Re:Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
by BurningFrog on Thursday July 07, 2022 @08:08PM
(#32021359)
I think much of the friction in this discussion is that we mean different things with "Chernobyl can happen again".
Chernobyl lacked many security features that are standard on all modern reactors. The biggest flaw was it had no containment structure. That's the steel & concrete dome which, if the worst happens, keeps the melted uranium contained within it.
That alone would have made the Chernobyl disaster just a bad local industrial accident, and that's the main thing I mean when I say it can't happen again. Though it's far from the only security improvement modern reactors have over Chernobyl.
> But that doesn't mean it's impossible
This is the "you never know!" argument. The good and bad part of it is the same: It is always true! Any thinkable disaster, can conceivably happen, and maybe you "should" be worried about it.
Of course, applied consistently, it would lead to total paralysis. This is no way to rationally approach risk.
Chernobyl lacked many security features that are standard on all modern reactors. The biggest flaw was it had no containment structure. That's the steel & concrete dome which, if the worst happens, keeps the melted uranium contained within it.
That alone would have made the Chernobyl disaster just a bad local industrial accident, and that's the main thing I mean when I say it can't happen again. Though it's far from the only security improvement modern reactors have over Chernobyl.
> But that doesn't mean it's impossible
This is the "you never know!" argument. The good and bad part of it is the same: It is always true! Any thinkable disaster, can conceivably happen, and maybe you "should" be worried about it.
Of course, applied consistently, it would lead to total paralysis. This is no way to rationally approach risk.