Small chance of nuclear meltdown

[DownUnder]

Anyone know the percentage of this 'small chance'? I've played several pangea maps and built the Three Gorges Damn for power so never had this problem. Now I play a terra map that has three major land masses so I decide to go nuclear to power factories that aren't on the same continent as the dam and the darn things are popping off left and right. I've had six blow up on me (without doing an exact count I am loosing between 15% and 20%) and global warming is start to make it's presence felt.

 

[BearMan]

Yepp, I made a thread about this, they need to ATLEAST half the chance...
Please go to bug reports center, and ask them to add it under "bug or feature", I've just been there posting bugs, forgot about this one.

 

[grumbler]

In CIV4Buildingsinfo.xml there is the line <iNukeExplosionRand>1000</iNukeExplosionRand>, which I suspect is the probability of a meltdown. The question is: Do you need to increase or decrease this value to reduce the occurence of meltdowns?

 

[Yoshua]

The chance is far, far too high. If by small chance they mean absolutely certain, then that would be an accurate description. If anything it's just a good modelling of the third law of thermodynamics (entropy within a system always increases, or put simply "Whatever can go wrong, eventually will"). I've yet to play a game, make nuclear reactors and not have one or more of them meltdown, it's not even uncommon for all of them to meltdown at some point.

But this is not realistic. Real nuclear reactors are nowhere near this unsafe. In the 40 some years nuclear power has been in use, you can count on one hand the major accidents involving nuclear power, and none of them were meltdowns (Three Mile Island was the closest, but the safety mechanisms actually prevented it from becoming a meltdown). I'd hazard a guess that the mechanism is in place because of a thinly veiled bias against nuclear power by the developers rather than any basis in reality.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Might this be related to unhappy people present in the city? (in civ3 a meltdown could only happen in a city in rebellion which happened when there are more unhappy than happy people in a city)

 

[Yoshua]

Might this be related to unhappy people present in the city? (in civ3 a meltdown could only happen in a city in rebellion which happened when there are more unhappy than happy people in a city)

You know, I never thought to check. May have a part in it. But my advice is to simply never build nuclear plants. Once you get recycling facilities there is no downside to using coal plants (even though they are actually far, far, far worse than nuclear plants in the real world for a whole slew of reasons). And if you can build hydro plants or the three gorges dam, even better. Power is an absolute in Civ 4, you have it or you don't, there's no quantity attached to it. Thus, no reason to ever build nuclear plants, your just asking for trouble.

 

[warpstorm]

Hmmm, Chernobyl.

 

[DownUnder]

Wow, this forum is quite active compared to some others I post on. Sorry I missed your post BearMan but its probably buried now.

I can almost guarantee my cities were not in a state of unhappiness as all but one where the reactor blew was under 15 population and I had plenty of wonders on the main continent to promote world wide happiness for my civ. I think I'll look at the coal/recycle tandem until someone figures out the meltdown code. This was going to be my last game on an easy level as I think I've got the hang of most of it now.

 

[Grogs]

Once you get recycling facilities there is no downside to using coal plants (even though they are actually far, far, far worse than nuclear plants in the real world for a whole slew of reasons).

Power plants are a separate category for unhealthiness. They don't count as 'buildings' like forges, factories, etc, so even after a recycling center you'll still have the +2 unhealthiness from a coal plant.

 

[NP300]

Hmmm, Chernobyl.

Only a few dozen people died in Chernobyl, mostly firemen involved in putting out the fires.

There isn't even any evidence for an increase in the cancer rate, save for thyroid cancer, and even this is under dispute by scientists due to fact that increased screenings after Chernobyl probably artificially inflated the thyroid cancer rate. So basically, Chernobyl has been vastly over-rated. The number of people that have died in Coal plant accidents or in accidents when damms have burst has been much greater than the number of people who have died in nuclear plant accidents. To top it off, the Chernobyl design was not a very safe design and the accident happened because the Soviets were performing experiments on the live reactor and the experimenters violated many of the Soviet safety guidelines, if you can believe that. So they had one of the most unsafe reactor designs, and were performing experiments on it while violating all the safety regulations. And even though Chernobyl was spewing radiation for weeks, which is a worst case scenario, hardly anyone died.

I'll probably mod my game to remove the chance of meltdown. Maybe I'll make them cause unhappiness under the "environmental" civic though, although some environmentalists, like Dr. Lovelock, are for nuclear power.

Here is a case of broken dam:

http://www.beyond.fr/sites/malpasset.html
http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_french/malpasset/malpasset.htm
http://simscience.org/cracks/advanced/malpasset.html

There were 423 dead, more than in Chernobyl.

According to this article 30,000 people died when the Morvi Dam burst in India:

http://www.cea.fr/gb/publications/Clefs44/an-clefs44/clefs4407a.html

But we never hear about that do we? We just hear Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl...

So basically, if there is a risk of nuclear reactors melting down there ought to be a risk of hydropower dams bursting and flooding your city, or of coal blants blowing up and killing pop points with toxic fumes (as has in fact happened).

 

[Mrdarklight]

---
(Three Mile Island was the closest, but the safety mechanisms actually prevented it from becoming a meltdown)
---

I agree with you on a meta level about the safety of nuclear power, and I think we should build nuke plants all over the place. The opposition to nuclear power in the US is an aftereffect of the Soviet efforts to destabilize America with anti-nuke protests, etc. The protests are gone, but the hatred of anything nuclear remains.

Anyway, that said, I'm pretty sure Chernobyl was a meltdown. The core actually melted through the floor of the building. It wasn't as catastrophic as it's made out, but it was still a meltdown.

 

[bukalski]

In chernobyl the mechanism that controlled the rate of fission was correlated to temperature. As temperature goes up fission becomes easier which allows temperature to increase even more. This is different from modern reactors in that the temperature is inverse to the rate of fission. Now when the temp rises fission decreases. So they are more stable

The way the soviet reactor was designed was unsafe in the fact that without operator intervention its core temperatur goes up, which allows a greater rate of fission, which makes temp go up, so greater rate of fission etc etc.

the temperature rose which melted the carbon blocks, which released gas, that built up and eventually blew up. So in fact chernobyl actually BLEW up. This killed the plant workers and lots of fireman. I dont know the numbers but I would have thought it was more than a couple dozen if looked at over the course of several years. Radiation doenst kill right away unless you get a very high dose.

It also spewed radioactive particles into the atmosphere where it traveled across europe.

This is quite an exception to the rule as in most scenarios an out of control reactor melts down. Melt down just means temp goes up which melts the core and surrounding material. This is only dangerous because the surrounding material is the radiation shielding. This is a danger only to the workers in the area and the further you get away from the site the radiation drops of at an exponential level.

Modern reactors are very safe. It requires deliberate action from the operators to remain working and has so many safety features its ridiculous. You can pretty much leave after starting it up and the only thing that will happen is it will shut down.

The navy has been operating hundreds of reactors on ships in rough seas which are operated by 20 year olds with 1 1/2 year of training. 6 months dedicated to basic algebra, basic circuits kind of stuff. 6 months of more in depth theory most of which doesnt apply and gets forgotten. Then 6 months of hands on reactor operation which is only partially used to do hands on work. Maybe a total of 1 month worth of actual hands on operation.

The real training doesnt happen until they get to the ship by which point its hands on AS they operate the plant. They start small and work their way up.

Granted the navy picks some of the smarter people who join the navy but that just equates to slightly above average. Any one of you could be operating a nuclear reactor without any problem.

 

[Innocence]

I'm having the same experience as you guys - Civ4 Nuclear Plants are too unstable by far. I think they should do the following:

1. Considerably lower the probability of meltdown under normal circumstances
2. Make ekstra meltdown check whenever a city is being bombarded
3. Raise the probability when the city is in Revolt (unless the plant is removed when the city is conquered - is it?)
4. Remove meltdown with the invention of Fusion (as in Civ1)

And finally: In the sentence "Small chance of meltdown", they should exchange the word "chance" with "risk"

Also, it'd be nice to have a feature to either tear down buildings (I know there's a MOD to do this), or at least disable them - I hate risking meltdown when the plant isn't being used.

EDIT: Oh, almost forgot: Along with making Nuclear Power "safer", they should make "scrubbing fallout" WAY harder, if not remove it althogether. AFAIK the area around Chernobyl will be uninhabitable for centuries, and that case wasn't even a real meltdown.

 

[BearMan]

After playing a new game of Civ4, with the new patch, I checked out the nuclearpowerplants again.
I got 3 meltdowns and I had around 10 cities (marathon game speed).


v 1.61 nuclearpowerplants are (still) useless.
will this ever be patched ? Is the meltdown rate turnbased ?
If so, consider poor marathon/epic players !

 

[Snerk]

Strange.. I've played many hours of civ4 and build many nuke plants. But i've never ever had any meltdowns. Infact i would say its been a bit boring having a game feature that never happens..

 

[BearMan]

Strange.. I've played many hours of civ4 and build many nuke plants. But i've never ever had any meltdowns. Infact i would say its been a bit boring having a game feature that never happens..

how do u do it ????
what game speed do u play on ?
how many do u build ?

 

[Snerk]

how do u do it ????
what game speed do u play on ?
how many do u build ?

I dont know... i just do it. I play on normal or epic and build it in almost every city that has a factory and not a coal plant. Perhaps like 4-5 per game. What happens when they melt down, is it the same effect as a nuke?

 

[BearMan]

I dont know... i just do it. I play on normal or epic and build it in almost every city that has a factory and not a coal plant. Perhaps like 4-5 per game. What happens when they melt down, is it the same effect as a nuke?

Never got hit by nuke, but well, yeah, they blow part of the city up...
including a lot of structures...
Sure u didn't install one of the realism meltdown mods ?

 

[Snerk]

Never got hit by nuke, but well, yeah, they blow part of the city up...
including a lot of structures...
Sure u didn't install one of the realism meltdown mods ?

Yes im sure. I've played alot with sevomod and i dont know if that does something with meltdown chance. But it has never happened to me with no mods installed either. Weird...

 

[mjs0]

After playing a new game of Civ4, with the new patch, I checked out the nuclearpowerplants again.
I got 3 meltdowns and I had around 10 cities (marathon game speed).

The chance of a nuclear meltdown is indeed turn based.
In the Civ4BuildingInfos.xml file the value of iNukeExplosionRand is set to 2000.
In the code CvCity::doMeltdown this results in the generation of a random number each turn between 0 and 2000, if it generates 0 then the plant melts down.

So,

• In each of your cities with a nuclear power plant there is a 0.0005% chance of a meltdown each turn
• With 10 cities your chance of all of them surviving a turn is thus (0.9995)^10 = 0.995 (approx)
• The chance of all of them surviving 100 turns will be (0.995)^100 or roughly 60%.

I.e. you have around a 40% chance of at least one meltdown with 10 nuclear power plants over the course of 100 turns.