[cperciva]

Nuclear accidents happen, yes... at power plants with designs which were outlawed on safety grounds 40 years ago.

If you want to prevent nuclear accidents, you should be supporting attempts to build new reactors, because that's the fastest route to getting the old ones decommissioned.

[eyrarric]

It is only because on the insistence of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover than Pressurized water reactors (PWRs) constitute a majority of all western nuclear power plants. He rejected "crazy thermodynamic cycles that everyone else wants to build". So we got stuck with PWR inherent flaws. Check "The Rickover Effect: How One Man Made a Difference" (http://bit.ly/2FiJQ1u)

[Caveman_Coder]

I loved that book! Excellent recommendation. If you want a good intro to non-PWR nuclear power technologies, I'd highly recommend "SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future" by Richard Martin.

[gambiting]

Exactly. It's an almost catch-22 situation: old reactors are unsafe, so people protest building new ones, which would make the old ones obsolete and make the whole technology safer.

[Zigurd]

Not really a catch-22: The chicken was supposedly declared safe before it laid those radioactive eggs. And if the designs and siting were subsequently found to be unsafe, why are those reactors re-certified as safe? The nuclear power industry has only itself to blame for costs and safety.

[gambiting]

Because the identified issues have been rectified - but the fixes add to the complexity and you are always relying on a fix to make it safe - while newer designs(pebble bed reactors) are inherently safe.

[Zigurd]

Re "Because the identified issues have been rectified" you mean like the containment buildings at Fuk that did not contain? And what, exactly, can one rectify about unsafe siting?

[bayesian_horse]

Protests don't really prohibit designing and prototyping safer reactors. And many of these designs seem to have a similar problem about nuclear waste.

Again: Solve nuclear waste problem first, before creating ever more nuclear waste.