Talk:Nuclear safety

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[edit] Question

if a nuclear power plant exploded how would if affect the water, soil, plants, and how much animal damage would it do to them?

Please see your user page's Discussion page for a simple discussion. Simesa 03:20, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
The article on Radioactive contamination is probably what you are looking for. 137.205.192.27 21:47, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Unreferenced tag

Actually, there doesn't seem to be a single statement of fact anywhere in the article to be unreferenced. Simesa 04:35, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

I agree and I have removed the tag. As it now stands, the article is hardly more than a list of articles in Category:Nuclear safety. I do not think we need a reference here to prove that the linked articles are related to nuclear safety. -- Petri Krohn 06:08, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Revert of April 23, 3 am EST

The first issue is the use of "defense in depth". Googling "defense in depth" +"nuclear power plant" I got 26,200 hits. Scanning the summaries of the first 99 of these, it was apparent that the term "defense in depth" is being used by a wide variety of people.

Second, we have the assertion that Chernobyl was caused by a common mode failure initiated by sabotage. While I have heard the sabotage theory, it's definitely held by a small minority. Most of us go with an incompetent test engineer, under pressure from Moscow, stupidly bulling through an experiment. Common mode may be somewhat applicable - the same steam explosion that shattered the fuel cladding also blew the reactor vessel head off. But in any event, this should be discussed in Chernobyl disaster, not in a diagram.

So I'm reverting. Simesa 07:04, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Simsea's 23 April revert

The lead sentence is "This diagram demonstrates the defense in depth quality of nuclear power plants." I Googled on "defense in depth" and found it described as a "strategy" and not as a "quality." To describe it as a "quality" of nuclear power plants implies that it is a fact about nuclear power plants rather than a strategy of reactor designers. This garbles the meaning and makes the sentence read like a piece of proj-nuclear power propaganda. If the purpose is not propagandistic, I recommend that that "strategy" replace "quality" and "reactor designers" replace "nuclear power plants."

Unlike facts, strategies can be wrong. Thus, if we can get the semantics right, this would be an appropriate place to present an exploration of how well "defense in depth" has worked in the past and is likely to work in the future. The discussion of the past should report situations such as the one at Chernobyl, where a single technician was able to defeat the "defense in depth" strategy of the Soviet Union's reactor designers. The discussion of the future should report the fact that a statistical fallacy is embedded in the engineering of nuclear power plant safety inspection systems. When I tried to report this in the nuclear power article in the past, someone reverted the content I'd supplied without justification.

--T oldberg 15:51, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm okay with "This diagram demonstrates the defense in depth strategy of nuclear designers." Based on my experience with other editors, I'm going to assume they'll concur also, so I'll make the change. Simesa 16:03, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
If you want to criticise the defense in depth concept, please do not do it in the image caption. Add your text to the article body itself.
The text used as the image caption comes directly from the image description Commons:Image:Nuclear power defense in depth.png. This again is written by a Finnish expert on nuclear safety, who is the author of the corresponding article on Finnisdh Wikipedia. If you want to illustrate common mode failure, you are free to use the existing free image as the basis of your derivative work. Please do not try to read something into the image, that was not included by the original creator. -- Petri Krohn 20:31, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Propsed observation

It's been proposed that observation "In France, which gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear power, more people have been killed from protesting against nuclear power, than from nuclear power itself. See Sébastien Briat." be added. Any comments? How many of the probably Chernobyl casualties will be French? (Even though Chernobyl was a Soviet military screwup, it was a civilian plant and still counts as nuclear power.) Simesa 21:49, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed addition

Long ago, the authors of U.S. policy on reactor safety made the assumption that rupture of a reactor pressure vessel with consequent breach of the containment was "incredible." Later, the Rasmussen study of reactor safety theorized that the probability was 1 in 10 million per vessel-year. The study concluded that reactors were adequately safe at this level of probability. However, we have only about 1/1000 of the years' worth of evidence that would be necessary to test the Rasmussen theory empirically.

If a defect of sufficient size were to escape detection in the periodic inspections that are required for the reactor pressure vessel, the result would surely be a melt-down of the core, breach of the containment and scattering of the fission products in the core over a wide area. In the middle of the 1980s, while managing the R&D program of a group of 30 nuclear electric utilities, I made a disturbing discovery. The discovery was that defect detection tests failed to define statistical populations, with the result that the reliability of the tests could not be measured. At the same time, a statistical fallacy that was prevalent in the engineering literature made it sound as though the reliability could be measured.

I've published three peer reviewed articles on this topic. As none of the claims made in these articles have been refuted in the peer reviewed literature, the situation is one-sided from the standpoint of the rules of evidence which Wikipedia requires in its articles. There is an opposition, which includes the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but the opposition has published nothing in the peer reviewed literature that refutes or limits in any way the claims made in my articles.

The appearence of safety for nuclear reactors hangs, to a disturbing degree, upon a statistical fallacy. It seems to me that this is a worthy topic for the Nuclear safety article. Any comments? --Terry Oldberg (talk) 18:16, 29 May 2008 (UTC)