James Bowery <jabow...@gmail.com> wrote: Whenever you see some idiot standing on a bully pulpit in media, government > and/or academia and saying "Who could have foreseen?" You can bet someone > did foresee it and not just because a broken clock is right twice a day. >
Yes, indeed. The Three Mile Island disaster was foretold, as I wrote earlier. The engineer who did field inspections reported that the same events had happened in other plants of this design, and that if it happened under full load the results might be disastrous. That is one example. There is a similar one that makes me feel sorry for regulators and field engineers. After Fukushima, someone found a report buried in the files saying: "There is historical evidence of high tsunamis in this area, so we should build up the sea wall in this reactor complex, and take other steps to avoid a catastrophe from a tsunami." In other words, Fukushima was a disaster foretold, just as Three Mile Island was. A reporter asked a Japanese official about this. The official responded with a bout of honesty that I suppose was induced by months of overwork and worry. He said something like: "You can always find a report predicting a disaster. Any disaster. We look at every scenario. We have experts in every field look into anything imaginable. The thing is, if you were to turn off a reactor until every possible scenario is covered, you would never turn it on." That was prophetic. Soon after that, they turned off nearly every Japanese nuke, and most are still off. Risk can never be fully eliminated. Ordinary members of the public have difficulty understanding this, but engineers know it. People get upset when airplanes crash or factories burn down. Sometimes they are justified in getting upset, such when a factory has a terrible safety record. Other times, people should simply accept that risk is inevitable despite our best efforts. One of the things I fear about the future of cold fusion is that people will insist it be "perfectly safe" without a trace of tritium. I fear they will ignore the fact that tritium is safely contained by the barriers built into by exit signs and wrist watches. People nowadays complain about the mercury released when you break a CFL lightbulb. This makes no sense because: 1. You seldom break a lightbulb. Think about it. When was the last time you did that? 2. Conventional incandescent lightbulbs release far more mercury than CFL bulbs do, when you take into account the mercury released from burning coal. Coal also releases far more radioactive garbage into the atmosphere than any intact normal fission reactor, albeit far less than Chernobyl or Fukushima. When it comes to safety and pollution, fission is an all-or-nothing technology. - Jed
