[wkat4242]

Oh yeah totally, they had a meltdown too. Though it was an idiotic operation at that time, with such a cavalier attitude to safety that I should hope will not be repeated in this day and age. They even opposed the air filters that were introduced anyway and reduced a lot of the contamination during the meltdown.

I didn't remember to mention it because it was not an energy generation installation that melted down but a military one for nuclear weapon manufacturing.

About those filters, a quote from wikipedia:

> They became known as "Cockcroft's Folly" as many regarded the delay they caused and their great expense to be a needless waste. During the fire the filters trapped about 95% of the radioactive dust and arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. Terence Price said "the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident"

[jacquesm]

In NL we apparently almost had a major incident at Petten.

https://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/bijna-meltdown-kernreactor-pette...

And that's the one that is public, there is at least one more that is still under wraps and possibly more than that. Nuclear is only as safe as the people running it and that is a major issue even before you bring in economics. You can't treat safety as a cost in installations like these and inevitably that's what happens. What I also find disingenuous is that in calculating the cost of electricity production from nuclear power capex required for the eventual dismantling isn't taken into account at all, and those costs are inevitably massive.

[wkat4242]

Wow I had no idea of that one. I actually lived pretty close to there.

Seems like the incidents happened in part because the operators couldn't see in the dark after a power outage, and the emergency torch had been taken by someone to fix their car... :X You can't make this stuff up.

[jacquesm]

Yes, that's how it happened (I heard it from a person that was closer to the source). And because you can't make this stuff up I don't think it is possible to responsibly operate a nuclear reactor because the normalization of deviation is impossible to guard against over the career span of a typical human. Everywhere people work they make mistakes and do stupid stuff and over time this accumulates to the point where the 'experts' are themselves the danger but because they've done it for so long nobody can do a better job than they can in the short term. And then there is aging gear, embrittlement and a thousand other things that can (and do) go wrong.

You can't fix human nature and that's the root cause of many of these problems. And because of that I'm very much against nuclear power, no matter what the short term advantages may seem to be. Sooner or later every plant needs to be de-commissioned, will have an incident or will end up as a target or a casualty of something or other. Multiply that by the number of power plants that you'd need to make the world reliant on nuclear power and the number of accidents would quickly rise above what is acceptable (if we're not already there).

Nuclear proponents are quick to argue that this was all with old technology and newer designs are safer but people are still the same and even new technology resulting in working installations will eventually see those same installations age.