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Are you aware that the Fukushima reactor was actually 6 years older than Chernobyl?

Chernobyl's RBMK design is so dangerous that I'd call it borderline criminal - the experiments done in the night of the accident were the apex of recklessness, and the government's response was.... well, Sovietic.

Of course no matter how well you design it, people will fuck up and use it the wrong way and ignore maintenances and safety margins. And this only accounts extreme stupidity and dysfunctional management - it does not even consider deliberate attempts to blow the damn thing up (actually the Chernobyl tests could be considered that, but i mean an absolute nightmare scenario like a takeover by technically competent terrorists)

Which is why you need to take all these chances into account, add a level 9 tsunami, a comet, a once in 100000 years quake, Godzilla, a zombie apocalypse, Stuxnet, wanacry, the second coming of Christ, the Rapture, North Korea, Dr Strangelove and a dangerously bored Trump, and you engineer everything to be still impossible to blow up.

Which is what we have actually been doing. They're not getting built because certifying a new design is horribly expensive, and the anti-nuclear opposition would limit their deployment, making them anti economical, but no, we haven't stopped improving them.

Unfortunately we still run the old ones, which, like a car built in the 60s, would be so much less safe to not even be legal nowadays, but you need to take into account that they're on the road.

China is deploying some new ones, and that might cause them to be adopted in the western world (I hope).

We badly need something to bridge the gap between now and when renewables+batteries can completely fulfill demand, because meanwhile fossile fuel plants get deployed instead, and we are really fucking up the planet with those.

> Chernobyl's RBMK design is so dangerous that I'd call it borderline criminal...

Here's an old comment backing this up with sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13349940

> China is deploying some new ones, and that might cause them to be adopted in the western world (I hope).

If the Chinese end up leading the way to a fission-powered future, it will be a great thing for the world. Don't forget the safety features!

> Chernobyl's RBMK design is so dangerous that I'd call it borderline criminal

Good thing that companies in the US never do anything that's borderline criminal.

The default alternative to using more nuclear energy is to use more fossil fuels. Maybe we'd like to use less energy, or switch to wind, solar or similar, but that isn't a viable option in the short term in a lot of cases.

We know that using fossil fuels will kill a few people every day, eventually adding up to a large number, as well as causing widespread, low-grade damage to the environment. On the other hand, nuclear has the potential to kill a moderate number of people at once if something goes horribly wrong, and cause severe damage to the environment of a small area.

It seems to me that a preference for more deaths and environmental damage overall because they happen a little at a time instead of in a catastrophic event is not rational.

It may not be rational under your belief system (and that's a totally valid position), but you should realize that most people see it differently.

Many people are afraid of terrorism and plane crashes and sex crimes, but are still driving to work in a car.

People seeing it differently does not mean they are rational actors.

That said, this kind of risk response might be an evolutionary adaption. Better have a threat that slowly kills individual members of the tribe (allows escape or replacement of losses) than something that is outside your control to respond to and wipes the whole tribe.

Yes, and those same people who drive to work in a car are willing to do so even though there's a tiny chance that they'll suddenly have an epileptic seizure and plow into a crowd of pedestrians on the sidewalk. So it's clearly not true that people only care about worst-case possibilities, without regard to the level of risk.

I do think that for someone living in the US, Canada, western Europe, Japan or other stable, low-violence parts of the world it is irrational to devote significant mental energy to concerns about terrorism or rape by strangers. It is more irrational to give up time, money or civil rights to assuage such fears.

Just because people "see it differently" doesn't mean that the statistics behind it are flawed…

To be fair this article doesn't say nuclear energy is safe - rather that it is the safest relative to other sources.

You mention Chernobyl and Fukushima - but those only stand out because the effects were concentrated in time and space (happened all at once and afflicted specific geographical regions).

The deleterious health effects of coal, oil, and natural gas are more diffuse. They don't make such good news stories and there's really no way to build an interested narrative around them. The effects evolve over time, the geographic impact is not as concentrated, and importantly there is a much stronger probabilistic element - the human brain has a hard time processing this, but it has an easy time processing nuclear dangers.

it's not irrational to prefer probabilistic, long-term problems to maybe once or twice having to evacuate new york or tokyo

i dont think climate change is considered probablistic anymore.

no, but the impact of something like, reducing coal by 10% and increasing nuclear by 10% is. the advantage is a slight reduction in emmisions and a slight increase in the possibility of a severe nuclear disaster. that's certainly a debate to be had, but one side isn't "more rational" than the other.

This reasoning is really closed minded and nonsensical. I've never seen the literature where people said "they are safe! Nothing could ever happen!". In fact melt downs are in many hollywood movies so I'm not sure how anyone could ever get this narrative.

Also, Chernobyl and Fukushima never "blew up". There are myths that many still believe today that a nuclear power plant can explode like a nuclear bomb (it can't). You seem to be attempting to stroke that fear with your wording whereas what you really mean is "melted down" or "failed".

Regardless, each generation of nuclear power plant is safer than the last. Some of the newest designs require reactions to be explicitly maintained and when that stops or fails it stops the reaction. What you seem to be suggesting is that, because there were past failures that have caused damage to surrounding areas and people, that we should never try to make further progress.

"Also, Chernobyl and Fukushima never "blew up". There are myths that many still believe today that a nuclear power plant can explode like a nuclear bomb (it can't)."

A failed nuclear power plant can indeed explode like a nuclear bomb and it is generally believed that explosion #2 (there were two major explosions) at chernobyl was the result of a criticality and analogous to "the explosion of a fizzled nuclear weapon.":

"The force of the second explosion, and the ratio of xenon radioisotopes released during the event, indicate that the second explosion could have been a nuclear power transient; the result of the melting core material, in the absence of its cladding, water coolant and moderator, undergoing runaway prompt criticality similar to the explosion of a fizzled nuclear weapon.[63] This nuclear excursion released 40 billion joules of energy, the equivalent of about ten tons of TNT. The analysis indicates that the nuclear excursion was limited to a small portion of the core.[63]"

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Experiment_...)

Consider: in a meltdown, which you refer to, the fissile material could accumulate in arbitrary dimensions, many of which could achieve criticality. At that time it becomes a (very crude) atomic weapon. If that criticality is not interrupted it will indeed explode.

> A failed nuclear power plant can indeed explode like a nuclear bomb and it is generally believed that explosion #2 (there were two major explosions) at chernobyl was the result of a criticality and analogous to "the explosion of a fizzled nuclear weapon."

Your statement seems to oppose itself. Fizzled would not be like a nuclear bomb so I don't quite understand what you're trying to refer to here. There is a reason the paper uses the word "fizzled". A nuclear power plant does not contain the necessary materials or force to create a nuclear fission explosion.

Remember, the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 13,000t to 18,000t TNT but the explosion at Chernobyl released some radiation and exploded with 10t TNT.

There are a few orders of magnitude between "fizzled nuclear weapon" and a "nuclear bomb".

"There are a few orders of magnitude between "fizzled nuclear weapon" and a "nuclear bomb"."

In magnitude, certainly - but the process (explosion resulting from criticality) is the same.

Your notion that nuclear plant accidents do not cause explosions (they have) and that those explosions cannot be similar to atomic bombs (they can be) is incorrect.

I am not categorically opposed to nuclear power. I just think it's worth getting these things right - especially when the well known details of the highest profile nuclear accident are in opposition to your claim(s).

There's actually a big difference between coolant-based explosions caused by runaway reactor heat and a nuclear weapon. The process is not the same, even when they are both driven by criticality. And where the difference lies in terms of time-scales and pressures involved, and thus our ability to contain and protect against them, equating the two in this context is not honest. You may as well be comparing grenades and firecrackers.

> In magnitude, certainly - but the process (explosion resulting from criticality) is the same.

No, this is not true. The uranium isn't enriched enough to do this in a nuclear power plant. Check out your own citation above it's a great read.

> Your notion that nuclear plant accidents do not cause explosions (they have)

I never stated this. In fact we talked about the explosions at chernobyl above in this comment chain.

> that those explosions cannot be similar to atomic bombs (they can be) is incorrect.

Define similar.

The explosions were not similar in that they were not explosions using uncontrolled fission material to cause a reaction in enriched uranium.

They were similar in that an explosion occurred that tossed up lots of fission material, similar to what a nuclear weapon would do when exploded but uranium did not itself explode.

> especially when the well known details of the highest profile nuclear accident are in opposition to your claim(s).

The two well known disasters, chernobyl and fukushima, were very, very old power plants. Fukushima, as far as I can tell, was not fully updated to any of the standard designs in the past 2-3 decades (only retrofitting here and there).

Given that I'm not sure what you are referring to or how those two accidents are in opposition to any of my claims.

Fukushima was constructed well before the Chernobyl disaster. It was not a new, safer design; No lessons learned from Chernobyl were incorporated.

"They have been playing with catastrophes of a magnitude we can't really comprehend"

Did you even read the article? Statistics show you that nuclear is safer. Coal/oil/etc actually kill about 1000× more people than nuclear per TWh generated.

No, you're wrong. The statistics are based on "what happened so far" and "what we think could happen if things got really bad".

The last part has been proven untrue time and again. Every single time nuclear proponents said "that cannot happen" and after it happened they found a new fallback position "okay, that could happen, but it cannot ever get worse".

You do realize it actually is not getting worse? Fukushima barely killed any people, while Chernobyl has ~100 casualties. The radiation of areas around Chernobyl is bigger and more lasting than those of Fukushima.

Not to mention these are 50yo plants, and new ones are just better (whether or not you believe the tests/physics behind that).

It is disingenuous to claim nuclear plant safety is getting worse.

No. Statistics are based on actual deaths. They don't extrapolate "what could happen in the future". Go read the actual source, table 2 of: http://www.scotianwindfields.ca/sites/default/files/publicat...

So if you played Russian roulette a couple of times and lived, it must be safe, right? Probability is events over trials, zero events in two trials means probability of dying is 0/2=0%.

We have been operating thousands of nuclear generators for 60 years.

Based on that information, what is the probability of a nuclear power plant accident making a large city near it uninhabitable?

How many people died in all of those? Now compare to the particulate pollution coal releases, which would force evacuation of neighborhoods if we treated them as nuclear plants.

The US Navy has operated hundreds of reactors for decades 24/7.

The point is not how many people have died, but how bad the impact can be. Even if nobody dies, the need to evacuate a large city like New York or Tokyo because a nuclear power plant nearby underwent rapid unplanned deconstruction might easily wipe off all economic gains from the nuclear energy, and then some.

As opposed to...the entire planet being affected, like it is with fossil fuels?

Solar, wind, hydro do not affect the entire planet. Even burning fossil fuels might be ok, if combined with CO2 sequestration.

But this is irrelevant. I'm just saying that you do a comparison, you need to take into consideration risks, too. Otherwise buying any kind of insurance looks pretty irrational.

Wind is bad for birds.

Ionizing radiation is bad for birds.

What's a worse accident then Chernobyl in terms of release? Evacuation is frequently not necessary as people willingly live in places with quite high natural radioactivity.

Only about 3.5% of radioactive material from one reactor was released (there were four reactors). Also no large city happened to be close enough downwind.

Some of the areas within 30 km exclusion zone still have levels of radiation too high for people to live there, and will remain high for hundreds of years.

It doesn't matter how many have died in the accidents so far.

It matters what the worst-case outcome is. I don't downplay it with some statistic about how rare it would be.

Doesn't this go both ways, though? You've discussed the worst-case outcome of using nuclear power at length. But I've yet to see you address, anywhere in this thread, the worst-case outcome of not using nuclear power and using greenhouse gas-emitting power sources instead.

"X power generation method isn't safe" just isn't a legit form of argument unless you can meaningfully compare it to 1)other power generation methods or 2)not generating that power. Climate change really is a catastrophe of a magnitude we can't really comprehend, and is what nuclear plants are most often replaced with. Nuclear accidents are really bad and really scary, but they've happened before and we at least understand (more or less) the worst case scenarios.

Efficiency and conservation is actually always overlooked, negawatts are basically always the cheapest/safest option, but both the free market and government intervention underinvestment in them.

In my view, most of the environmental disaster that was caused by Fukushima has nothing to do with the tsunami itself but with complete disregard for safety during the incident response.

Exactly, we cannot believe all those pretty statistics about how safe nuclear power is, because (inter alia) precisely this disregard for safety is never factored in.

Nuclear power is always sold on the best case or average case calculation. Because the worst case is probably so bad that it dominates the whole calculation.

Your argument doesn't make sense to me. Nuclear proponents have argued that nuclear power is safe for decades, and the statistics that show they've been right so far are somehow proof that they've been lying this entire time?