Not downplaying those deaths, but at least you can rebuild on the land right after. Seems way different than having some part of the world off limit for 10,000 years.
Thirty cities were hit by flood waters that were moving at 50 km/hr. This likely involved many, many industrial chemicals, solvents, waste, and other harmful elements that were generally disbursed.
[T]he failures largely accrued from institutional hubris, engineering insufficiency, lack of relevant domain knowledge (often deliberate ignorance or denial, see especially Vajont, also St. Francis), poor overall management, lack of disaster preparation, drilling, or readiness, limited resurces or capabilities (especially in developing countries), communications breakdown (see Banqiao's comms loss), and inadequate response in light of imminent or present threat.
None of these are domain-specific to hydraulic civil engineering or absent from nuclear engineering projects.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20020553>
And:
The specific failings at Banqiao were virtually all managerial and political, not technical; poor engineering, inadequate safety provisions, underestimated environmental and operational risks, poor contingency planning, unforeseen perfect storm (literally), severed communications, insufficient warnings, no community disaster preparation, inadequate rescue and recovery. None of these failures are specific to hydro, all apply to nuclear power, and as non-engineering problems there is no technical fix that makes them go away.
In Banqiao, about 25,000 people died in the immediate inundation. Another 150,000 died in the following weeks of starvation and disease. There's no great mystery as to how such deaths are avoided: floodwaters are mitigated by high ground and evacuation centres; starvation and disease by food, water, and medical stocks; and rescue & recovery by trained teams and equipment. Reestablishment of communications, transport, and utilities is critical.
China at the time was desperately poor, politically dysfunctional, and gambled hugely on risk and lost. Other major hydro disasters tend to share these traits.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24327114>
The risks from Banqiao were short-term (acute), though profound. They could have been mitigated by planning, preparation, warnings, evacuation, and response. China at the time lacked the safety and civil defence maturity and mindsets, the political will, the engineering culture, and simply the capacity to respond appropriately given the magnitude of the disaster. The deaths were avoidable, and similar threats, say the 2017 Oroville Dam spillway failure. The engineering failure resulted in costs, but no loss of life, nor any significant damage to property other than the dam itself.
The U.S. still does see occasional dam failures, as with the Edenville and Sanford Dam failures of 19 May 2020. Here again poor engineering, construction, and operation created the risk, though again, preparedness and response prevented deaths, though in this case there was significant property damage.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edenville_Dam>
Today, Chernobyl and Fukushima are exclusion zones, and they will be for centuries. The reactor cores themselves, for tens of thousands of years. This is far longer than the companies, countries, cultures, and even languages extant at the time of the disasters --- our capacity to address risks and management at this scale is utterly nonexistent. Banqiao is home to 17 million people who face no ongoing concerns from the incident.
Dam failures are short-lastting disasters, occurring over hours, days, or perhaps weeks.
Nuclear failures are long-lasting disasters, occurring over decades, centuries, and perhaps millennia.
Nuclear weapon is not equal to nuclear reactor. If Russians will blow up Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant, most of the people will be evacuated, but radiation will poison land and sea for hundreds or thousands of year.
What are you talking about exactly: the destroyed reactor #4 won't be rebuilt but I don't think it's relevant, but the other reactors were still functional a decade after the accident, and people have been working there since then.
And Pripyat won't ever be rebuilt mostly because it was never destroyed in the first place. In fact if Ukraine wasn't facing a chronic population shrinkage due to low natality, Pripyat could have been resettled long ago with only minor restrictions (and since the area is mostly a swamp, it's not like it had a big agricultural value before anyway).
> but radiation will poison land and sea for hundreds or thousands of year.
This is Nuclear risk misunderstanding number 1: “radiation” poison nothing except living thing receiving them in very high doses, radiation don't stay. What stays is the “radioactive material” which (unless at the epicenter of the accident) do emit a limited amount of radiations. What's harmful is eating or inhaling such material like any pollutants, and unlike other pollutants, radioactive material decays and only a fraction of it remains after a decade.
People are routinely exposed to environmental pollution that are as dangerous: if you had lived in Pripyat for the past 20 years, your risk of cancer would probably be lower than someone having lived in Kyiv, just because there's no car and the related air pollution in Pripyat.