8 ms·
Aren't there fail-safe designs for newer reactors? Whatever tiny risk exists would be worth taking IMO.
by lasc4r 5y ago
Aren't there fail-safe designs for newer reactors? Whatever tiny risk exists would be worth taking IMO.
- gpm 5y agoI'm pretty sure every reactor ever designed was designed to fail safely. Including Chernobyl... I don't trust humans to design and maintain things that actually always fail safely though. Eventually someone is going to do something dumb and cut the wrong corner or, just do something dumb like disable the emergency core cooling system as part of a test of another system (what caused Chernobyl...) In a perfect world fission power could be used safely, the real world isn't perfect, and the pro-nuclear crowds main argument seems to be to go around saying "we're actually perfect now".
- junon 5y agoChernobyl had an unsafe design from the beginning and the engineers knew it.
- bumby 5y agoIt seems to be a combination of poor design and not following operational procedures to manage the poor design. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/appendices/chernobyl-accident-appendix-1-sequence-of-events.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
- merb 5y agofukushima as well, heck even the governement did know that. that does not make it better. in fact that makes it worse.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- philwelch 5y ago> In a perfect world fission power could be used safely, the real world isn't perfect, and the pro-nuclear crowds main argument seems to be to go around saying "we're actually perfect now". This isn’t a criticism of nuclear power; it’s a criticism of industrial civilization and technological progress. You can make the exact same point about coal mining, lithium mining, power grids, hell, even campfires if you wanted to. If I went and dug up horror stories about what happened before we had an electrical code and used those horror stories to argue that we shouldn’t have electricity inside our homes, it would be perfectly reasonable to say, “that’s why we have electrical codes”. And I don’t think it would be a strong counter for me to say, “but the electrical code isn’t perfect”.
- gpm 5y agoIt's not a criticism of all technological progress, it's a criticism of technology where you cannot accept a single worst case failure, as is the case with nuclear power plants and very little else. If an electrical fault in your house meant killings 10s or hundreds of millions of people, instead of costing you a home (and if you're really unlucky single digit numbers of lives) we'd be foolish to allow it. As it turns out, electrical faults in a house only burns down the house, not the continent.
- philwelch 5y agoA nuclear accident isn’t going to kill tens or hundreds of millions of people. Nuclear bombs—and fusion bombs at that—deployed in large numbers, would do that. But a single nuclear accident isn’t anywhere near the same scale as a full scale nuclear strike. Chernobyl killed tens of people. And Chernobyl was the “shitty construction with no electrical codes” of nuclear power plants. Fukushima killed like one person.
- gpm 5y agoChernobyl by all accounts killed thousands of people, and by some (dubious) accounts may have killed many more than that. Chernobyl was capable of killing millions of people, again I refer you to the article that I started this whole subthread with. What actually happened in Chernobyl was very very far from the worst case nuclear disaster: https://www.thetrumpet.com/14007-three-men-who-saved-millions https://www.thetrumpet.com/14007-three-men-who-saved-million...
- mrtksn 5y agoFailsafe fission is a myth, it depends on accidents happening according to the design when everything is built and maintained perfectly. Fukushima was failsafe until a tsunami flooded the backup generators. The danger of tsunami was dully noted of course but as it turns out electricity supply to the reactor cooling wasn't all that failsafe. The passive systems? They all depend on large groups of people doing their job perfectly during the manufacturing and another group of people doing their jobs perfectly at maintaining these systems and not disabling them when inconvenient. I don't trust people doing everything right every single time. The fission reaction is a kind of a reaction that can go out of control very fast spontaneously. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against nuclear energy but I think it must be treated as something we can do until we switch to something sustainable. I tried to find marketing material for Chernobyl and Fukushima but I did not find anything, I wanted to see if they explained the risks or did they described these plants as perfectly safe. People now claim that those designs were flawed and that everyone knew about it but I don't believe it, I will be shocked if people were promised anything less than perfect safety. As we stand today, we built 667 nuclear power reactors and 2(actually more as fukushima lost multiple reactors) of those went bust with significant damage to the communities close to the reactors. The body count is hard to pinpoint but large communities had their lives uprooted and everything could have went worse if we lacked heroes. With currently %10 of our electricity is coming from Nuclear, in 60 years we had 2 regions becoming uninhabitable practically forever due to incidents that could have been much worse. If our track record remains in line, with %100 nuclear we can expect to have 20 more places ruined within the lifetime of a junior developer who just started today. I don't know, maybe we can have nuclear power plants close to photovoltaic production facilities to offset the energy need when building those far away from densely populated places and ramp up our efforts to switch to the fusion reactor in the sky? Turn off the last nuclear power plant when we have enough solar energy equipment?