3 ms·
I think it needs to be said that with nuclear disasters, "fault" is only passingly relevant. Blaming any one thing on the failure is irrelevant to the fact that
by abakker 11y ago
I think it needs to be said that with nuclear disasters, "fault" is only passingly relevant. Blaming any one thing on the failure is irrelevant to the fact that when nuclear plants fail, they create highly dangerous and difficult to clean up messes. If an freak asteroid punctures a containment facility, it is nobody's fault, and no flaw of design, planning, etc. Yet, we still have radiation and waste to deal with.
Nuclear power is great, but it would be a mistake to ever assume it can be totally safe, and to forget that we have very little recourse when inevitable failures happen.
Net: If a power plant fails, we care a little bit about who/what/why/how, but a lot more about large quantities of lethal radiation and fallout that we have no good method of ameliorating.
- jahewson 11y agoLikewise it would be a mistake to assume that it's totally unsafe based on a single instance of poor planning. But it's true that reactors of this vintage are flawed and the risks probably are too high. Fortunately we have modern reactor designs to fix that.
- AstralStorm 11y agoBut do you care the same when a filter in your local coal plant fails? That happens way, way more often and actually releases way more hazardous substances that are even harder to remove. Moreover, any stop/start of the plant likely requires oil burner start which requires the filters to be disabled (or they'd be destroyed). Specifically, mildly radioactive ash, large amounts of smoke, sulfur and nitrites. These leach into groundwater easily (unlike fallout) and are also biomagnified like fission products. Only natural gas is comparatively clean and there are major problems with dependency and delivery infrastructure. (Plus it is about just as environmentally friendly to mine as coal.)