the exact moment in the cram course — sitting in a conference room at a Navy base on a gorgeous San Diego day — when I thought, oh, s__t, civilian workers shouldn't be running nuclear-power plants that are located anywhere near civilization. This was about a year before Three Mile Island and about eight years before Chernobyl.
To be clear, I was comfortable with the Navy's operating practices, which — thanks to the Rickover culture — were ferociously focused on safety and on second-checking everything in sight.
Supposedly there are inherently-safer civilian reactor designs out there now that are less vulnerable to human f*-ups; I haven't kept up and wouldn't be competent to judge.