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Thats a mess waiting to happen. Just crazy, after Fukushima I lost any belief remaining that the nuclear industry can be safe.

by tdyen 11y ago

x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
Then you should do more research. Thorium salt reactors are quite promising.
stephengillie 11y ago
It's possible to make a nuclear reactor fail-safe. It's only poor engineering that lead to Fukushima being fail-dangerous. From here it moves from being a technical question (how to do this) to being a political question (who does it and why). How do we convince non-technical bureaucrats to convince reactor architects to make these be fail-safe?
- Zirro 11y ago
  "It's possible to make a nuclear reactor fail-safe" Are any such "fail-safe" reactors in operation today? You make it sound like a very simple problem.
  - crocal 11y ago
    Conceptually, Thorium reactors are an answer known to be workable. To put it simply the reactor is like a bowl of radioactive soup with a plug at the bottom made of ice and self refrigerated using the power produced by the reactor. If it stops working, plug melts, soup flows out of the bowl and reactor stops. The soup is not too radioactive, and thorium is more Common. This design is not without challenges, but certainly not bigger than fast reactors and nuclear reprocessing. There was even working prototypes in the USA very early in the atomic age. However, Thorium reactors do not produce plutonium, and so, cannot be the technology selected in a cold war context where you need to build atomic weapons by the score. So, no such reactors are in service today, but they are being studied, especially in India if I recall properly. The reactors you see today were designed to produce bombs primarily. They only produce energy as an happy side effect. Safety was important, but not the main design goal. To fix this, you need to overcome two problems. 1: you must convince governments to pile billions on developing this technology, with no military goal or economical incentive in sight. 2: you must overcome resistence to change of existing industry, who basically must turn their known design upside down. Good luck with that. See what AREVA has done with its stupid EPR... So not a simple problem, but maybe complexity is not where you thought ^^
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      That's a working Liquid Metal or Liquid Metal Salt reactor not necessary a Thorium Reactor. The US prototype "Nuclear Jet Engine" used a similar design to prevent a run off. Reactors today also weren't designed to produce bombs, this was true for the 50's, the US isn't running breeding reactors any more, the US for the most part doesn't produce much if any fissile material any longer, the Netherlands actually produces more enriched Uranium per year than the states. ATM there are pretty much 2 countries which use breeder reactors exclusively that's India and Russia, Japan and France still operate some but they are also phased out. As for the Thorium crap, does a thorium reactor works? yes, is it better than other LM/LMS reactor designs no. Is it safer than other WAS reactor designs no. Is it less radioactive than other reactor fuels, thorium yes, the actual LM/LMS fuel for a thorium reactor nope, for both slow and fast thorium cycles you are going to mix in some really nasty isotopes with the salts to kick off and control the reaction and the burn-off rate. Thorium reactors will still require breeder reactors to produce fuel elements for the actual fuel. While I also like to believe that some YouTube video can solve all of the problems in the world and that everything is a government conspiracy the world doesn't really work that way. Yes in principle you can design a safer "Thorium" liquid metal salt reactor than a 1950's fast breeder reactor but they aren't necessarily safer than modern 4 generation reactors like BN-1200 (BN-800 can be considered a gen 3.9 since it's a faster breeder liquid metal cooled reactor which is kinda of a prototype for the Gen 4 BN-1200 one) which is a sodium cooled fast breeder reactor, unlike the (classical Shippingport) Thorium design the BN-1200 (and the 800) design can be safety used with (since the coolant can reach 500c+ in the heat exchanger without being under any pressure) modern high efficiency gas-steam turbines, competing designs which use Fluoride Slats and Helium as coolants also offer WAS operations in many cases with coupled with high efficiency. Also an important thing to remember is that while that pipe-dream Thorium reactor might be safer on paper we have 70 years of experience with dealing with Uranium fuel cycles and reactor design. Those 70 years of experience, procedures, known and understood risks and issues are quite important when designing things that might kill 100000 people when they go boom, saying well i found this old design from a US project to irradiate the upper atmosphere with nuclear jets doesn't really inspire much confidence in anyone who ever handled even a simple risk assessment.
      - 11y ago
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    You make a great point. In retrospect, I think this is in the same state as remote work policies - techies can't see any reason it wouldn't work in theory, but practical implementation eludes us today.
- elektromekatron 11y ago
  Give less weight to relative hours of previous service in the safety assessment. The reason crap old designs are still built today is because they score higher on the risk assessment than safer designs due to the accumulated hours of service.
- Zigurd 11y ago
  > It's only poor engineering... Poor policy, really. We should not be extending the operation of old plants. The engineering is relatively poor based on what we now know about building and siting nuclear plants, but it was state of the art at the time.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    I don't think putting the emergency generators for a flood-prone site in the basement can be considered wise even given the knowledge of the time.
    - tsotha 11y ago
      GE reactor plans called for the batteries and generators to be in the basement, and TEPCO decided not to deviate from the plans because they were worried any changes could introduce subtle failure modes.
- pdonis 11y ago
  > It's only poor engineering that lead to Fukushima being fail-dangerous. Poor engineering (more precisely, site selection) of the backup diesel generators, yes. Poor engineering of the reactor itself? Absolutely not. The reactor was engineered extremely well; if it hadn't been, the radiation release due to the extended loss of backup power would have been much worse. Yes, it's true that today we know how to design reactors that don't need backup power in the event of an emergency shutdown. But we didn't know how to do that when the Fukushima reactor was built. You can't fault the engineers who designed and built it for not doing something that nobody knew how to do at the time. > How do we convince non-technical bureaucrats to convince reactor architects to make these be fail-safe? I would say it's more a question of how do you stop non-technical bureaucrats from preventing reactor architects from making them fail-safe. From what I've seen of the decision-making processes that were at work at Fukushima, I strongly suspect that it wasn't technical people that made the decision to put backup diesel generators where they could be flooded by a tsunami. It was bureaucrats who were too ignorant to understand the issues involved.
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    > Poor engineering of the reactor itself? Absolutely not. The reactor was engineered extremely well; if it hadn't been, the radiation release due to the extended loss of backup power would have been much worse. I've always had trouble understanding why the nuclear reactors weren't powering their own pumps. What sort of engineering situation led to them requiring yet another generator? Were they powered from the power grid instead of directly from the reactors? > It was bureaucrats who were too ignorant to understand the issues involved. This is so frustrating. But we can't expect elected officials to be experts on every subject matter.
    - pdonis 11y ago
      > I've always had trouble understanding why the nuclear reactors weren't powering their own pumps. They do in normal operation, but they can't (obviously) if they're shut down. That's what the backup generators are for, to power the pumps so coolant flow is maintained for decay heat removal if the reactor has to shut down. Newer reactor designs don't require pumps to keep running after shutdown for decay heat removal; but those designs didn't exist when the Fukushima reactor was built.
comrade1 11y ago
Chernobyl made a lot larger part of the planet uninhabitable than Fukushima did.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  No it did not. Read the WHO report. Any reference to chernobyl being "Uninhabitable" is more nuclear politics than scientific reality.
  - comrade1 11y ago
    Are you saying Fukushima left more uninhabitable land? I don't think that's right.
    - sandworm101 11y ago
      Neither. Other than a very few hot site, most all of the evacuated land is perfectly livable. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
joshuapants 11y ago
And that's why you base decisions on facts rather than emotions. Nuclear power is safe, and only getting safer as time goes on. The Fukushima plant was 40 years old, not state of the art (even when it was built). It does not reflect the nuclear industry as a whole, just some very bad decisions from people who knew better. All the deaths at Fukushima (18,500) were from the tsunami itself. Nobody got radiation poisoning, and there is only a modest increase in cancer risks [1]. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/28/us-japan-nuclear-cancer-idUSBRE91R0D420130228 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/28/us-japan-nuclear-c... But experts said the overall risk was small. The radiation exposure means about 1.25 out of every 100 girls in the area could develop thyroid cancer over their lifetime, instead of the natural rate of about 0.75 percent. edit: Nobody vote this up anymore, I'm at 1337 points and I'd like to keep it there
- tedunangst 11y ago
  You seem to have hit 1340, but I gave you a downvote in an effort to restore order to the world. :)
zzalpha 11y ago
Did the massive explosion in Tianjin convince you that the petroleum fuel industry cannot be safe? Did the New Horizons spill convince you that the oil drilling industry cannot be safe? Did the tens of thousands of vehicular deaths every year convince you that cars cannot be safe? I share with you the concerns that nuclear power requires strong regulation and current technology desperately needs to be updated. But the simple fact is that, if we want to get off of carbon, nuclear is going to play a role. So let's figure out how to do it properly instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Meanwhile, holding nuclear power up to a safety standard that virtually no other energy generation method could live up to demonstrates the lack of rationality present in this debate. The very electricity we're trying to produce has, itself, killed more people than nuclear power ever has.
BonsaiDen 11y ago
Yes, nuclear power does have a safety problem, but not a imminent one. The real problem does not come from operations, but from the waste these operations leave behind. Minimizing and storing nuclear waste are the far greater challenges than just running the plants. Another problem is the question, who is going to pay for all that waste in the end? Well first off, most likely future generations and when we look at the current time frame, that's actually not as clear as one might think. For example, the German government has long struggled - and still is - to actually get the power plant operators to pay for the waste disposal. Before that is was pretty much "We get to make the money basically for free, and you pay for the waste." Which of course is also an issue with the argument that nuclear power is cheap, because in most cases the cost of waste disposal and final storage are not included in the calculation, because these things can just "happen later". Waste disposal was way too long under the radar, so there was no pressure to develop new, better alternatives to the current reactor technologies for a very long time, since "state of the art" was just good enough, and cheap.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Lots of other human activities generate toxic waste in far greater volumes than nuclear reactors do. Nuclear waste remains dangerous for thousands of years, but lots of other toxic waste remains dangerous forever. Toxic waste is a problem in general, but not a particularly severe one. Why so worried about nuclear waste specifically?
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  > Minimizing and storing nuclear waste are the far greater challenges than just running the plants. Yes, but they are political challenges, not engineering challenges. It's well-known how to keep nuclear waste secure for the length of time one should reasonably care about. Keeping, say, Congress from killing the storage facility due to anti-nuclear ignorance is what needs to be overcome here. But that being said, "ignorant people are preventing this problem from being solved" is not an argument against solving the problem, it's an argument in favor of educating and convincing the people.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
saulrh 11y ago
Then you need to do more research. Fukushima was not part of the modern nuclear industry. Its technology and hardware and culture were fifty years old, every single part of them. If you go back fifty years in literally any other major technology it's all mind-blowingly unsafe. Fifty-year-old cars are deathtraps. Fifty-year-old houses are deathtraps. Fifty-year-old elevators are deathtraps. Fifty-year-old chemistry sets are deathtraps. Fifty-year-old airplanes are barely not deathtraps. And even though fifty-year-old technologies are pants-shittingly unsafe, you're perfectly fine using modern cars, and modern chemistry sets, and modern elevators, and modern airplanes. Because they're all safe. And you should be perfectly fine using modern nuclear power, because it's perfectly safe. Besides, you know what? Even if nuclear power plants were as dangerous as the ones at Chernobyl and Fukushima I'd still be agitating for their adoption. Do you have any idea how minor and infrequent nuclear incidents really are compared to the alternatives? Chernobyl is so far out into the worst case column that it's not even reasonable. It's like badmouthing cars today because a tanker full of hydrofluoric acid crashed in downtown Seattle circa 1934. There are two major nuclear incidents in history. Two. Neither of them was as bad as an average dam burst. One of them wasn't even as bad as an average coal mine collapse. And the worst dam-bursts in history outweigh the worst nuclear disasters in history by four orders of magnitude. Go look up Banqiao Dam. Even the "green" alternatives are pretty awful; more people have died falling off wind turbines than will ever die to nuclear power. Compared to the alternatives, nuke plants are rainbows and sunshine.
- 13years 11y ago
  Most other accidents have casualties which are easily traceable. Comparing deaths to those that fall from wind turbines is not a fair comparison. Nuclear accidents happen in slow motion and the effects are not as easily traceable. It will be decades before we know the impact and it will only be due to statistics. Just because you don't die today, doesn't mean you will not die earlier than you normally would have. Also, to say they are infrequent is not necessarily clear description considering the Fukishima accident is still not over by any means. It is an accident that continues everyday. http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/29/is-fukushima-getting-worse/ http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/29/is-fukushima-getting-... and http://enenews.com/officials-trillions-becquerels-radioactive-material-flowing-sea-fukushima-map-shows-nuclear-waste-flowing-bottom-ocean-offshore-japan-tv-journalist-contaminated-seawater-will-circulate-around-gl http://enenews.com/officials-trillions-becquerels-radioactiv...
InclinedPlane 11y ago
Fukushima was a half-century old design that was hit with a record breaking natural disaster and yet despite all that the disaster has resulted in a remarkable lack of death and catastrophe. Meanwhile, other methods of power generation continue to kill people by the wagon load every day and nobody seems to care much because we're comfortable with those ways of dying whereas we're creeped out about the spookiness of radiation.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  Indeed it was on the other hand if you ask anyone if given the choice would they live within the meltdown blast radius from a nuclear reactor you'll pretty much hear a resounding no.
DennisP 11y ago
The Integral Fast Reactor in the U.S. was tested against the exact scenario that damaged Fukushima: loss of electrical power. The IFR shut down quietly with no damage, just due to the physics of the fuel and coolant.

Thats a mess waiting to happen. Just crazy, after Fukushima I lost any belief remaining that the nuclear industry can be safe.

by tdyen 11y ago

Thats a mess waiting to happen. Just crazy, after Fukushima I lost any belief remaining that the nuclear industry can be safe.

x3n0ph3n3 11y ago

Then you should do more research. Thorium salt reactors are quite promising.

stephengillie 11y ago

It's possible to make a nuclear reactor fail-safe. It's only poor engineering that lead to Fukushima being fail-dangerous. From here it moves from being a technical question (how to do this) to being a political question (who does it and why). How do we convince non-technical bureaucrats to convince reactor architects to make these be fail-safe?

Zirro 11y ago
"It's possible to make a nuclear reactor fail-safe" Are any such "fail-safe" reactors in operation today? You make it sound like a very simple problem.
- crocal 11y ago
  Conceptually, Thorium reactors are an answer known to be workable. To put it simply the reactor is like a bowl of radioactive soup with a plug at the bottom made of ice and self refrigerated using the power produced by the reactor. If it stops working, plug melts, soup flows out of the bowl and reactor stops. The soup is not too radioactive, and thorium is more Common. This design is not without challenges, but certainly not bigger than fast reactors and nuclear reprocessing. There was even working prototypes in the USA very early in the atomic age. However, Thorium reactors do not produce plutonium, and so, cannot be the technology selected in a cold war context where you need to build atomic weapons by the score. So, no such reactors are in service today, but they are being studied, especially in India if I recall properly. The reactors you see today were designed to produce bombs primarily. They only produce energy as an happy side effect. Safety was important, but not the main design goal. To fix this, you need to overcome two problems. 1: you must convince governments to pile billions on developing this technology, with no military goal or economical incentive in sight. 2: you must overcome resistence to change of existing industry, who basically must turn their known design upside down. Good luck with that. See what AREVA has done with its stupid EPR... So not a simple problem, but maybe complexity is not where you thought ^^
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    That's a working Liquid Metal or Liquid Metal Salt reactor not necessary a Thorium Reactor. The US prototype "Nuclear Jet Engine" used a similar design to prevent a run off. Reactors today also weren't designed to produce bombs, this was true for the 50's, the US isn't running breeding reactors any more, the US for the most part doesn't produce much if any fissile material any longer, the Netherlands actually produces more enriched Uranium per year than the states. ATM there are pretty much 2 countries which use breeder reactors exclusively that's India and Russia, Japan and France still operate some but they are also phased out. As for the Thorium crap, does a thorium reactor works? yes, is it better than other LM/LMS reactor designs no. Is it safer than other WAS reactor designs no. Is it less radioactive than other reactor fuels, thorium yes, the actual LM/LMS fuel for a thorium reactor nope, for both slow and fast thorium cycles you are going to mix in some really nasty isotopes with the salts to kick off and control the reaction and the burn-off rate. Thorium reactors will still require breeder reactors to produce fuel elements for the actual fuel. While I also like to believe that some YouTube video can solve all of the problems in the world and that everything is a government conspiracy the world doesn't really work that way. Yes in principle you can design a safer "Thorium" liquid metal salt reactor than a 1950's fast breeder reactor but they aren't necessarily safer than modern 4 generation reactors like BN-1200 (BN-800 can be considered a gen 3.9 since it's a faster breeder liquid metal cooled reactor which is kinda of a prototype for the Gen 4 BN-1200 one) which is a sodium cooled fast breeder reactor, unlike the (classical Shippingport) Thorium design the BN-1200 (and the 800) design can be safety used with (since the coolant can reach 500c+ in the heat exchanger without being under any pressure) modern high efficiency gas-steam turbines, competing designs which use Fluoride Slats and Helium as coolants also offer WAS operations in many cases with coupled with high efficiency. Also an important thing to remember is that while that pipe-dream Thorium reactor might be safer on paper we have 70 years of experience with dealing with Uranium fuel cycles and reactor design. Those 70 years of experience, procedures, known and understood risks and issues are quite important when designing things that might kill 100000 people when they go boom, saying well i found this old design from a US project to irradiate the upper atmosphere with nuclear jets doesn't really inspire much confidence in anyone who ever handled even a simple risk assessment.
    - 11y ago
- stephengillie 11y ago
  You make a great point. In retrospect, I think this is in the same state as remote work policies - techies can't see any reason it wouldn't work in theory, but practical implementation eludes us today.
elektromekatron 11y ago
Give less weight to relative hours of previous service in the safety assessment. The reason crap old designs are still built today is because they score higher on the risk assessment than safer designs due to the accumulated hours of service.
Zigurd 11y ago
> It's only poor engineering... Poor policy, really. We should not be extending the operation of old plants. The engineering is relatively poor based on what we now know about building and siting nuclear plants, but it was state of the art at the time.
- mikeash 11y ago
  I don't think putting the emergency generators for a flood-prone site in the basement can be considered wise even given the knowledge of the time.
  - tsotha 11y ago
    GE reactor plans called for the batteries and generators to be in the basement, and TEPCO decided not to deviate from the plans because they were worried any changes could introduce subtle failure modes.
pdonis 11y ago
> It's only poor engineering that lead to Fukushima being fail-dangerous. Poor engineering (more precisely, site selection) of the backup diesel generators, yes. Poor engineering of the reactor itself? Absolutely not. The reactor was engineered extremely well; if it hadn't been, the radiation release due to the extended loss of backup power would have been much worse. Yes, it's true that today we know how to design reactors that don't need backup power in the event of an emergency shutdown. But we didn't know how to do that when the Fukushima reactor was built. You can't fault the engineers who designed and built it for not doing something that nobody knew how to do at the time. > How do we convince non-technical bureaucrats to convince reactor architects to make these be fail-safe? I would say it's more a question of how do you stop non-technical bureaucrats from preventing reactor architects from making them fail-safe. From what I've seen of the decision-making processes that were at work at Fukushima, I strongly suspect that it wasn't technical people that made the decision to put backup diesel generators where they could be flooded by a tsunami. It was bureaucrats who were too ignorant to understand the issues involved.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  > Poor engineering of the reactor itself? Absolutely not. The reactor was engineered extremely well; if it hadn't been, the radiation release due to the extended loss of backup power would have been much worse. I've always had trouble understanding why the nuclear reactors weren't powering their own pumps. What sort of engineering situation led to them requiring yet another generator? Were they powered from the power grid instead of directly from the reactors? > It was bureaucrats who were too ignorant to understand the issues involved. This is so frustrating. But we can't expect elected officials to be experts on every subject matter.
  - pdonis 11y ago
    > I've always had trouble understanding why the nuclear reactors weren't powering their own pumps. They do in normal operation, but they can't (obviously) if they're shut down. That's what the backup generators are for, to power the pumps so coolant flow is maintained for decay heat removal if the reactor has to shut down. Newer reactor designs don't require pumps to keep running after shutdown for decay heat removal; but those designs didn't exist when the Fukushima reactor was built.

comrade1 11y ago

Chernobyl made a lot larger part of the planet uninhabitable than Fukushima did.

sandworm101 11y ago
No it did not. Read the WHO report. Any reference to chernobyl being "Uninhabitable" is more nuclear politics than scientific reality.
- comrade1 11y ago
  Are you saying Fukushima left more uninhabitable land? I don't think that's right.
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    Neither. Other than a very few hot site, most all of the evacuated land is perfectly livable. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model

joshuapants 11y ago

And that's why you base decisions on facts rather than emotions. Nuclear power is safe, and only getting safer as time goes on. The Fukushima plant was 40 years old, not state of the art (even when it was built). It does not reflect the nuclear industry as a whole, just some very bad decisions from people who knew better. All the deaths at Fukushima (18,500) were from the tsunami itself. Nobody got radiation poisoning, and there is only a modest increase in cancer risks [1]. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/28/us-japan-nuclear-cancer-idUSBRE91R0D420130228 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/28/us-japan-nuclear-c... But experts said the overall risk was small. The radiation exposure means about 1.25 out of every 100 girls in the area could develop thyroid cancer over their lifetime, instead of the natural rate of about 0.75 percent. edit: Nobody vote this up anymore, I'm at 1337 points and I'd like to keep it there

tedunangst 11y ago
You seem to have hit 1340, but I gave you a downvote in an effort to restore order to the world. :)

zzalpha 11y ago

Did the massive explosion in Tianjin convince you that the petroleum fuel industry cannot be safe? Did the New Horizons spill convince you that the oil drilling industry cannot be safe? Did the tens of thousands of vehicular deaths every year convince you that cars cannot be safe? I share with you the concerns that nuclear power requires strong regulation and current technology desperately needs to be updated. But the simple fact is that, if we want to get off of carbon, nuclear is going to play a role. So let's figure out how to do it properly instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Meanwhile, holding nuclear power up to a safety standard that virtually no other energy generation method could live up to demonstrates the lack of rationality present in this debate. The very electricity we're trying to produce has, itself, killed more people than nuclear power ever has.

BonsaiDen 11y ago

Yes, nuclear power does have a safety problem, but not a imminent one. The real problem does not come from operations, but from the waste these operations leave behind. Minimizing and storing nuclear waste are the far greater challenges than just running the plants. Another problem is the question, who is going to pay for all that waste in the end? Well first off, most likely future generations and when we look at the current time frame, that's actually not as clear as one might think. For example, the German government has long struggled - and still is - to actually get the power plant operators to pay for the waste disposal. Before that is was pretty much "We get to make the money basically for free, and you pay for the waste." Which of course is also an issue with the argument that nuclear power is cheap, because in most cases the cost of waste disposal and final storage are not included in the calculation, because these things can just "happen later". Waste disposal was way too long under the radar, so there was no pressure to develop new, better alternatives to the current reactor technologies for a very long time, since "state of the art" was just good enough, and cheap.

mikeash 11y ago
Lots of other human activities generate toxic waste in far greater volumes than nuclear reactors do. Nuclear waste remains dangerous for thousands of years, but lots of other toxic waste remains dangerous forever. Toxic waste is a problem in general, but not a particularly severe one. Why so worried about nuclear waste specifically?
13thLetter 11y ago
> Minimizing and storing nuclear waste are the far greater challenges than just running the plants. Yes, but they are political challenges, not engineering challenges. It's well-known how to keep nuclear waste secure for the length of time one should reasonably care about. Keeping, say, Congress from killing the storage facility due to anti-nuclear ignorance is what needs to be overcome here. But that being said, "ignorant people are preventing this problem from being solved" is not an argument against solving the problem, it's an argument in favor of educating and convincing the people.
- dredmorbius 11y ago

saulrh 11y ago

Then you need to do more research. Fukushima was not part of the modern nuclear industry. Its technology and hardware and culture were fifty years old, every single part of them. If you go back fifty years in literally any other major technology it's all mind-blowingly unsafe. Fifty-year-old cars are deathtraps. Fifty-year-old houses are deathtraps. Fifty-year-old elevators are deathtraps. Fifty-year-old chemistry sets are deathtraps. Fifty-year-old airplanes are barely not deathtraps. And even though fifty-year-old technologies are pants-shittingly unsafe, you're perfectly fine using modern cars, and modern chemistry sets, and modern elevators, and modern airplanes. Because they're all safe. And you should be perfectly fine using modern nuclear power, because it's perfectly safe. Besides, you know what? Even if nuclear power plants were as dangerous as the ones at Chernobyl and Fukushima I'd still be agitating for their adoption. Do you have any idea how minor and infrequent nuclear incidents really are compared to the alternatives? Chernobyl is so far out into the worst case column that it's not even reasonable. It's like badmouthing cars today because a tanker full of hydrofluoric acid crashed in downtown Seattle circa 1934. There are two major nuclear incidents in history. Two. Neither of them was as bad as an average dam burst. One of them wasn't even as bad as an average coal mine collapse. And the worst dam-bursts in history outweigh the worst nuclear disasters in history by four orders of magnitude. Go look up Banqiao Dam. Even the "green" alternatives are pretty awful; more people have died falling off wind turbines than will ever die to nuclear power. Compared to the alternatives, nuke plants are rainbows and sunshine.

13years 11y ago
Most other accidents have casualties which are easily traceable. Comparing deaths to those that fall from wind turbines is not a fair comparison. Nuclear accidents happen in slow motion and the effects are not as easily traceable. It will be decades before we know the impact and it will only be due to statistics. Just because you don't die today, doesn't mean you will not die earlier than you normally would have. Also, to say they are infrequent is not necessarily clear description considering the Fukishima accident is still not over by any means. It is an accident that continues everyday. http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/29/is-fukushima-getting-worse/ http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/29/is-fukushima-getting-... and http://enenews.com/officials-trillions-becquerels-radioactive-material-flowing-sea-fukushima-map-shows-nuclear-waste-flowing-bottom-ocean-offshore-japan-tv-journalist-contaminated-seawater-will-circulate-around-gl http://enenews.com/officials-trillions-becquerels-radioactiv...

InclinedPlane 11y ago

Fukushima was a half-century old design that was hit with a record breaking natural disaster and yet despite all that the disaster has resulted in a remarkable lack of death and catastrophe. Meanwhile, other methods of power generation continue to kill people by the wagon load every day and nobody seems to care much because we're comfortable with those ways of dying whereas we're creeped out about the spookiness of radiation.

dogma1138 11y ago
Indeed it was on the other hand if you ask anyone if given the choice would they live within the meltdown blast radius from a nuclear reactor you'll pretty much hear a resounding no.

DennisP 11y ago

The Integral Fast Reactor in the U.S. was tested against the exact scenario that damaged Fukushima: loss of electrical power. The IFR shut down quietly with no damage, just due to the physics of the fuel and coolant.