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Comment by pilsetnieks | Hacker News Reader

Does it, though? A large portion can definitely be avoided with design and technology. Chernobyl happened because it was a positive feedback loop, in the West it was an obsolete design even before it was built. And Fukushima was quite literally acts of god (in the actuarial sense.)

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Yes, it does. Humans lie and cheat and steal and misrepresent. Contractors use inappropriate materials or cut corners. Regulators demand unreasonable operational constraints because of political pressure. Insurers demand unaffordable costs. Protestors fight construction because of unfounded fears. Political stasis prevents sensible waste management strategies. And so on.

I absolutely think it would be possible to build a safe future on nuclear power - in an ideal world. But the world is very very far from ideal; the impression I get is that that effort which would be required to actually deliver a modern nuclear strategy is unattainable.

It doesn't matter if you have a new design if you don't deploy it. The Fukushima plant was older than the Chernobyl plant. One could have simply decided to replace it with a newer design. In hindsight if Japan's government didn't have to pay for the Fukushima cleanup they could have done more sensible things, like update the entire nuclear fleet. It certainly would have been cheaper to tear all nuclear plants in Japan down and build new ones when you look at the cost overruns at Fukushima.

As an equal analogy - why can't we design our way out of governments having lots of "human bullshit" problems? If you can answer that question, you solve a much bigger problem than energy.

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