And it seems likely that with enough operating plant, there always will be engineering failures. Aeroppanes sometimes fail catastrophically too of course.
Do they? I can't really recall an instance of catastrophic airplane failure over the last decade outside of 737 MAX certification / regulatory capture issues
I also think the amount of airplanes that exist is higher than the amount of nuclear reactors we'd need for it to be a strong power source, and I also suspect that airplanes face slightly more volatile conditions
It's a key example, and is the same failure mode nuclear power has.
Nuclear power could be engineered to be at least as safe as (most) commercial flight.
But it won't be - and this is absolutely predictable. Because of politics and money.
There is no answer to this, except to fix politics and money and make them as safe as commercial flight.
That's a whole different scale of problem to fixing climate change.
IMO this isn't a utopian fantasy, it's absolutely critical for species survival. But it doesn't look as if we're going to be starting the process any time soon.
Exporting the same problems to Mars or upload space or wherever won't solve them either.
Right, fair question. I read "engineering failures" above, so I want to highlight that this isn't so much an engineering failure as it is a capitalistic failure driven by incestuous relationships in US aerospace.
I do totally agree this is a real risk for any ___domain, especially energy which has so much money flowing, but I just don't think "engineering" is actually the issue which these things fail under
We don't have any technical defense against institutional failure. In some places and times there are cultural defenses, but those are often seen to erode.
The best defense is not to need any. There is much less need to defend against institutional failure in the case of renewables, because the technical failures to guard against have limited impact, well constrained in cost, time and space.
Honestly, I’m not well educated on Chernobyl’s mode of failure or political incentive structures. I’d probably agree with your implication that if procedures can’t be followed consistently/successfully than that is exactly an engineering failure, but as I said I do not know this circumstance
Well sure. But while extremely rare is fine for aeroplanes, it's less clear that it's fine for nuclear reactors. So far we've been lucky that none of the big incidents have affected a major metropolitan area.
I'm not completely anti-nuclear. But it seems clear to me that it should be seen as a stepping-stone technology on the way to a renewables + storage future rather than a long-term solution.
