Massachusetts gas fires: Another technological tragedy
"All of these events feel like unnecessary disasters—if we were just a little smarter, we could have avoided them—but the fires in Lawrence are particularly tormenting in this respect. With an aircraft 35,000 feet over the ocean, you can’t simply press Pause when things don’t go right. Likewise a nuclear reactor has no safe-harbor state; even after you shut down the fission chain reaction, the core of the reactor generates enough heat to destroy itself. But Columbia Gas faced no such constraints in Lawrence. "<p>Pretty interesting comparison. Arguably airplanes can coast down and nuclear reactors (especially Gen-IV low-pressure ones like sodium metal or molten salt) can passively cool their nuclear decay heat post shutdown without external power. But it is true that TMI and Fukushima were not chain reacting, they were both decay heat cooling problems. For those unfamiliar with this, a chain reactor immediately drops to about 7% of full power after shutdown and then exponentially decays to 1% after a day and half a percent after weeks. Turns out 1% of a gigawatt is still a lot.<p>On the nuclear topic, I'm annoyed that natural gas accidents that cause deaths get way lighter media treatment than nuclear accidents like TMI that cause no deaths.