Quote:
Originally Posted by XutvJet
We've had three major nuclear disasters in 43 years. That's not a great track record for a system that is supposed to be "safe", full of redundancies, and ran by high qualified personnel.
Nuclear power is an amazing technological advancement, but a sane person should question the risk vs reward factor when it comes to larger facilities like nuclear power plants.
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There is far more risk in continued heavy use of fossil fuels that we ignore because it's normalized. We have daily oil spill or toxic chemical spill disasters due to power production by fossil fuels.
Relativeness is a keyword when dealing with anything nuclear. Safer compared to burning fossil fuels? It absolutely is, even with Chernobyl. It's easy to be scared of nuclear waste that's in a concrete casks in a area with tons of warning signs and planned to be buried somewhere for hundreds of years. But if coal power plants just spew shit in the atmosphere, there's nothing to be scared of there, especially downwind, because those "tree huggers" would have complained about it. Enjoy that 50 tons of mercury in the atmosphere every year. Oil tanker crashes and dumps thousands of barrels worth of oil or toxic chemicals? That's fine. Off-shore oil rig "full of redundancies, and ran by high qualified personnel" has a problem and dumps millions of gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, poisoning the food for millions of people? That's sane.
Interesting fact that many people didn't know (not that many people know anything substantive about it to begin with) - after Chernobyl's reactor 4 accident destroyed much of the building, reactor 3, which shared a wall in the building with reactor 4, was only powered down for the last time in the year 2000. Turns out even a dangerous nuclear reactor design can be safely used if you don't disable all of the safeguards on it.