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It’s not a fundamental problem with nuclear power as both China and Russia build new reactors safe and economically. The West just forgot how to build large pr

• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > It’s not a fundamental problem with nuclear power as both China and Russia build new reactors safe and economically. Well, they've built them. Even unsafe nuclear plants (at least historically) are higher frequency of still-rare but potentially-catastrophic failures, not regular failures that are likely to be obvious after a handful of years of a small number of reactors being in operation, its far from clear that they do so safely. (And, since neither of these regimes favors transparency, its not like you can easily externally analytically assess likely safety, either, and even the economics before considering safety may be less clear than they superficially seem.) But, yes, getting things done that some currently-in-power faction would prefer is more complicatdd in systems in which the dominant faction is constrained by competing power bases rather than free to run roughshod over them. Though that's not something that has recently changed, its always been true, and those constraints have been a feature of the West for centuries, and most people in the West consider it a feature, not a bug; what is new in regard to nuclear power since the 1950s is that there are both more alternatives and more understanding that it has risks at all.