Failsafe fission is a myth, it depends on accidents happening according to the design when everything is built and maintained perfectly. Fukushima was failsafe until a tsunami flooded the backup generators. The danger of tsunami was dully noted of course but as it turns out electricity supply to the reactor cooling wasn't all that failsafe.
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?
> we had 2 regions becoming uninhabitable practically forever due to incidents that could have been much worse.
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.
No, it's flatly false unless "region" is being used in a highly misleading way. There are about 2500 people living right now in the town of Okuma where the Fukushima Daiichi reactor was located.
Lots of things depend on everyone doing their job mostly perfectly, and then inspections and tests, etc. to make sure. Chemical plants, oil platforms, airplanes, etc. We should expect the occasional accident, which there have been for all power generation technologies. Nuclear is one of the very safest, by far, if you account for all of the accidents to date.
> As we stand today, we built 667 nuclear power reactors and 2 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.
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 don't think any of the people who are sceptic about fission are pro-fossil-fuels.
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.
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?