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.
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
317 points (98.2% liked)
History Memes
2607 readers
4 users here now
A place to share history memes!
Rules:
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, assorted bigotry, etc.
-
No fascism (including tankies/red fash), atrocity denial or apologia, etc.
-
Tag NSFW pics as NSFW.
-
Follow all Piefed.social rules.
-
History referenced must be 20+ years old.
-
Avoid posting AI-generated content whenever possible.
Banner courtesy of @setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world
OTHER COMMS IN THE HISTORYVERSE:
- !historyruins@piefed.social
- !historyart@piefed.social
- !historyartifacts@piefed.social
- !historyphotos@piefed.social
- !askhistorians@piefed.social
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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
Renewables have the best LCOE
https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2025-_vf.pdf
Renewables have the best SLCOE
Thanks!
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.
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(18 replies)
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
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 scream effect would be important would never occur".
load more comments
(1 replies)
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?
load more comments
(5 replies)
I legitimately hate that the top sentiment in this thread seems to be nuclear bad. What bullshit propaganda.
Wow. Your comment was at the top in my sort and I thought "what kind of smooth brained moron thinks nuclear is bad?" The comment directly below says something like "nuclear bad, we don't need it" what an incredibly stupid take. Nuclear is far safer and less radioactive than many of the energy sources we're using. Full renewables would be awesome but let's not just dismiss nuclear, it's pretty awesome.
While nuclear may have an agreeable amount of safety, the construction of new reactors takes a lot of money and time, and their operation is dependant on the sourcing and disposing of nuclear fuel. One advantage of it might be that it produces a constant amount of electricity, but not a day goes by where solar doesn't make power as well. So why not just go with solar then?
Because we can't make an instant transition to solar and it's far better than fossil fuels and coal. It also alleviates a lot of the storage issues with solar. All solar should be the eventual goal, but nuclear as a stop gap in the decades before we can go full green energy makes sense to me.
Of course we can. Also, building new nuclear plants actually takes the decades you claim solar would take. Not a very good stop gap if it won't be done before the gap you want to stop has stopped by itself now, is it?
load more comments
(6 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
The current top comment is that renewables have taken over as our best option, so yay for that
If you want a more nuanced take: I think nuclear is cool tech, but it's a bad idea for economic reasons and due to the waste issues.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(11 replies)
Yeah but also, nuclear is bad and we don't need it (anymore).
Yeah but also, nuclear is ~~bad~~ fucking expensive and we don't need it (anymore).
Yeah but also, nuclear is fucking bad and fucking expensive and we don't need it (anymore).
There are some specialized applications (e.g. RTGs for space probes) where nuclear power is still very useful. I agree that "regular" NPPs aren't that great anymore.
There is an arguable case for fast breeders as part of a long-term waste management strategy. That one works by breeding high level waste into a more radioactive form that will take a mere 200 years to decay to the level of natural uranium ore as opposed to 20000 years.
The upside: Disposal is doable with technology that exists today as opposed to technology we may at one point possess in the future. We also don't need to design facilities that last longer than all of recorded history. We don't need much beyond fast breeders and a few guarded and well-maintained warehouses.
The downside: It still involves guarding and maintaining warehouses full of extremely dangerous high level waste for 200 years and breeders inherently pose a nuclear proliferation risk.
It's by no means a panacea but as one of the very few feasible ideas for nuclear waste management I think they're at least worth talking about.
That's very reasonable, which is why it's very unlikely to ever be executed.
Hiring party yes men to run everything as cheaply as possible is literally how the USA is run.
And, well... Let's say we may need to enclose them in a concrete mausoleum before soon.
Hiring party yes men to run everything as cheaply as possible is literally how the USA is run.
It takes decades to strip out the entire apparatus down to things like technical fields. They're trying, though, and if not stopped, they will get us to the level of the Soviet system.
My problem with nuclear energy is that we should have been using it for the last 60+ years but we didn't and now we don't have enough time to build the reactors. Renewables and batteries are the cheapest and fastest way to replace fossil fuels at this point.
load more comments
(1 replies)
This is kind of why I'm not 100% behind nuclear in general. The technology is pretty sound, and even the waste generated pales in comparison to what's up with atmospheric pollution right now. My problem is with corner-cutting and having failure modes that create disasters in the first place. The standards for success are necessarily incredibly high and must be adhered to without fail over the lifetime of the plant. As they say, learn from history: humanity's track record with those requirements is not good.
There are better options on the horizon though, like thorium reactors that are smaller and don't create big problems when they break. So, the idea of another 3 Mile Island, Fukushima, or Chernobyl may eventually be a thing of the past.
The lesson that people learned from Chernobyl is that these things need to fail safely. Modern reactors will automatically wind down their reactions when a problem appears, without intervention. If someone is dumb enough to build a reactor that has runaway reaction problems like Chernobyl... that's on them
It is not on them, thats the problem, someone else dies cleaning up their mess and the disastercleanup is paid by the taxpayers
load more comments
(3 replies)
The thing about Three Mile Island is that it was a nothing burger. Hell, Unit 2 was operating up until 2015, and is now being refueled to be restarted. Even when you look at Chernobyl, it's now one of the biggest and best nature preserves in Europe. Life still lives there, just not people. It's not some toxic contaminated wasteland covered in a miasma of chemical filth and devoid of life.
The containment structure did its job, what it was designed to do and contained the partial meltdown. No contamination was released and no meaningful amount of radiation escaped the site. The oil and gas lobby then took it upon themselves to pour resources into anti nuclear crusades, to further ingratiate the fuels they have a financial interest in maintaining the demand for.
view more: next ›