No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl. Passive safety is a given now.
Your emotion-driven conservatism has to be weighed against the real harms caused by other viable baseline power systems. Advocacy against nuclear power is advocacy for fossil fuels, like it or not.
> This is comprehensively untrue... Your emotion-driven conservatism...
I think your choice in phrasing speaks more to your emotional state than mine.
> No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl.
You are discounting the fact that many of the nuclear reactors that remain in operation today were designed decades ago and were built decades ago.
Of course newer nuclear technology is safer -- I don't think anyone would ever disagree with that. But we are considering the safety of nuclear power as it exists today. Why would we omit nuclear reactors that are currently in operation today (and will continue to be in operation for quite some time) from the discussion?
This comment is more clear. Above, you spoke about nuclear power in the abstract. It's good to separate out the discussion like this. Because nuclear power can mean building new safe reactors, or it can mean keeping really old ones running.
> But we are considering the safety of nuclear power as it exists today.
Even then, it's not a homogeneous blob of risk. There are different reactor designs, run by authorities of different competence levels, built at varying distances away from cities. There's no substitute for a case by case analysis.
I sense a hand-wavy aspect to the argument. I want some harder facts. What percentage of currently live reactors have an equal or greater risk than the Chernobyl plant? Is it 2% or 50%? Such distinctions make a big difference to the tail risk.
> No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl. Passive safety is a given now.
Current reactors are burner reactors. They cannot power the world (there is not enough sufficiently cheap uranium). To power the world, breeder reactors are needed.
Breeder reactors will burn the bred isotopes, either Pu isotopes or U-233. These isotopes, when fissioned, produce about half the delayed neutrons of U-235. As a result, reactors burning them are skating closer to the edge of prompt criticality than today's reactors. Chernobyl was a prompt criticality accident. A prompt criticality accident in a fast reactor (any breeder using Pu will be a fast reactor) is potentially much more serious than even Chernobyl.
>No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl
Fukushima is older than Chernobyl. This type of thinking is how these catastrophes happen. People keep obsolete designs in operation for 50 years or more and basically make any safety gains today pointless.
No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl. Passive safety is a given now.
Your emotion-driven conservatism has to be weighed against the real harms caused by other viable baseline power systems. Advocacy against nuclear power is advocacy for fossil fuels, like it or not.