Piece of a fission reactor became radioactive due to neutron bombardment.

Lost track of this radioactive piece in the pool, found it by accident, zap!

Neutrons make hardware radioactive.

Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion (not fission) reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion (not fission) reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays.

If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we will need in our lifetimes.

Quoting John Carmack: "Deuterium fusion would give us a cheap and basically unlimited fuel source with a modest waste stream, but it is an almost comically complex and expensive way to generate heat compared to fission, which is basically 'put these rocks next to each other and they get hot'."

Here's a Wayback mirror since the server appears to be struggling: http://web.archive.org/web/20240402165313/https://isoe-netwo...

Edit: While the above link works for me, this link might work better for some: http://web.archive.org/web/20240402165313if_/https://isoe-ne...

One interesting fact about nuclear energy I came across the other day is at both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, other reactors on the site continued to operate - and produce electricity - for many years after the incidents.

In Russia today - just outside St Petersburg, a stones throw from Finland and Estonia - they still operate reactors of the same design as Chernobyl (with retrofits) and don't plan to shut them down for at least another decade.

I think this is the incident referenced in WhatIf's exploration of how long you could swim in a nuclear reactor's spent fuel pool.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

This incident in 2010: https://www.ensi.ch/de/2010/08/31/kkl-ueberschreitung-der-zu...

Worker touches something he shouldn't. Unlike in Los Alamos he survived though, and didn't loose his hand. With higher voltages such incidents are usually deadly, that's why we were explicitly trained to NOT touch anything, and put our hands behind our back.

You might say it was NSFW.

I have great respect for the safety culture that IAEA has mandated. These accident reports always contain great learnings. Yet, it is so easy for non-experts (and experts forgetting that risks and rewards are connected) to misread this as conclusive evidence og the universal dangers of nuclear. That a relatively simple human error, with little consequence, is treated like a flight crash signals disproportionately to the public that nuclear isn’t worth the risk.

*2010/2011.

Where did this happen at?

Related and easily explained: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/