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The fact is that HUMANS will build the new reactors; interfere with engineering plans and systems; and not be trained properly. If a reactor can't be safely de

• deleted 11y ago
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• lbenes 11y ago
  You're so paralyzed by fear of a nuclear accident you miss the big picture. For example, the fly ash emitted burning coal for electricity carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.[1] Sure the results of a nuclear meltdown are scary on the local level. But you know what's a lot scarier on the global level? Runaway climate change. It took the worse earthquake in the Japan's recorded history along with several human mistakes on an outdated reactor to cause Fukushima. And we don't more of these designs. Like the article discussed, what we want is the government to be smart about nuclear power. There 7 million deaths annually due to air pollution. How many American lives are lost due to terrorism? And yet we wasted $4 trillion in the Middle East after 911. Imagine if we spent that on new reactor designs and fusion research? Global warming is the biggest threat facing our species. It's time we stopped worrying about our neighborhood and starting thinking about our planet. [1]http://www.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045.short http://www.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045.short
  • varjag 11y ago
    When I was 8, I read a 1970s novel, describing a struggle of young nuclear engineers to promote newer reactor design through the behemoths of rigid bureaucracy. The new design was inherently safer and thus did not need the expensive steel containment shell built around, thus saving resources to the Motherland. Chernobyl happened the next year, we lived 250km north of it. Luckily for us, most of the fallout precipitated on heads of other people some 100km south. Yet the radiation levels were a part of daily weather forecast for the next decade. We didn't have a toaster, a microwave, a dishwasher or a VCR home then, but we owned a radiometer. We were instructed to hide from the rain in the weeks after the accident. I remember hiding with a friend under concrete slabs at a construction site on our way from school. The habit kind of stuck in the unconscious: in Belarus, people still scramble for cover at the slightest hint of rain, even though the accident was a full generation ago. I only realized it after living abroad for some years. Anyway, whenever someone on Reddit or here rediscovers that Nuclear is Safe when Done Right, I always remember that novel.
    • DennisP 11y ago
      I doubt anyone ever claimed that Chernobyl was nuclear Done Right. It was probably the most unsafe reactor design ever put into production. The best modern designs have a strong negative feedback: as the fuel gets hotter, the reaction rate slows down, just due to the physics of the fuel and coolant. Chernobyl did the opposite: as the fuel got hotter the nuclear reactions happened faster. It relied on human operation of control rods to keep it from blowing up. And on top of that it skipped the containment shell.
      • varjag 11y ago
        Actually, it relied on two complimentary safeguard circuits to restrict the rod movements within its calculated performance envelope. They could not be overriden from the front panel, so electricians were dispatched to cut them off, in order to conduct an "experiment" in the wake of International Labour Day. How safe are the other reactor designs when malicious human intervention is considered is still a very open question. I would also remark there was a deserved stream of criticism from the West both for the reactor design and the containment effort that followed. The overwhelming opinion throughout the 1990s-2000s was that the Western designs are safe and catastrophic scenarios like Chernobyl are implausible. Then Fukushima happens, the three reactors blow up and the only saving grace for Japan was the wind blowing oceanside. And the containment is done by low wage workers in sneakers, while Asimo and its advanced robot colleagues play robosoccer in Tokyo. The narrative is now changed to other designs being "inherently safe", although it's not very plausible how any concentrated, massive release of energy can be made inherently safe. Yes you can reduce probabilities and exclude some catastrophic scenarios, but this is a thing with crises: they always come unexpected. I'm sure when the plug in a molten salt reactor fails for some reason (say tectonic shift from a quake), there will no doubt be another design touted as safe. Now consider that fission power atm is what, 10-15% of compound world power generation? As of now it's focused in a handful of nations, most of whom are known for safety culture. As it proliferates worldwide, the average quality of maintenance will decline and the number of stations would naturally multiply, so perhaps we'll see a major nuclear accident every couple years instead of decades. And we haven't even started with waste disposal and non-proliferation considerations here. I'd really really rather wait for fusion.
• burnte 11y ago
  > If a reactor can't be safely designed, built and run by fallible humans then it shouldn't be built. And, as I mentioned, we have designs that can be run safely by fallible humans, we just need to keep penny pinchers from breaking the design during design/construction. And extra $1,000,000 here and there for a safety margin is a far better investment than hundreds of millions in cleanup.