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Comment by cameldrv | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty pro-nuclear. Nuclear power has proven to be extremely safe relative to the alternatives. In this specific case though, to say that there was one design flaw is failing to go beyond the first why.

The second why is "why does the reactor require an uninterrupted supply of electrical power in order to not melt down? Gen 2 nuclear power is inherently dangerous, and is only made safe through active safety systems. If the reactor trips, the cooling pumps must run or decay heat will cause a meltdown. Gen 3 reactors tend to incorporate a lot more passive safety systems or at least ones that don't require electricity.

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It's just a trade-off of mathematical probabilities. The alleged extreme safety comes with an extreme destructive disasters.

When it comes to risk management, the human brain that is bound by evolution to dangers close in time and location, is not capable of assessing the consequences of losing a piece of the planet earth's habitat for millions of years.

The arctic and antarctic regions are literal ninth-circle hellscapes (the ninth circle of hell is the one that is frozen over). Significantly worse than the areas around Chernobyl which is apparently well on the way to becoming a national park.

I'm not sure that there is a 'risk' that the human brain can't process. Risk of what, exactly? Huge cost to the generation that has to move, massive risk if it hits farmland, sure. But even assuming that the 'millions of years' figure is factual - which I doubt - we are certainly going to run out of human race before we run out of land. The risks are all fairly short-term things.

The term national park is a euphemism, considering that all life forms in this exclusion zone suffer from genetic diseases.

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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas...

Radiation is not as scary as you've been led to believe. The main long-term dangers from a really bad nuclear accident are Cs 137 and Sr 90. Both of these have half lives of about 30 years. We past the first half life of the Chernobyl fallout.

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