Aren't there fail-safe designs for newer reactors? Whatever tiny risk exists would be worth taking IMO.
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".
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
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”.
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.
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 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...
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.
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?
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, 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.
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.