After that, the reaction has been self-sustaining.
It's easy to campaign to tear something down. It's hard to be the one who has to rebuild the replacement. We need people who focus on the latter before the former.
The truth is our systemic desire to cut costs cuts corners. Everything after each disaster will have been "obvious".
The price of the tiniest of mistakes is outweighing the advantage.
Stick a power plant in the middle of nowhere and charge batteries with it if you want to convince people.
So the US Secretary of the Navy is in a position to make an informed decision about nuclear reactors—and he's chosen to run a significant part of the US Navy on them—but the voting public is not.
Fukushima was bad, but even if you count the deaths from the poorly handled evacuation, you're at ~2200 people that died because of it.
Coal kills 13,000 people in just the US /every/ year.
We are overall woefully uninformed about these things, to the point that the majority of people in some recent opinion polls in Europe believe that nuclear power plants emit greenhouse gases.
> not exactly a scathing indictment of nuclear power itself.
No, but it's certainly a statement about our ability to operate nuclear power. You really can't separate the two.
Fukushima may have been spared the worst, but the amount of deaths is only part of the story. Pripyat is still a ghost town. That's nearly 50,000 people that were permanently displaced from their homes. I imagine quite a few people are not returning to the Fukushima area as well.
... in tsunami endangered areas. Yes, Japanese made a bad mistake to let Americans build such a badly designed nuclear plant in that region and this was known before the disaster. They did not care - the price was good and the risk was acceptable to the people in charge.
Most of nuclear plants in the world are not in tsunami endangered areas though and are operated safely.
How can one begin to even make this claim knowing: a) Chernobyl, b) Three Mile Island, and c) Fukushima? They clearly aren't operated safely. Just to be clear, I'm not anti-nuclear and I'm not making a case against nuclear power. I'm making a simple observation that really shouldn't be a debate. Three entirely different areas with three entirely different political/power/environmental structures in place.
What about regime collapse? We've been worried about nuclear weapons and the political situation in Pakistan. But a similar threat lurks behind nuclear power. What if the government of the future cannot properly maintain their nuclear plants? Based on the past 100 years of history I do not believe this is merely a hypothetical concern.
There will be disasters in the future. You understand this concept, right? Things that we know today which we will later claim could only be known in retrospect, like a tsunami hitting a nuclear power plant in Japan. I'm rolling my eyes right fucking now.
Yes sometimes people or nature do bad things that result in disasters. Disasters will happen with or without nuclear reactors.
I'm saying the serious disasters involving nuclear reactors are rare. Serious disasters because of nuclear reactors are rarer. Chernobyl was incompetence of personnel due to dysfunctional society + cheapest design without containment. It is not indictment of nuclear energy, but indictment of the soviet system. Fukushima wasn't as bad as Chernobyl, but it too shows problems with how government approached nuclear risk. I do not condone building plants like they did in Chernobyl and Fukushima.
> What if the government of the future cannot properly maintain their nuclear plants? Based on the past 100 years of history I do not believe this is merely a hypothetical concern.
We help them. West did help Russia with decommissioning of old nuclear equipment. I think that is a good strategy.
> There will be disasters in the future. You understand this concept, right?
Indeed I do. But it would be very stupid of us to stop advancing nuclear energy because we made mistakes in the past. We learn from mistakes and double down. I believe we can do it and we should do it.