Chernobyl showed the potential impact. Fukushima showed that even several decades down the line things can still rapidly run out of control. All the knowledge and experience in the world isn't going to save you when something unexpected happens and things are just waiting to spiral out of control.
Which is one of the reasons that reactor would never have gotten an operating license in any western country. Oh, and not having any containment.
Nuclear could become less unsafe once humanity has found ways not to go commity horrble violence every other generation.
What, if anything, would convince you?
Not sure if fission will ever be able to reach that. Fusion perhaps? I'd certainly like to see that researched with high priority.
In the short to medium term at the very least, I see more economic potential in simple, modular tech. Cheap generation using solar, wind and water. Matching supply and demand better through storage and interconnects.
I'd also be very interested in actual research on how to actually lower demand, in beating the Jevons paradox.
You'll never get waste management below about 300 years with fission, because that's basically what you get from the fission products. But the really long-term stuff is plutonium and other transuranics. Those are unburnt fuel. Fast reactors and some molten salt reactors are supposed to eliminate that. Bury the fission products for 300 years and they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore.
As an American this seems like a long time to me, but when I lived in Germany it didn't so much. We had a brewery in town that had been operating continually for 800 years.
Proliferation resistance gets complicated but some designs are a lot better at it than others. Almost everything requires at least some enriched fuel for startup, even if unenriched works after that. CANDU reactors don't require enriched fuel at all but they don't achieve the waste requirement. Some designs let you extract usable weapons material from reactor fuel (including current CANDU reactors), with others there's no way to extract fissile that's easier to enrich than natural uranium ore.
It might be doable to centralize startup fuel production in nuclear powers, and use reactors that take unenriched fuel after startup, have no way to extract weapons-grade material, and consume the transuranics.
Fusion of course would fix a lot of this. D-T fusion does produce a lot of neutrons that you could use to make plutonium, but you need those neutrons to make more tritium. You get activated reactors parts but those fit your time requirement.
That's at least one and probably more like five wars over the reactor territory.
I'm mildly optimistic about fusion's potential...
I'm mildly optimistic about fusion as well. One big advantage is regulatory; fission reactors can be safe if you design them well, but fusion reactors can't do much damage even if they're terrible. The NRC has already decided on a much lighter regulatory regime for them.
I guess we should stop having large, complicated projects. Potable water mains, road and rail networks, the power grid, the internet, bridges, medicine, etc, are all too complicated for humans to manage.
I mean, nuclear is only the safest form of energy generation that humanity has ever produced, but you're absolutely right.
Now, what's the absolute worst that could happen when a nuclear reactor spirals out of control?
People drink contaminated, unpotable water and die.
> What's the absolute worst that could happen when a train derails?
People die.
> What's the absolute worst that could happen when a backhoe snacks on a fiber trunk?
Life-critical infrastructure that depends on the communication fails in a bad way and people die.
> Now, what's the absolute worst that could happen when a nuclear reactor spirals out of control?
People die.
Nothing in life is without risk.
Nuclear reactors spiraling out of control have killed fewer people per KWH generated than any other source of energy that human beings have come up with.
If we're talking non-human it is a bit harder.
I'd rather see this simplified and improved than stopped.
> I mean, nuclear is only the safest form of energy generation that humanity has ever produced, but you're absolutely right.
Ground mounted solar is clearly superior in terms of safety.
Neither of these problems is true of more recent reactors.
We don't make bridges safe by getting humans to cooperate better and cross bridges one car at a time. We make them strong and stable so humans can drive however they like and the bridge is fine. That's how all engineering works, and it applies to nuclear reactors just like anything else.
And honestly it wasn't, not really. It was hit with a record-breaking earthquake and a record-breaking tsunami... and more lives were lost due to evacuation than to the plant shutdown.
Yes, radiation killed zero. Evacuation - thousands
Most tragic thing is that Chernobyl accident could have been prevented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disaster...
Not at all hyperbole when you consider how badly it poisoned the well for future nuclear projects.
If the core had melted down to a body of water, the steam flash could have vaporized it & ejected it high into the atmosphere.
That's city-ending, if not quite "continent rendered uninhabitable".