I work in the nuclear industry. This is an industry I chose to work in because I think it is important to humanity's prosperity. So you will not be surprised when I get somewhat irritated by this often-repeated rational that we shouldn't be using nuclear power because you can't guarantee that the reactor won't explode.
That is absolutely correct. You cannot guarantee that nuclear is 100% safe. Of course, you can't guarantee that a car is 100% safe, but that doesn't stop basically everybody in Canadian society from riding in motor vehicles on a regular basis. Getting into a private vehicle is probably the riskiest thing that you can do on a daily basis, and yet not only do we accept it, we barely regulate it. We accept a level of risk in our personal lives that would never be acceptable for an industry.
Nothing can be made perfectly safe, simply because nothing in the world is perfect. As builders and creators, we accept this and instead determine an acceptable level of risk. A nuclear plant has to meet more stringent safety standards than a candy factory because the consequences of a failure are higher. This is why you have only seen a small number of events in 50 years of power reactor operation.
(side note: sugar factories can explode and it's fucking impressive to see).
Obviously we have made mistakes. The Fukushima Daiichi reactor disaster is an example of where we fucked up. The people who designed the plant were unwilling to believe that anything could happen to cause it to fail, and ignored evidence that they were not planning for the worst tsunami event possible. You still have to see things in perspective though: the earthquake and tsunami that caused the plant to meltdown killed over 15 000 people. The meltdown has not killed anyone yet, and while there aren't any great estimates for long term deaths caused by the radioactive release, the highest legitimate estimate I've seen is around 100. Perhaps the area housing should have been built to withstand a tsunami.
I will enter into a bit of rhetoric now, but it still needs to be said.
If we stopped doing things when something went wrong, we would not be surviving as a species right now. This is not meant to ignore the suffering of the victims of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. This is meant to say that our technological prowess is what allows us to support a population of 7 billion people. In 1984, a pesticide plant in Bhopal released a cloud of toxic gas over the
town, exposing over 500 000 people. Death estimates range from 3000 to
over 16 000. Yet we still make pesticides. Why? Because people like to
eat, and crops are important.
Every year, thousands of people die prematurely from fossil fuel related disease (tons more sources, but I'm feeling lazy), but we still burn stuff to make power.
Hydroelectric dams threaten populations downstream from them. Depending on the dam, tens of thousands of people could die if it were to fail. This seems like a pretty big risk - after all, I can't guarantee that a dam won't burst. Maybe we should stop using hydro power?
I'm not trying to say that a nuclear plant and a hydro dam pose the same level of threat. The idea that I'm attempting to convey is that it's not as simple as Safe vs. Not Safe. Like everything else in life, technology has a lot of grey areas that we have to manage. It is not an option to stop producing electrical power. Very plainly put,
society would collapse. That is not me being melodramatic. Without
electricity we cannot support the world's population. Without it, the
world's population would be decimated, if not worse. Not only do we have to keep making electricity, but we have to increase our ability to do so.
In fact, this can be generalized, and I make the following statement unequivocally: we have no choice
but to continue forward in our technological drive if the population is
to keep increasing.
You don't run from your mistakes. You look at them closely. You inspect the fuck out of every scrap of data you have and you make sure you never make the same mistake again, but you don't quit. Nuclear power has only been around for about 60 years, depending on how you reckon it. We've done a lot of learning since then, and we're getting better at it.
As we do with everything else.
