[HN Gopher] The Windscale Fire: Britain's 'Chernobyl' (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
The Windscale Fire: Britain's 'Chernobyl' (2019)
Author : myth_drannon
Score : 53 points
Date : 2023-05-03 10:17 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mirror.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mirror.co.uk)
| EliRivers wrote:
| Apropos of the theme, I have a family member who does height
| work. Every year (typically in the months where weather will
| allow), he gets contracted to do some disassembly of buildings at
| Sellafield (Windscale as was). What follows is hearsay, but still
| fun :)
|
| The typical way to raze building involves just knocking them
| down; these are actual disassemblies. They'll go up and unbolt
| and slice off pieces, and carefully lower them, where they'll be
| examined and tagged and bagged for onwards disposal. It's a
| really expensive way to remove a building. There are sections of
| the site where he's been told "do NOT stop walking in front of
| THIS building". There are rooms (and maybe entire buildings) for
| which the records of what radioactive fun went on in them have
| been lost. There are dangerously radioactive (provenance unknown)
| things effectively dumped in ponds that have to be removed
| carefully, a piece at a time, possibly involving underwater
| disassembly. Possibly including a car that sucked up a big dose
| of something it shouldn't and needed to be made relatively safer,
| quickly.
|
| The only saving grace is that when you have to disassemble things
| so slowly, the handful of people hired to do it can literally
| only be paid so much per day. It's going to cost orders of
| magnitude more than just knocking a building down, but spread
| over decades and decades.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Oh! And people get upset at paying taxes.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Your family member is hopefully wearing a dosimeter while doing
| all that. Sounds scary as can be.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| Anyone working in a facility like this is absolutely wearing
| multiple dosimeters.
|
| They will have a cumulative exposure meter, this measures a
| total amount of dosage over a period of time and is how
| official things like monthly/yearly/lifetime limits for
| radiation workers are calculated. This meter is for things
| like "oops you went 2% over your yearly radiation dose and
| it's only November you have to stop working until January or
| you increase your lifetime cancer risk by .94%"
|
| They will also have an acute meter, this is basically a tiny
| geiger counter which alarms above specific levels. This is
| for situations like "oh shit that pipe you just stepped next
| to has a leak and if you don't leave the room in the next 60
| seconds, your never going to have any kids (or much worse)."
|
| In some highly critical locations, it's possible for people
| to wear multiples of each of these, especially the cumulative
| meters because they are cheap and there might be multiple
| stakeholders who each have a process for ensuring compliance
| (e.g. your employer requires one, the facility requires one
| and the government requires one) -- this is rare bureaucratic
| nonsense but happens.
|
| For the acute meters you might have multiple just for
| redundancy. It would really suck if you don't find out you're
| getting an abnormal dose until your friend walks into the
| room you've been standing in for an hour, or worse, when your
| cumulative meter is read days/weeks later.
| robocat wrote:
| * * *
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| https://archive.ph/aEJxE
| HPsquared wrote:
| Such an awful name, given what happened.
| Neil44 wrote:
| Strange choice linking to the Mirror version of this story.
| cduzz wrote:
| There's a great documentary about this on youtube --
| https://youtu.be/x_pWgRx7lno
|
| It's an amazing story.
|
| I wonder how much of the workplace health and safety processes
| from the blitz were still somewhat in force here. For instance
| there was a mid-blitz technique of soaking unexploded bombs in
| liquid oxygen to cool and pause a battery in the anti-tamper
| device that otherwise made the bomb impossible to defuse. But
| golly, that's an unhealthy sentence to type in a 2020s not-at-war
| part of the world.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| The event was not an isolated incident; there had been a series
| of radioactive discharges from the piles in the years leading up
| to the accident. In the spring of 1957, only months before the
| fire, there was a leak of radioactive material in which
| strontium-90 isotopes were released into the environment. Like
| the later fire, this incident was also covered up by the British
| government. Later studies on the release of radioactive material
| due to the Windscale fire revealed that much of the contamination
| had resulted from such radiation leaks before the fire.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| This is a literal copy/paste from the Wikipedia article, word
| for word.
| Luc wrote:
| Amazing how nobody got hurt really. Luckily iodine-131 has a half
| life of 8 days.
| 1equalsequals1 wrote:
| About 200 people died from cancers related to this
| Luc wrote:
| That was the prediction. But ultimately no correlation was
| found.
|
| Source: Mahaffey, "Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear
| Meltdowns and Disasters"
| [deleted]
| awaythrow98765 wrote:
| This is assuming the LNT (linear no threshold) model of
| radiation damage is true. Which it probably isn't. Lower than
| predicted deaths from accidents such as Windscale/Sellafield
| are sometimes taken as arguments against LNT.
|
| However, in all such discussions, one needs to be aware of
| the strong interest of the British government to keep all
| things around it's nuclear weapons program secret. So maybe
| the public figures are fake.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Few things in medicine are linear. DNA has error-correcting
| codes, much like a hard drive or network connection.
|
| In hard drives or networks, errors are tolerable below a
| certain threshold. It's a different story once
| unrecoverable errors start to occur (data loss, system
| crashes, perhaps errors getting caught by higher-level
| things like exceptions).
|
| I'd expect DNA, cells and biological systems are probably
| similar. The error correcting mechanisms can probably
| handle some errors up to a threshold (which probably itself
| varies between individuals).
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| It would have been a lot worse without "Cockcroft's Folly" -
| massive filters built on top of the "chimneys" that caught
| radioactive crud coming up the stack.
|
| These reactors weren't build for nuclear power or anything, they
| were built to create the right kind of nuclear materials for
| weapons. They were essentially a couple of bloody great big
| nuclear bonfires!
|
| He also along with Ernest Walton developed the Cockcroft-Walton
| multiplier, which is a clever arrangement of capacitors and
| diodes that produce a very high voltage from an AC source.
| Initially these were used in "atom smashing" cyclotrons, but came
| to be used in every CRT television you've ever seen.
| pfdietz wrote:
| There is a somewhat similar technology for LWRs: systems that
| filter soluble fission products (including iodine in second
| generation systems) from steam so the steam can be vented from
| the containment structure in an accident. These would have been
| very useful at Fukushima.
|
| https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1224/ML12248A021.pdf
|
| The Cockcroft-Walton scheme was not for cyclotrons, but rather
| for a simple linear potential drop accelerator. Cyclotrons
| build up the energy of particles over many iterations, so they
| don't need that high a voltage.
| dang wrote:
| There's a good article about that which was discussed here:
|
| _Windscale Piles: Cockcroft 's Follies avoided nuclear
| disaster_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558045 - Nov
| 2014 (15 comments)
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Indeed, people should always bear in mind Windscale was a
| nuclear weapons facility hidden inside a power plant than a
| genuine attempt at a power station.
| Maakuth wrote:
| From what I've read, I don't think there was any sort of
| power plant around even for pretense.
| ianburrell wrote:
| I think the worlds first commercial nuclear reactors had
| just started operating at the time of the accident. But
| they were separate and built later.
| azubinski wrote:
| "...resulted in a tragedy worse than Chernobyl"
|
| Tragedies are tragedies, and only scoundrels compete on the scale
| of tragedies.
|
| But in fairness, this accident was small compared to Chernobyl:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
| epmatsw wrote:
| Reminds me a bit of the Rocky Flats fire & contamination
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_contamination_from...
| JohnCClarke wrote:
| I've noticed there are a lot of people on this site who favor
| nuclear energy.
|
| Given that it's just a technology choice, and that there are much
| cheaper [1], faster, options available I wonder why?
|
| --- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quI_8xYSWYE
| petercooper wrote:
| A good video! Just to attempt a potentially frivolous answer to
| your question, the "race" in her video is about economic
| factors and this is often not particularly interesting to
| engineering minded folks, whereas nuclear power has all sorts
| of fun challenges, options, and processes going on. It's more
| _interesting_ , perhaps, even if it's not the best option in a
| pragmatic sense.
| JohnCClarke wrote:
| TBH: That's I think too!
| mrguyorama wrote:
| There is a pervasive narrative in certain groups that
| renewables fundamentally cannot do "the job" of providing power
| for all of humanity. They cherry pick issues from current small
| scale deployments, ignore all the times and places it works
| just fine, and claim that only nuclear can handle our needs
| without reducing our way of life.
|
| This is done at least by some in order to attempt to get
| funding redirected away from solar and wind and storage
| projects and research into the money pit of nuclear power
| plants and research. They do this because they actually care
| about having to rely on fossil fuels for as long as possible.
|
| This is why a lot of conservatives in Texas believe their
| winter storm horrors were caused by wind turbines, which they
| often call "windmills" for some reason, even though if you call
| a magazine "a clip" they will rip your head off and complain
| that you shouldn't be allowed to make policy about something
| you don't understand.
| gambiting wrote:
| Wait, I'm confused. In countries with heavy renewables
| investment in Europe, there are days when they make so much
| energy they have to export it, and there are days when the
| wind doesn't blow quite as much so they have to import energy
| instead.
|
| That is a fact, right? Not some right wing propaganda.
|
| So if we know this is a fact, how can we address the fact
| that renewables dip below what we need from time to time? How
| do you handle the baseload? I don't think that's
| "cherrypicking" - more like a fundamental issue that as far
| as I can see has only couple ways of being addressed - either
| have plants that run on fossil fuels, or.....nuclear power.
| Out of the two, nuclear wins easily when it comes to
| environmental cost, no?
|
| Like....is literally anything I said in any way
| controversial?
| olddustytrail wrote:
| At least one thing you said is a bit bizarre:
|
| > there are days when they make so much energy they have to
| export it
|
| "Oh no! Our power generation is making so much energy that
| we have to sell even more of it and make even more money!
| What a disaster!"
|
| You do get that power companies _want_ to make money,
| right?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| This was a bad accident and a fascinating story.
|
| I would like to just remind everyone of safety context, where the
| WHO is currently estimating 7 million premature deaths per year
| from particulate emissions from fossil and biofuel combustion
| energy sources.
|
| Despite several high-profile and memorable nuclear accidents,
| nuclear fission remains among the safest and cleanest ways we
| know to make electricity. Plus it's low-carbon to boot.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
| bazoom42 wrote:
| > 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate
| emissions from fossil and biofuel combustion energy sources.
|
| Does this include emissions from stuff like motor vehicles,
| kitchen stoves etc? Or just emissions from power plants which
| could reasonably be replaced with nuclear?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| 3 million is indoor cook stoves on biofuel without
| ventilation. 4 is all ambient air pollution, mostly from
| fossil power plants but including cars.
|
| Car fossil can be reasonably replaced with nuclear through
| electric vehicles. Same with stoves.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Something like windscale would never be built again either. It
| was an air cooled research reactor designed to make weapon
| fuel, not power generation or anything useful for civilian
| purposes. As they learned, air cooling at that scale was a
| terrible idea and never used again.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Air-cooled reactor... that horrifies me. But it was built
| before they really knew what they were playing with.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Not really, everyone knew this was dangerous. For the UK it
| was either "do this or don't make nuclear weapons"
| Gwypaas wrote:
| > I would like to just remind everyone of safety context, where
| the WHO is currently estimating 7 million premature deaths per
| year from particulate emissions from fossil and biofuel
| combustion energy sources.
|
| Great that the alternative in 2023 are renewables and not
| fossil fuel then!
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Biofuel is renewable and kills about 3 million of the 7 from
| particulates. Renewable is not the goal. Low carbon and clean
| are.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Now you are being disingenuous. Everyone reputable
| separates "traditional biofuels", which include poorer
| people cooking over open wood fires, from modern biofuels.
|
| Traditional biofuels are being replaced with renewables at
| an incredible pace since it allows for distributed power
| generation, and a better life, globally.
|
| Modern biofuels are one alternative among others, including
| synthetic fuels, likely to be used for long-distance air
| travel and ocean-crossing commercial shipping. That is an
| incredibly tiny source of pollution today and one that we
| will very easily regulate to handle potential particle
| emissions in the future.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| No need to insult. I think most people agree that low-
| carbon, long-term sustainable, clean are the goals, not
| renewability. It's widely accepted that some renewables
| like biofuel in general have both air pollution and
| climate challenges. Take a look at the IPCC's lifecycle
| CO2 assessments for proof.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| And you get 5-10x the people using electricity instead of
| burning either biofuels or fossil fuels using renewables.
|
| What are we optimizing for here? Impact or through any
| means possible justifying nuclear?
| Mindwipe wrote:
| The problem is -
|
| a) the British state has a very, very long track record of
| lying about domestic nuclear, so the public finds any safety
| claims hard to take seriously.
|
| b) the main issue with nuclear power in the UK is economic -
| the public have had to take on genuinely enormous liabilities
| in pensions and cleanup liabilities from every previous
| attempt, so do not take the cost projections for future sites
| at face value. And quite rationally so. But if we assume that
| liability overruns from the taxpayer were to happen at the same
| rate, the economic case for nuclear versus renewables on a
| small, windy, rainy island with a lot of tides disappears.
| pjc50 wrote:
| c) up until about 1990, nuclear reactors using U -> Pu cycles
| were a critical component of building nuclear weapons, and
| the _designed intent_ of nuclear weapons was casualty figures
| in the _hundreds of millions_. This sat uneasily alongside a
| policy of "of course we don't intend to actually do that
| unless threatened".
|
| Every now and again people remember this when looking at
| Iran, Ukraine, Taiwan etc.
|
| d) the last UK agriculture impact of the 1986 Chernobyl
| disaster were lifted in 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-
| england-cumbria-18299228
| DrBazza wrote:
| a) evidence?
|
| What the UK has a long long track record of, is CND and
| Greenpeace misrepresenting or outright lying to the general
| public about all aspects of nuclear power and often
| conflating it with nuclear weapons. I trust scientists over
| Doris, 63, from Derby, who doesn't like nuclear power 'for
| reasons'.
|
| b) All Western countries have an economic problem with
| nuclear power because the government has been involved since
| day one for obvious military reasons, limiting the ability to
| commercialise it and hence reduce costs. SpaceX launches cost
| 10% of government launches because they've been allowed to
| commercialise rockets.
| scraptor wrote:
| How about the events mentioned in TFA, where the government
| covered up the extent of the radiation leak from the fire
| in the nuclear plant of unsafe design operated despite
| repeated accidents, which would have resulted in
| catastrophic release of uranium dust if not for the
| individual decision by the the project lead to build
| filters into the chimneys despite ridicule from the rest of
| the team?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| a) OP's article includes the observation that a report into
| a serious fire was suppressed for 30 years. Perhaps start
| your search for evidence with what has already been
| provided, and then broaden to include the whole history of
| the plant.
|
| b) it seems like the high costs are less a function of
| government inefficiency than the fact that reprocessing for
| weapon production is difficult and dangerous, which adds to
| the cost. Commercial endeavors don't have or want to
| produce plutonium, but if you think that private industry
| is somehow immune from the creation of negative
| externalities, corner-cutting, or cover-ups then I've got
| an incredible new cryptocurrency opportunity just for you.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It has been commercialised? What are EDF and Westinghouse?
| Even Rolls-Royce is touting the small modular reactor
| beloved of HN. The problem is that the UK government
| contracting out to privateish nuclear (state-owned EDF and
| China General Nuclear Power Group) still hasn't reduced
| costs.
|
| No, the cost advantage of SpaceX is that they're allowed to
| fail. This cannot apply to the nuclear industry.
| itronitron wrote:
| After reading The Greenpeace Book of the Nuclear Age, which
| chronicles all major nuclear incidents (up to the 1990's I think)
| I had two key takeaways. There are far more missing nuclear
| submarines than I would have ever expected, and Britain does not
| have the right cultural mindset for dealing with nuclear safety.
| Apologies if that offends anyone.
| pookha wrote:
| I'm very hopeful that within a hundred years this madness will
| stop and nuclear power will be common place. It's evolved and
| come along way since Chernobyl... Small modular reactor's and
| molten salt reactors can pump out more than enough clean energy
| and without the fear mongering and waste side effects.
| Apologies to British Petroleum
| myrmidon wrote:
| What exactly gives you any confidence that nuclear power will
| ever experience a resurgence in the future?
|
| To me, it appears to be a niche technology with a host of
| problems (fuel mining, decomissioning and fuel reprocessing
| are dirty and expensive) that is completely incapable of
| competing with renewable power on cost already, and current
| trendlines (plant vs. wind/solar/battery costs) are
| absolutely NOT favorable.
|
| I encounter this highly (and IMO irrationally) favorable view
| of nuclear power very frequently on HN and would really like
| to understand why this is so prevalent...
| pookha wrote:
| The newer breed of reactors should win out...
|
| For example MSR's can operate at very high temperatures,
| can recycle nuclear waste, don't use fuel-rod's and can be
| made to be smaller and more economical than the older
| pressurized water reactors that you're referring too.
|
| https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/spotlight-on-
| innovation...
| myrmidon wrote:
| That reads like a fluff piece to me, which seems
| unsurprising considering the source; my understanding is
| that all we have right now are research reactors, i.e.
| the things are not really suitable for commercial use
| even if they could already be built/deployed quickly and
| at scale (which they can't).
|
| And that makes the economics just wishful thinking-- to
| back them up, we would need first a finalized, commercial
| design, then to actually build it in some numbers, and
| verify cost effectiveness. And this is a point that
| renewables already reached a decade ago, while still
| getting cheaper...
|
| Nuclear power in general also suffers from the big
| problem that it becomes even less attractive the more
| cheap intermittent power is available, because all the
| costs are fixed; just turning these on when there is no
| wind/sun makes the already bad cost efficiency even
| worse...
| pookha wrote:
| This wind-and-solar religious argument isn't necessary
| and I'm guessing it's based in European poltics. I'm OK
| with wind and solar but not at the scale where it's the
| only option... And that's because it doesn't work at
| scale... As Germany found out you can't meet peek demand
| with just wind and solar:
|
| https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-
| failure-...
|
| They have "dark doldrums" and have to revert to natural
| gas and diesel power plants (which is why BP and American
| energy companies push wind and solar). On top of that you
| can't just cover the entire countryside in massive wind
| turbines or solar panels. You've got protected species
| and you've got NIMBY. Why push the endless political
| pissing matches when you could easily develop nuclear
| power too? Do both. Let nuclear power handle the
| doldrums.
| myrmidon wrote:
| The article you linked is full of opinionated pessimistic
| whining, but since its over 3 years old its easy to
| compare its negative outlook on renewable focused policy
| with actual results:
|
| According to https://energy-
| charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm, current
| german electricity mix is ~50% renewable since beginning
| of the year. Used to be 35% in 2018. So the "unreachable"
| target of 80% in 2050 seems completely trivial; just keep
| doing things at a similar rate and that target is in
| reach within a single decade (!!).
|
| Intermittency of renewable sources is a problem that has
| multiple perfectly viable solutions, namely
| overprovisioning, storage, grid connectivity and peaker
| plants. Finding the most cost effective mix of those (and
| adjusting it over time as technology evolves) is a
| problem that the free market is _perfectly_ equipped to
| solve.
|
| Area consumption is not a big issue, neither for solar
| nor for wind, because roofs and agriculture (and the off-
| shore option in the case of wind).
|
| Nuclear power is a bad mix with renewables because it's
| already too expensive and building it for peak loads
| makes that drastically worse since it's all fixed cost
| basically. Gas powered plants are super attractive with
| renewables because of the very same dynamics (cheap
| installation costs and variable costs that largely depend
| on actual utilization).
|
| In the _extremely_ unlikely case that battery technology
| fails completely it would always be possible to use
| hydrogen as energy storage in combination with refitted
| gas peaker plants. But that scenario appears unlikely to
| me.
|
| Also note that renewables have already overtaken nuclear
| power in the US, too; given recent experiences with the
| nuclear industry it seems EXTREMELY unlikely to me that
| this trend would ever reverse.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Certain people push this narrative that renewables cannot
| meet any need, basically at all, and are pushing that we
| should invest in nuclear instead, precisely because it is
| expensive and will go no where for quite some time so that
| fossil fuels continue to be needed for longer. It's
| intentionally done to try to handicap renewable energy
| progress.
| inkcapmushroom wrote:
| Renewables have obvious deficiencies which are not
| resolved simply by having more of them. By shunning
| nuclear you choose to have fossil fuel power plants
| everywhere to keep the flow of power consistent and
| matching demand. Grid-level storage is just as much of an
| unsolved problem as affordable nuclear, but while getting
| nuclear costs down is a matter of iterating and improving
| existing technologies, grid-level storage will likely
| require brand new technologies which are far from
| guaranteed.
|
| At this point I don't think nuclear is the way; I think
| it's got too many hurdles and we don't have enough time
| to figure it out in a safe way, if we ever can get the
| costs down and improve safety at the same time. But it's
| undeniably attractive as a nearly carbon-free energy
| source.
|
| Deciding that anyone with a different opinion than yours
| on a complex topic must be some kind of shill for big oil
| is doing yourself a disservice.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The madness is people in charge of nuclear facilities being
| able to cover up accidents with the complicity of
| governments. Windscale is now called Sellafield because it
| had acquired such a bad reputation that the UK government
| decided to just give it a nicer name as a PR move. In
| addition to incidents described in OP's article, operators
| dumped ~200kg of plutonium into the Irish Sea in the 1950s,
| as well as other waste byproducts subsequently. These
| quantities are probably small enough not to present any great
| risk to life or local ecology, but using a small sea as a
| dumping ground without the agreement or even awareness of
| neighbors hardly builds confidence. There have also been
| numerous smaller scale incidents over the years:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents
|
| I'm pro-nuclear and share your optimism about small modern
| reactor designs. But _any_ nuclear proposal that doesn 't
| include safety and transparency as core values that take
| priority over _all_ other considerations deserves to be
| rejected. There 's a reason that people have grave doubts
| about the integrity of the nuclear industry, and it's not
| technical but social. There are way too many nuclear
| proposals that lead off with happy talk about the benefits,
| and defer discussion of safety, transparency, cost and so on
| until those issues are raised as objections. It's a PR
| strategy and I automatically distrust it, because that 'good
| vibes only' mindset is likely to embed itself in the
| subsequent management of the plant and lead to cover-your-ass
| style decision-making.
|
| tl;dr I like nuclear technology, it's the operators I don't
| trust.
| badcppdev wrote:
| Follow up question. Can you name a country that does have a
| good cultural mindset for nuclear safety?
|
| Years ago I used to naively assume the Japanese were very
| safety conscious and then I read details post-Fukushima that
| made me realise that the corporate managerial mindset rules
| there as well.
| willyt wrote:
| I've come to think that France might have a good culture in
| this respect. No major train crashes for years; there's never
| been a serious accident on the TGV. They have nuclear
| reactors all over the place and they seem to have managed to
| operate them safely. Airbus by all accounts seems to have a
| good safety culture.
|
| Maybe it's because of the 'fraternite' in 'liberte egalite
| fraternite; they have very strong culture of public
| solidarity and very low income inequality compared to say
| Britain or the US.
|
| And maybe that's why it doesn't cost a fortune to build high
| speed rail there as well; because there is a moral element to
| it that means you don't rip off your fellow countrymen.
| pookha wrote:
| France standardized all of their reactors. You could swap
| components in and out of any number of their nuclear
| reactors.
|
| https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-
| in-t...
|
| That's not how most other countries handled their nuclear
| power architecture and I think it's one of the main reasons
| why France has had major success with no issues. There's
| nothing flashy about how their nuclear reactors operate but
| they're very easy to staff and maintain long-term.
| jl6 wrote:
| It's not all good news though - more than half of the
| fleet were offline at one point last year, to repair
| cracks that had developed. Arguably the standardized
| design led to all these reactors having the same problem
| at about the same time, where some diversity of design
| might have limited the "blast radius" of this flaw.
| calaphos wrote:
| Noticably when encountering issues with welds last year
| they also shut down all reactors with shared components
| for inspection/maintenance.
|
| While this has been a real problem and got them into some
| supply tight spots over winter it definitely speaks for
| their approach to safety.
| martinald wrote:
| France has a gini coefficient of 32.4, UK 35.1. In
| comparison the US has one of 41.5, and Norway 27.7. There's
| not a huge difference in income inequality between France
| and the UK.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Don't be silly, everyone on HN knows that Europe has no
| industry! /sarcasm
|
| (more seriously, the French nuclear industry has avoided
| major disasters but at the cost of some expensive repairs
| as the fleet is aging together. At least they didn't skimp
| on the repairs.)
| George83728 wrote:
| > _There are far more missing nuclear submarines than I would
| have ever expected_
|
| Of all nuclear accidents, these are easily the _least_
| concerning. For one, only two western nuclear submarines have
| ever been lost and those were well publicized, nobody should be
| surprised by those. The Soviets /Russians lost quite a few,
| which I don't think many people would find surprising, but it's
| really not a big deal anyway from an environmental perspective.
| Sea water is excellent shielding, the wrecks are now used as
| habitats for all kinds of sea life which is unfazed by the
| radiation. As for heavy metal pollution, ocean water already
| has several _billion_ tons of uranium and other heavy metals
| dissolved in it, naturally. A few more tons from a few reactor
| cores is nothing.
|
| Quite frankly, we should view _deliberately_ dropping old
| nuclear reactors into the ocean as a practical and economical
| method of disposal. In fact, the Soviets and the UK have
| deliberately done this several times and (the US and
| Switzerland did too, to a much lesser extent.) There is no
| evidence that any of this has caused any harm to the
| environment.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Maybe they should be buried deeply, in subduction zones, far
| from human habitation, so that they are pulled deep into the
| Earth by plate tectonics.
| bequanna wrote:
| > Quite frankly, we should view deliberately dropping old
| nuclear reactors into the ocean as a practical and economical
| method of disposal.
|
| Imagine the optics! If this is a good solution it would most
| certainly have to be done by governments in secrecy.
| FredPret wrote:
| Is the number of missing nuclear submarines greater than
| zero???
| itronitron wrote:
| Yes, and you should read the book, it is very interesting and
| well written!
| wcoenen wrote:
| List of sunken nuclear submarines: https://en.wikipedia.org/w
| iki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submari...
|
| Edit: none of these seem to be "missing". I think they meant
| that there are a number of unrecovered (in some cases even
| intentionally scuttled) nuclear submarine wrecks.
| pjc50 wrote:
| There are a couple of missing nuclear weapons out there
| somewhere as well.
| pjc50 wrote:
| As some of the other comments have noted, Windscale (now
| Sellafield) was part of the British nuclear weapons programme.
| That covered everything in secrecy which was bad for public
| trust. And this has always been difficult to extricate from
| uranium-based processes. It's where the "peace" in "Greenpeace"
| comes from; a lot of historical opposition to nuclear reactors
| was driven by the knowledge that the resulting plutonium would be
| used to make even more bombs.
|
| The worst case of this was
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera , a foreshadow of
| the "weapons of mass destruction" excuse for attacking Iraq.
| jbyers wrote:
| This article is not particularly detailed, authoritative, or
| newsworthy. Wikipedia offers a better overview:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
| equalsione wrote:
| Revisiting the 1957 Windscale Nuclear Accident using Atmospheric
| Reanalysis data - The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC)
|
| https://www.ichec.ie/news/revisiting-1957-windscale-nuclear-...
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