Comment by virtue3

Comment by virtue3 4 hours ago

The problem with nuclear mistakes is they aren't a few decades. They can be measured in centuries.

So yeah. Regulation.

Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima) 3mile Island - don't have so many damn errors printing out that everything is ignore Chernobyl - we all know I think. It's still being worked on to contain it fully. Goiânia accident (brazil) - caesium-137 - Time magazine has identified the accident as one of the world's "worst nuclear disasters" and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called it "one of the world's worst radiological incidents". (and this was just a radiation source, not a nuclear plant)

So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.

I think what is missing in your argument is not that these pieces are difficult. It's that combining all of them adds to a significant amount of complexity.

It's not JUST a heat exchanger. It's a heat exchanger that has to go through shielding. And it has to operate at much higher pressures than another type of power production facility would use. Which adds more complexity. And even greater need of safety.

I'm not arguing against Nuclear; I think it's incredibly worthwhile especially in the current age of AI eating up so much power in a constant use situation. But I do think it needs to be extremely regulated due to the risks of things going south.

DennisP 4 hours ago

And then there's coal. The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills fewer people than coal kills as part of its normal expected operation.

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immibis 3 hours ago

The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills as many people right here and makes as much land uninhabitable right here as coal does in our enemy countries within its normal expected operation.

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- tedk-42 an hour ago
  
  Except for Russia, where else have deaths + land issues happened?
  
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- AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago
  
  Our enemy countries are West Virginia and Pennsylvania?
  
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- Natsu an hour ago
  
  Meltdowns aren't physically possible if we're building newer types of plants, so there can't be a new Chernobyl or even Fukushima if we're using modern types of passively cooled plants.
  
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frotaur 3 hours ago

I agree Chernobyl was an epic disaster, but Fukushima ? Last I heard the radiation level are basically normal even close to the reactor, and overall radiation wide there hasn't been much damage if at all.

So it seems that fukushima is an example of something that should have been an EPIC accident, but actually was perfectly fine in the end. I may be wrong, but thats what I remembered from the wikipedia page.

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Reason077 2 hours ago

The costs of cleaning up Fukushima, including the wider effects on the Japanese economy, are estimated to exceed US$200 billion. That makes it a pretty EPIC disaster in economic terms alone.
Even Chernobyl was not really that bad in terms of lives lost. Even taking the worst estimates of long-term deaths from radiation exposure, it killed a tiny fraction of the numbers of people who have died from hydroelectric disasters or from exposure to coal power plant pollution. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a catastrophic disaster for the regional (and wider Soviet) economy.

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felipeerias 3 hours ago

Fukushima was partly an issue of flawed risk assessment. The tsunami that took down the plant was believed to be an incredibly rare even, expected to happen once every ten thousand years.
However, that was a result of faulty assumptions made when the plant was initially planned. With better data and methods, the event would have seemed a lot more likely.

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immibis 2 hours ago

It was perfectly fine because the operators stole the batteries from all the cars in the parking lot to run the control room. Not something I'd like the continued existence of New York City to rely upon.

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