Reply to post: Re: even more safer to operate?

Re: even more safer to operate?

Chernobyl was a commie design with absolutely no reactor containment that made most western nuclear engineers get an involuntary shiver down their spines if you even mentioned it. Having both a positive void coefficient and a positive temperature coefficient (making it react faster if it got more steam in the core and if the core got hotter) was something that made more sane engineers quickly bin an idea. The commies liked it because it was both very cheap to build and produced lovely, lovely plutonium. And then they did several things to it that were KNOWN to be absolutely terrible to do, but badly trained operators on a night shift got pushed to perform an unfamiliar to them and badly defined test in bad conditions on a hot reactor core. And then it went kaboom. Something no reactor now in operation can do in the same way. Subsequent coverups, denial and mismanagement has made the impact of it far worse than it could have been

Fukushima is another example of bad management and political interference. It would have ended far less badly if they had been allowed to vent reactor pressure earlier, but political dithering and conditions conspired to prevent permission being given. It would never have happened if they had heeded warnings both at time of design and later that putting ALL your backup generators below sea-level is a bad idea. It would have ended less badly had they had external power hookups ready to go instead of having to jury-rig them afterwards, again they were warned of that ahead of time. It's also the absolute extreme worse-case scenario that can happen to a nuclear power plant. A very severe earthquake (which the station survived without issue, followed by a tsunami exceeding expected height by about 100% flooding all backup power generators AND destroying all power connections to the rest of the grid, leaving a nuclear power station with 3 active reactors in total blackout. Final tally is 1 reactor with a full fuel relocation (meltdown), potentially (partially) melted through the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel, 1 reactor with a partial fuel relocation where most evidence points to nearly all fuel still being in the RPV and 1 reactor with a partial meltdown where the core is still largely intact. Outside of the reactor, the earthquake and tsunami killed more people and did more devastation than the incident at the powerplant ever will, even long term. Most of the areas that were (unnecessarily) evacuated are being repopulated, the vast vast majority of contamination outside the plant has been cleaned up to a level far beyond what most countries would require and now things are simply going to take time to figure out how to safely remove the rest of the debris and fuel from the damaged reactors. It's a difficult process but not impossible.

As to the impact of coal plants it's not as if those incidents don't happen, and it's not as if the companies managing those plants don't do their best to shirk responsibility and ignore the risks