Atomic accidents
A researcher and nuclear energy advocate describes a number of nuclear mishaps, analyzing what happened and why and explains how each of these accidents have furthered the study of the atom and nuclear energy.
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17recommend
29mentions
20people
2014–2026years
69% recommend31% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Atomic Accidents By James Maheffey. Witty author who worked in the field. Extremely entertaining highly recommended.
- ...and for some lighter reading, anything by James Mahaffey, in particular the "Atomic Accidents". Both insightful - and bizzarely entertaining to read.
- > I did not know about that aspect of nuclear plants and in my non-expert view it would be a major point against nuclear plants in the discussion how to solve climate change
It's a reasonable criticism to make, but I think it tends to be a bit overblown. Modern reactors have redundant layers of systems to prevent such a disaster from occurring. In the ~60 year history of nuclear reactors Fukashima is the only time this type of failure has happened (Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were very different), and even then it was due to a cascading series of problems:
* In hindsight it was a really poor idea to locate a nuclear plant by the ocean in a region known for strong earthquakes and tsunamis.
* The backup generators flooded because they were located in the basements, another poor decision for an area at risk of tsunamis.
* TEPCO had additional generators and batteries on site within 6 hours of the earthquake, which was in time to prevent a meltdown, but they were unable to connect them to the plant's electrical system (I don't recall the details of why).
It's also worth mentioning that this is only a problem with large reactors. Smaller designs like those used in ships and submarines still have decay heat, but the reactor core is physically smaller so that it doesn't contain enough isotopes to cause a meltdown. Many nuclear advocates believe that we should be building more nuclear plants with smaller reactors for this reason as well as smaller reactors being easier to operate without getting into a dangerous state.
As far as reading, I highly recommend Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey [0]. It's very well written, aimed at a total layman, and covers basically everything that has gone wrong since we as a species started seriously messing with nuclear materials in the 19th century.
- I like the engineering of nuclear power plants, but I'm not particularly biased towards them over renewables.
But we need to greatly improve energy storage if renewables are going to work.
Places like Scotland have generated equivalent to around 97% of their entire electricity consumption from renewables - yet still consume around 13% of their energy from fossil fuels as they export the renewable energy at peak production.[1]
I also just really don't like the misinformation that surrounds nuclear energy. I majored in Physics and it's just irritating to see people so confident in their ignorance. I recommend the book "Atomic Accidents"[2] as an excellent book on the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear power plant engineering in general.
[1] https://fullfact.org/environment/scotland-renewable-energy/
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-...
- That manually operated control rod was sophisticated compared to some of the earlier experiments. They used to stack bricks around a chunk of uranium, so the bricks would reflect neutrons back at the uranium. Eventually, once you stack enough bricks around the uranium it goes super critical and just goes nuts. They used to manually search out this super critical threshold by manually stacking bricks and then slowly move that final brick towards and away from the uranium and watch it balance on the line between sub critical and super critical.
One day, someone dropped the brick and there was a blue flash. Lots of neutrons were released that day. People died from radiation exposure soon after.
There's also a story about a fuel rod getting jammed, so they tried to force it with a crane and ended up breaking it in half, spilling highly radioactive water all over the place, and then the fuel rod catches on fire because it's not being cooled anymore. It's comical how quickly these disasters escalate.
Read https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-... , it's accurate and relatively fun given the subject. One of the chapters is titled "The US Government almost never lost nuclear weapons", which I find subtly amusing.
- Weird! I just saw this mentioned in Joe Scott's recent video on Nuclear Waste[1]
I hope it's successful as I feel nuclear fission power has been unfairly maligned.
I strongly recommend the book Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey[2] to learn more about how fission power plants work and what went wrong at Chernobyl etc. - it's one of my favourite books of all-time.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96et8ZGsxJY&t=545s
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20579068-atomic-accident...
