Nuclear Warming?

[BlackMastodon]

To wit:

Oh SHIT he means business!

Just playing, I agree with everything you said.

Do you think the process would become safer if we remove the monitary gains from it? Seems like when there is money to be made corners get cut and saftey gets left behind. A not for profit nuclear power plant? Is that even viable? I know there is still human error to account for but is it possible to remove greed from the equation?

I don't think it's possible to remove greed out of any human equation, unfortunately, as others have pointed out.

Science is rarely 'solved,' just advanced. Just because we know how to do it and we know how to do it safely doesn't mean that we know how to do it efficiently and at scale.
There's always room for innovation, discovery, and improvement. For instance, changing from a Uranium fueled reactor to a Thorium fueled reactor. Who's to say there isn't another type of yet-to-be-discovered fuel that is more economically feasible without compromising on efficiency or safety? How would we ever know if we just slapped a bow on it and said "Well, that's nuclear energy; sure is neat we figured that one out, bummer that it's too expensive."

This thread made me want to look up Thorium reactors again. I remember something like 15 years ago on ifuckinglovescience or some shit I read about them and they seemed like such a "why aren't we funding this?!" thing that it drove me nuts. But it does raise the question of whether we could use a less radioactive fuel source even if it would reduce power output.

 

[narad]

This hasn't ever happened

No, the absolute worst outcomes have never happened. Is this solace? The incidents that have happened were frankly bad enough, and we probably won't fully grasp the long-term effects stemming from Fukushima for a long time.

Someone made the car analogy. In the same way, we've been building cars for a hundred years. It's still not uncommon for a manufacturer to have to recall thousands of vehicles for some issue resulting from poor implementation and oversight, until enough unlucky people stumble upon just the right combination of events to experience the failures and make them known. Some of these risks are even known in advance, and the amount of times a company has ignored whistleblowers. the amount of times regulations were ignored or regulators looked the other way, ...innumerable. Private or pubilc, doesn't matter. Look at the series of decisions that led to the Challenger disaster. This is the kind of bumbling and poor decision making you're going to find all across america, where these plants are not necessarily up to date or well-maintained.

So safe in theory is pretty meaningless when the implementation is always subject to human factors and incentives. And just adamantly shouting that it's safe, the perception of safety, contributes to the suboptimal implementations in the first place.