3 ms·

I don't thinnk it was the fear of the general population, because what influence do we have on dangerous endeavors? If the scientist can do it safely, they cou

• danpalmer 9y ago
  I disagree. Nuclear reactors have been very safe for a long time now, but between high profile incidents with old reactors, the link with nuclear weapons, and misinformation, the public perception is that they are unsafe.
  • mikejb 9y ago
    "very safe" might be true (your interpretation of 'very' might vary), but it is a low chance/high price kind of thing. I live in Bavaria, and hunters here still need to take precautions due to Chernobyl, some 31 years later.
    • DiThi 9y ago
      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, if plans have measures to avoid such corruptions. And that's not counting the many safer designs we have nowadays. Many plants today don't even need backup electricity to automatically shut down by themselves.
      • mikejb 9y ago
        I fully agree that newer designs are safer, but ignoring the human factor in the equation is IMO not very reasonable. Without the human factor, driving a car is very safe. That argument is valid, but it doesn't reflect reality.
        • DougWebb 9y ago
          Good engineers take the human factor into account and include backups in their designs to handle failure modes caused by the human factor. What they can't do is work around politics or budgetary constraints which force trade-offs between safety and cost. Anything can be made as safe as necessary, if you're willing to pay for the redundancies. When it comes to reactors on Earth, a very large proportion of the budget is diverted to bureaucratic paperwork, lobbying, and PR, which could instead be used to pay for additional safety measures.
        • thehardsphere 9y ago
          There are some "human factor" problems that engineers cannot and should not be expected to resolve. I mean, how can someone design a communist-proof nuclear reactor?
          • striking 9y ago
            Make them pay to get in?
            • thehardsphere 9y ago
              Wouldn't work. They know how to steal and can even make fiat currency outside of the free market context. Not a bad idea though.
    • danpalmer 9y ago
      Sure, but that was a) 31 years ago, b) a reactor built without the safety standards we have now, and c) a reactor operated without the safety standards we have now. As far as I understand, making a reactor built in the last 25 years go 'wrong' in any way like that is very difficult, and would take much more than negligence or incompetence. Fukushima is an example of this – the reactor that had issues was over 50 years old, but all the modern ones were fine.
• thehardsphere 9y ago
  It's always been political, both in terms of the relative "scariness" of nuclear technology after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the costs of space programs. Most of the space flight technologies using nuclear power were devised for manned flights beyond Earth's gravitational influence, and were on the drawing boards as early as the fifties. Once America successfully landed on the moon and the Soviets gave up, there was immense political pressure to scale back the US space program. With the Space Race won, it was harder to justify the costs of manned interplanetary spaceflight, so a lot of more exotic (read: expensive) plans were shelved. This included more than a couple nuclear propulsion ideas for spacecraft, including one for a nuclear thermal rocket that had been successfully prototyped in the lab and was ready for an actual launch. Lots of stuff we could have done and could be doing in space if there was money for it.