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> No. Every time we have an accident we think of what could have prevented it, and invent more safety systems. And for the third time, the safety systems that

> No. Every time we have an accident we think of what could have prevented it, and invent more safety systems. And for the third time, the safety systems that would have prevented Chernobyl are already present in western reactors: * Western reactors have secondary containment * Western reactors also use dedicated control and moderator rods We don't need to spend the money to invent more safety systems if we already have them. > 10X of approximately nothing might still not be enough to bother automating anything, and you'd have to convince those companies that demand is going to stay and make the investment worthwhile. Meanwhile we're not about to stop needing gearboxes and generators. It's not a question of automation, it's more of a factor of institutional knowledge and overhead cost of design. When building something unique like a steam generator a new manufacturer typically builds a broken first model and has to iterate a couple times before nailing down the manufacturing process. That overhead cost can be amortized over a larger production run.

dale_glass 4y ago
> And for the third time, the safety systems that would have prevented Chernobyl are already present in western reactors You're stuck on Chernobyl. I repeat, it was an example of a trend. The specific example wasn't intended to be of any particular importance. The trend of accident -> extra security is. So yeah, Chernobyl was a bad example, but that does nothing to change that when something on a nuclear plant goes wrong, we look at how to stop future accidents, and add extra tech for monitoring/backups/etc, making nuclear more expensive, which is one of the reasons why price hasn't gone down over time. Because we've added extra stuff on top to patch up both big and smaller problems that cropped up. Though I think that without Chernobyl it's well possible somebody would have eventually suggested maybe a containment building isn't quite necessary. Because it sure isn't free. Meanwhile, if a wind turbine falls apart somewhere, for the most part we just ignore it. It's a problem for the operator. We're not trying to ensure no wind turbine anywhere doesn't fall apart ever.

dale_glass 4y ago

> And for the third time, the safety systems that would have prevented Chernobyl are already present in western reactors You're stuck on Chernobyl. I repeat, it was an example of a trend. The specific example wasn't intended to be of any particular importance. The trend of accident -> extra security is. So yeah, Chernobyl was a bad example, but that does nothing to change that when something on a nuclear plant goes wrong, we look at how to stop future accidents, and add extra tech for monitoring/backups/etc, making nuclear more expensive, which is one of the reasons why price hasn't gone down over time. Because we've added extra stuff on top to patch up both big and smaller problems that cropped up. Though I think that without Chernobyl it's well possible somebody would have eventually suggested maybe a containment building isn't quite necessary. Because it sure isn't free. Meanwhile, if a wind turbine falls apart somewhere, for the most part we just ignore it. It's a problem for the operator. We're not trying to ensure no wind turbine anywhere doesn't fall apart ever.