The Soviets were the only ones that built reactors that way. As in, having the ability to blow up.
> Spent fuel pools are probably the greatest example of this. They haven’t caused a major issue yet but they’re potentially a much larger risk than the actual reactor.
I think you're also over estimating the danger here. We've been operating over 500 reactors for over 70 years. That's some pretty good statistical power.
Edit2: Blowing up isn’t the only risk from a melt down, a major meltdown on a river could contaminate millions of people’s drinking water without any boom.
First pools are shared between reactors so there’s probably only around 200 that have ever been built.
Also, the risk isn’t simply in year X for pool Y, it’s for every pool and every year. At best we can estimate the risk of a pool over it’s lifetime is probably under 2% and the risk from all pools is also under 2% in any given year. The risk of any pool over the next 50 years, now that we have very little hard data on. At least in terms of real world data ir could be 0.05% or 50% and we just don’t have enough real world data to validate.
> At best we can estimate the risk of a pool over it’s lifetime is probably under 2% and the risk from all pools is also under 2% in any given year
How are you getting this number?
> The risk of any pool over the next 50 years, now that we have very little hard data on
What are you talking about? We have plenty of data. We literally have decades of physical testing and hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars worth of simulation testing. What do you think Sierra[0] (#3 super computer in the world) is doing all day? It is a classified machine at a DOE lab. Even a substantial portion of Summit does this same research (it also does a lot of climate research). But come on, 3 of the top 10 super computers are at US DOE labs, and the 3 exascale machines being built are also targeted for DOE labs (Aurora, Frontier, El Capitan (classified)). LLNL and ORNL spend significant resources on nuclear research.
“We've been operating over 500 reactors for over 70 years. That's some pretty good statistical power.”
I was correcting the statistical power comment. People estimate their quite safe, but essentially we ran the test once without problems which doesn’t say anything. 70 years ago there weren’t 500 reactors even today theirs less than 450 at probably under 200 sites. Thus the odds of any specific one having a problem next year is low, but the odds of any one having a problem next year is 200x as high and the odds of anyone having a problem in the next 50 years is ~50 * 200 times that. Or to put it another way they could be more dangerous than nuclear reactors but we just don’t have enough data to get signal from random noise.
As to why these estimates might not be meaningful, they ignore things like active sabotage which is why real world data is more meaningful.
> but essentially we ran the test once without problems which doesn’t say anything.
No, we ran the test over a thousand times (including research reactors). We have been running tests for over 70 years.
Honestly, it just sounds like you don't know very much about nuclear physics let alone nuclear reactors physics. Nor does it sound like you know much about statistics. You are being extremely confident while demonstrating a lack of knowledge.
Honestly, why talk with such confidence about a field you haven't worked in (even adjacent to) nor studied?
Suppose you want to know how soon a CPU will fail. You can’t just test 1 CPU for 1 month and say well each of it’s 1 billion transistors lasted 1 month so the CPU also last a long time. That logic obviously doesn’t work because the part fails when any component fails.
Your trying to apply that same logic to say all spent fuel pools are safe over their lifetime because each individual spent fuel pools is unlikely to fail in a given year.
It’s the same thing with nuclear reactors, each individual reactor is low risk but build 1,000 of them and some will likely fail over their collective 50 year lifespan.
No, we are sampling a thousand different CPUs of about 30 varieties over 70 years. That's enough data to know on average how long a random CPU will last, to know how long any particular CPU will last, and to find trends about the longevity trends of newer CPUs over time.
You are using bad statistics. You are using bad science. And it is clear you don't know anything about nuclear fuel pools, reactors, nor nuclear waste management. Get off your high horse. If you want some books on these subjects I'm happy to recommend some but you got a lot of catching up to do before you have the right to act so cocky.
What’s the the odds that any spent nuclear fuel pool will fail in the next 50 years? That is exactly the number I referred to here and you seem to think we know. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28898610.
Now you might want to use estimates of existing designs, but we don’t have them because new designs will be used over the next 50 years. So what exactly are your hard numbers based on? Effectively one test of roughly that length.
After getting hit by a tsunami. And it was a 1970s design; modern designs would not have blown up, and in fact some other reactors in the area built ten years later faced the same challenges and did fine.
And even the one that blew up released very little radiation to the surrounding area. You'd get more of a dosage living in Denver than Fukushima.
Fukushima didn't blow up. There was no explosion. Taking a bulldozer to a building is very different than using explosives (especially nuclear explosives).
The reactor didn't blow up. The building around it, outside of the containment structure, did blow up because of a hydrogen leak. It wasn't actually a big problem by itself, but it looked pretty dramatic on TV, so it probably contributed to people's overreaction afterwards.
> Fukushima weathered the worst earthquake AND tsunami in decades at the same time.
To also elaborate, all the reactors at Fukushima were designed to be able to handle any earthquake and tsunami that they thought could possibly happen in the region. Problem is that there was an earthquake larger than any in recorded history and larger than they thought the fault was capable of making. Some people are surprised that we've learned a lot about earthquakes and faults within the last 40 years.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. That bigger earthquakes can happen? Yeah. That's known. But there's also a maximum quake that a particular fault can generate. The Liquiñe-Ofqui fault is not the same fault line that caused the Tōhoku earthquake. You're comparing apples and oranges. It's like saying that Pompeii could happen in Arizona.
> Spent fuel pools are probably the greatest example of this. They haven’t caused a major issue yet but they’re potentially a much larger risk than the actual reactor.
I think you're also over estimating the danger here. We've been operating over 500 reactors for over 70 years. That's some pretty good statistical power.