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Comment by drran | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but we have multiple catastrophes already, despite the vanishingly small number of nuclear plants. If we want to increase the number of nuclear stations by 10x, we need to make them 10x safer just to keep the number of catastrophes at the same 1/30y level. Do you have an idea how to make a nuclear plant 10x safer comparing to today?

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It looks like the all time death toll of nuclear power so far is <20,000 total. Meanwhile coal plants kill 30,000 per year in Europe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiatio...

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/air-pollut...

It's because we ran away from contaminated sites.

> Do you have an idea how to make a nuclear plant 10x safer comparing to today?

Yes. All the reasons for the catastrophes are well known.

There are 1) known reasons for known catastrophes, so we can protect against them, 2) unknown reasons for known catastrophes, so we need to make a guess, and 3) unknown reasons for unknown catastrophes, which are not happened yet, including state sponsored attack on a nuclear plant. We cannot be prepared for unknown unknowns, so we need to plan for the worst case scenario. The worst-case scenario for nuclear plant is continent scale Red Forest (about 1M Chornobyl's).

Do you know how to reduce continent scale threat to just the size of a nation or a town?

Nuclear fusion or LENR can do that, because of small amount of radioactive materials and no positive coefficient by design, but how you can do that for massive fission?

We know how to build safer nuclear now than we did 60 years ago when the current gen were mostly built.

Current generation nuclear plants default to off, they need active operation to stay on. If something goes wrong, they automatically, without any intervention by anyone, go offline.

They are also designed to withstand collisions from aircraft and multiple other attack vectors: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1159_web.p...

> We know how to build safer nuclear now than we did 60 years ago when the current gen were mostly built.

I will reword my question: How we can make nuclear safer by 10x in next 10 years? We need them to be 10x safer if we want to have 10x more nuclear plants.

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