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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

The Chernobyl exclusion zone as terrible as it is, is very far from a worst case. It's what you get from a moderately bad meltdown with heroic mitigation efforts as a follow up. The risks are far greater than that. Holding it up and saying "this isn't bad" is missing that that's the point, this is what happens in a "good" meltdown.

An article describing some of it... https://www.thetrumpet.com/14007-three-men-who-saved-million...

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It's also what you get from a reactor with no containment dome, unlike every modern reactor.

On top of that, the Chernobyl reactor had a strong positive feedback: as the temperature went up, the reaction sped up. Modern reactors do the opposite.

Only up to a point. Modern designs tend to be short term passively safe, but shut off the pumps and radioactive decay alone can be enough to eventually cause a melt down in many modern designs. Which is the core issue, there’s a huge cost trade off for protection vs every possible issue no matter how remote.

Spent fuel pools are probably the greatest example of this. They haven’t caused a major issue yet but they’re potentially a much larger risk than the actual reactor.

The Soviets were the only ones that built reactors that way. As in, having the ability to blow up.

> Spent fuel pools are probably the greatest example of this. They haven’t caused a major issue yet but they’re potentially a much larger risk than the actual reactor.

I think you're also over estimating the danger here. We've been operating over 500 reactors for over 70 years. That's some pretty good statistical power.

Edit2: Blowing up isn’t the only risk from a melt down, a major meltdown on a river could contaminate millions of people’s drinking water without any boom.

First pools are shared between reactors so there’s probably only around 200 that have ever been built.

Also, the risk isn’t simply in year X for pool Y, it’s for every pool and every year. At best we can estimate the risk of a pool over it’s lifetime is probably under 2% and the risk from all pools is also under 2% in any given year. The risk of any pool over the next 50 years, now that we have very little hard data on. At least in terms of real world data ir could be 0.05% or 50% and we just don’t have enough real world data to validate.

Edit: You can scroll through this list but it looks like on average there’s around 3 reactors per location. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

> At best we can estimate the risk of a pool over it’s lifetime is probably under 2% and the risk from all pools is also under 2% in any given year

How are you getting this number?

> The risk of any pool over the next 50 years, now that we have very little hard data on

What are you talking about? We have plenty of data. We literally have decades of physical testing and hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars worth of simulation testing. What do you think Sierra[0] (#3 super computer in the world) is doing all day? It is a classified machine at a DOE lab. Even a substantial portion of Summit does this same research (it also does a lot of climate research). But come on, 3 of the top 10 super computers are at US DOE labs, and the 3 exascale machines being built are also targeted for DOE labs (Aurora, Frontier, El Capitan (classified)). LLNL and ORNL spend significant resources on nuclear research.

[0] https://top500.org/system/179398/

“We've been operating over 500 reactors for over 70 years. That's some pretty good statistical power.”

I was correcting the statistical power comment. People estimate their quite safe, but essentially we ran the test once without problems which doesn’t say anything. 70 years ago there weren’t 500 reactors even today theirs less than 450 at probably under 200 sites. Thus the odds of any specific one having a problem next year is low, but the odds of any one having a problem next year is 200x as high and the odds of anyone having a problem in the next 50 years is ~50 * 200 times that. Or to put it another way they could be more dangerous than nuclear reactors but we just don’t have enough data to get signal from random noise.

As to why these estimates might not be meaningful, they ignore things like active sabotage which is why real world data is more meaningful.

> but essentially we ran the test once without problems which doesn’t say anything.

No, we ran the test over a thousand times (including research reactors). We have been running tests for over 70 years.

Honestly, it just sounds like you don't know very much about nuclear physics let alone nuclear reactors physics. Nor does it sound like you know much about statistics. You are being extremely confident while demonstrating a lack of knowledge.

Honestly, why talk with such confidence about a field you haven't worked in (even adjacent to) nor studied?

I am amused you think that.

Suppose you want to know how soon a CPU will fail. You can’t just test 1 CPU for 1 month and say well each of it’s 1 billion transistors lasted 1 month so the CPU also last a long time. That logic obviously doesn’t work because the part fails when any component fails.

Your trying to apply that same logic to say all spent fuel pools are safe over their lifetime because each individual spent fuel pools is unlikely to fail in a given year.

It’s the same thing with nuclear reactors, each individual reactor is low risk but build 1,000 of them and some will likely fail over their collective 50 year lifespan.

No, we are sampling a thousand different CPUs of about 30 varieties over 70 years. That's enough data to know on average how long a random CPU will last, to know how long any particular CPU will last, and to find trends about the longevity trends of newer CPUs over time.

You are using bad statistics. You are using bad science. And it is clear you don't know anything about nuclear fuel pools, reactors, nor nuclear waste management. Get off your high horse. If you want some books on these subjects I'm happy to recommend some but you got a lot of catching up to do before you have the right to act so cocky.

What’s the the odds that any spent nuclear fuel pool will fail in the next 50 years? That is exactly the number I referred to here and you seem to think we know. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28898610.

Now you might want to use estimates of existing designs, but we don’t have them because new designs will be used over the next 50 years. So what exactly are your hard numbers based on? Effectively one test of roughly that length.

Eh, Fukushima had a western reactor design. And it sort of blew up.

After getting hit by a tsunami. And it was a 1970s design; modern designs would not have blown up, and in fact some other reactors in the area built ten years later faced the same challenges and did fine.

And even the one that blew up released very little radiation to the surrounding area. You'd get more of a dosage living in Denver than Fukushima.

Fukushima didn't blow up. There was no explosion. Taking a bulldozer to a building is very different than using explosives (especially nuclear explosives).

The reactor didn't blow up. The building around it, outside of the containment structure, did blow up because of a hydrogen leak. It wasn't actually a big problem by itself, but it looked pretty dramatic on TV, so it probably contributed to people's overreaction afterwards.

Fukushima weathered the worst earthquake AND tsunami in decades at the same time.

And we only had one direct fatality from radiation.

> Fukushima weathered the worst earthquake AND tsunami in decades at the same time.

To also elaborate, all the reactors at Fukushima were designed to be able to handle any earthquake and tsunami that they thought could possibly happen in the region. Problem is that there was an earthquake larger than any in recorded history and larger than they thought the fault was capable of making. Some people are surprised that we've learned a lot about earthquakes and faults within the last 40 years.

>shut off the pumps and radioactive decay alone can be enough to eventually cause a melt down in many modern designs

The newest designs being built worldwide use natural circulation cooling and do not need cooling pumps in emergencies. Eventually the cooling pool needs to be refilled, but it's external to the containment pressure boundary, so you could refill it with a fire truck.

> so you could refill it with a fire truck.

Note you might need a lot of fire trucks, though. If decay heat is 0.2% of nominal power after a week, we need .8mL per nameplate MW (thermal) per second... which doesn't sound bad, but a 2GW reactor needs 5000L firetrucks showing up every 50 minutes, 24/7, after a week. This could be challenging depending upon the underlying emergency.

    ((0.002 megawatt) / ((2260 + 250) * (kilojoules / kg))) / (997 (kg / (m^3))) = 0.00079921038 liters per second

Assumption is that you're raising the temperature of the water 60C and then evaporating it, and that all the heat energy goes into the water. In the real world it can be expected to be slightly better than this, but not much...

You're off in your calculation by 3 orders of magnitude, you meant to write 0.002 gigawatt, not megawatt. Then yes, you get 0.7 liters/second, and 5000 L/hour for 2 GW plant. However, in actual reality, the firetruck would just park there, put one end of the hose into the plentiful source of water that surely must be available next to a power plant, and the other one into the entrance for coolant, and start its pump. Pumping 1 liter/second is quite in range of firetruck pumps abilities.

> You're off in your calculation by 3 orders of magnitude, you meant to write 0.002 gigawatt, not megawatt.

No... decay heat is about .2% of nameplate power after a week. So for each megawatt of nameplate thermal power, you need to get rid of 2 kilowatts of heat-- or 0.8mL/second of water boiling off. "If decay heat is 0.2% of nominal power after a week, we need .8mL per nameplate MW (thermal) per second..." Was quite clearly said.

> put one end of the hose into the plentiful source of water that surely must be available next to a power plant, and the other one into the entrance for coolant, and start its pump. Pumping 1 liter/second is quite in range of firetruck pumps abilities.

This is pretty optimistic in many disaster scenarios and doesn't apply to all plants.

That’s a great assumption unless loss of water is the underlying emergency and to really mess things up you lost both water and the scram failed.

That risk can be minimized by placing them near large natural bodies of water, but not all are ex: https://ejatlas.org/conflict/metsamor-nuclear-power-plant

Natural circulation gets heat from a reactor to X, but now your dependent on X. This often seems like a trivial detail, but Fukushima failed 3 days after the earthquake.

The issue is you want several things from a passive system at the same time, don’t lose heat in normal operation, quickly lose multiple GW of heat in an emergency and as much as 200+MW of heat for days after a shutdown. The obvious solution is to have a tank of water that boils if the reactor temperature gets to high, but now you need to keep that tank full.

Thus many designs result in a reactor that is passively safe for some number of hours and at risk after that. They describe this as a passively safe reactor even if it’s got external dependencies.

Nope.

Decay heat is below a half percent of operating after about a day. So 200 MW decay heat days later would mean a 40GW (thermal) reactor.

That's about ten times larger than the largest reactors in existence today.

Also, watts measure power, not heat.

Watts is joules per second be that electricity, horsepower, or heat.

Passive systems can’t assume a successful shutdown.

I can't figure out what you're saying here. You're assuming that the control rods aren't in, days later, for the purpose of calculating heat days after shutdown?

I am saying passive safety can’t assume anything else worked.

If you're going to apply "passive safety" globally, sure.

But what we're talking about here is passive cooling system safety, not that the entire reactor is passively safe. The multiply-redundant shutdown systems suffice to end the chain reaction.

If the chain reaction ends, you're pretty much immediately at 7% of decay heat -- so sure, a 1.5GW reactor will put out 100MW of decay heat, still. But this will rapidly fall off. After about an hour, it's more like 15MW; after a day, 6MW.

Your statement of "200MW of decay heat" days later assumes either a ridiculous initial condition (an implausibly large reactor) or assumes you still have an operating reactor, which... isn't decay heat anymore.

There have been multiple cases where reactors haven’t fully shut down safely. Assuming a scram will 100% work every time in an emergency simply isn’t appropriate or realistic.

Also, Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station has 3 different 4000MW thermal reactors, 7% of that is 280MW, though sure if everything shuts down properly it should hit ~15MW. Mitsubishi APWR is aiming for 4.5GW thermal in normal operation though some safety margin needs to be considered on top of that.

> There have been multiple cases where reactors haven’t fully shut down safely

There's Chernobyl, and a few cases where a scram was delayed by 15 minutes or less. How can this produce hundreds of megawatts days later?

> There have been multiple cases where reactors haven’t fully shut down safely. Assuming a scram will 100% work every time in an emergency simply isn’t appropriate or realistic.

Assuming that every system fully fails is unrealistic, too.

> 7% of that is 280MW,

You said hundreds of megawatts days later.

> Mitsubishi APWR is aiming for 4.5GW thermal in normal operation though some safety margin needs to be considered on top of that.

What, they're going to run it over nameplate for days straight? A small excursion over 4.5GW won't appreciably change the amount of power output days later. Now you're just being silly.

Your boiling a fixed pool of water. 15 minutes of nameplate capacity is boiling over 5 days of reserve at an expected 0.2% thermal output. The margins are often measure in minutes not days which is a long way from anything that could be called passively safe.

> Assuming that every system fully fails is unrealistic, too.

Not if you want to say your system is passively safe. I fully believe nuclear can be operated safety, but a huge part of that is acknowledging every possible failure mode rather than just saying unlikely means impossible.

I think you're trying really hard to salvage a point talking about hundreds of megawatts of "decay heat" days later.

An operating reactor isn't making "decay heat".

The claim made is that the cooling system is passively safe in shutdown. Fudging the amount of decay heat by a couple orders of magnitude, and then arguing about "what if it doesn't shut down" is a bogus argument.

Obviously if you cannot reduce a reactor below nameplate power indefinitely, you have a big problem. Thankfully, we have multiply-redundant protections against this in modern designs: redundant control rod assemblies, neutron poisoning, positive stability, etc. Other than Chernobyl (a clearly bad design), all cases of delayed shutdown experienced so far have been innocuous and we've learned a lot from them.

I can only assume my original point wasn’t clear. The normal amount of decay heat is the best case possibility and should be handed just fine by any reasonable design. I don’t think there’s any reason to assume a design has that kind of fatal flaws. “quickly lose multiple GW of heat in an emergency and as much as 200+MW of heat for days after a shutdown.” Was in reference to something compounding the issue of which their’s two main issues either it didn’t shutdown quickly or it didn’t shutdown completely.

I am objecting to is the assumption that safety systems should assume things are fine in an emergency. Chernobyl had multiple compounding issues, many other accidents where less serious because X and Y happened but Z didn’t happen. Depending on such trends continuing results in a false sense of security.

A passively safe system doesn’t mean there isn’t damage. It’s perfectly reasonable for a design to say in the event of X, Y, and Z stuffs going to break. Causing a billion dollars in damage is a perfectly reasonable trade off, losing containment isn’t.

PS: Part of that is acknowledging bad designs are going to happen, we engineers are going to make mistakes. Which means not all assumptions hold.

> it didn’t shutdown completely.

This would be the only possible explanation, and it is directly contradicted by calling it "decay heat".

It's pretty tricky to think of a scenario where you'd have 5-10% of nameplate days after attempted shutdown.

The worst incident where there was a failed shutdown-- other than Chernobyl-- that I'm aware of was a 1980 BWR incident.

* The reactor was at nearly no power except decay power for the entire duration of the incident: half the rods fully inserted.

* Manual remediation got all the rods in within 15 minutes.

* Last-ditch shutdown procedures, e.g. SLCS, were unnecessary because there was still sufficient control and rapid rampdown of reactor output.

* This is an old BWR design and...

* Procedures were updated and improved, and even with these old BWR designs we've had no subsequent incidents in 40 years.

Failure to shut down is indeed something really, really bad-- but insisting that cooling be designed to withstand this is a bit silly. Instead, we'd best design to be sure to avoid failures to shutdown, excursions in power far over nameplate, etc... rather than insist cooling systems survive fundamentally unsurvivable events without any intervention. E.g. we don't criticize SL-1's cooling design for not surviving the excursion to 10,000x nameplate.

The watt is a measure of power, heat (or energy) per unit time.

One could use pumps for increased efficiency during normal operation but the idea is that natural circulation should be able to remove all the heat if the reactor is SCRAMed. NuScale's design for instance only uses pumps for the steam generator, the rest is handled by natural circulation and the reactor sits in a water pool that needs to be replenished after two weeks in case of a major accident.

No. Modern reactors use their pumps to keep the reactor going. Shut them off and the reactor shuts itself off.

They now all have passive safety systems that do not require power.

I know that molten salt reactors have a "salt plug" at the bottom of the tank that will melt if the temperature is too high, dumping the liquid fuel into a boron bath.

I think this kind of reactor is safe in a way that no modern reactor is - operators can remove all power and walk away in this shutdown state. This isn't possible with modern reactors, where 6% of the heat that they produce comes from daughter nuclei, and this decay heat requires cooling power for months after a controlled shutdown.

I do agree, we have to build these safely, with every conceivable scenario, such that walking away is possible.

Converting to thorium fuel would also be far better, as there is only one stable isotope in nature, so no refing is necessary (beyond high-purity smelting), and no centrifuges.

If they would’ve used water as a moderator, built a containment building, and not allowed manual override like every other reactor ever, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It’s absolutely a worst case scenario.

Aren't there fail-safe designs for newer reactors? Whatever tiny risk exists would be worth taking IMO.

I'm pretty sure every reactor ever designed was designed to fail safely. Including Chernobyl...

I don't trust humans to design and maintain things that actually always fail safely though. Eventually someone is going to do something dumb and cut the wrong corner or, just do something dumb like disable the emergency core cooling system as part of a test of another system (what caused Chernobyl...)

In a perfect world fission power could be used safely, the real world isn't perfect, and the pro-nuclear crowds main argument seems to be to go around saying "we're actually perfect now".

> In a perfect world fission power could be used safely, the real world isn't perfect, and the pro-nuclear crowds main argument seems to be to go around saying "we're actually perfect now".

This isn’t a criticism of nuclear power; it’s a criticism of industrial civilization and technological progress. You can make the exact same point about coal mining, lithium mining, power grids, hell, even campfires if you wanted to.

If I went and dug up horror stories about what happened before we had an electrical code and used those horror stories to argue that we shouldn’t have electricity inside our homes, it would be perfectly reasonable to say, “that’s why we have electrical codes”. And I don’t think it would be a strong counter for me to say, “but the electrical code isn’t perfect”.

It's not a criticism of all technological progress, it's a criticism of technology where you cannot accept a single worst case failure, as is the case with nuclear power plants and very little else.

If an electrical fault in your house meant killings 10s or hundreds of millions of people, instead of costing you a home (and if you're really unlucky single digit numbers of lives) we'd be foolish to allow it. As it turns out, electrical faults in a house only burns down the house, not the continent.

A nuclear accident isn’t going to kill tens or hundreds of millions of people. Nuclear bombs—and fusion bombs at that—deployed in large numbers, would do that. But a single nuclear accident isn’t anywhere near the same scale as a full scale nuclear strike.

Chernobyl killed tens of people. And Chernobyl was the “shitty construction with no electrical codes” of nuclear power plants. Fukushima killed like one person.

Chernobyl by all accounts killed thousands of people, and by some (dubious) accounts may have killed many more than that.

Chernobyl was capable of killing millions of people, again I refer you to the article that I started this whole subthread with. What actually happened in Chernobyl was very very far from the worst case nuclear disaster: https://www.thetrumpet.com/14007-three-men-who-saved-million...

> Chernobyl by all accounts killed thousands of people

Fewer than 100 deaths have been directly attributed to Chernobyl. All of the numbers in the thousands are estimates based on assumptions and statistical models around radiation exposure. But if you’re bringing that into the question, it’s only fair to calculate the number of excess deaths that would have been caused by the extra amount of coal mining and air pollution that would have occurred if the Soviet Union did not operate nuclear power plants. And when you work that out, you’ll see it’s likely that the Soviet nuclear power system—which was catastrophically mis-managed not just by 21st century standards but by the standards of the USSR’s contemporaries—still saved many more lives than it cost.

Chernobyl had an unsafe design from the beginning and the engineers knew it.

It seems to be a combination of poor design and not following operational procedures to manage the poor design.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...

fukushima as well, heck even the governement did know that. that does not make it better. in fact that makes it worse.

Failsafe fission is a myth, it depends on accidents happening according to the design when everything is built and maintained perfectly. Fukushima was failsafe until a tsunami flooded the backup generators. The danger of tsunami was dully noted of course but as it turns out electricity supply to the reactor cooling wasn't all that failsafe.

The passive systems? They all depend on large groups of people doing their job perfectly during the manufacturing and another group of people doing their jobs perfectly at maintaining these systems and not disabling them when inconvenient. I don't trust people doing everything right every single time.

The fission reaction is a kind of a reaction that can go out of control very fast spontaneously.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against nuclear energy but I think it must be treated as something we can do until we switch to something sustainable.

I tried to find marketing material for Chernobyl and Fukushima but I did not find anything, I wanted to see if they explained the risks or did they described these plants as perfectly safe. People now claim that those designs were flawed and that everyone knew about it but I don't believe it, I will be shocked if people were promised anything less than perfect safety.

As we stand today, we built 667 nuclear power reactors and 2(actually more as fukushima lost multiple reactors) of those went bust with significant damage to the communities close to the reactors. The body count is hard to pinpoint but large communities had their lives uprooted and everything could have went worse if we lacked heroes.

With currently %10 of our electricity is coming from Nuclear, in 60 years we had 2 regions becoming uninhabitable practically forever due to incidents that could have been much worse. If our track record remains in line, with %100 nuclear we can expect to have 20 more places ruined within the lifetime of a junior developer who just started today.

I don't know, maybe we can have nuclear power plants close to photovoltaic production facilities to offset the energy need when building those far away from densely populated places and ramp up our efforts to switch to the fusion reactor in the sky? Turn off the last nuclear power plant when we have enough solar energy equipment?

> we had 2 regions becoming uninhabitable practically forever due to incidents that could have been much worse.

are they really uninhabitable forever? The nature seems to have returned to Chernobyl, there are still people living there who defied the evacuation order. Sure, as a precaution the exclusion zone makes sense, but to call it uninhabitable practically forever is a stretch.

No, it's flatly false unless "region" is being used in a highly misleading way. There are about 2500 people living right now in the town of Okuma where the Fukushima Daiichi reactor was located.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Ckuma,_Fukushima

Lots of things depend on everyone doing their job mostly perfectly, and then inspections and tests, etc. to make sure. Chemical plants, oil platforms, airplanes, etc. We should expect the occasional accident, which there have been for all power generation technologies. Nuclear is one of the very safest, by far, if you account for all of the accidents to date.

The other energy sources have risks and fatalities, you got to weigh the options against nuclear, can't judge it by itself.

The other energy sources don't require stable societies a thousand years from now.

> As we stand today, we built 667 nuclear power reactors and 2 of those went bust with significant damage to the communities close to the reactors. The body count is hard to pinpoint but large communities had their lives uprooted and everything could have went worse if we lacked heroes.

You could very easily make the same argument about climate change. What about the Amazon fires, Australia fires, California fires? The floods in Germany? Countless people had their lives uprooted from climate change (which was caused by many things, including CO2 emitting electricity generation)

I don't think any of the people who are sceptic about fission are pro-fossil-fuels.

I, for example, see the future in renewables plus storage, distributed and optimized for the local situation.

I accept fission as something necessary right now to buy time.

Maybe I'm wrong and fission is the better answer than renewables, but long term I feel like it's the same can of worms that fossil fuel was all over again.

I just hope we can make smart decisions that help us fight climate change short, mid and long-term.

This assumes that nuclear power plants aren't getting any safer.

I largely agree but I think people who run nuclear power stations are well aware of Chernobyl and will not make similar mistakes.

Realistically, it was the worst case as modern designs are much safer. What are you imagining would be the very-far worse case and how would that arise?

I'd argue Fukushima was a worst-case scenario with a Gen-3 commercial plant.

seems like the debate is still polarizing.. either there were not enough engineering improvement, or bad communication to settle the issue

It's not a question of engineering improvement. The comment at the top of this thread said it fairly well:

> 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.

I'd add "design" and "construct" to that list as well.

I have pretty much no doubt that it's theoretically possible to design, construct, maintain and operate a safe reactor, I don't believe for an instant though that the decision making authorities are capable of actually requiring in perpetuity that those things and only those things are done despite the huge financial incentives to cut corners and play the 1-in-a-million catastrophic failure lottery.

I quite agree with the dubious government skill levels in general, but considering the task I'd say they made a decent run for a first era so far. 3 big catastrophes (not good not terrible).

Question would be, can we raise the safety levels one order up ?

Also in a way, we will face that soon because the current fleet will have to be replaced by something one way or another.

The amount of coal necessary to replace nuclear fuel is about a million times greater. Do you trust those governments to handle 1000000x as much fossil fuel as nuclear? Especially consider the fact that such a large amount of coal has roughly equally as much natural radioactive contaminants as the amount of nuclear fuel that could replace it.

This is a poor argument, you're comparing nuclear to literally the worst alternative you can think of.

The alternative to building new nuclear plants is not building new coal plants, or keeping existing coal plants in use for longer. It's to take the same money that you could have spent on new nuclear power plants, and to spend them on new power plants of other types. If it's a fossil fuel form in the modern era, that probably means gas (16% of new power generation in the US), not coal (0% of new capacity I believe, rather quickly being retired/converted to natural gas). More likely it means solar (39%) or wind (31%).

(Source for numbers: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416)

But yes, I trust our society to handle coal (and other fossil fuels) more than I trust it to handle nuclear plants, because you can't hide the effects of fossil fuels, but you can hide (and deny) the negative effects of a unsafe nuclear plant until it fails catastrophically.

> you can't hide the effects of fossil fuels, but you can hide (and deny) the negative effects of a unsafe nuclear plant until it fails catastrophically.

What? The subtopic of the thread is climate change. That was hidden from the public eye for over 30 years. We're literally in the situation where fossil fuels have failed catastrophically and now everyone knows about it. Which I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate because a large portion of the population is still denying it.

So yeah, this is a poor argument.

I'll take the risk of some nuclear reactor accidents compared to the inevitability of world wide calamity and wars that will happen because of climate changes and resource limits. It's going to be some risk vs inevitability because the world is not going to change from fossil fuels until it's too late.I don't live some magic reality where the hippies win and we all will embrace each other and be responsible rather than be the tribal apes that we really all are.

World wide calamity is inevitable at this point. It doesn't really matter if we build nuclear or renewables or both, we cannot stop it, because the root cause is capitalism and we cannot replace that. So given that a calamity is coming I would rather build stuff that cannot melt down when unmaintaned.

What is your idea of a catastrophic failure? A nuclear detonation? Because that actually can't happen. Not because there is some gizmo preventing it that might one day fail, but because it actually, physically can not happen.

Is it a meltdown? That has already happened at Fukushima, and didn't end up being catastrophic. At least not compared to catastrophes like tsunamis and earthquakes.

Analysis of the Chernobyl accident suggests that this is not quite true

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.2017.1...

It's described in the article I linked in the comment two above, I'll link it again here. A steam explosion spreading orders of magnitude more radiation than Chernobyl had already (which was prevented by people entering the reactor in the days immediately after the first explosion).

https://www.thetrumpet.com/14007-three-men-who-saved-million...

Incidentally, nuclear detonations can happen, and there is some belief that very small ones did happen in Chernobyl, but the type of the explosion is really besides the point.

>Incidentally, nuclear detonations can happen, and there is some belief that very small ones did happen in Chernobyl, but the type of the explosion is really besides the point.

If you're going to make the claim that this is possible, we need a source.

> https://www.thetrumpet.com/14007-three-men-who-saved-million...

Preferably not a source that uses 'bible prophecy'.

Lol, I just dug up the first article I could find, admittedly didn't check the news source.

But that source isn't for the claim you're quoting... that's for the (well known) claim that Chernobyl could have gone much worse if not for remdiation efforts, it shouldn't be hard to find alternate sources for that claim.

For the claim you're quoting, see the paper cited in the sibling comment to mine.

Edit: For completeness I'll relink that paper here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.2017.1...

>> 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.

If this is the coup d'etat then there's no argument. Because if you don't trust them for this then how can you trust them for anything? That's fair, not having trust. But at least be consistent.

Trust isn't boolean, there are levels/degrees.

That's kinda the root of my argument though.

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