I live less than 100 km away from Olkiluoto nuclear plant, and I have never been worried about its safety. I wonder why this incident ever got any publicity outside Finland. Even here it faded away very quickly.
Distributed systems are complicated beasts too, and have fascinating failure modes, but they get no press, because there are so many incidents and so many installations.
Centralized systems make a better scapegoat regardless of probabilities.
It reminds me of something Georges Charpak mentioned, paraphrasing: we can detect tiny particles, and now we are scared, but we cannot detect economic crashes, and we should be more scared of that.
The Finnish nuclear unit-nuclear watchdog had found that radiation levels had risen [1], the public does deserve to know and make up its own opinion about it.
Also, centralized systems are a lot more vulnerable and high-risk compared to distributed systems.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/finland-nuclear-incident/rad...
In particular, no change of radiation levels whatsoever outside the reactor building was ever detected. But initial reports did not make this quite clear.
On the other hand, they're very interested in things that can kill them.
I also wonder if there's more public attention paid to nuclear incidents in the region because of the proximity of a player who does not disclose or cooperate in nuclear incidents.
This would positively affect my perception of the plant's operators. They handled the crisis, and now are laying out the post-mortem for the public in a transparent manner. A culture of secrecy conceals incompetence, and that can lead to disaster. See: Chernobyl
I would argue that it is precisely this type of incident that should be well publicized to demonstrate how things work when they're working correctly.
Perhaps I am being pedantic, but this strikes me as a strange position to announce. Nuclear power is a broad category of things which includes fission, decay and fusion, all of the above can be used to generate heat.
If you look at a pie chart of how the electric power is generated in your country, and you see "nuclear power", which of "fission", "decay" and "fusion" are you going to think about?
In the meantime there are new types of fission reactors being developed (small modular such as Nuscale, advanced fission deployed in China) and they aim the address shortcomings of older designs.
The problem with current generation of fission plants is that they were primarily designed to be integrated into military-industrial complex that produces fuel for nuclear weapons. You can have safer fission plants by focusing on power generation only.
P.S. Not sure what's up with downvotes, but whatever.
What was the impact of the nuclear reactor there?
For example:
> “With hindsight, we can say the evacuation was a mistake,” says Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management at the University of Bristol and leader of a recent research project on nuclear accidents. “We would have recommended that nobody be evacuated.”
https://www.ft.com/content/000f864e-22ba-11e8-add1-0e8958b18...