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Actually, it relied on two complimentary safeguard circuits to restrict the rod movements within its calculated performance envelope. They could not be overriden from the front panel, so electricians were dispatched to cut them off, in order to conduct an "experiment" in the wake of International Labour Day. How safe are the other reactor designs when malicious human intervention is considered is still a very open question. I would also remark there was a deserved stream of criticism from the West both for the reactor design and the containment effort that followed. The overwhelming opinion throughout the 1990s-2000s was that the Western designs are safe and catastrophic scenarios like Chernobyl are implausible. Then Fukushima happens, the three reactors blow up and the only saving grace for Japan was the wind blowing oceanside. And the containment is done by low wage workers in sneakers, while Asimo and its advanced robot colleagues play robosoccer in Tokyo. The narrative is now changed to other designs being "inherently safe", although it's not very plausible how any concentrated, massive release of energy can be made inherently safe. Yes you can reduce probabilities and exclude some catastrophic scenarios, but this is a thing with crises: they always come unexpected. I'm sure when the plug in a molten salt reactor fails for some reason (say tectonic shift from a quake), there will no doubt be another design touted as safe. Now consider that fission power atm is what, 10-15% of compound world power generation? As of now it's focused in a handful of nations, most of whom are known for safety culture. As it proliferates worldwide, the average quality of maintenance will decline and the number of stations would naturally multiply, so perhaps we'll see a major nuclear accident every couple years instead of decades. And we haven't even started with waste disposal and non-proliferation considerations here. I'd really really rather wait for fusion. |
Which was nowhere close to as bad as Chernobyl. There is a lot of fear-mongering going around that tries to imply they were somehow similar, but most of that relies on people not understanding the difference between a steam explosion in Chernobyl's reactor core (which had no containment building) blowing finely pulverized radioactive graphite and fission products across the landscape, and Fukushima's hydrogen explosions outside the containment chamber, which caused far less damage and left most of the fuel still contained in the reactor cores.
Nobody has died from radiation at Fukushima Daiichi, and there is a good chance any future cancer risk is extremely low. In fact, the way the reactor survived the worse earthquake and tsunami on record without causing a radiation hazard like some places around Chernobyl shows how safe nuclear power is, even in old designs. This was confirmed at the nearby Fukushima Daini reactor, which survived the earthquake and tsunami.
> perhaps we'll see a major nuclear accident every couple years instead of decades
Extrapolating from two incidents isn't useful. Since one of those data points wasn't significant nuclear accident, you're now trying to extrapolate form a single data point, which is not the kind of math we should base policy on.
The bigger problem with this kind of fear is that you're giving a pass to the coal industry (among other industries) which have far, far worse disasters regularly. Even if you count every single nuclear associated disaster (including Chernobyl), there number of people injured/killed and the land impact of those disasters is insignificant noise compared to what the coal (or chemical) industry has done.
> we haven't even started with waste disposal and non-proliferation considerations here
So you haven't looked at any of the advances in nuclear power that have been made over the last sever decades? Modern breeder designs don't have the waste problem. Most technologies advanced a lot over the last 40+ years - why would you assume that nuclear never advanced past the 60s?