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The Media and Nuclear Power

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RDTroja:

--- Quote from: Preciousblue1965 on Nov 23, 2009, 02:43 ---...  Most people if they have a bad day at work, they end up burning someone's hamburger, losing a major contract, or crashing the company car.  There is a little pain, but in the end it is pretty easy to get over.  If nuclear power has a Really bad day, that part of the Earth is unihabitable for many decades. IT is hard for people to get past that, unless we explain to them how much we learned from those two incidents and why this is a very small chance of it happening again.  

--- End quote ---

This is actually part of the problem. TMI and Chernobyl can't be lumped into 'nuclear disasters that make part of the planet uninhabitable.' The education has to start with "TMI proved we can't screw up so bad that we scar the earth." Chernobyl was the result of a bad design that everyone KNEW was a bad design and the whole world had told the Soviets was a bad design. The arrogance of 'our people are so well trained that they will not make a mistake' was what did in Chernobyl in the end, but the design was doomed from the beginning. We need to make sure that people understand the difference between TMI and Chernobyl, not let them think they are similar in any respect.

At TMI the operators made virtually every wrong decision that they came across. I am not indicting them, they simply did not have the knowledge that we gained when the event happened. They were faced with indications that their training had told them could not co-exist and they took steps that they believed would fix the problem. They guessed wrong. Even with all of that, the amount of radioactive material that got away was not enough to cause anything more than a PR problem. The most disastrous part of TMI was the way that the press and the government officials responded.

Chernobyl, on the other hand was a disaster that just hadn't happend yet, until it did. The design was faulty, the procedures were faulty, the management was faulty and the test they were carrying out when the accident occurred was faulty to begin with and executed poorly in the end. The steam explosion was bad, but the fire was the real killer as far as environmental damage was concerned. We simply can't make one of our reactors do that. Twenty years later, the public still does not know that.

TMI was not even a drop in the Chernobyl ocean. And it is quite likely the worst event we will have outside the RBMK world. Please don't let the public think they have anything in common. If we lump them together, they will, too.

Neutron_Herder:
I've had several of my friends and family members email me the story about the stuff that happened this weekend and ask me if I really want to be in this business with things like this happening.  I've tried to take the time to respond to each one with two big points.

1)  No activity was released to the atmosphere.  Even the NRC agrees that there is no radiological impact, and even the people that did receive some exposure received less than any one person that lives in the Denver area, flies in an airplane or a living, or gets a chest xray.

2)  The fact that it's being treated like a big deal by the people involved is ultimately a good thing, IMO.  The fact that we dissect everything that happens, no matter how minor, is the reason that the program is as safe as it is.  If done correctly, critiques and root cause analysis give good information to all concerned and also help to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

People are scared of what they don't understand though, and that's a difficult thing to overcome.  Once sensationalized by the media it's almost insurmountable.

Preciousblue1965:

--- Quote from: Marssim on Nov 23, 2009, 04:39 ---Not true. Two places where the nuclear world had a VERY bad day, and are quite inhabited today, as the webcams testify and bear witness;

Nagasaki;

http://www.doboku.pref.nagasaki.jp/~rinkai/fuukei/tokiwa.htm

Hiroshima:

http://219.118.253.214/top/liveapplet.html

Chernobyl is not economically viable for remediation and restoration, Russia is a big place and has lots more ground still waiting for the shovels of new construction.

--- End quote ---

Ok fair enough.  I stand corrected. 

I also agree that TMI and Chernobyl are indeed two different birds and we have learned so much from both incidents, either in regards to operating or radiation effects.  Same thing with SL-1 with regards to rod criteria and other aspects.

But just remember that there are those that salivate at any and all negative stories associated with nuclear power and will do everything they can to demonize that industry, using misconstrued facts or just flat out lies.  Unfortunately it is easier to convince the public of the negatives of something they don't understand, than it is to educate the public about a science as intricate as nuclear power.

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