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Re:China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear re... by X6S1x6Okd1st on Monday November 08, 2021 @02:05PM (#29152930)
Chernobyl exclusion zone: 1,004 mi²

Fukushima exclusion zone: 1,600 mi²

I can't seem to find great numbers of how much land we expect to lose to climate change, I expect it will be quite large.

I'm personally pro nuclear, but it's pretty clear we were building fairly dangerous plants back when Chernobyl & Fukushima were built. I still don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the world would be worse or better if we had built many of them in the US.

Re:China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear re... by godelski on Monday November 08, 2021 @02:47PM (#29153386)
The Fukushima incident shouldn't really be compared with the Chernobyl incident. Chernobyl was very preventable. As for Fukushima, the earthquake science didn't realize that such a quake was possible in the region until pretty close to the event happening, meaning little time to act in it. While people will point out early reports and hypothesis, that's not how science works. We need to peer review. The science has come a long way since then (specifically from computational modeling), but that's different from building reactors with the potential to explode (something the west didn't do) and pushing it's bounds (even if we didn't know about xenon spiking at the time).
Re:China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear re... by effie on Monday November 08, 2021 @05:50PM (#29155349)
Chernobyl NPP wasn't really dangerous design if run by competent people, many of those kind of NPP reactors are still working decades without a major incident. It was a mistake of the chief of the shift to proceed with unsafe test caused by the failure of the Soviet political system to maintain proper level of understanding and safety in the NPP. The personnel did not have the correct mental model of the device.

Fukushima was a bad plant because they built it in a tsunami zone. Otherwise its design isn't dangerous either. But it got destroyed by unexpected tsunami. People should have expected the tsunami can happen and not build the plant there. People were stupid, NPP design would be fine if built far from tsunamis.