[pocksuppet]

Do you trust today's politicians to hire competent engineers?

Do you trust today's politicians to provide all the money the engineers ask for?

Besides an engineering problem, they are also a political problem for as long as they exist, and even longer. Remember how Russia bombed Chernobyl in the Ukraine war?

[Moldoteck]

they dont hire engineers either. Those are hired by companies that design/build reactors. How many died from Chernobyl bombing in Ukraine?

[pocksuppet]

Nothing happens until it does. Chernobyl was the safest reactor until it wasn't.

[api]

Did anyone ever say Chernobyl was the safest reactor? It didn’t even have a containment building. I recall reading that the Soviet designs were regarded as poor at the time.

I don’t totally disagree though. You can reduce it to economics. Nuclear has a safety profile whose far tail becomes exponentially expensive. It also has a lot of hidden costs that often get hand waved away.

There have been much worse industrial accidents than Chernobyl in terms of life lost, like Bhopal which I think is still the record. But I believe Fukushima may have even passed Chernobyl as the most expensive industrial accident in history.

For the cost of one Fukushima cleanup, Japan could have built wind solar and batteries equal to many Fukushima plants combined output.

That’s really the problem. Amortized over the whole fleet over decades, and also including either waste disposal or recycling (which is also expensive), nuclear may just not be cost competitive. Fission power is a tech that looks spectacular on paper.

I’m talking about fission of course. If we make fusion work that will be different. It isn’t dangerous to those outside the plant and produces a tiny fraction of the waste. (It would make some due to neutron activation but much less and much less “hot.”)