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Can we afford to be afraid of nuclear power? (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I don't agree with @grue's at all, but I think we can still agree that Greifswald appears to be an outlier in that it was especially badly built and managed. This fuckup of a plant is probably not indicative of every other plant.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

On the one hand, yes it is. On the other hand the general average also does not seem good.

There are many reactors which had similar, but not as bad histories. Kozloduy NPP (BG), Zion Nuclear Power Station (US), Ignalina (LI), Shoreham, Bohunice, Superphénix, ... While reactors which have run without noteworthy problems make up not even half of the total, which is far below anything which should be the norm for public infrastructure.

Lets take Germany as example, which fits quite well due to half of the countries having very lax requirements (DDR) and half having strict ones (West-Germany)

We have 7 Reactors which where built but never operated due to safety concerns (3 in Greifswald)
We have at least 4 sites (with at least 8 reactor blocks) with major issues, besides Greifswald we have e.g. hydrogen explosions (Brunsbüttel), turbine fires (Gundremmingen A), transformer fires (Krümmel). These are just the ones I found with a quick search.
We have another 9 reactor blocks with minor issues like Grundmemmingen B (Bavaria), lets pick this one at random and name the minor incidents: 2 Workers killed by boiling steam explosion (1975), short circuit leading to 3m of contaminated water at 80°C in the building (1977), failed sealing leading to automatic shutdown and repair (2008), failed rods emitting 500-fold the allowed amount of radioactive gases into the atmosphere (2011), another 4 incidents which have not yet been made public and really minor issues like value issues.
We have about 10 with only minor issues. Stretching from Emsland with only 2 known small leaks to Grafenrheinfeld where there were sudden shutdowns and a fire which nearly reached the main reactor but was extinguished in time.

In fact during looking this up I haven't found a single reactor which ran a significant time without any incident, even if I do not count construction issues which were caught and fixed in time before they resulted in incidents.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Tbf, steam explosions, turbine and transformator fires aren't exclusive to NPPs. Just nobody cares if these events happen in any other thermal power plant.
The incidents exclusive to NPPs are those where (potentially) radioactive substances are emitted into the environment.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

First there is a reason for that, as all major incident and even many minor incidents (see above) release radioactivity. Often into the environment in very minor cases only into the reactor building and the workers.

Secondly its wrong. Yes incidents do happen in normal plant too. But any remotely major ones also make it into the news. Actually they do it more often as the plants are not as remote and as huge that you wouldn't notice them. As you can see 4 incidents haven't been made public in Grundmemmingen B, I don't know of a single one which has not been disclosed for years with coal/gas plants.

Lets pick a random sample of 10 German coal & gas plants from the Wikipedia list: (Kraftwerk Bremen-Mittelsbüren[49]Gemeinschaftskraftwerk Bremen (GKB)[52]Industriekraftwerk Bremerhaven[1]Industriekraftwerk Breuberg[53]Egger Kraftwerk Brilon[1]Kraftwerk Burghausen[1]Industriekraftwerk Marl[1][2]Kraftwerk Clauen[1]Heizkraftwerk Cottbus[55][2]GTKW Darmstadt[57] )

We have 8 with no incidents at all, notable Bremen-Mittelsbüren which runs since 1964! Special mention also for Marl where the plant didn't have issues, but the chemical factories around it, oh boy!

We have 2 with Issues, a complete list:

Fire in turbine, nobody hurt (Clauen)
boiler explosion 3 hurt, 2 dead (Brilon)

So in total you have less issues than with a single average atomic reactor and only 20% of the list had issues. Why is that so? First these systems are simple. The only contain comparatively few parts, you can access almost everything for inspection without special gear and notice and fix any faults before they even have a chance to become a problem. Secondly they deal with lower extremes. The steam circuit has less pressure, the power for the transformers is lower.

This also hold for the huge ones, e.g. the 4 Datteln plants where only Datteln 4 had a major fire incident with no deaths. The oldest one running 1964-2014, longer than any atomic reactor in Germany.

When you look to wind turbines incidents are even more rare. We have currently about 28600 wind turbines in Germany, of these 129 had incidents like damage to the blades. 8 towers collapsed so 0.5% with issues and 0.02% with major ones. (And these issues concentrate on the first turbines built)