Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

NathanTPS t1_is8ur2d wrote

Reply to comment by Sketti_n_butter in Ethics of Nuclear Energy in Times of Climate Change: Escaping the Collective Action Problem by CartesianClosedCat

Just think about that for a second. The reactor didn't merely "break" that makes it sound like a simple mechanical failure in your car. When a reactor fails you have as good a likelihood of severe disaster as you do containment. And the containment of three mile island wasn't really containment, they just managed to stop the meltdown from going critical. Radioactive smoke still spewed into the air, even if there wasn't a chrynople style explosion with the meltdown or a Fukushima melt through the floor and into the ocean. Either was entirely possible, and it's less that the incident happened in the "good ol' US of A" than it was fortunate luck.

My main point was that if we ended up opening enough ractors to meet our current and future energy needs, eventually, sooner than later, we would have reactor meltdowns, and some would be like Fukushima and some would be like chrynople, and yes, some would be like three mile island.

Point is, we don't want that old 40 year technology running our reactors. As has been mentioned, there are way safer reactor designs now than what we are using ones that contribute far less waste. There is still was, but it is fractions upon fractions of what the current in use reactors produce.

−4

zowie54 t1_is9czpd wrote

Sorry, but treating either of those situations like inevitable problems is not accurate or useful. Look at the US Navy's track record. There are 15 reactors in Pearl Harbor that no one bats an eye about, but if you suggest swapping nuclear for Oahu's fossil fuel based power generation, the public would lose their minds. People need to remember that nuclear isn't the villain

5

Sketti_n_butter t1_is9juhc wrote

The technology is mature. That means the bugs have been worked out. Nuclear is the the safest technology on earth when you look at deaths per megawatt hour either in the industry or from the public. Hell, coal plant put out more radiation that nuclear plants. Literally the safest technology on earth and anyone who says otherwise hasn't read the data.

3

ExileFrontier t1_is9mlyv wrote

The navy has 160 nuclear reactors and a lot of them run off that 40 year old technology. Yet the navy has not had a nuclear accident in the roughly 70 years it's nuclear program has been alive.

3