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this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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Okay, but if this was a nuclear power plant we'd have a second Fukushima on our hands.
Nuclear powerplants are so safe that they've only had a handful of (admittedly disastrous and high profile) failures, and have killed less people per watt hour generated than even wind and solar power. Nuclear power is the safest, cleanest, most efficient form of green energy we can get right now. Yes, it can be dangerous if not managed properly. But Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island were not freak accidents. Deliberate mistakes were made that were known at the time and should be used as warnings to keep the industry safe, not as sirens that lead is to swear off nuclear energy.
Fukushima involved bad mistakes and a set of freak accidents. It was hit first by a the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan and then by a tsunami.
Now sure, there are plenty of mistakes they made that seem obvious in hindsight. But, it's fundamentally different from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl where the only causes were design and operational mistakes.
That is fair, I would call that a bit of perspective, bit not unfair perspective. Yes, it did take significant disasters to make the mistakes apparent, so who's to say if anybody would've noticed or how much of a problem they would've been.
Yeah. In hindsight a nuclear power plant in a country with frequent earthquakes has to be hardened against earthquakes. Earthquakes can cause tsunamis so any plant on the coast has to be ready to handle tsunamis. Tsunamis come a while after earthquakes, so they have to be prepared for the double whammy of an earthquake with a tsunami just a short time later. And, to be fair, it's not like they hadn't thought of those things at all. It's just that they made some design mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight.
But, it's still significantly better than power plants that just melt down completely on their own due to incompetent design and incompetent operations, with no triggering natural disaster.