[natmaka]

> 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.

[arcticbull]

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

[natmaka]

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).

[arcticbull]

> 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.

[natmaka]

>> 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.

If citizens directly decide upon a given subject then a referendum about nuclear energy is necessary. In nearly all nations there was none. Therefore we aren't all directly responsible.

In practice elected people decide, and in Western democracies they theoretically bar the majority from oppressing any minority ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority ).

However it could not work this way for nuclear energy because dismissing concerns (about safety, about dangerous waste long-term effects...) is sufficient and was easy: at first by declaring that all those reactors are under control, that any real problem is so highly improbable there is no real risk. Nuclear experts convinced many politicians.

This stance was tainted after each mishap (TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima...), and the approach mutated into minimizing the effects of mishaps. However less and less politicians were willing to take the risk.

Renewables then began to gain traction, as more and more citizens and politicians see them as adequate and alleviating many challenges (risk, waste, dependency towards uranium...), and renewables quickly gains terrain while nuclear is more and more stuck.

The new approach is to pretend that renewables aren't adequate due to their intermittency, albeit many studies and existing technologies do offer efficient ways to compensate it.

The effect on democratic nations' choices will be clear in 5 to 10 years. However in such a context whatever the result will be pretending that we will all be responsible for it is IMO highly debatable.

>> No, given the RBMK architecture the positive void coefficient isn't a major flaw.

> The results speak for themselves.

I repeat: each and any existing nuclear reactor car suffer a meltdown, this is absolutely not specific/proper to RBMK. Moreover there is no perfect containment, in some configurations they may isolate the reactor for only a few days.

> The data on nuclear speaks for itself

It highly depends upon which data one considers, in other terms which ones are describing reality.