They need cooling water, so “on the coast” is a reasonable location. Or do you mean “not in Japan”? A country without many great options for clean energy generation. Frankly Japan is one of the places nuclear makes sense to me. There’s not many options.

It doesn’t make sense to me in the US where there’s a sunshine belt across the country 5 timezones long, large windswept plains and shallow coastlines. The US is rich in options and nuclear falls down the list.

I think you misunderstood what was written:

The Katsurao village official said about 337 square kilometers of land in seven Fukushima municipalities are deemed “difficult-to-return” zones. Of those, just 27 square kilometers in six of the same municipalities are specified reconstruction zones.

27 km² are the worst areas. The other 310km² are still “difficult-to-return”.

At what point am I supporting coal? Totally irrelevant

I’m saying Fukushima was an ecological disaster. Thankfully very few people died, but to only focus on that minimises the impact of the event. If you’re going to say Fukushima wasn’t that bad, you can’t just cherry pick at the impacts.

Is nuclear better than fossil fuels? Yes. But that was an argument for the 80s. The time for nuclear was 50 years ago. It didn’t happen.

what do they call all the waste mining material? The kind of shit that they leave in huge piles, to get rained on, which leeches all kinds of fun shit into the ground?

oh right, they call them tailings. Surely we’ve never seen mass ecological fallout from tailings getting into, let’s say, a river.

If you want a reaction that you can take energy away from the reaction, the reaction needs to create more energy than it needs to maintain itself. If you fail to take that energy away, the reaction will accelerate and your output will grow even further.

It is basic physics.

The only alternative would be to have an open system that runs on so little fuel that you need to feed it continuously. This has an entirely different level of problems, as now it will be impossible to contain the radiation to the reaction chamber and the containers of the spent fuel. Also with that you would need an entirely different design of how the radioactive material is held in place and how the reactions are controlled. The current way of adjusting how much you block with control rods probably won’t work.

It is just impossible to have an exponential system like the nuclear reactions used in a reactor without active control measures. And active measures can fail.

For starters we are talking about concepts, not actually built and tested Reactors. If you have any connection to scientific research, technology development or engineering, you should know that between hypothesis, laboratory testing, prototype development, technology upscaling, establishment of production lines and finally long term operation routines there is a lot that will not be like expected, has to be revised, adjusted, scrapped, redesigned…

The history of nuclear energy is riddled with cases of hubris leading to disasters. It is evident that so far humans were unable and unwilling to give safety the proper considerations.

But from a practical point of view anyone with some industry experience would find the idea insane, that Small and Modular systems, so high throughput of small batches would increase safety. It is much more complicated to provide Quality and Safety checks in such an environment. Especially as these would be done by multiple for profit companies, the necessary oversight would be more difficult to provide for the regulation authorities, so in the medium run we will get Boeing like situations. Just that cost cutting and mingling will lead to reactors contaminating large swaths of areas on top of potentially killing hundreds of people.

So now you explain, why we should totally listen to the claims made by for profit cost cutting companies, that are solely based on concepts, without any actual field testing.

Because that was exactly the Titanic situation. People believed it to be unsinkable and decided to cut on costs for emergency measures. Reality proved them wrong on the first and last voyage.

Here’s a list of industrial disasters. Take your pick of the ones that count as engineering or negligence (and Chernobyl was at least as much negligence as engineering) and tell me how many you get to.

Of course, we haven’t discussed what kind of risk we’re talking about. And is it better to have thousands of low-impact high-risk activities or one or two high-impact low-risk activities? Because, make no mistake, nuclear has cost less in human lives per unit of energy than any other power generation method we have. And hydroelectric has as profound an impact on the environment as nuclear fallout, it just tends to make some nice beaches and fishing so it isn’t negative, right?

Did people during the concept and design phase of these anticipate them causing disasters?

in terms of the RBMK? Yes, it was noted in the design specifications that it gets particularly unstable at low power levels due to xenon poisoning. The operators were also aware that they were operating outside of design spec, and not following the recommended operating procedure. They had also remove WAY more control rods than ever should’ve been removed.

In every possible definition of it, they fucked up in literally every possible way.

Did the people who operate them adhere to best safety practices, maintenance and regulations?

in what way? In most cases, the vast majority of them in fact, yes. This is why only a handful of reactor plants have had issues like this, and the vast majority are operating perfectly fine until this day. Safety practices, maintenance, and regulations are a problem in every industry, so unless you want to argue we should stop doing everything because “bad things happen sometimes” this isn’t really an argument unfortunately.

If you need a better example, just look at nuclear powered submarines, there has never been an accident. Including all of the various sinkings that have happened throughout the years.

Did the regulatory authorities ensure that there would be no disaster possible through enforcing said regulations, in particular regarding location specific concerns such as Tsunamis in Fukushima?

So in this case it’s more complicated. Japanese culture is a little different to western culture, so this was ultimately a failure of culture, and you can still see the effects of this today with how TEPCO handles itself. At the time nuclear regulation was extremely lax, due to how “formal” it was, so that was the ultimate cause of this problem, but again, this happens in literally every industry.

As long as you have the same human characters in the same economic structures in the same administrative structures, there is no reason to be confident, that these disasters will not happen again.

as long as you have people, and capital, then people should not do anything ever in the potential scenario that somebody gets hurt, or worse, injured, or even maybe killed in an event that shouldn’t have otherwise happened* FTFY

And to be clear, the human impact of nuclear energy, INCLUDING all of these disasters is STILL lower than coal, gas, or oil, and on par, if not better than solar, and especially wind.