☁️ chance of wicked rain
July 2, 2024 5:12 PM Subscribe
"Cloud problems offer no such assurances. They are inherently complex and unpredictable, and they usually have social, psychological, or political dimensions. Because of their dynamic, shape-shifting nature, trying to “fix” a cloud problem often ends up creating several new problems." [mit]
"For instance, to make nuclear reactors as reliable as jetliners, that industry would need to commit to one common reactor design, build tens of thousands of reactors, operate them for decades, suffer through thousands of catastrophes, slowly accumulate lessons and insights from those catastrophes, and then use them to refine that common reactor design.
"This obviously won’t happen."
cf. [Harper’s:] “It’s generational,” observed Navin. “If you were active in the environmental movement in the Seventies, if you went through Three Mile Island”—the plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that sparked panic in 1979 when it began melting down—“you’re likely to be antinuclear today. But for young people concerned about the environment, anyone under thirty-five, it’s not an issue. The polls barely registered a blip over Fukushima.”
. . .
Moorpark, a small town northwest of Los Angeles, became the first American community to draw its electricity from a nuclear reactor. Moorpark’s power came from the Sodium Reactor Experiment, operated by the Atomic Energy Commission at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory twenty miles away. …intoned Murrow. “Here at Moorpark, a chain reaction that started with [Fermi/wiki] washed the dishes and lit a book for a small boy to read.” No such lyrical announcement marked the day in July 1959 when the plant’s coolant system failed and its uranium oxide fuel rods began melting down. With the reactor running out of control and set to explode, desperate operators deliberately released huge amounts of radioactive material into the air for nearly two weeks, making it almost certainly the most dangerous nuclear accident in U.S. history.
"For instance, to make nuclear reactors as reliable as jetliners, that industry would need to commit to one common reactor design, build tens of thousands of reactors, operate them for decades, suffer through thousands of catastrophes, slowly accumulate lessons and insights from those catastrophes, and then use them to refine that common reactor design.
"This obviously won’t happen."
cf. [Harper’s:] “It’s generational,” observed Navin. “If you were active in the environmental movement in the Seventies, if you went through Three Mile Island”—the plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that sparked panic in 1979 when it began melting down—“you’re likely to be antinuclear today. But for young people concerned about the environment, anyone under thirty-five, it’s not an issue. The polls barely registered a blip over Fukushima.”
. . .
Moorpark, a small town northwest of Los Angeles, became the first American community to draw its electricity from a nuclear reactor. Moorpark’s power came from the Sodium Reactor Experiment, operated by the Atomic Energy Commission at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory twenty miles away. …intoned Murrow. “Here at Moorpark, a chain reaction that started with [Fermi/wiki] washed the dishes and lit a book for a small boy to read.” No such lyrical announcement marked the day in July 1959 when the plant’s coolant system failed and its uranium oxide fuel rods began melting down. With the reactor running out of control and set to explode, desperate operators deliberately released huge amounts of radioactive material into the air for nearly two weeks, making it almost certainly the most dangerous nuclear accident in U.S. history.
The last link frustrates me as it reads so staunchly anti-nuclear and blames human corruption for much of it? while millions of people die from coal/gas/oil each year but we need our electricity and way of life so nuclear bad and… we just… are supposed to roll (coal) with it? Maybe we should at least talk about how all this is utterly unsustainable or something?
posted by eschatonizer at 7:00 PM on July 2 [2 favorites]
posted by eschatonizer at 7:00 PM on July 2 [2 favorites]
millions of people die from coal/gas/oil each year
Surely there's enough of a nuclear sample for comparison, right?
It seems like there are cost comparisons between nuclear and solar / wind...are there risk analyses as well? Or is it one of those (likely), "I've got my story...you've got yours"?
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 8:25 PM on July 2
Surely there's enough of a nuclear sample for comparison, right?
It seems like there are cost comparisons between nuclear and solar / wind...are there risk analyses as well? Or is it one of those (likely), "I've got my story...you've got yours"?
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 8:25 PM on July 2
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Rational Accidents sounds really interesting and it's now on my list. The longer I work in industry the more skeptical I get of risk calculations. Not of the math itself, but whether or not we truly have representative enough datasets to really make the claims that we make about how reliable chemical plants are. Given that each plant is more or less a bespoke thing and many haven't really been around long enough to know what the reliability curve looks like as they near end of life. For the nuclear industry, their PR often makes the claim that major incidents are "one in a million year" events, that any of us have witnessed even a single one in our lifetimes should make us very skeptical of that.
posted by selenized at 6:38 PM on July 2 [1 favorite]