Nuclear Power Safety

This comment is wrong. Countries relying on nuclear energy (United States, China, France…) certainly don’t struggle with “unplanned downtime”. Nor can a modern reactor, built to modern standards, “poison a whole country and their neighbors”. Chernobyl is the worst radiological accident in history and the only one of its kind. Modern reactors can’t explode and burn like Chernobyl. It’s impossible. And nuclear power plants are not built by the lowest bidder, because the number of corporations that

If nuclear power plants slowly created an exclusion zone around them that grows over time, then you would have a point since each individual plant would have a tiny exclusion zone, but the problem is that the accidents are the result of gross negligence in the cases of both Chernobyl and Fukushima. Arguing about modern safety standards is meaningless by the way. Back when the Fukushima accident happened, the Fukushima power plant was older than the one in Chernobyl. This tells us two things. Peo

Interesting, especially when you consider the environmental disaster that occurs when something goes wrong with nuclear power. Think Fukushima or Chernobyl. From the actual HN list right now: https://moxie.org/stories/chernobyl-scene-report/

It's not simply an emotional argument. Fukishima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island weren't supposed to have the issues that hit them either, right up until the point that they did. Every nuclear power plant that ever failed was claimed to be safe until it did, and only after that point did it become so obviously unsafe that it shouldn't be compared to all the other safe nuclear plants. Even when the safety issues could have been and were predicted in advance, as with Fukish

The Fukushima reactors and a lot of the german ones were built by the same company. They overlooked the flood risk on the japanese coast (which has huge tsunamis every few decades). What did they overlook elsewhere? After Chernobyl, politicians promised that western reactors could not possibly explode. Fukushima proved them wrong.

If you're smart, and careful and plan well and don't try to cut corners, you'll be safe.Chernobyl was hampered by design flaws [1] that can be pretty well avoided these days, and it's not like light water reactors are the only / best option, either.[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-08-23-mn-15781-...</a

It's very safe if you don't disable safety systems put in place (like it was explicitly done in Chernobyl to do dangerous experiments, even though they labeled it as "routine tests"). And if you don't ignore many warnings given in the industry (like TEPCO ignoring many recommendations of raising their tsunami protection walls many years before the catastrophe, like other plants closer to the epicenter that were unaffected).So the chance is much lower than people think

This isn’t convincing, sorry. While Fukushima wasn’t that bad, it could have been terrible. It had the potential to make a large region of Japan uninhabitable and poison the food supply. That is super serious. Just because nothing bad happened this time, doesn’t mean that we’ll be so lucky in the future.The biggest issue with your argument is that you have inadequate explanations for the failures that have happened. Chernobyl: bad reactor design. Fukushima: under engineered. Obviously

Not really. Chernobyl was explicitly known to have a vulnerability at a very unusual operating point. Fukushima was repeatedly flooded and officials refused to make protections against modest natural disasters. Three Mile Island was a mechanical failure.There aren't many examples where something that went wrong was thought to be impossible. Much more often it is scenarios that were known to be possible, but ignored for reasons of cost or politics.Nuclear plants are hardened agains

It took a tsunami on an unmaintained nuclear power plant to cause Fukushima.It took the russians lifting off _every single security mechanism_ to cause Chernobyl.The ojer major incidents like Three Mile Island are just "well, security measures have failed, we didn't have enough fallbacks. It's broken now. Light irradiation around but nothing major".So, no, nuclear power doesn't stop for anything but the absolute worst conditions. As for the "doing even wors