Chernobyl was almost the largest disaster in all of history. I'm not saying nuclear reactors are unsafe now, but the reality is that a true disaster at a nuclear power plant literally means the end of huge amounts of land, enough to end entire countries or large parts of continents. You can't say things like that about walking or other types of transport...
To be fair Chernobyl was designed what, 15 years after the invention of nuclear technology? Even discounting all the politicial and management control problems, the engineering and scientific knowledge of nuclear reactor design was still in its infancy. Imagine if we judged the safety of automobiles on pre-Model-T cars. Or steam boilers and engines on the first 20 yearrs of their invention.
What's the worst accident involving a Model T, maybe a dozen dead? Early steam boilers aren't going to be much worse either. Nuclear accidents are essentially unlimited in size. Nothing else can do that kind of country-sized - let alone it being permanent.
Chernobyl showed the potential impact. Fukushima showed that even several decades down the line things can still rapidly run out of control. All the knowledge and experience in the world isn't going to save you when something unexpected happens and things are just waiting to spiral out of control.
When ranking Chernobyl accident for death toll (95–4,000+ deaths) it's very far behind Failure of Banqiao Dam (26,000–240,000), behind 2023 Derna dam collapse (11,300), behind the world's worst industrial disaster - Bhopal disaster (3,787–16,000), behind 1979 Machchhu dam failure (1,800–25,000), about as deadly as Halifax Explosion (1,950 deaths).
Most tragic thing is that Chernobyl accident could have been prevented.
Chernobyl's reactors were fundamentally unsafe designs from an engineering perspective, to say nothing of the perverse incentives at play because of the Soviet political system. We've learned a lot since the RBMK was designed in the 1960s.
The problem with Chernobyl was that (1) it didn't have a containment dome, and (2) it was designed so as the temperature increased, the reaction sped up. It was fundamentally unstable.
Neither of these problems is true of more recent reactors.
We don't make bridges safe by getting humans to cooperate better and cross bridges one car at a time. We make them strong and stable so humans can drive however they like and the bridge is fine. That's how all engineering works, and it applies to nuclear reactors just like anything else.
Compact, mass produced nuclear energy projects with no nuclear proliferation risk and radioactive waste management time limited to less than one human generation's professional career span. That seems like a decent baseline to me.
Not sure if fission will ever be able to reach that. Fusion perhaps? I'd certainly like to see that researched with high priority.
In the short to medium term at the very least, I see more economic potential in simple, modular tech. Cheap generation using solar, wind and water. Matching supply and demand better through storage and interconnects.
I'd also be very interested in actual research on how to actually lower demand, in beating the Jevons paradox.
Some of the GenIV designs would be compact and easily mass-produced.
You'll never get waste management below about 300 years with fission, because that's basically what you get from the fission products. But the really long-term stuff is plutonium and other transuranics. Those are unburnt fuel. Fast reactors and some molten salt reactors are supposed to eliminate that. Bury the fission products for 300 years and they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore.
As an American this seems like a long time to me, but when I lived in Germany it didn't so much. We had a brewery in town that had been operating continually for 800 years.
Proliferation resistance gets complicated but some designs are a lot better at it than others. Almost everything requires at least some enriched fuel for startup, even if unenriched works after that. CANDU reactors don't require enriched fuel at all but they don't achieve the waste requirement. Some designs let you extract usable weapons material from reactor fuel (including current CANDU reactors), with others there's no way to extract fissile that's easier to enrich than natural uranium ore.
It might be doable to centralize startup fuel production in nuclear powers, and use reactors that take unenriched fuel after startup, have no way to extract weapons-grade material, and consume the transuranics.
Fusion of course would fix a lot of this. D-T fusion does produce a lot of neutrons that you could use to make plutonium, but you need those neutrons to make more tritium. You get activated reactors parts but those fit your time requirement.
> The problem is with the human layer of managing large complicated projects.
I guess we should stop having large, complicated projects. Potable water mains, road and rail networks, the power grid, the internet, bridges, medicine, etc, are all too complicated for humans to manage.
I mean, nuclear is only the safest form of energy generation that humanity has ever produced, but you're absolutely right.
> I guess we should stop having large, complicated projects. Potable water mains, road and rail networks, the power grid, the internet, bridges, medicine, etc, are all too complicated for humans to manage.
I'd rather see this simplified and improved than stopped.
> I mean, nuclear is only the safest form of energy generation that humanity has ever produced, but you're absolutely right.
Ground mounted solar is clearly superior in terms of safety.
What's the absolute worst that could happen when a water mains breaks? What's the absolute worst that could happen when a train derails? What's the absolute worst that could happen when a backhoe snacks on a fiber trunk?
Now, what's the absolute worst that could happen when a nuclear reactor spirals out of control?
Hypothetically, a train could derail, the train was carrying nuclear waste, the derailment occurred in a highly populated area, near a Virology Lab. The lab was damaged, which released a deadly form of Smallpox, which spread to every corner of the Earth, killing every single human. That would be pretty bad, but not sure if it would be the absolute worst.
You don't need the nuclear waste in that, the train could derail, be carrying a lazy courier transporting a deadly bio-hazard, and unleash a deadly virus and kill literally everyone. From a human-centred perspective that is probably the worst case.
> What's the absolute worst that could happen when a water mains breaks?
People drink contaminated, unpotable water and die.
> What's the absolute worst that could happen when a train derails?
People die.
> What's the absolute worst that could happen when a backhoe snacks on a fiber trunk?
Life-critical infrastructure that depends on the communication fails in a bad way and people die.
> Now, what's the absolute worst that could happen when a nuclear reactor spirals out of control?
People die.
Nothing in life is without risk.
Nuclear reactors spiraling out of control have killed fewer people per KWH generated than any other source of energy that human beings have come up with.
