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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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