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community weblog
☁️ chance of wicked rain
"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.
posted by HearHere on Jul 02, 2024 at 5:12 PM
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I agree with the review of Wicked Problems, it's a collection of interesting stories about engineering failures (and Edwin A. Link's biography is way more interesting than you would think!) but the connecting narrative is muddled and doesn't really work.
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
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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
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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
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Our World In Data: Our perceptions of the safety of nuclear energy are strongly influenced by two accidents: Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011. These were tragic events. However, compared to the millions that die from fossil fuels every year, the final death tolls were very low. To calculate the death rates used here, I assume a death toll of 433 from Chernobyl, and 2,314 from Fukushima. If you are interested, I look at how many died in each accident in detail in a related article.
The other source heavily influenced by a few large-scale accidents is hydropower. Its death rate since 1965 is 1.3 deaths per TWh. This rate is almost completely dominated by one event: the Banqiao Dam Failure in China in 1975, which killed approximately 171,000 people. Otherwise, hydropower was very safe, with a death rate of just 0.04 deaths per TWh — comparable to nuclear, solar, and wind.
Finally, we have solar and wind. The death rates from both of these sources are low but not zero. A small number of people die in accidents in supply chains — ranging from helicopter collisions with turbines, fires during the installation of turbines or panels, and drownings on offshore wind sites.
People often focus on the marginal differences at the bottom of the chart — between nuclear, solar, and wind. This comparison is misguided: the uncertainties around these values mean they are likely to overlap.
The key insight is that they are all much, much safer than fossil fuels.
Emphasis mine.
The main reason for my own extremely strong preference for wind + solar PV + batteries over nuclear generation is one of scale and grid resilience and robustness.
The reason that all of those technologies are already cheaper than nukes by a factor of at least three is that mass production works, and the actual items that need to be mass produced in order to make wind + solar PV and batteries work are all quite small-scale, lending them to widespread deployment at a large variety of installed scales. Nukes don't even begin to make economic sense at capacities below a few hundred megawatts.
When a large-scale power plant fails, either temporarily due to some technical issue or permanently due to obsolescence, that failure has a large impact on the energy market: at best it makes prices spike and at worst will cause actual blackouts. In stark contrast, if the PV panels and inverter supplying my house fall over, nobody else even notices. Same applies to individual PV panels in a utility-scale plant, or individual turbines in a wind farm: almost all failures are going to involve at worst a slight reduction in plant capacity.
The second main reason I prefer renewables to nukes is that the renewable technologies don't rely on a fuel supply chain that comes with a host of safety, equity, reliability and abuse issues.
The mining of fuel - be it fossil carbon or radioactive ores - is a waste of resources and I despise waste. One day, and I hope still to be alive to see it, most of the industries of the world will not be based on the dig it up, transform it, dump it methods that have dominated the last couple of centuries but will work more like an ecology does, where stuff circulates in complex networks and all the outputs of any given industrial process get used as inputs for others. To me, energy generation technologies that tap into existing energy flows are compatible with that future in ways that nothing relying on mined fuels could ever be.
posted by flabdablet at 1:00 AM
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So many good points, flabdablet!
posted by mumimor at 1:47 AM
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enough of a nuclear sample for comparison, right?
estimates vary [bulletin of atomic scientists]
posted by HearHere at 5:02 AM
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The two things I got from the Harper's article:
- you don't have a radioactive iodine problem if you don't measure it;
- They actually completed Vogtle 4! Whoa. I know several industry types who owe lots of beers now that damn thing got commissioned.
posted by scruss at 5:20 AM
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^content note: war
posted by HearHere at 5:22 AM
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radioactive iodine problem
iodine-131 [wiki]
posted by HearHere at 5:42 AM
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"Cloud problems" is a catchier term for what I've always called them: "People problems".
posted by Ickster at 7:09 AM
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IMO: the energy future is one of the least interesting cloud problems there is - there are some pretty clear answers, the negative externalities are pretty clear, and the alternatives exist. It was probably more interesting in 1980.
City design is a cloud problem. Pandemic response is a cloud problem. Education is a cloud problem.
Environmentalism itself is a cloud problem. They correctly diagnosed that human development has negative externalities, so they decided to limit growth in cities, via extremely restrictive zoning policies and environmental reviews. Which shifted human growth to other states and outward into exurbia. Whoops.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:32 AM
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Also trying to 'solve traffic' (if by solve traffic they mean auto traffic) is a clock problem with a clear answer. I guess there needs to be a 3rd kind of problem - ones where we know the answer but just don't want to do it, so we imagine it's more complex than it is, and treat the negative externalities like positive ones.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:36 AM
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It's not regulation, Downer says.....This deep and constantly growing data set, combined with the industry's commitment to thoroughly investigating each and every failure, lets it generalize the lessons learned across the entire industry—the second key to understanding jetliner reliability.
Uh, they do that because of regulations. It is regulations. They also make fighter jets. They know people gonna die in their products.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:43 AM
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there needs to be a 3rd kind of problem - ones where we know the answer but just don't want to do it, so we imagine it's more complex than it is
'messy' ["boutique professional services firm"; citation's Charles Perrow, who describes Three Mile Island as a Normal Accident (gbooks)] ?
posted by HearHere at 8:39 AM
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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.
Early in my career (not a chemical plant) I was asked to put together a risk matrix for an engineering change proposal to illustrate the difference between a mitigated and unmitigated risk. The potential consequence we wanted to avoid was easy enough (thing catches fire, blows up, people die, potential total loss of materiel), but how do you even start to quantify the likelihood of something dependent on so many different circumstances and assumptions, which themselves are difficult to measure? I bought the issue up to my boss and he explained that 1) if the risk was at a certain amount, it would need to be elevated high up for acceptance, which would result in a lot of bureaucracy the customer wanted to avoid, so there was a cap on how high the likelihood could go and 2) the true purpose of the assessment wasn't to provide upper management with the most accurate picture, it was to service as a notice of "This needs to be done and if you don't do this and things blow up, don't say we didn't tell you".
posted by ndr at 5:04 PM
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