Re:Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about t...
by lucb1e on Sunday August 23, 2020 @09:00AM
(#24251594)
To be clear, the title used to match the article's and was a bit weird. +1 for changing it on HN.
Re:Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about t...
by cookienapper on Monday August 24, 2020 @08:45AM
(#24260052)
Bill Gates was in the process of building a new prototype nuclear power plant. Highlights for this design is that in a worst case scenario; it will continue working without ANY human intervention. From my understanding, it may lose efficiency but will not meltdown. That's the design philosophy in a nutshell. Prototypes were set to be built in China - until Trump blocked it as part of his trade-war initiative.
> If there was a meltdown tomorrow in the UK, France, US or elsewhere, it’s likely that our failure to adjust our thinking in light of the experiences at Fukushima and Chernobyl would mean we evacuate too many people for too long. People would die as a result.
Indeed, evacuate too many. The "learning about the risk of nuclear" we did "for the first time" is a study about the effects of the evacuation versus if they had stayed. In both nuclear disasters we ever had, the overreaction was apparently huge and it cost many thousands of lives in direct and indirect consequences. It might be a bit too soon to say, but in a way, the long-term repercussions of overreacting (expanding fossil fuel burning in favor of nuclear, the public reputation of nuclear) will likely be felt for generations. I'm not sure we'd ever have made 1.5°C, but now we definitely won't. (We have to still limit by how much we go over, of course, but it would have been great if we could avoid the tipping point.)