https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale

One problem is that many of the accidents are put too high on the INES scale.

TMI resulted in no radiation deaths or release of any material. Yet is it a 5. By the definitions, it should be a 3. Fukishima is a 7, the same a Chernobyl! It should also be a 5 or 6. No direct deaths. They hype the 1600 deaths from "evacuation", which also seems way overstated.

On the other hand SL-1 is historically kept low at 4. It should be a 5, maybe a 6.

Thats good statistics and the outcome was better, but my post was in response to the comments that seem to say that Russians are idiots and americans are so much better.

I think in the infancy of Nuclear power a lot was learned by anyone in the industry.

From accounts at that time three mile island was moments away form a runaway disaster wasn't it? I remember reading an internal analysis extensively when looking at what causes disaster of any type, and fortunately there was some quick thinking at three mile island that prevented a more severe crisis.

The lesson there was the perfect storm of failsafes failing.

Obviously compared to that ,Chernobyl got way out of hand for many reasons, but three mile island had the potential to have been much worse

I think the positive from all of this is the lessons learned that make the possibility of much safer nuclear power today than many decades ago.

Show of hands, how many here have worked inside a containment zone at a nuke plant?

Not even close. Chernobyl went prompt critical. It literally became a nuclear bomb. TMI had no chance of that happening. Light water moderated reactors slow down when the water boils off, by design, as a safety feature. Chernobyl has a positive temperature coefficient. And it had no containment dome.

And sorry to get into politics, but the difference is a dictatorship (socialist) and a democratic-republic. The USSR wanted nuclear weapons at any cost. They knew that to have nuclear weapons meant they could not be attacked. This is why North Korea developed nukes and why the Iranians are hell bent on the same track. Once you have nukes, the chance someone will do a conventional attack against you is near zero.

The Soviets cut corners on EVERYTHING. They took the carbon moderated reactor for plutonium production and used it for power generation.

I am not saying the US was perfect and pure. Hannaford is still a mess. But everything in the USSR was 2 to 3 orders of magnitude worse.

I don't see anyone claiming that. They were just told to cut any safety corner at all to speed production and make it cheaper. To build any reactor with no containment building and the building was made of wood, yea maybe they cut a few too many corners. Three Mile Island was a string of poor decisions. Not one death.

Fukushima was a entire series of off the scale natural disasters more extreme than their wildest dreams. One of the biggest earthquakes on the planet, did not hurt the reactors. One of the worst Tsunamis ever did. And then the backups and fail safes were just under-engineered to withstand the waves. They too were willing to save money and design to a level all the experts thought were adequate. As often happens, the experts were just wrong. It will likely be the most expensive cleanup in history.

An accident in the same way having a blood alcohol level of .32 and hoping on a dirt bike riding through the woods at 90mph, at night with no lights and then hitting a tree is an accident.

Fukushima, they knew the danger. They had already re-located some of the engine generator sets up hill (units 4-6). And the gensets were setup to allow cross connecting so that they could feed everything. The problem was they had not yet moved the switchgear on units 1-3. Once the switchgear went underwater, there was no way to feed power to the cooling water pumps.

Fukushima-II, the gensets were inside the water tight building.

4th episode pissed me off, shooting dogs and cats.


The moral of the story so far:

trust your government, give it power to control everything and let it make all your decisions for you. It will take care of you instead of itself!

In other news, bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

As Sammy asked "How many...….", well I did refueling (1A and 1B) on the Enterprise CVA(N) 65 in 1969, USS Bainbridge CGN 25, USS Truxtun CGN 35 and TWICE at the D1G training plant West of Saratoga Springs NY. In all cases I got to do the final inspection before the gasket was laid onto the pressure vessel to insure the 4 "scratches" were clear across the whole surface and then the cover would be lowered into place. In those D1G type reactor cores the fuel was put in, one fuel assembly + rod at a time until the core was complete. Then cover installed, omega seal welded then nuts and washers installed and torqued.


A scary thing was stretching those studs some amount (forget how much) then turning the nut xx degrees and keep doing until xxx torque. They would make all sorts of noises.
At the second refueling in NY one of G.E.'s warehouse guys marked a crate wrong and half way through fuel insertion things jammed badly. We had a couple days of investigation then pulling the wrong fuel cell into wet storage and the correct items installed!


My Oncologist thinks the radiation I received might have a lot to do with the cancer I have been fighting now for a year? 16 REM's worth is quite a lot I guess even though the Navy said the quarterly doses were okay?

I worked containment at San Onofre but not while loading or unloading the reactor and didn't put my face in it, scary.
IIRC we were limited to an effective dose of 5 rems/year.
Believe it not I worked with a couple of guys who wanted to max out the allowed dosage as quickly as possible. If they hit that limit early, they got paid for doing nothing for the remainder of that time period. Not my style.

I ended up getting more radiation working outside on the turbine than I did in containment because of the direct sunshine. Never anything close to what you were hit with.

I lived across the street for 7 years from a guy who was a welder at the nuclear power plant in Clinton, Illinois. Twice in those 7 years I remember him being "off of work for the rest of the year" because he'd hit his REM limit. He wasn't the kind of guy to purposefully do it either, I just got the impression that he wanted to finish the job. I think in one case he was off four a couple of weeks and the other time it was a few months. Yes, he got paid when he wasn't working.

A dozen people that work(ed) for me.

On a breakdown some get their allowable annual dose in a few days.

16 REM's is 160 mSv, this is 'a lot'.

The allowable nuclear worker annual limit is 50 mSv, but a five year dose of 100 mSv.

Emergency limit is 500 mSv.

Typical 'environment' numbers are 3 mSv annually, mostly cosmic.

Nope. I don't fear going in, but they are technicians, and I'm an engineer. They don't need (or want) me.

So you don't care about the cow?

I like burgers.

Wasn't that awesome when the old lady talked about the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin, then stalin purges, and told the guy to go to hell?
That really hit home, my wife's grandmother and grandfather had to leave their farm to escape Stalin's soldiers.
they fled to China, then the Philippines, then the US.

We got it so rough here.

Babushka, portrayed in the movie:

https://videos.usatoday.net/Brightcove2/29906170001/2016/04/29906170001_4847455846001_4847304662001.mp4

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eaYc8M1UEwg" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I should have mentioned, I was active duty as a Machinist Mate, the jobs on Big E, I was an E6 (First Class Petty), the others as E7 (Chief Petty Officer). Pretty much everyone in the reactor divisions when those refueling took place got the same doses I did. As an example the Electronic Techs got a lot as they had to works with the control rod connectors since GE in their wisdom would change control rods every time!!!!

Now day my students tell me the subs and carriers all use the shipyard people to do any and all reactor work. "Back in the day" the sailors did most all of it.

Was that a case of the Navy didn't fully understand the long-term consequences of the exposure, or did they just figure that was part of the job?

This has more detail about the first hour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITEXGdht3y8