Re:First contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima ...
by eXpl0it3r on Sunday February 17, 2019 @03:22PM
(#19186634)
That's somewhat my point as well. There's no perfect world, there will be human errors and there will be natural disasters, but the point with newer reactor designs, is that they have design decisions in them that account for such issues, we have learned from the past, so that even a meltdown can be contained relatively well.
Re:First contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima ...
by merb on Tuesday February 19, 2019 @03:51AM
(#19197563)
well depends, even the safest system can have a bug. especially the more complex a system gets. I mean look at all the software bugs.
I wouldn't count on human technology on catastrophic failures and sadly most humans make errors in situations that we can't control.
actually the problem was never the reactor itself. chernobyl never failed because the reactor was totally unsafe. It wasn't the newest, but humans could've prevented anything. fukushima wasn't the unsafest reactor as well. however it got hit by a wave it couldn't stand and after that humans missmanaged everything to safely shut it off.
do you see a common denominator? the problem is that money is always involved even when you can build these things for cheap, however money and humans will make reactors unsafe, not the design of the reactor. at some point somebody wants to save money and most often this money saving practice will then be extremly disastorous.
I'm not saying that nuclear is bad per se, of course the waste is bad, but is it worse than coal? I'm not sure. however as long as humans control or have control over these things they will always be unsafe in a certain way.