For the most part, this is a good, informative video about the advantages of nuclear energy.
Then, at 9:00 they talk about the danger of nuclear weapon proliferation. Obviously, this is a scary subject and requires scary footage. Guess what they chose?
Nuclear weapons test footage?
No.
Muslims praying.
Marg Bar The Economist.
Tell me how a metal rod encaced in concrete, burried thousands of feet underground, surrounded by radiation shielding, in the middle of the desert, is going to hurt you.
And yet this has never caused a problem in the decades-long history of nuclear energy production.
And yet we have the technology for safe containment.
No, which is why you have state-run nuclear power systems. Besides, your concern was the technology, which objectively does exist to the level we can generate nuclear energy safely.
Chernobyl was also impossible until it happened.
Where was my concern the technology?
We've have the technology to generate safe nuclear energy production. We had that when Chernobyl was constructed. Chernobyl chose not to use that technology.
Chernobyl was the only nuclear reactor design capable of failing like that, and even then they had to shut off all the safety systems and sabotage the stop mechanism to actually have a disaster.
The time is now. The time is the 1960s actually.
Maybe I phrased it badly then. New technology only matters if you use it, so in my eyes in 1986, even though research was ahead, the new models were not built, so talking about that new technology leads nowhere. If even a state run nuclear power plant doesn't use supposedly safe technology, what are our options?
I'm also cautious about handing capitalists, quite literally, infinite power. Why wouldn't they get greedy and run the plants over the limit and cause unforeseen disasters?
Safe nuclear technology wasn't "research" at the time. It's always been safe. People had been building safe reactors since the 60s.
Reactors are not prone to exploding. You have to try to make a reactor even capable of exploding, then make it actually explode. That's what the Soviets did. They made an incredibly stupid in their design, knowingly deviating from an established standard, knowingly introducing these possibilities, then a dozen oversights and stupid decisions to actualize the failure.
Nature has, on occasion, just happened to arange Uranium deposits in such a way as to create a sustained fission reaction and these did not explode. Nuclear safety is anprim level technology.
You are severely misunderstanding the state of nuclear technology and how nuclear systems are run.
Was the plant in Fukushima built using "safe" technology?
Fukashima was technologically safe, but then it broke. The technology to prevent such damage to the reactor does exist. Sea walls and inland regions have existed for centuries, and most nuclear reactors use them.
Fukashima is addressed in the video actually (which I'm assuming you didn't watch).
The video had like 3 irrelevant sentences about Fukushima, not sure what you mean? If such preventative technology existed, why didn't they use it? Besides the "human factor", it's almost like technology only exists within the economic system that decides whether to devote resources to it. 🤔
And then there's the building time. By the time we finish any new "safe" plants, would not the window for averting runaway climate change have passed anyway?
The points they made:
-The actual reactor failure only killed one person
-Nuclear power is the safest of any reliable power supply
-Compared to coal usage, nuclear power generation has saved millions of lives
-Nuclear would have done more, had it not been for misguided environmentalist concerns
Existing plants need to be kept open for one.
Second, while new plants are major projects, they can be completed within the timeframe it will take to phase out coal. Wether that's fast enough is another question, but late is better than never.
Finally, even after a transition away from fossile fuels, nuclear power will be worth investing in. A reliable, constant power supply will always be better than a variable one (even with tons of batteries).
I guess the key is comparing it to coal then.
Only measuring immediate explosion deaths gives me "gomulizm killd 100 gorillion" vibes, it still caused massive environmental destruction, which affects human health as well.