Hector Martin

MY NUCLEAR TAKE: Nuclear power is massively preferable to, and the best chance for reducing use of, fossil fuels; however, fuel reprocessing is necessary, and businesses *will* cut safety corners unless highly regulated. Perhaps for-profit nuclear providers should not be allowed

I admit the disaster at Fukushima leads me to doubt my position on this subject

who puts emergency diesel generator intakes at 2 meters above sea level in a tsunami prone region on anything? Let alone a nuclear reactor? The plant wasn’t designed for that area it was a design brought over from the states with no modificarions for the local risks

like even if Fukushima hadn’t happened, the difference between how nuclear engineers act about their field’s safety vs that specific design instance is staggering

This is precisely the problem as far as I am concerned. We must judge a field based on its actual behavior, not on its "documented" norms. If the nuclear field says "do this" but a plant is in operation doing very-much-not-that, that causes me to doubt many other things

If we are to judge based on actual behavior, how much worse is an occasional nuclear catastrophe compared to business as usual with fossil fuels? It might be one of those airplane vs car situations, where the safe choice feels unsafe because the failures are more spectacular.