Which is why I will forever be against nuclear, we cannot make something incompetence proof. Everything can be controlled for except for the human at the helm.

Was it cheaply built too?

I was under the impression there were only a few suboptimal structural/design decisions (which would be consistent with the time it was built & serve as a lesson to other designers, like all normal industries should work).

the most confusing thing to me will always be that the containment building of that plant design is basically a shed. like yeah, they can't melt down or whatever, but surely you want to stop any radioactive material from leaving the building even when working normally?

True true, but before all the atomheads spawn here. Why not use technology, that provides energy without the possibility of nuking a city/country/world.

Some people use the argument that nuclear power is OK because Chernobyl only happened because of incompetence. That's the whole point! In my view, that is an argument AGAINST nuclear power.

Incompetence and human error will always happen. It will happen again, eventually. That's why we can't have a power source, with the potential to leave a continent poisoned for thousands of years, relying on the competence or lack of sabotage of human beings.

Go ahead nukies, downvote away, you dogmatic idiots.

Oh, yeah, I agree entirely. I'm all for keeping current nuclear reactors open, since every plant operating is one big chunk of fossil fuels taken out of the equation, but the time for building new nuclear power plants is... pretty much over. Renewables have advanced too far and too quickly for new nuclear reactors to be viable, barring the "Always 20 years away" dream of viable fusion reactors.

And you also need quite a lot of water to evaporate in those cooling towers, so when france had a drought they needed to turn off a few nuclear reactors too.

Hiring party yes men to run everything as cheaply as possible is literally how the USA is run.

It takes decades to strip out the entire apparatus down to things like technical fields. They're trying, though, and if not stopped, they will get us to the level of the Soviet system.

Wow. Your comment was at the top in my sort and I thought "what kind of smooth brained moron thinks nuclear is bad?" The comment directly below says something like "nuclear bad, we don't need it" what an incredibly stupid take. Nuclear is far safer and less radioactive than many of the energy sources we're using. Full renewables would be awesome but let's not just dismiss nuclear, it's pretty awesome.

The current top comment is that renewables have taken over as our best option, so yay for that

Not everything that disagrees with you is propaganda, you know?

It is great in times of peace, there are issues when it gets bombed.

Yep, I agree entirely.

The thing about Three Mile Island is that it was a nothing burger. Hell, Unit 2 was operating up until 2015, and is now being refueled to be restarted. Even when you look at Chernobyl, it's now one of the biggest and best nature preserves in Europe. Life still lives there, just not people. It's not some toxic contaminated wasteland covered in a miasma of chemical filth and devoid of life.

The containment structure did its job, what it was designed to do and contained the partial meltdown. No contamination was released and no meaningful amount of radiation escaped the site. The oil and gas lobby then took it upon themselves to pour resources into anti nuclear crusades, to further ingratiate the fuels they have a financial interest in maintaining the demand for.

The lesson that people learned from Chernobyl is that these things need to fail safely. Modern reactors will automatically wind down their reactions when a problem appears, without intervention. If someone is dumb enough to build a reactor that has runaway reaction problems like Chernobyl... that's on them

The best argument i have seen towards this (not my own) is that human incompetence is almost inevitable and nuclear power is to dangerous precisely because of that.

Personally i believe we can do better but its an understandable perspective.

The counter argument to nuclear power is not that "nuclear power" is unsafe.

It's that "everyone involved with nuclear power, are incompetent, greedy fucks, who sabotage a maybe potentially safe technology for potential monetary gain and because incompetence and greed can't be prevented, nuclear power will stay unsafe, regardless of technological progress."

It's not that you can't sufficiently engineer the thing itself. You can't engineer the people who run it, ever.

Cleanup for the first turned off nuclear reactor is going into it's third decade in Germany and won't be done for another 40 years. All tax money. And that's without a disaster.

Challenge accepted?

Nuclear’s strongest argument is that conservatives aren’t rabidly opposing it,

Don't worry, they broke out the 'national security' card whenever expansion of nuclear plants was proposed to take over more of the grid load from their precious fossil fuels.