[Gwypaas]

> You're imagining an act of god that does precisely so much damage that the difference between catastrophic failure and a non-event is this one cracked pipe. That was, please note, detected and fixed before failure.

Take the severe Forsmark incident in 2006 in Sweden. Many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades. Thus loss of cooling became almost a certainty. That is why you test and do not accept half fixes to placate the operators profit margin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...

> And the downside of that risk coming to fruition is a 0-death to near-0-death crisis (which is much better than whatever this precise external shock will cause).

And a at least $200B bill to cleanup the mess in Fukushimas case. Lets remove the Price Anderson Act so they have to pay the true cost for their risk?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

[roenxi]

> Lets remove the Price Anderson Act so they have to pay the true cost for their risk?

Yeah. The costs and benefits should be born by the capital owner. The issue is that if you want to force them to pay for a cost externality that should be balanced out by considering the benefit eternalities. For nuclear power? if the world was fair they'd get a much bigger net subsidy. The risks of nuclear power going critical are far smaller than the benefits from not having to use coal for example.

I forget what a life saved is worth in engineering terms. Something like 1 or 10 million per capita I think. $200 billion in cleanup only needs to save ~200-2,000 lives to be justified.

> Many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades.

Things like pipes being cracked, for example? That is the issue here to me, this is part of a system of defences where it is anticipated that some of them won't be working. No one defence being broken should be a crisis.

I'm cool with the idea that they should fix their pipe. I'm not cool with it being treated like a big deal without pretty solid evidence that the deal is big.

[Gwypaas]

> The risks of nuclear power going critical are far smaller than the benefits from not having to use coal for example.

That is a strawman argument. Coal has generally been uneconomical since the advent of combined cycle gas turbines where gas infrastructure exists. Today renewables are vastly undercutting both.

Trying to frame it as a choice between nuclear and coal is only made because nuclear does not stack up against the real competition in 2023.

> I forget what a life saved is worth in engineering terms. Something like 1 or 10 million per capita I think. $200 billion in cleanup only needs to save ~200-2,000 lives to be justified.

Or we just build power generation without those third party risks. I do not understand why you are trying to frame a $200 billion cleanup bill as "nothing to see, move along sheeple!".

> I'm cool with the idea that they should fix their pipe. I'm not cool with it being treated like a big deal without pretty solid evidence that the deal is big.

Almost all nuclear accidents final hole in the Swiss cheese is some sort of loss of cooling. When the backup power fails due to negligent maintenance that is a big deal.

Fukushima led to us building stockpiles of backup generators together with the necessary electric connections allowing us us to fly them in with helicopters and connect them if the primary ones fail. Saying that failure in the primary ones is "fine, nothing to see" is sticking your head in the sand.