"Officially safe" is a hilarious term which tries to predict the possibility of an MCA or "Maximum Credible Accident." Of course, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima were also "officially safe" when they were built.
"In the event of any runaway reactor event, NuScale says, the reactor quenches itself in its pool, making it “passively safe.”"
Everything is 'safe' until we discover it isn't and improve. Many things have improved over times. Calling them safe seems fine, we can do so understanding the process of learning and advancing.
> Three Mile Island
Was handled reasonably well, resulted in safety improvements to procedures and designs for future reactors.
From https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3...
> The approximately 2 million people around TMI-2 during the accident are estimated to have received an average radiation dose of only about 1 millirem above the usual background dose. To put this into context, exposure from a chest X-ray is about 6 millirem and the area's natural radioactive background dose is about 100-125 millirem per year for the area. The accident's maximum dose to a person at the site boundary would have been less than 100 millirem above background.
Not exactly the end of the world.
> Chernobyl
Accident caused by Communists who did not care about what happened to Ukrainians, as usual for them, and experimented with something that any nuclear physicist could have told them was a terrible idea. This is like blaming vehicles and calling them unsafe after reaching over from the passenger seat and yanking the wheel to drive a truck into a crowd. The moral of the story here is to keep Communists away from anything important, which applies to farms, industrial sectors, food distribution, and really most things more complicated than a pitchfork or a torch.
> Fukushima
Was reasonably safe for its long life, but they cheaped out on the necessary wall and drainage functionality; should probably have been decomm'd and replaced before this happened.
The problem in the nuclear industry is that anti-nuclear people like you form public opinion that causes it to be difficult for it to move forward. New plants based on newer designs are orders of magnitude safer - e.g. the CANDU Canadian reactor which is more fail-safe than most, and the push towards 4th generation reactors.
Get out of the way and let the planet have a clean base load energy source, or be sitting here bitching about carbon footprints 50 years from now when it should be a solved problem already.
>Was reasonably safe for its long life, but they cheaped out on the necessary wall and drainage functionality
They didn't "cheap out" on the seawall at Fukushima. You may be referring to how the plant design was sited closer to the ocean but the seawall was constructed to not be overtopped by the highest tsunami possible. At the time the plant was constructed the theory was that tsunamis were generated in part by underwater landslides and the topology of the surrounding ocean was taken into account to come up with the largest possible tsunami it would have to block. The science behind tsunami formation was flawed during construction and once that theory was later improved no one ever reconsidered the implications for the seawall design.
I agree that public perception is the largest problem by far with nuclear energy but you're not helping your argument by brushing real problems under the rug like this.
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
But keep in mind that the NRX reactor it was based on had an accident:
https://www.cns-snc.ca/media/history/nrx.html
(famously, Jimmy Carter was part of the NRX clean-up crew).
What happens if the passive cooling pool drains? Let me guess, “That will never happen!”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price–Anderson_Nuclear_Indus...
They didn't really care what happened to _anybody_, not just Ukrainians. Ukrainians (as well as about 30% of Russians) just happened to live in that particular location. The plume made it all the way to the Nordics and Germany, and I, as a kid, had to take iodine tablets in Russia, even though officially everything was "under control" for a few days. Then the narrative shifted to showing the heroism of the "liquidators", never fully acknowledging how dangerous any of this really was.
All of these things are solvable problems, but if we don't solve them before all the current nuclear plant techs age out, we won't be able to apprentice people and keep the culture of solid maintenance alive. At that point, they really do become an albatross.
There were many such RBMK reactors spread all over the Soviet world that had the same flaws . There are many problems with your summary so can I just recommend that you watch the HBO mini series "Chernobyl" instead? It's a great watch.
I haven't watched Chernobyl because I prefer to not get my history from television shows with a narrative axe to grind.
I don't know if this bit is true, but specific reference is made in the show to the displacer rods being made of graphite because it was cheaper than an alternative material, which caused a problem because they acted as an accelerant rather than a moderator when the cooling rods were partially inserted. Fine as long as the control rods don't get stuck, or get pushed out by evaporating steam. Again (if true) that's a design choice which made the situation worse than it might otherwise have been. Is that not a flaw?