A fatal, familiar chain reaction

[kristopher]

A fatal, familiar chain reaction
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster were both caused by a string of human errors, says Geoffrey Lean.
7:13PM GMT 12 Nov 2010

There is one huge, unanswered – maybe unanswerable – question hanging over the painstaking inquiry into the causes of BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout, “the Gulf of Mexico’s Chernobyl”.

...One decision, the most crucial, is particularly puzzling. In the hours before the accident, men on the rig carried out the essential test that would tell them whether oil and gas were – potentially fatally – leaking into the well. Three times they tried it and each time the result signalled danger. But they decided to proceed as if all was well.

“The well was blown,” Sean Grimsley, one of the inquiry’s deputy chief counsels told us. “Hydrocarbons were leaking in. But for whatever reason the crew decided it was a good test. The question is why these experienced men out on that rig talked themselves into believing that it indicated well integrity. None of them wanted to die.”

The same question arose at another inquiry I covered, nearly a quarter of a century ago, into Chernobyl itself. It is now fashionable to blame the accident on the Russian RBMK reactor design. But, though this was not great, the world’s worst nuclear disaster was, in fact, caused by a similar chain of human errors.

Under pressure ...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/geoffrey-lean/8130146/A-fatal-familiar-chain-reaction.html

[NNadir]

1. Well, if one knows ANY nuclear engineering and physics - which obviously leaves out anti-nukes -

who hate the science they know nothing about, one understands that the accident at Chernobyl - in which human error was definitely involved - could not have happened in a reactor without a positive void co-efficient.

Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe showed this to be the case within a year of the accident.

He, of course, wasn't some rote anti-nuke living off Googling.

Of course, we don't have <em>any</em> of our anti-nukes here, almost all of whom are also car CULTists, giving up their diddling little dreams of solar <em>cars</em> because of the Yugo, even though cars <em>continue</em> to kill tens of thousands of people each year in this country alone.

But somehow, in a world dominated by PWR, BWR, and PHWR, all they ever want to talk about is the unusual poorly designed graphite reactor at Chernobyl.

Somehow I don't think a googled newspaper article is quite on the level of Hans Bethe.

[Tesha]

2. Do you figure that you win more people to your cause by being obnoxious?

Because I've notice your general tenor has degraded over the
years to the point where I find you just insufferably obnoxious
and you even seem proud of this.

You've done more to convince me that my anti-nuclear position
is the sane position that any ten members of (say) the Union of
Concerned Scientists.

Tesha

[txlibdem]

4. The anti-nuclear position

In 40 or 50 years there may be no need for nuclear reactors at all, time will tell. Or we'll get cheap affordable Nuclear Fusion reactors and we'll all be using nuke power till the end of time. The one thing we all agree on is that we should never build any more of the Chernobyl-type reactors -- and we in the west NEVER have. We do not have any like that now, nor 50 years ago. Period. I don't even want to see anyone build more reactors like the ones in operation today, which are all Generation ii reactors. We should be concentrating on Generation iv reactors, with a simultaneous plan to move from Uranium as the fuel onto Thorium. We have only about 50 to 100 years of Uranium left at current usage levels (and I am a firm believer that we need to double or triple the amount of nuclear power generation in the world so the end of Uranium is a lot sooner).

Also keep in mind that certain posters here on DU love to keep cutting and pasting the same source articles over and over again, even after the biases and incorrect information from those articles has been disproven time and again. Some people just have little patience for the hundredth post of the same old article, and the 101th, and the 102nd, etc. So please forgive him if you can.

That's not the exact case here but it's a far stretch to link Chernobyl to the Gulf Oil Disaster. It seems to make more sense to link the Gulf Oil Disaster to the oil pipeline explosion that killed people and the recent deadly oil refinery explosion -- all of which happened in the span of 5 years. Yet the OP seems interested in dredging up a non-sequitur from 24 years ago.

Among infractions on BP's safety resume: a 2005 blast at a Texas refinery that killed 15 employees; a neglected pipeline that burst in 2006 and dumped 200,000 gallons of oil on Alaska's North Slope; and more than $550 million in safety fines in the years since, including 700 violations in the Texas refinery alone last year. Ironically, the Times notes the standard-bearer of industry safety: ExxonMobil, author of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

http://www.newser.com/story/88196/bps-safety-record-murky.html

[Tesha]

5. Actually, we *DID* build graphite-moderated reactors.

They're at Hanford, where we used them to breed the plutonium
that went into our nuclear weapons.

And yes, there will be alternatives to nuclear fission power in
the near future, alternatives that don't tie our society to ten
thousand years of stewardship of deadly nuclear waste.

Tesha

[txlibdem]

6. Chernobyl was not a research or military reactor, it was generating base power for the nearby areas

Strawman not accepted.
1. None of our commercial power generation nuclear reactors were of that type.
2. All of our commercial power generation nuclear reactors had (and have) a containment vessel -- the lack of which caused the nuclear material to escape the reactor site.

There is no similarity in the design of our Generation ii reactors and the Chernobyl reactor. And let us not forget that only 1 of the 4 reactors at Chernobyl were affected -- the other three continued to generate safe clean nuclear power, within meters of the "asploded" terrible Chernobyl reactor that "asploded real, real big!"

Despite the accident, Ukraine continued to operate the remaining reactors at Chernobyl for many years. The last reactor at the site was closed down in 2000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

What? They continued to operate the remaining 3 reactors for anther 14 years?!? Well there must have been numerous additional explosions right? If so, it's funny we haven't heard a word about them. It sure seems like we would have heard something. The hype far, far outstrips the reality of Chernobyl. It was a tragedy and people lost their lives. Just as they did in the BP Gulf Disaster, the explosion of the oil pipeline in Alaska, and the explosion of the oil refinery in Texas. Just as the 29 miners did in the Massey mine earlier this year. Guess what? There is nothing you can do to completely remove all risk from your life. Stay in your house 24/7 and a piece of an airplane will fall on your house, or a tornado will pick it up and toss it 5 miles (goodbye you when that happens). It sucks but life is risk.

As to the idiotic attempts to attach Chernobyl to everything under the sun that the poster happens to disagree with (BP in this case), it is a childish debate tactic that I learned in 8th grade. The one has nothing to do with the other. Fail.

Nuclear waste is almost eliminated with Thorium cycle reactors and its half life is measured in decades, not millenia. And we will run out of Uranium too soon. We need to switch to Thorium cycle reactors, we have over 1000 years of Thorium and more in the oceans that we can learn to extract in an economical fashion long before then. And we had better have figured out Fusion power long before the end of this century anyway.

I have to scratch my head when people get all worked up about the scary, scary nuclear waste. Where do you think it is right now, today? It's in your community. Are you dead yet? No? Well that ought to tell you that you are being used and your fears are being manipulated by people who make tons and tons of money on coal and oil and they like things just the way they are right now.

[kristopher]

7. You know absolutely nothing.

The weakest part of every design ever created is the human element.

The history of both the DeepWater Horizon and Chernobyl disasters demonstrate perfectly that the consequences can be far, far larger than the hand-waving of fools can fix.

You and those like you are GREAT at explaining why is will never happen;
...and then just as GREAT at explaining how it DID happen and
how it will NEVER happen again.

Yeah.
Right.

And for the record - you were the one using a strawman, not Tesha.

[Tesha]

8. 'Shame we never built those "thorium cycle" reactors you like so much.

And with regard to waste, as folks like to observe, "when you find
you're in a hole, stop digging." Yes, we have waste today, but that
doesn't mean we should generate even more of it with no plan to
deal with it.

Society does not have the stability to do anything that requires
ten thousand years of good stewardship, and that includes
the production of nuclear waste.

By the way, did I claim that the Hanford rectors were power reactors?
No, I did not. I explicitly stated that they were for plutonium production.
But I realize you'll reject any claim, no matter how reasonable, that one
of the reasons the AEC/DoE was so hot on making a success of com-
mercial nuclear power was that it greatly facilitated their ability to
run a nuclear weapons program (what with the continued production
of nuclear engineers, nuclear companies, and the like).

Tesha

[kristopher]

9. Not only can we not provide "ten thousand years of good stewardship"

for the wastes, we can't build and operate complex systems with perfection, period.

As the OP focuses on for the two disasters under discussion, a chain of human errors is always involved in the failure of a complex system. It is unavoidable.

Let's look at why that is such a problem with nuclear. Imagine

If a Chernobyl scale disaster near a population center were to occur after we have just spent 30 years building 200 reactors per year at a cost of $8B each.

Unlike Chernobyl, this time instead of weather conditions helping mitigate the damage let's assume that a major city like New York, Philadelphia or Chicago is made immediately uninhabitable for 100 years. Not thinking of casualties; just focusing on the economics of the circumstances the world now faces, can the ripple effect even be estimated?

When you can't begin to imagine the worse case scenario of following a path like this, it might be a good idea to look for alternatives if they exist.

And in the case of nuclear power, the renewable option not only exists, it will actually produce a far better energy system if we commit to it.

[kestrel91316]

3. Civil discourse FAIL. Again.