A great irony

[Khan]

Your observation is totally correct. I didn

[nemafakei]

The Chernobyl disaster wasn't really an accident. It wasn't premeditated or designed, but it was something more than "oops, I forgot to switch the coolant mechanisms on today". It happened because the managers were deliberately playing around with what happens if you fire taking the safeties off. The limits of redundancy and failsafe at the time, not to mention more recently, make the technology incredibly safe. You can shut a Magnox reactor down in six seconds, and it will happen without human intervention if things get too hot. But just because it's quite hard to shut down a reactor, that doesn't mean it can't happen again - so long as you've got managers capable of and liable to play chicken with nukes, as almost any failsafe can be overridden, it all becomes a bit irrelevant.

Nuclear power is actually pretty neat in theory, in practice, it depends on how it's being run. There need to be a lot of human failsafes to make the mechanical ones immune to interference - protecting people who blow whistles and push stop-buttons from recrimination, for instance.

[Khan]

As America has shown, nuclear power is being very well run in the states, with deaths in America due to nuclear power totaling 0. (although the article I cited said that 100 people died due to not having proper equipment while they were mining and that was very early on and completely rectified now) Also Chernobyl had no containment structure, Three Mile Island probably would have been the same but the technology was there to save people.

As a simple side point, for all the nay saying over nuclear power, what else do people suggest?

[SWkwisatz]

But if nothing happened why is it even a point for discussion.

To show the risks? A partial core meltdown is more than serious, you can

[Khan]

To show the risks? A partial core meltdown is more than serious, you can

[SWkwisatz]

I may just be an optimist but to me it seems that if something went wrong yet all the safety procedures worked and nobody was hurt, that would be a plus for nuclear power, rather than a negative because it could have gone worse.

Well I don

[Kokiri-Mentat]

Heh, I don't mean to resurrect a dying thread, but I really enjoyed emprworm's post.  Quite the build-up......and then "splat".

Anyway, I do not know too terribly much of the energies you all speak of, but I would like to interject that I, like emprworm, would love to see fossil fuels gone.  I think that the worst thing that could happen to the U.S. right now would be for gas to drop back down to $2.00 per gallon  (current average being around $4.00).

This would only fool people into thinking that we can continue with this old American mindset of running an entire economy with oil.  The U.S. desperately needs to drop this deadly oil dependency, and if we don't there will be very bad news for us in the future.