this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Yes, but when things go wrong, the boom is relatively small and contained.
We can't run a regular coal or natural gas power plant here without fucking it up and getting people killed. Despite the safety of modern plant designs, I do NOT trust the people in charge here with fissile material.
Go lookup CANDU reactors, we have designs already that can't steam explode themselves and instead will fail safe. Also just to be clear nuclear reactors don't perform a nuclear explosion if they fail, the Chernobyl explosion was a steam explosion that threw nuclear material into the air.
The level of incompetence I've grown to expect of my state government would suggest that they'd have fissile material delivered and stored in a leaky shed, where it will create runoff which contaminates the local reservoir, before a crackhead steals it, takes it to the scrapyard, and it is never seen again.
Or we could just use solar with none of those risks but still using the largest nuclear reaction around.
...and rendered an area the size of a county unsuitable for humans for hundreds of generations.
You're going to have to show me a government that isn't half-full of people who hate education, who hate science, and most of all who hate accountability before I vote for more nuclear power.
You know, the beautiful thing about being a society is we can all just agree to regulate them. I think that's called a government.
Like I said, we can't/won't effectively regulate the power plants we have now.
Our government is only good for generating moral panics and building roads. I hope that changes one day, but it has been getting worse for a long time, so I won't hold my breath for it to all be fixed tomorrow.
That's fair, I wasn't giving you the benefit of the doubt, that's my bad
That's why people prefer driving over flying, right? If something goes wrong, the boom is small and contained.
Never mind that planes are much safer and efficient at travelling long distance.
Not so: https://daily.jstor.org/the-tragedy-at-buffalo-creek/
When things go wrong? When things go right for coal and gas plants, the "boom" is a humanity-threatening event that already in its extremely early stages has been named the Holocene Extinction.