<Snipped quote by Dinh AaronMk>
But that's what I am saying though. If we were to fall back on nuclear power to a larger degree, wouldn't that sort of thing become more common? It just comes off to me a bit like being the guy in 1900 talking about the first car accident and saying "Hey, these guys wrecked their cars because they were being stupid and it was raining and its a new thing, people will wise up and this won't be common in the future."
You can't underestimate the ability of people to fuck up. It's just something that happens. And the main concern is that, if we were to quadruple the number of nuclear facilities, we'd see more of these fuck ups. We don't want to take what happened in Chernobyl and say "Well, for that to happen you have to have Soviet Bureaucracy", because that seems like false-empiricism, like saying "It has to be 1986, and Mikhail Gorbachev has to be in power, and you have to be somewhere in the Ukraine." Then we move to Fukushima and the situation is different, so we add a new list of requirements. That doesn't tell me we know all the ways these things can be fucked up, it tells me were are discovering the ways we can fuck up by having them happen. And I think this is too broad a disaster to play with it too lightly.
I think the thing being over-looked here as far as US design goes is that American plants are over-designed with security in mind versus Russian or Japanese plants. A notable fault in Chernobyl besides the failure to maintain an optimal void coefficient (the balance of water that surround the active reactor without vaporizing into steam so fast that it leaves large pockets of air that do nothing to maintain the reactor's temperature, in the case of Chernobyl when they let the water turn to steam they could get more energy from their RBMK reactor) was that the power-plant did not contain any containment structure for a likely explosion in the reactor core itself.
While Three Mile Island was a disaster in the American front, it wasn't actually a disaster and contained itself very well on part of the largely over-engineered structure of the plant to contain and explosion.
When NPPs explode too, it's not to the size of nuclear bombs. It's worth noting that the fuel in these isn't refined to the needed 5% minimum to allow for a explosive chain-reaction. So a solid shell of concrete can hold about anything that can go wrong.
It's not that these things happen, it's how they're contained. And besides, out of the over 400 global NPPs only 3 have gone wrong. Statistically it's a >1% failure rate and we as a society were more aware of the potential risks of failure then than we were with coal or oil power which even today results in consistent environmental and health failures with as much long-term public risk as a nuclear disaster.
The thing about radiation is that honestly, you can ignore most of it. Chernobyl levels are even measured in the milliseiverts and not a full sievert it'd take to cause immediate harm. Not to mention besides the implications that life doesn't give a shit for radioactivity,
it may actually be good for you at those levels.
Versus having to eat a mercury choked tomato because waste fillings from a coal plant were blown into a field and mingled down into the sediment.
Member
AliceAbigail
Scrawl Banditta
Wilted Rose
mickilennial
Ekreture
Supermaxx
erikh