- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- climate@slrpnk.net
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- climate@slrpnk.net
First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled::NuScale and its primary partner give up on its first installation.
3 people got killed by one of these like 60 years ago due to blatant design flaws that could’ve been solved. This means they can never exist again.
That is massively understating the damage Chernobyl did as well as the number of people who died from cancer and radiation poisoning, to the point of sheer dishonesty.
Also remember that time that they wanted to test a safety system so they disabled the other safety systems and the protocols said they should have shut down the reactor instead of doing the test due to other factors but they did the test anyways and it exploded? Oh and their “emergency off” button was actually an “emergency increase power then off” button. Clearly there’s no way to do these things safely.
I was talking about the one that exploded in Idaho. It was a “small” reactor. The control rods had to be adjusted by hand. Clearly there was nothing they could have done instead to avoid human error /s
Lol I wasn’t familiar with that one.
But my point was that even the big ones that have had big failures were caused by dumb shit that was entirely avoidable. All three of the famous ones could be designed away in new reactors.
The problem I have is these problems are all caused by corner cutting and yes we could live in fantasy world where corporations don’t cut corners to save money and will just keep pouring money into a pit just to be safe even when they’re already losing money hand over fist due to not being able to compete with kWh pricing from renewables - but we don’t live in that world.
We’ll end up with minimum wage staff working without proper training, safety systems turned off because they’re too expensive to repair, and leaks not reported because company policy is broken. They’re going to be run by the same companies the are dumping oil into the Niger Delta for the last however many decades simply because it’s cheaper than fixing the issue - putting faith that ‘we’ll do it properly this time’ is incredibly dumb based on the near limitless examples of that never happening.