Explanation: While it’s sometimes considered that the Chornobyl disaster is proof of the danger of nuclear power - and it is certainly proof of the dangers possible when things do go wrong - it’s often understated that the core cause of the disaster was… immense incompetence. It was all incredibly avoidable from start to finish.
True true, but before all the atomheads spawn here. Why not use technology, that provides energy without the possibility of nuking a city/country/world.
The fact that they shut down because of the water outlet temp is due to policy and procedure, not because of the engineering of the plants. We have many reactors in the US that sit on the great lakes and the ocean, both of which don’t suffer this problem.
Nuclear is expensive for the same reason, politics, not engineering or the science behind it.
We have many reactors in the US that sit on the great lakes and the ocean, both of which don’t suffer this problem.
No, you just don’t have environmental regulations in the US.
The reason those plants have been shut down wasn’t because they can’t technically operate in the summer heat (as any thermal power plant, they do operate on a temperature difference, so warmer cooling water will lower their efficiency, though), but because the temperature of the cooling water released would be high enough to endanger the ecosystem in the body of water they draw their cooling water from.
The nuclear industry is arguably the most regulated energy industry here in the US. The fact of the matter is that energy consumption isn’t going to go down any time soon, and while solar and wind are great supplements, they are very diffuse and the capacity factor is quite low, requiring more just to overcome the uncertainty in the weather.
The discharge from Turkey point in Florida creates one of the largest protected sanctuaries for crocodiles in the state. So also not something we can’t handle with proper engineering.
Procedure sounds an awful lot like a technical requirement ;)
Don’t worry the reactors on the shore of greater bodies of water will surely come up to temps sooner or later.
The “politics” making this stuff expensive is mainly safety precautions, which I for one would like to have in place when we’re talking about a nuclear fission reaction strapped to a water boiler.
This is why we should focus on less "aggressive’ forms of powe generation. Especially if they are more independent.
Well when I operated reactors for the Navy, we procedurally couldn’t exceed a certain outlet temp, but I was not only mechanically possible, but occasionally required when we were operating in very warm waters ;)
Nuclear in America is expensive because we stopped building reactors for 40+ years, so all of the supply chain and expertise atrophied.
France is doing just fine power wise and doesn’t rely on Russian gas to do so. One could argue their actions in North Africa to secure their uranium reserve, are equivalently bad, but that goes for the minerals required for batteries/solar panels/wind turbines, all of which require a massive amount of material to be pulled out of the ground and be processed with chemicals.
It’s unlikely for the lake cooled reactors like 9 mile point to suffer from high inlet temps because the bottom of the lake is a massive heatsink which is already used by some municipalities for cheap district cooling.
I think solar and wind are good for land that is developed but underutilized, like a rooftop, but bulldozing swaths of desert, which hosts its own unique ecosystem, just to coat it in silica and metal feels counterproductive.
Nuclear power is just so energy dense that it makes little sense not to use it. It could completely eliminate oil in heavy polluting industries like shipping. As well as still being able to tie into our current power grid, something that still isn’t addressed in “green circles”.
And is also way cheaper and more reliable and doesn’t produce trash that will be radioactive for thousands of years and doesn’t make a country reliant on very unstable and/or autocratic countries to get access to the resources required for it’s use
There are some downsides. They just pale in comparison to fossil fuels and nuclear.
For example, tidal barrages and tidal power disrupting local ecosystems, wildlife deaths from windmills, geothermal agitating local land stability and releasing emissions, etc.
No perfect solutions - but there are better solutions, and renewables are definitely better than the existing alternatives. Full speed ahead.
The possibility of nuking shit is the only reason why governments keep subsidising nuclear power generation, because the nuclear industry it supports serves as a manpower and knowledge pool for the potential military use of nuclear power.
If you want to do it half way safely, nuclear power is anything but cheap. You can’t justify the enormous costs by anything but it being a stepping stone to nuking shit. I am fine with that, it unfortunately is a necessary evil. Just stop lying about the cheap reliable power source, and state the true reasons behind running that kind of haphazard expensive shit.
Which is why I will forever be against nuclear, we cannot make something incompetence proof. Everything can be controlled for except for the human at the helm.
I mean, that would sanction being against a… great many ordinary things.
That being said, it doesn’t matter much at this point. Renewables are advancing so fast, and are so far along, that they’ll supplant nuclear for all but a handful of functions anyway. Renewable future let’s goooo
Fair enough. I assumed you meant more casualties than the environmental effects, which is my bad.
(though it is inhabitable even now in most places, with radiation levels having dropped dramatically in most of the exclusion zone, just… not recommended. Long-term cancer risks and all that - living there would be like working as a coal miner, which is obviously undesirable to deal with)
There are regions throughout Europe, all the way into Germany, where you can’t safely eat wild mushrooms, and certain wild animals to this day due to contamination from Chernobyl.
I was under the impression there were only a few suboptimal structural/design decisions (which would be consistent with the time it was built & serve as a lesson to other designers, like all normal industries should work).
Cheaply built? No. But it did have a known design flaw that wouldn’t be fixed in RBMK reactors until after the disaster. The control rods contained graphite tips to moderate reaction rates when the rods were fully removed. Because they’re the first thing to enter the reactor during a scram (emergency shutdown), they temporarily increase the rate of reaction. This was discovered in 1983 but never fixed because “apparently there was a widespread view that the conditions under which the positive scram effect would be important would never occur”.
Well, yeah, there are a lot of such design flaws in important systems (like commercial aviation) that are either a shortcut (profit cost-cutting or prohibitive costs) or not having enough data on the possibility of occurrence so you can’t make an informed decision (and you just can’t have it all otherwise nothing ever gets built).
What you described seems like the latter since they knew about it & deliberately decided it doesn’t need fixing/changing, but was fixed later when they presumably determined that it made the accident worse. Idk anything about it tho.
the most confusing thing to me will always be that the containment building of that plant design is basically a shed. like yeah, they can’t melt down or whatever, but surely you want to stop any radioactive material from leaving the building even when working normally?
Chernobyl accelerated a big anti nuclear movement in Germany. It was the biggest and most well organized protest movement for decades. They managed to shut down construction of some power plants pretty quickly. Some with finished construction never started operating. Exiting nuclear was a main issue for the Green Party from early on. When they got into a government coalition with the SPD in 1998, a phaseout of nuclear power was planned and implemented. When the CDU got back into government, they reversed the exit from nuclear power, even though this was unpopular. The Fukushima nuclear disaster affected Merkel‘s
popularity so much, they decided to exit nuclear power again. All of this cost a lot of money, huge amounts of CO2 emissions, and Germany lost technology.
The anti nuclear movement is the most successful political movement of the German left. It’s also an utter tragedy.
Putin Propaganda
While the German left and especially the peace movement and anti nuclear movement received some Soviet support, Putin‘s Russia didn’t play a role AFAIK. For the Soviets a militarily weak and non nuclear West Germany was in their interest.
Some people use the argument that nuclear power is OK because Chernobyl only happened because of incompetence. That’s the whole point! In my view, that is an argument AGAINST nuclear power.
Incompetence and human error will always happen. It will happen again, eventually. That’s why we can’t have a power source, with the potential to leave a continent poisoned for thousands of years, relying on the competence or lack of sabotage of human beings.
Go ahead nukies, downvote away, you dogmatic idiots.
Explanation: While it’s sometimes considered that the Chornobyl disaster is proof of the danger of nuclear power - and it is certainly proof of the dangers possible when things do go wrong - it’s often understated that the core cause of the disaster was… immense incompetence. It was all incredibly avoidable from start to finish.
True true, but before all the atomheads spawn here. Why not use technology, that provides energy without the possibility of nuking a city/country/world.
Don’t build a reactor that’s designed to produce bomb worthy fissile material then.
Don’t build a reactor in the first place maybe. We have better ways to produce power.
Citation needed
https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-shut-down-nuclear-power-plants-amid-scorching-heatwave
You cannot cool nuclear (and by extension most other nonrenewable power plants) in the summer. With heat rising, it will only get harder.
Plus nuclear is expensive as fuck, as you can see in the other comment
The fact that they shut down because of the water outlet temp is due to policy and procedure, not because of the engineering of the plants. We have many reactors in the US that sit on the great lakes and the ocean, both of which don’t suffer this problem.
Nuclear is expensive for the same reason, politics, not engineering or the science behind it.
No, you just don’t have environmental regulations in the US.
The reason those plants have been shut down wasn’t because they can’t technically operate in the summer heat (as any thermal power plant, they do operate on a temperature difference, so warmer cooling water will lower their efficiency, though), but because the temperature of the cooling water released would be high enough to endanger the ecosystem in the body of water they draw their cooling water from.
The nuclear industry is arguably the most regulated energy industry here in the US. The fact of the matter is that energy consumption isn’t going to go down any time soon, and while solar and wind are great supplements, they are very diffuse and the capacity factor is quite low, requiring more just to overcome the uncertainty in the weather.
The discharge from Turkey point in Florida creates one of the largest protected sanctuaries for crocodiles in the state. So also not something we can’t handle with proper engineering.
Procedure sounds an awful lot like a technical requirement ;)
Don’t worry the reactors on the shore of greater bodies of water will surely come up to temps sooner or later.
The “politics” making this stuff expensive is mainly safety precautions, which I for one would like to have in place when we’re talking about a nuclear fission reaction strapped to a water boiler.
This is why we should focus on less "aggressive’ forms of powe generation. Especially if they are more independent.
Well when I operated reactors for the Navy, we procedurally couldn’t exceed a certain outlet temp, but I was not only mechanically possible, but occasionally required when we were operating in very warm waters ;)
Nuclear in America is expensive because we stopped building reactors for 40+ years, so all of the supply chain and expertise atrophied.
France is doing just fine power wise and doesn’t rely on Russian gas to do so. One could argue their actions in North Africa to secure their uranium reserve, are equivalently bad, but that goes for the minerals required for batteries/solar panels/wind turbines, all of which require a massive amount of material to be pulled out of the ground and be processed with chemicals.
It’s unlikely for the lake cooled reactors like 9 mile point to suffer from high inlet temps because the bottom of the lake is a massive heatsink which is already used by some municipalities for cheap district cooling.
I think solar and wind are good for land that is developed but underutilized, like a rooftop, but bulldozing swaths of desert, which hosts its own unique ecosystem, just to coat it in silica and metal feels counterproductive.
Nuclear power is just so energy dense that it makes little sense not to use it. It could completely eliminate oil in heavy polluting industries like shipping. As well as still being able to tie into our current power grid, something that still isn’t addressed in “green circles”.
Renewables have the best LCOE
https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2025-_vf.pdf
Renewables have the best SLCOE
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Draft/GenCost2025-26ConsultDraft_20251216-FINAL.pdf
Thanks!
And is also way cheaper and more reliable and doesn’t produce trash that will be radioactive for thousands of years and doesn’t make a country reliant on very unstable and/or autocratic countries to get access to the resources required for it’s use
Seems like there are only positives to renewables :D
There are some downsides. They just pale in comparison to fossil fuels and nuclear.
For example, tidal barrages and tidal power disrupting local ecosystems, wildlife deaths from windmills, geothermal agitating local land stability and releasing emissions, etc.
No perfect solutions - but there are better solutions, and renewables are definitely better than the existing alternatives. Full speed ahead.
The possibility of nuking shit is the only reason why governments keep subsidising nuclear power generation, because the nuclear industry it supports serves as a manpower and knowledge pool for the potential military use of nuclear power.
If you want to do it half way safely, nuclear power is anything but cheap. You can’t justify the enormous costs by anything but it being a stepping stone to nuking shit. I am fine with that, it unfortunately is a necessary evil. Just stop lying about the cheap reliable power source, and state the true reasons behind running that kind of haphazard expensive shit.
Which is why I will forever be against nuclear, we cannot make something incompetence proof. Everything can be controlled for except for the human at the helm.
I mean, that would sanction being against a… great many ordinary things.
That being said, it doesn’t matter much at this point. Renewables are advancing so fast, and are so far along, that they’ll supplant nuclear for all but a handful of functions anyway. Renewable future let’s goooo
Luckily a great many things don’t render land inhabitable for centuries.
Fair enough. I assumed you meant more casualties than the environmental effects, which is my bad.
(though it is inhabitable even now in most places, with radiation levels having dropped dramatically in most of the exclusion zone, just… not recommended. Long-term cancer risks and all that - living there would be like working as a coal miner, which is obviously undesirable to deal with)
There are regions throughout Europe, all the way into Germany, where you can’t safely eat wild mushrooms, and certain wild animals to this day due to contamination from Chernobyl.
Was it cheaply built too?
I was under the impression there were only a few suboptimal structural/design decisions (which would be consistent with the time it was built & serve as a lesson to other designers, like all normal industries should work).
Cheaply built? No. But it did have a known design flaw that wouldn’t be fixed in RBMK reactors until after the disaster. The control rods contained graphite tips to moderate reaction rates when the rods were fully removed. Because they’re the first thing to enter the reactor during a scram (emergency shutdown), they temporarily increase the rate of reaction. This was discovered in 1983 but never fixed because “apparently there was a widespread view that the conditions under which the positive scram effect would be important would never occur”.
Well, yeah, there are a lot of such design flaws in important systems (like commercial aviation) that are either a shortcut (profit cost-cutting or prohibitive costs) or not having enough data on the possibility of occurrence so you can’t make an informed decision (and you just can’t have it all otherwise nothing ever gets built).
What you described seems like the latter since they knew about it & deliberately decided it doesn’t need fixing/changing, but was fixed later when they presumably determined that it made the accident worse. Idk anything about it tho.
the most confusing thing to me will always be that the containment building of that plant design is basically a shed. like yeah, they can’t melt down or whatever, but surely you want to stop any radioactive material from leaving the building even when working normally?
Chernobyl was the reason Germany became anti nuclear.
wasnt that more recent, due to putins propaganda.
Chernobyl accelerated a big anti nuclear movement in Germany. It was the biggest and most well organized protest movement for decades. They managed to shut down construction of some power plants pretty quickly. Some with finished construction never started operating. Exiting nuclear was a main issue for the Green Party from early on. When they got into a government coalition with the SPD in 1998, a phaseout of nuclear power was planned and implemented. When the CDU got back into government, they reversed the exit from nuclear power, even though this was unpopular. The Fukushima nuclear disaster affected Merkel‘s popularity so much, they decided to exit nuclear power again. All of this cost a lot of money, huge amounts of CO2 emissions, and Germany lost technology.
The anti nuclear movement is the most successful political movement of the German left. It’s also an utter tragedy.
While the German left and especially the peace movement and anti nuclear movement received some Soviet support, Putin‘s Russia didn’t play a role AFAIK. For the Soviets a militarily weak and non nuclear West Germany was in their interest.
No that was after the cdu did a 180 on merkels anto-atom course, then they did another 180, only to now ask for nuclear power again…
Some people use the argument that nuclear power is OK because Chernobyl only happened because of incompetence. That’s the whole point! In my view, that is an argument AGAINST nuclear power.
Incompetence and human error will always happen. It will happen again, eventually. That’s why we can’t have a power source, with the potential to leave a continent poisoned for thousands of years, relying on the competence or lack of sabotage of human beings.
Go ahead nukies, downvote away, you dogmatic idiots.