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Comment by jpxw | Hacker News Reader

One incident caused by a natural disaster that would never happen in a European country like Germany, the other caused by mismanagement and frankly jaw droppingly pigheaded incompetence which would also never happen in a country like Germany.

Edit: in response to the large number of people bringing up BER and other infrastructure failures in Germany: yes, BER and others may have been bad, but a completely different kind (and magnitude) of incompetence than that which led to the Chernobyl meltdown. They really aren’t comparable.

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This summer a large part of germany was completely flooded. This was a natural disaster, which might happen at higher frequencies nowadays. The alarming systems in place competely failed and around 200 people drowned in Germany. There are so many things which could happen and countries like Germany are not prepared for.

Which is exactly why geologists do surveying before they build a nuclear power plant...

This is ridiculous! The house owners were convinced that there couldn't take place a flooding in that area! Most of them had no insuranced for flooding either. No specialist of any kind has predicted such a scenario...

Those houses aren't nuclear reactors. The safety measures were exponentially less stringent.

> This was a natural disaster, which might happen at higher frequencies nowadays.

You don't build nuclear power plants in narrow valleys with known flood events though. I mean, you also don't build wind turbines in swamps and hope they don't fall over, or put solar panels on your roof and don't fasten them.

Building a castle in a swamp can work, though.

Certainly by the time you get to the fourth one, the strongest castle in these islands

https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/770/floodi...

> mismanagement and frankly jaw droppingly pigheaded incompetence which would also never happen in a country like Germany.

Are we talking about the same Germany?

Edit: I should probably give some examples: Suttgart 21 train station, BER airport

Jaw droppingly pigheaded incompetence is unfortunately quite common once economic pressure makes the correct way of running things untenable.

Everybody starts cutting small corners everywhere, assuming it doesn't matter much as all the other people are still doing their job. One day, a corner too many gets cut, and the slack in the system is too small to catch what should be a minor problem.

Don't trust the public facade and official reports, they have been filtered by PR departments and by people not wishing to report bad news to their managers and peers

>the other caused by mismanagement and frankly jaw droppingly pigheaded incompetence which would also never happen in a country like Germany.

Are you sure? One example:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-48527308

>BER has become for Germany not a new source of pride but a symbol of engineering catastrophe. It's what top global infrastructure expert Bent Flyvbjerg calls a "national trauma" and an ideal way "to learn how not to do things".

Accidents will always happen, even in Germany [1]. And don’t forget their WW2 bomb detection isn’t perfect [2]. Nor are they free from corruptive practices [3].

1. https://www.itv.com/news/2016-02-09/a-history-of-german-trai...

2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59487910

3. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34324772

> jaw droppingly pigheaded incompetence which would also never happen in a country like Germany.

Hahaha! Haha! Ha. #sad

Yes, although never say never...

Well nothing is risk-free. But in my opinion in any case the risk of allowing climate change to rampantly continue vastly outweighs the infinitesimal risks of nuclear.

"infinitesimal risk" would be something that is unlikely to happen once in a million years or even the lifetime of the planet which is clearly not the case. It's "acceptable risk" or "justifiable risk" at best.

Floodings are going to be much more frequent than they were in the past. If you want to take a look at where those nuclear reactors are located and explain how they were to be operated safely and cost effectively in the next decade or two I think the Germans would be all ear.

Germany has this right: do it now, and deal with it, rather than to continue to kick the can down the road for later generations to solve the problems, a kind of temporeal externalization.

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