Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Will Russia's War Change Chernobyl?" video.

  1. Yap, nicely explained! :D In comparison to past accidents, not only more modern nuclear power plants are closer to an onion with several layers of exhaustive protection and prevention, you basically already have a sarcophagus pre-built there for the worst case scenario. Most nuclear power plant incidents in history happened due to a long and frankly jaw dropping chain of incompetence, incredibly poor practices, corruption and sometimes ignorance too. Given the situation of the USSR and Chernobyl, plus it's era and place in history, people don't get too surprised to know the chain of errors that happened. But I think international press and just general perception made a poor job explaining the chain of events that led to Fukushima. Of course, an unprecedented off the charts earthquake followed by tsunami hitting the plant directly played it's part there, and I guess it's the focus of most coverage due to the devastating effects of the combined catastrophe - but it was only because of a chain of corruption, hubris, bad decisions fueled by bad corporate/government culture that the meltdown really happened. And in some way, people were already biased against seeing that side of things - how come Japanese culture so famous for it's... supposed correctness lead to something you'd expect from 80s USSR or something? Well, it so happens that these sorts of corruption problems plus chains of incompetence also do exist in Japanese culture, politics and private enterprise. There had been at least 10 years of ignoring recommendations of extremely basic structural adjustments which would have specifically prevented the meltdown. The one valid criticism that I can always agree with to people adamantly against nuclear power is this: Can we ever 100% guaranteed eliminate those (corruption, hubris, incompetence, poor practices, etc) from big projects such as nuclear power plants? I don't think so! The way I answer this to myself is - almost every single big infrastructure project that lots of people rely upon, asks themselves the same question at some point. Dams, bridges, buildings, roads... people who watch Plainly Difficult will know. xD But, it is not only about the potential for failure, which every single power plant type in the world inherently has anyways - it's about the balance between what it offers versus what risks are acceptable. Nuclear power has a particular image problem that is like planes falling from the sky taken to it's absolute extremes. Almost everyone around the world knows about Chernobyl and Fukushima, sometimes down to the tiniest details. Almost no one knows how much we already rely on nuclear power, don't know how many of those plants have been working with zero incidents for several decades, and how much those power plants offset the need for exponentially more fossil fuel plants. It's also poorly understood how many current renewable sources infrastructures would be needed to cover what a single nuclear power plant can generate. Current tech considered, we just cannot scratch the surface yet. You need to look at statistics for that... how much is generated by each type of power plant proportionate of how much infrastructure we have on each plus money put into. Then you start understanding why we still need nuclear power. I think we all hope that someday tech advances, building technologies, optimization in usage of power and other factors develop in a way that we can cover all our needs plus a large safety net with renewables alone. It's just that, for the time being and the near future, we just can't get there yet. And we're running out of time to bridge that gap.
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