| Their risk isn't zero but even the 60s the inventor of PWR said this was not very safe design and designing inherent safely systems are far better. Of course you never have zero risk. That literally impossible and not a standard you would use for literally anything else in human existence. The fact is, you can design nuclear power plants that are so safe that the chain of events you had to come up with to get any radiation outside of the reactor safety boundary is so ridiculous that the probability of them happening is barley measurable. Sure if you have human error and 3 black swan events on the same day, the risk is not zero. But even if you come up with these crazy events the damage from those events would be a far smaller then Chernobyl and Chernobyl was also far less damaging then in popular imagination. The risk that somebody dies during the construction of the reactor confinement building is probably 100000x higher, but nobody seeks to prevent ever building large structures. > Chernobyl operators thought their reactor design had zero risk of exploding, current reactors are much safer but I'm pretty sure the risk isn't zero. This is where we are with nuclear. Any debate goes back to Chernobyl. Again, in no other area do we go and say 'well the soviet thought this in the 60s so therefore we can never moved past it'. There is fundamental physics and chemistry involved and just because some soviet operators didn't know that does mean its unknowable. Humanity should be living in the nuclear age. Climate change would not even be a thing if everybody had done what the French have done in the 70s. And we would be much better in terms of space exploration if the whole world were not so reluctant about using anything nuclear. |