alt Hacker NewsShouldn't we stop pushing the cost of things onto the public, in both CO2 and nuclear contamination?
Surely a nuclear reactor is only economical if you don't have to pay for the cost of a Chernobyl type event. Did they assess the costs? Surely they played the costs down as the public is going to pay for the consequences. Shrug. It's so easy to do business this way. The fins also expose themselves to blackmail by an adversarial neighbor.
But if this is all well reasoned we can now start building data centers on the south pole and dump the nuclear waste where no one notices it. Because that's the fumbling policy relied on. The people are being played for fools.
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Chernobyl disaster was biggest nuclear accident, but not the biggest disaster related to energy production. In 1975 the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam and other dams in Henan Province, China caused more casualties than any other dam failure in history. The disaster killed an estimated 171,000 people and 11 million people lost their homes. It's not much known in the West because various elements of the Chinese government concealed the details of the disaster until the 1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
In terms of loss of life Chernobyl disaster is comparable to Bhopal disaster (at least 3,787 over 16,000 claimed deaths), caused by Methyl isocyanate leak from the storage tank. A combination of poorly-maintained or non-functional facilities, a disregard of safety standards, and an under-trained workforce made it possible for water to leak into the MIC tanks in the absence of properly working safety systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Chernobyl disaster was caused by a combination of reactor design error and operator error. After this errors have been fixed (different nuclear fuel composition, modern monitoring and controlling equipment, improved operator training and procedures) there are still 7 operational RBMK in Russia. (The same reactor type as Chernobyl)
1. Chernobyl disaster was not related in any way with nuclear plant normal functioning. It was "experiment of how low output reactor can go" proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience. It's monument of why government officials should not touch anything related to science
2. Chernobyl nuclear plant was very poor copy of safe by design nuclear plant. It had critical flaw in carbon based proton catching mechanism
3. Closed zone is currently habitable (except Sarcophagus area). You'll receive much higher radiation dose simply by flying to Norway. Nature is returning there, there're plans to repopulate it
4. This was in Soviet Union and power plant was "public". Most of the power plant in EU is public if not every single one. I don't have exact information on this topic
Please do not treat entire technology, which is safe, as a threat simply because some greedy, uneducated people from the past wanted better position and paid ultimate price for it