The fact that it's impossible to estimate the risk because the failure rates are unknown is concerning?
Yes, more frequent failures would make it easier for insurance companies to estimate the risk and calculate premiums but I don't exactly see how that would be good thing...
The claim that disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.
One might object that there is selection bias in the original claim, due to the slowdown in construction of recent plants, but that is a separate issue. A more thorough investigation of the causes of all events leading to a significant degradation of safety margins would be needed to determine whether and how older designs are inherently more risky and whether that risk can be adequately mitigated given the constraints imposed by their design.
The fact that, prior to Chernobyl, there were several foreshadowing incidents with RBMKs which should have raised serious concerns, suggests that 'lessons learned' isn't much of a reason to be satisfied with the status quo.
Even if we don't treat Chernobyl as sui generis, the safety situation with nuclear power is akin to that of airplanes. We don't bat an eye at the quotidian death toll of cars or coal
I've yet to see a nuclear safety argument that doesn't reduce to 'nuclear energy provokes emotional fear'
Oh, it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable? How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or infamous oil spills or dam failures or even the mining scars...
"Every year, sheep herds in selected municipalities must be brought down onto cultivated land and given clean feed for a certain number of weeks before they can be slaughtered, in order to bring the levels in the meat down below the maximum permitted level."
Germany 2026, 3000 boar at 100-200 euros compensation each:
“It has taken nearly 25 years for the contamination of Scottish soils to decay to officially safe levels – and we're 1,400 miles away,”
Northern norway - scotland - bavaria - ukraine, that's about half the continental US affected for decades, so it's a fair comparison wouldn't you agree?
The fallout does not necessarily fall er, out closer to the plant. It depends on weather, which way the winds blew and where it happened to rain.
That said, you may by all means be right that the fears from what actually happened was too high. You may also be wrong, it's hard to tell.
But that is actually not relevant to the point. We know that actual Chernobyl caused expensive countermeasures to be deployed in a very large area for a long time because there was a measurable reason to do so.
The important thing to consider here is not how bad it actually was, but how bad it could have been.
If the plant had burned for months instead of days, it would have been so bad that any discussion about nuclear power today would only be done as satire.
Yes, it is true, the weather at that time did that big loop thing, taking the bad stuff up to Scandinavia and then eventually looping it back.
Still, some stuff clearly came here, the mushrooms appreciated it.
Unfortunately, I don't have the skills to figure out what was the real impact.
You are correct, things could have been much worse. On the other hand, also as a result of Chernobyl, anything similar is nowadays much less likely.
At the end, it is always a tradeoff. Germany and others turning off their nuclear power stations got themselves in quite an energetic problem. Especially nowadays with all the wars and their consequences.
> it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable
The big fear for me would be that this happens to a nuclear power plant that is located in a densely populated area (of which there are many). Chernobyl was bad, but imagine the impact if the exclusion zone contained a major city.
The only real problem with the Fukushima incident was the (unnecessary) evacuation. It really would be best if they weren't built too close to where people live.
>How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or infamous oil spills or dam failures or even the mining scars...
When did a dam failure in the Ukraine affect wildlife in Sweden for 30+ years? It's kind of a several-orders-of-magnitude larger area being affected for orders-of-magniture longer timespans.
Exxon valdez and even deepwater horizon is ancient history, Chernobyl is not, in fact it's current events. And will be, for the foreseeable future, as will Fukushima.
No Japanese alive today will stop paying for Fukushima for as long as they live. Are any other costs from the tsunami still ongoing?
>Happy to be proven wrong, but
Won't prove you wrong but maybe it will make you reconsider the link as a support of your argument:
Danger is what could happen, not what has actually happened.
A loaded gun is dangerous even if it hasn't been fired yet, nuclear plants are dangerous even if they haven't been bunker-buster-bombed yet. More so than any coal plant, tanker ship or hydro dam.
This is exactly my point. You are looking at a single fantastic instance: you could have 100 Chernobyls and it would still be less destruction, illness, and death per TWh. To consider Deepwater Horizon "ancient history" is a particularly astonishing claim
> nuclear plants are dangerous even if they haven't been bunker-buster-bombed yet. More so than any coal plant, tanker ship or hydro dam
Banqiao dam was a single hydroelectric installation, for which the estimated death toll of its failure is in the ballpark of every nuclear death combined including Hiroshima and Nagasaki
>you could have 100 Chernobyls and it would still be less destruction
Sorry but this isn't true. You base this claim on what has happened but not what could have happened, which is a mistake.
The actual truth is that 1 Chernobyl almost ruined Europe. If the heroic individuals who managed to stop the graphite fire had said "f it I'm outta here" instead of sacrificing their lives, it would have made large areas in far corners of Europe uninhabitable, and even larger areas unsuitable for farming, for decades.
This is not hyperbole, it is a likely outcome based on the amount of material that would have been released and prevailing weather patterns.
It didn't actually happen, but it could have. We were spared the worst case scenarios from Chernobyl.
100 Chernobyls would not have been 100 Chernobyls that lasted for a week, most of them would have pumped out sterilizing levels of radiation for months. Nothing humans have done to date would be comparable to such a scenario.
Danger is not related to what has happened, but what could happen. This is important to keep in mind when discussing things that will have consequences for centuries. Many things happen over centuries, we're not even a century from WW2 yet.
>To consider Deepwater Horizon "ancient history" is a particularly astonishing claim
Figuratively, of course. I meant that the deepwater event is handled and done. We don't actively need to consider how to handle it today. Nature is still recovering but you can eat any fish you catch in the gulf without worrying about the oil spill and you don't need to clean any birds.
Chernobyl is not over, and won't be for the foreseeable future. It could cause new fallout 100 years from now, our grandchildren might have to pay for a new sarcophagus, at the very least pay for maintenance of the existing one. It is an ongoing cost on several national budgets.
Only a very few things that humans do really compares to the the consequences from nuclear power. It's troubling to see it being so severely misunderstood and belittled even on a forum like this. If we decide to do it it should at the very least be with a good understanding of the actual risks.
> disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.
There was a single nuclear disaster in history that actually caused a lot of damage (Fukushima was of course very costly financially). Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though. Just don't build them in coastal areas were Tsunamis are fairly common and more importantly don't allow Soviet engineers to design and operate your nuclear power plants.
> Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though
I mean, when we get Chernobyl 2.0 with hundreds of millions of victims, will the fact that it was caused by "variables that can be easily controlled" somehow make the situation any better?
The benchmark is strange: single-run results (the author acknowledges it's unreliable) and uses older models like GPT-4o or Opus 4 (although the benchmark is from 2026).
This will serve as an interesting empirical test, then: will LLMs do better with Vera than with Go or other languages? The testing so far seems inconclusive (https://github.com/aallan/vera-bench), but the authors make this interesting observation:
"No LLM has ever been trained on Vera. There are no Vera examples on GitHub, no Stack Overflow answers, no tutorials — the language was created after these models' training cutoffs. Every token of Vera code in these results was written by a model that learned the language entirely from a single document (SKILL.md [https://veralang.dev/SKILL.md]) provided in the prompt at evaluation time."
If LLMs do much better with Vera (or something like it) than with traditional languages, we may be entering a time when most machine-written code will be difficult for humans to review - but maybe that ship has already sailed.
On the other hand, an accurate digital simulation of a mechanical calculator really does calculate. The "a simulation is not the real thing" objection breaks down when the function is information processing, on account of information's substrate independence.
One of her points is that there are various pesky consequences for AI companies if AI becomes to be seen as conscious, such as what the paper calls the "welfare trap": if AI systems are widely regarded as being conscious or sentient, they will be seen as "moral patients", reinforcing existing concerns over whether they are being treated appropriately. This paper explicitly says that its conclusion "pulls the field of AI safety out of the welfare trap, [allowing] us to focus entirely on the concrete risks of anthropomorphism [by] treating AGI as a powerful but inherently non-sentient tool."
You noticed that too huh? It's weird ... It's not like they have to do this? They aren't forced to go full evil company mode by any extrinsic thing but even the way they frame it "welfare trap" trap? for whom?
Anthropic is actually trying to do some research into model welfare which I am personally very happy about. I absolutely do not understand people who dismiss it ... wouldn't you like to at least check? doesn't it at least make sense to do the experiments? ? Ask the questions so that we don't find out "oops, yeah we've been causing massive amounts of suffering" here in 10 years? Maybe makes sense to do a little upfront research? Which to be clear this paper is not.
Full disclosure: I didn't figure this out myself, I got it from Ms. Vale's review.
I agree that the term "welfare trap" is a loaded one. This looks to me to be a case of refusing to look through the telescope in case they might see something they do not want to.
Precisely! This makes me think that in 1930 there was a big difference between what had been written by then and what was generally available and known. Today, we have access to letters that scholars wrote to each other etc. Also, a 1930s encyclopedia was no Wikipedia (which still has gaps) and had no entry on Ada Lovelace (for multiple reasons).
I cannot, of course, speak about this particular incident, but a person inclined to skip procedures expressly implemented to avoid the problem which occurred, or who ignores clear warnings that a problem is developing, is a liability, not a trained asset.
I reckon that’s right (though maybe its mostly instinct rather than explicit worry), and I imagine there’s also the risk of being kicked out by a larger species looking for a nesting site.
The controller was not guilty of malfeasance, but clearing the trucks onto the runway with an airliner on short final was a mistake, no matter whatever else one could say about it.
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