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A Chernobyl accident can't happen in a western reactor, and it wasn't what happened in Fukushima either, so the lecturers weren't wrong. I don't know the facts

A Chernobyl accident can't happen in a western reactor, and it wasn't what happened in Fukushima either, so the lecturers weren't wrong. I don't know the facts of the tsunami whether it was unprecedented or not, but considering the magnitude of the quake I'm guessing it was one of the largest tsunamis to ever hit Japan. This is speculation on my part. They didn't ignore the risk of tsunamis, they had precautions against them but they weren't up to par. It was a series of malfunctioning safeties that caused the accident. The backup power generators conked out, and the backup to the backup was washed away by the floods. And the floods only managed to get that far because the protective walls weren't enough. "Build better walls" seems like a trivial problem to solve, don't you think? International regulatory bodies could also be more proactive in finding these flaws prior to accidents. It's not a hard problem to solve in the long run. It'll be easier and quicker than finding a viable non-nuclear energy option anyway.

oldgradstudent 8y ago
> A Chernobyl accident can't happen in a western reactor, and it wasn't what happened in Fukushima either, so the lecturers weren't wrong. He was referring to the core meltdown, not the very specific fault mechanism. I should have made it clear. Otherwise, it would be an uninteresting technicality. The entire Fukushima incident makes me suspect it's a result of defining an exact fault model and then optimizing to the model. This way, if the fault slightly exceeds the model, the result is not graceful degradation, but catastrophic failure. Can we put the generators below sea level? sure, the sea wall is high enough, no need to worry about that at all. > "Build better walls" seems like a trivial problem to solve, don't you think? Yes, but is it a robust solution?

oldgradstudent 8y ago

> A Chernobyl accident can't happen in a western reactor, and it wasn't what happened in Fukushima either, so the lecturers weren't wrong. He was referring to the core meltdown, not the very specific fault mechanism. I should have made it clear. Otherwise, it would be an uninteresting technicality. The entire Fukushima incident makes me suspect it's a result of defining an exact fault model and then optimizing to the model. This way, if the fault slightly exceeds the model, the result is not graceful degradation, but catastrophic failure. Can we put the generators below sea level? sure, the sea wall is high enough, no need to worry about that at all. > "Build better walls" seems like a trivial problem to solve, don't you think? Yes, but is it a robust solution?