You've somehow managed to miss the entire point you were responding to. A power plant that is designed today is designed with 50 more years' knowledge of possible failure modes than a plant that was designed 50 years ago.
Does that mean that it cannot fail? No, but as adults we are constantly exposed to risks of all kinds and life is simply a matter of weighing risks and benefits. The car you drive to work is not perfectly safe, and in fact all Americans have an extraordinarily high risk of dying in an auto accident compared to most other causes of death. But you decide that having a job is worth the risk of driving to work, and the cars today are certainly far safer than cars engineered in the 50s or even the 70s.
The risk of a modern nuclear plant is far lower than one engineered during the 50s (as most current reactors are). And truthfully, even those present a much lower health/safety risk than coal plants do.
The biggest problem at this point is that NIMBYs who don't want any upgrades or modernization to take place have stifled replacement of older reactors with safer and more modern ones, and prevented proper reprocessing and disposal of the waste in safe repositories. Instead we just run the older reactors far past their design lifespans and allow the waste to pile up on-site. If you want to bring up Fukushima - most of the contamination was caused by discharging water from the spent fuel pools that are needed to hold all that waste that piles up due to lack of proper disposal.
In other words - NIMBYs literally caused the vast majority of the contamination from the Fukushima accident.
On the other hand, you didn't offer any rebuttal to the arguments I offered, either. You just found fault with a single line and decided to go with it.
A tone argument is a logical fallacy, and I made a substantive post. Do you care to offer anything else in response?
Time passes. A truly stunning insight.
You've somehow managed to miss the entire point you were responding to. A power plant that is designed today is designed with 50 more years' knowledge of possible failure modes than a plant that was designed 50 years ago.
Does that mean that it cannot fail? No, but as adults we are constantly exposed to risks of all kinds and life is simply a matter of weighing risks and benefits. The car you drive to work is not perfectly safe, and in fact all Americans have an extraordinarily high risk of dying in an auto accident compared to most other causes of death. But you decide that having a job is worth the risk of driving to work, and the cars today are certainly far safer than cars engineered in the 50s or even the 70s.
The risk of a modern nuclear plant is far lower than one engineered during the 50s (as most current reactors are). And truthfully, even those present a much lower health/safety risk than coal plants do.
The biggest problem at this point is that NIMBYs who don't want any upgrades or modernization to take place have stifled replacement of older reactors with safer and more modern ones, and prevented proper reprocessing and disposal of the waste in safe repositories. Instead we just run the older reactors far past their design lifespans and allow the waste to pile up on-site. If you want to bring up Fukushima - most of the contamination was caused by discharging water from the spent fuel pools that are needed to hold all that waste that piles up due to lack of proper disposal.
In other words - NIMBYs literally caused the vast majority of the contamination from the Fukushima accident.