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Your narrative sounds like you're claiming that we didn't learn from Chernobyl and that Fukushima is proof of that. That's not true, no one is going around clai
by MertsA 6y ago
Your narrative sounds like you're claiming that we didn't learn from Chernobyl and that Fukushima is proof of that. That's not true, no one is going around claiming that ancient designs are somehow becoming safer and safer. Fukushima was constructed literally before Chernobyl was. Back then generation II reactors took an active approach to safety. Operators might have to take action and power to the plant needed to be always available in order to safely manage some faults. They took the approach of "lets get five redundant diesel generators and have triple redundant control cabling, sensors, and valves" whereas newer Generation IV reactors are passively safe when things go wrong. Even on the AP1000 which was approved by the NRC back in 2005 is passively safe even in a plantwide blackout with a gravity based evaporative cooling system that can last 72 hours before needing an additional source of water to fill it back up. Around 72 hours after shutdown the decay heat should be able to boil a little over a gallon per second of 30C water. All things considered it's pretty trivial to get a gallon per second of water to the reactor within 3 days time. The new SMR from NuScale that just got approved is even better given that the pool the reactor sits in is sized large enough that by the time the water in the pool is gone it'll have reduced to the point where it's cold enough to just air cool the reactor so it's passively safe indefinitely.
Even in the case of Fukushima, I'd like to point out that all things considered, zero people died from acute radiation poisoning and IIRC only one case of lung cancer was likely attributed to exposure from Fukushima. Fukushima was basically a worst case scenario for any Gen II reactor. The only reason Chernobyl was so much worse was because of the incredibly unsafe design out of the USSR. They didn't care, they didn't bother with a containment building at all, had operators blindly following orders from management even more incompetent than the operators were, operated the reactor way outside of the limits that were placed on the reactor by removing all the control rods which was never supposed to be done, etc. You can pin Fukushima on the Nuclear industry, Chernobyl was solely because of the callous indifference and incompetence of the USSR.