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0 pointscsomar1y ago0 comments

You make the ultimate point. In a "sane?" world, once nuclear has been discovered, every country should have gone the way of France or the Soviet Union. Build nuclear everywhere with over-capacity built-in.

The problem is, once Chernobyl happened (which might have bankrupted a struggling USSR), every country became wary of nuclear as some hidden costs are now more apparent. The Fukushima disaster didn't help either: Even if you run your plant just fine, a strong earthquake can turn it into a nuclear bomb.

So we are back to basics, collecting photons from far away. Using quantity instead of sci-fi stuff. It's quite safe too, at least the panels themselves.

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nine_k1y ago

For Chernobyl to happen, the team on the NPP had to do a number of crazy things, and disable a number of security systems which otherwise would stop the crazy things from being done.

Certainly RBMK reactors are old and have some shortcomings, but a number of them is still running without incidents. Newer designs are significantly more safe by construction.

But the public, sadly, is beholden to legends and emotions, as it has been for millennia. Having an educated opinion is work, it takes time and effort, and a human only has a limited amount of both.

kaliqt1y ago

Fukushima was extremely minor though. Chernobyl is the worst and even that was not that bad, yeah we dramatize it a lot in media, but at a societal scale measuring physically (what actually happened vs how you felt about what happened) it was a blip on the radar.

eldaisfish1y ago

>Even if you run your plant just fine, a strong earthquake can turn it into a nuclear bomb.

This is entirely false. No civilian nuclear power plant anywhere on earth has the level of fuel enrichment necessary to become a bomb.

If you have credible sources, please do share.

Galaxeblaffer1y ago

Please tell me how an earthquake can turn a relatively modern nuclear pp into a nuclear bomb ?

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