[mannykannot]

The claim that disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.

One might object that there is selection bias in the original claim, due to the slowdown in construction of recent plants, but that is a separate issue. A more thorough investigation of the causes of all events leading to a significant degradation of safety margins would be needed to determine whether and how older designs are inherently more risky and whether that risk can be adequately mitigated given the constraints imposed by their design.

The fact that, prior to Chernobyl, there were several foreshadowing incidents with RBMKs which should have raised serious concerns, suggests that 'lessons learned' isn't much of a reason to be satisfied with the status quo.

[leonidasrup]

Even in case of RBMK where were many lessons learned. There are still to this day 7 operational RBMKs in Russia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK

[thrownthatway]

RMBKs are irrelevant to nuclear reactor safety.

You had a good argument up until you went there.

[anonymars]

Even if we don't treat Chernobyl as sui generis, the safety situation with nuclear power is akin to that of airplanes. We don't bat an eye at the quotidian death toll of cars or coal

I've yet to see a nuclear safety argument that doesn't reduce to 'nuclear energy provokes emotional fear'

Oh, it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable? How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or infamous oil spills or dam failures or even the mining scars...

Happy to be proven wrong, but https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

[mpweiher]

> I've yet to see a nuclear safety argument that doesn't reduce to 'nuclear energy provokes emotional fear'

Yep. It's called radiophobia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia

And it is far, far deadlier than nuclear energy itself.

[Kon5ole]

>How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or infamous oil spills or dam failures or even the mining scars...

When did a dam failure in the Ukraine affect wildlife in Sweden for 30+ years? It's kind of a several-orders-of-magnitude larger area being affected for orders-of-magniture longer timespans.

Exxon valdez and even deepwater horizon is ancient history, Chernobyl is not, in fact it's current events. And will be, for the foreseeable future, as will Fukushima.

No Japanese alive today will stop paying for Fukushima for as long as they live. Are any other costs from the tsunami still ongoing?

>Happy to be proven wrong, but

Won't prove you wrong but maybe it will make you reconsider the link as a support of your argument:

Danger is what could happen, not what has actually happened.

A loaded gun is dangerous even if it hasn't been fired yet, nuclear plants are dangerous even if they haven't been bunker-buster-bombed yet. More so than any coal plant, tanker ship or hydro dam.

[anonymars]

This is exactly my point. You are looking at a single fantastic instance: you could have 100 Chernobyls and it would still be less destruction, illness, and death per TWh. To consider Deepwater Horizon "ancient history" is a particularly astonishing claim

> nuclear plants are dangerous even if they haven't been bunker-buster-bombed yet. More so than any coal plant, tanker ship or hydro dam

Banqiao dam was a single hydroelectric installation, for which the estimated death toll of its failure is in the ballpark of every nuclear death combined including Hiroshima and Nagasaki

[Kon5ole]

>you could have 100 Chernobyls and it would still be less destruction

Sorry but this isn't true. You base this claim on what has happened but not what could have happened, which is a mistake.

The actual truth is that 1 Chernobyl almost ruined Europe. If the heroic individuals who managed to stop the graphite fire had said "f it I'm outta here" instead of sacrificing their lives, it would have made large areas in far corners of Europe uninhabitable, and even larger areas unsuitable for farming, for decades.

This is not hyperbole, it is a likely outcome based on the amount of material that would have been released and prevailing weather patterns.

It didn't actually happen, but it could have. We were spared the worst case scenarios from Chernobyl.

100 Chernobyls would not have been 100 Chernobyls that lasted for a week, most of them would have pumped out sterilizing levels of radiation for months. Nothing humans have done to date would be comparable to such a scenario.

Danger is not related to what has happened, but what could happen. This is important to keep in mind when discussing things that will have consequences for centuries. Many things happen over centuries, we're not even a century from WW2 yet.

>To consider Deepwater Horizon "ancient history" is a particularly astonishing claim

Figuratively, of course. I meant that the deepwater event is handled and done. We don't actively need to consider how to handle it today. Nature is still recovering but you can eat any fish you catch in the gulf without worrying about the oil spill and you don't need to clean any birds.

Chernobyl is not over, and won't be for the foreseeable future. It could cause new fallout 100 years from now, our grandchildren might have to pay for a new sarcophagus, at the very least pay for maintenance of the existing one. It is an ongoing cost on several national budgets.

Only a very few things that humans do really compares to the the consequences from nuclear power. It's troubling to see it being so severely misunderstood and belittled even on a forum like this. If we decide to do it it should at the very least be with a good understanding of the actual risks.

[thrownthatway]

> it occasionally irradiates a swath

That has happened exactly once.

[Kon5ole]

>That has happened exactly once.

And affected an area about the size of half the continental US, causing expensive countermeasures to be taken for 40 years and counting.

Maybe once was enough?

[don_esteban]

Care to document what expensive countermeasures are nowadays being taken in the area the size of half the continental US?

[Kon5ole]

I can give some scattered examples:

Norway 2025: https://www.dsa.no/en/radioactivity-in-food-and-environment/...

"Every year, sheep herds in selected municipalities must be brought down onto cultivated land and given clean feed for a certain number of weeks before they can be slaughtered, in order to bring the levels in the meat down below the maximum permitted level."

Germany 2026, 3000 boar at 100-200 euros compensation each:

https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/fast-3000-verstrahlte-wildsch...

Scotland was done after "only" 25 years:

https://robedwards53.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/25-years-on-ch...

“It has taken nearly 25 years for the contamination of Scottish soils to decay to officially safe levels – and we're 1,400 miles away,”

Northern norway - scotland - bavaria - ukraine, that's about half the continental US affected for decades, so it's a fair comparison wouldn't you agree?

[nicoburns]

> it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable

The big fear for me would be that this happens to a nuclear power plant that is located in a densely populated area (of which there are many). Chernobyl was bad, but imagine the impact if the exclusion zone contained a major city.

[thrownthatway]

Two new AP1000 reactors are being built in Ukraine. During a hot war.

That’s how safe and important these things are.

[nicoburns]

> That’s how safe and important these things are.

I don't think something being done in war time is evidence of it's safety! If anything, way tends to encourage more risk taking.

[peterfirefly]

The only real problem with the Fukushima incident was the (unnecessary) evacuation. It really would be best if they weren't built too close to where people live.

[pqtyw]

> disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.

There was a single nuclear disaster in history that actually caused a lot of damage (Fukushima was of course very costly financially). Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though. Just don't build them in coastal areas were Tsunamis are fairly common and more importantly don't allow Soviet engineers to design and operate your nuclear power plants.

[Ray20]

> Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though

I mean, when we get Chernobyl 2.0 with hundreds of millions of victims, will the fact that it was caused by "variables that can be easily controlled" somehow make the situation any better?