These are Amazing and a little terrifying :)
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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interestingasfuck
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I'm a little apprehensive about the bigger budget documentaries. I feel like the cheaper more boring versions have less intensive to spin the truths.
My favorite documentary ( I can't seem to find it now ) was pretty clear about cause, failure to act, failure to act correctly, failure to notify people. It was truly a perfect storm of people doing the wrong thing. There was a safety design flaw, unrelated there was a bad valve, the company that made the valve knew it was bad, and knew exactly where that valve was installed but never called it out. There were control room lapses in maintenance and reaction. There was confusion around what was happening. Authorities weren't notified in time, when they were notified, it was incorrect. It took the President Carter (a trained nuclear engineer) to fly in personally to rein in the situation.
It could have been worse. It may have even been a but worse than they let on. A whistleblower over the whole situation was mysteriously killed.
The thing is, the whole thing happened in '79 we didn't even have reasonable computers at the time. Simulations were a pipe-dream. There are safer materials we could use. We could even design something more safely to use current fuels.
But, we have solar, we have wind and maybe fusion. All of which are probably more cost effective.
That's fair. They implied more radiation got out then was disclosed but life has kept me from digging into that claim so... not sure. Given the lack of major disasters (absent Tsunamis and Chernobyl) I'd say we're either doing well with safety or very, very lucky.
They vented quite a bit of gas. More than they even knew. The real question would be water seepage, but none had seemed to detect any.
I'm going to be cautious with my words so I don't doxx myself. I worked with the raw data for the environmental and groundwater program for TMI for about seven years. The legacy contamination onsite from '79 is heavily monitored and an annual report is created every year for both the environmental program and the groundwater program.
Those reports are available on the NRC website.
yeah be super careful here, it's hard to impossible to erase things from the Fediverse.