Seeing that they need quite a lot of clean water, which is not widely available everywhere during the entire year in big amounts, especially with these droughts due to climate change.

  • infinitevalence
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    1 year ago

    A word with what? Great examples of safe and effective design that kept all the fuel in the containment vessel?

    Three Mile Island was a partial meltdown with no release of isotopes or actinides. Could it have been better, for sure, and the decommissioning and clean up had their own issues but in a single day the amount of toxic chemicals and radioactive dust given off in a single coal burner is greater than ALL the radiation released at TMI. If we are going to cite it as an example of failure or harm its only fair to show comparable harm for other currently subsidized forms of energy that are uncounted when it comes to their full harm outside of just global warming gasses.

    No significant level of radiation was attributed to the TMI-2 accident outside of the TMI-2 facility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

    Fukushima was another great example of how safe nuclear can be when properly regulated. When the quake hit all of the online reactors went into shutdown stopping the reactors. The flaw at Fukushima was in emergency power and cooling as well as management. The backup cooling pumps were below the sea wall and in the basements of the buildings so they flooded. With the pumps flooded they could not keep the fuel in the reactors cool. Fukushima also had warnings that the sea wall was not sufficient to protect the facility. They ignored the warnings and did not raise the walls and as such the reactors ended up melting down but remained within the containment buildings. The explosions at Fukushima were related to hydrogen and were not related to reactors going prompt critical. The sister facility to Fukushima had higher walls, pumps above the reactors, and better management who used on-site materials to extend power to the facilities to keep the pumps running after they lost local power. https://hbr.org/2014/07/how-the-other-fukushima-plant-survived

    So yeah outside of Chernobyl and some early test reactors, Nuclear has been shown to be the safest and least polluting form of power generation in history.

    https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0832/ML083260701.pdf https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.202.4372.1045