Or deliberate error. It doesn't really matter to me, as I consider deliberate and accidental the same in terms of punishment.

Fukushima (and Three Mile Island) are actually strong arguments in favor of nuclear. After all the hype, these accidents really weren't that bad and each would have been easy to avoid with competent engineering. In proportion to accidents vs. power generated for wind and other forms, nuclear (except for Chernobyl) looks very good.

Chernobyl is far more an argument against Soviet style government than an argument against nuclear. But both France and the USA are rapidly evolving toward Soviet style government. If you can't avoid bad government, then nuclear is not safe.

Most humans seem to be totally taken in by basic naming fallacies: Obama won a lot of points in his competition against Congress by proposing "jobs" bills that would have been so destructive that even the Democrats in the Senate wouldn't touch them. But to much of the public, opposing Obama's "jobs" bill was synonymous with opposing jobs. People could not understand the fact that there was negative correlation between name and content.

For nuclear, that becomes more serious when you look at the new stricter "safety" regulations that will be applied if the USA ever again builds nuclear. These "safety" regulation will PREVENT the engineering of safe designs. They are called "safety" regulations, but they not only won't promote safety, they will prevent safety. The simplistic dishonest intent of the authors was to increase cost while appearing to promote safety. On the surface you might expect such regulations to be at least safety neutral. But when you regulate too many details without understanding consequences, you destroy safety.

I don't know what safety regulation look like in France, but I do have an idea what the government looks like in France. So I expect safety regulations written in France are even more damaging to safety than those in the USA.

Not that bad? Do you realize that the situation in Fukushima is still not under control and that 300 tons of contaminated water are still leaking into the ocean every day? If that is not that bad, what do you call bad?

Hello Sun and Moore's Law!!! Duuu$

I don't get why people think an earthquake and a tsunami are something that is controllable. That was the issue with Fukushima not someone making a mistake or a poory designed facility or bad government.

I can understand (and I respect) who is in favor of nuclear, but these things cannot be read.

Have you read any of the details of that disaster?
The design would have easily handled the earthquake. The design would have easily handled a tsunami. The design was only flawed if a tsunami hit quickly after an earthquake. In hindsight, when would you expect a tsunami to hit? Very reasonable design changes would have handled an earthquake quickly followed by a tsunami, but no one had thought it through. Engineers are able to get such things right. They just didn't.

Similarly the world trade center was enough over designed to the impact of a somewhat smaller jet, that it would have done well with impacts of the size that occurred. It was also over designed enough for fire to do well with a fire of the size accelerated by that amount of jet fuel. But it was specifically flawed in design for a big fire happening immediately after a large high speed impact. But what do you expect to happen after a high speed impact? In hindsight the design change would have been quite reasonable.

Whether humans ever could organize giant projects without stupid design mistakes (that are glaringly obvious in hindsight) is a tough question. But the fact that, without stupid mistakes, a reasonably priced design for these things is within our current technology, is pretty solid.

I have actually and still to this day details ar coming out of what happened. I don't presume to know everythig about it nor do I presume to know about the engineering of such facilities but what I do know is no matter how much thought goes into things no one knows everything and no one can consider every possibility. Claiming that such disasters are the fault of bad design or bad government assumes that the people desigining such things know absolutely everything. That assumption is ludicrous, we are human afterall.

France has many nuke power plants.


As to if it is good or bad no one can tell. Burning coal and oil may produce as much radioactive material as potential nuke. After all you can't really make any more nuclear material than was originally on the earth.

True, not, true and maybe...

They're not all for France.

Our government (Belgium) is dropping some plants.
Their way to achieve this: buying nuclear power from France.

Likewise, we also made our air less toxic.
Their way to achieve this: buying clean air space in Russia.

Never underestimate the stupidity from European politics.

You have a government? So the stalemate is over.

Yeah ... at the end we just picked the one with the funniest bow tie:
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/...o_1656905c.jpg

I'm more worried about the upcoming right-wing governments in Europe.

I would be to, Golden Dawn in Greece seems to have much of the "protest" vote.