I mean, Bangqiao wiped out numerous settlements. On the other hand you know the remaining RBMK reactors at Chernobyl continued to operate for years after the incident, the last one closing in 2000, and only after the international community conditioned funding for the New Safe Containment installation on it. There's still a few RBMK reactors operating - after the safety retrofits of course.
> remaining RBMK reactors at Chernobyl continued to operate for years
Many reactors did continue to operate, in many sites. It shows that the design wasn't flawed to the point of condemning it: a fix was possible. Implication: even a non-major flaw can trigger a disaster.
Ok? But the bigger point is that’s not at all unique to nuclear. It’s common to a whole ton of things we do. And they can all have just as big an impact. Planes for instance. We iterate and improve, we don’t run back to the Stone Age.
Also the positive void coefficient was clearly a major flaw lol
The major difference is that for nearly all other causes nearly all victims chose to use the thing. My own brother died during a jetliner crash (SR-111), not surprisingly while he was in the plane after deciding to climb in it. I'm sad about this but I sure cannot say he didn't decide to accept the risk.
This is not true for nuclear energy: even very remote bystanders unwilling to take the risk are majorly exposed. In other words those who build or agree are exposing those who don't (along with many generations to come thanks to plant decommissions and nuclear waste).
Moreover traveling to very distant places by land or sea is way slower, and more difficult/dangerous than by using a jetliner.
This is not true for nuclear energy: we already use other types of equipment (wind turbines, solar panels...) offering the same fundamental service (and we know how to alleviate their intermittency), without any measurable risk of major accident, no long-term dangerous waste, no dependency towards a combustible... Those very equipment, and this should not come as a surprise, are more and more preferred to nuclear: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...
Iterating/improving does not guarantee constant enhancement, nor a progress on the long-term, as any software development specialist knows. The keyword here is 'side-effects' (discovering a bug, then fixing it... and by doing so inducing a latent and more dangerous bug). Even if it did there is no way to be absolutely sure of our risk assessment because being sure implies to know each and every defect/flaw, therefore the very decision to take (or refuse) the risk would entirely lay on trust towards the specialists, leading to a vast array of major challenges (to begin with: specialists will be both judges and defendants).
No, given the RBMK architecture the positive void coefficient isn't a major flaw. It simply implies that some ways to operate the reactor (letting it gain thermal power after reaching a given low-power stage) is strictly forbidden. Each and every reactor has limitations of this sort, mainly defined as dangerous maneuvers or states duly declared to the operators as forbidden.
This approach (positive void coefficient) is intrinsic to RBMKs, there is no way to operate a RBMK reactor under another principle, and (I repeat) many of such reactors ran for decades after Chernobyl, and some operate right now. Therefore the positive void coefficient isn't a critical flaw (which would imply to immediately quit exploiting all RBMK reactors).
> This is not true for nuclear energy: even very remote bystanders unwilling to take the risk are majorly exposed.
Nah. We're all responsible for the choice. That's how democracy works.
> No, given the RBMK architecture the positive void coefficient isn't a major flaw.
The results speak for themselves.
The data on nuclear speaks for itself. Even Fukushima alone in isolation was one of the safest power plants we have, and it was the second worst nuclear disaster in history.