To repeat it, one of the richest countries of the world runs the oldest nuclear reactor in the middle of central Europe. If this one blows up Switzerland and Southern Germany is toast forever. There will be no lucky wind directions.
And it doesn't help that the Swiss don't have a independent regulating authority for nuclear energy.
A PWR isn't going to "blow up" when it gets too old, or at all really. Chernobyl, the only large-scale plant to ever actually blow up, had a crazy dangerous design compared to any of these older reactors (and you're not kidding about them being old, they are seven years older than Chernobyl).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
(some of the design problems have been addressed in the still operating reactors)
I'd argue that any reactor design that doesn't just allow to be shut down and walked away from, is inherently unsafe - it's just that RBMK have far worse consequences when humans screw up, which can be seen as their fundamental flaw, they basically miss a safety net in the form of an auxillary containment. Fukushima showed what could happen in reactors like the ones used in Switzerland - IMO that's way more manageable than climate change, although the question remains whether 'china syndrome' is possible and how such a true worst case would look like. I once did some rough calculations on how much radioactive material is present in typical reactors, and it's really quite staggering - dispersed in bad ways you basically get lethal doses for hundreds of millions of people.
So the only sane way forward IMO is to finally replace all these old designs with ones that have passive cooling systems in an emergency, meanwhile passing housing laws for new houses that require a certain percentage of solar roof, x amount of kWh battery per inhabitant as well as the ability to feed the grid from both roof and battery in order to create a stable renewable grid. Unfortunately no green party is pragmatic enough - their anti nuclear stances mean that we'd have to increase carbon reliance before being able to decrease it, which poses IMO greater dangers than even the worst case imaginable with nuclear. Therefore I'd rather vote for those who want to keep nuclear rather than those who promote renewables.
Even though Ignalia-2 had the most advanced safety features of any RBMK reactor, a condition of Lithuania's EU membership was the plant be shutdown. As such the Baltic states have been very dependant on Russia for energy since the shutdown.
Belarus is in the process of building a plant on the Lithuanian border. Although it's PWR and has many safety features RBMK didn't have, thanks to politics the lack of transparency over safety issues is rather concerning:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/09/belarus-under-...
Is it because those who have to bear the risks (e.g. RBMK on-site engineers) aren't the same who'd pass on information through the administrative chain? Was the main thing missing free information flow? Could communism work if all economic/infrastructure/administration units would just be forced to publish all their data in raw form, so other people could analyse it and make better decisions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressurized_water_reactor#Mode...
The nuclear plants in Switzerland are safer and more efficient than coal power plants.
To put it into perspective, the Fukushima disaster has made 800000 hectares of land unusable for farming, which is more than the area of land under cultivation in the entire country of Switzerland.
How do you compare the efficiency of two systems with dissimilar inputs?
This is prudent and a wise financial choice, and it might be a hint why they are one of the richest countries in the world. No need to replace this simply because it is old: Rather, that an upgrade would pay for itself or mechanical reasoning. However, I'd assume there is regular testing and maintenance done to avoid some of the mechanical reasoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Federal_Nuclear_Safety_I...
There seem to be a generic feeling of "nuclear is fine" in reaction to all the anti-nuclear bashing going on, but few people seem to be really paying attention to the case at hand.
From what I read these reactors are not just old, they are built on an area that can have up to M7 earthquakes. The seismic risk was taken into account when building the power plants, but after a new security audit following Fukushima, it appears the risk was vastly underestimated, and from there all plans of building replacement plants in the area got nerfed.
Basically these reactors are not actually deemed to be safe, it's just not practical to shut them down now without any alternative plan to cover for the electric needs of the whole country, when there is enough chance of no major earthquakes until they get decommissioned.
> In 2011, in response to Fukushima, ENSI called for a rapid review of seismic safety at all nuclear power plants in Switzerland. The results were to be submitted within a year and concentrated on the most important aspects. They showed that all Swiss nuclear power plants are sufficiently protected against earthquakes and flooding potentially caused by a breach in a dam following a seismic event. Further investigations also revealed that all nuclear power plants in Switzerland have a safety margin.
https://www.ensi.ch/en/2016/05/31/updated-seismic-hazard-ass...
An audit commanded by the Health departments to non goverment related parties points at the vastly under-estimated seismic risk: http://www.atomschutzverband.ch/xs_daten/Fakten/93_3_Experti...
BTW the operation of nuclear power plant in Switzerland seems to be allowed as long as the ENSI accepts it as safe. Without any knowledge in the matter, I highly doubt there's no tremendous pressure and work done on the ENSI to be more lenient towards risk.
Just like in Japan.