Nuclear Power? Good or Bad?

Just curious, how does it prove how safe they are? Even though they shut down they still melted down.

No, if I remember correctly, the modern plants shut themselves down, meaning they didn't cause any trouble. The outdated (just after WWII, I think) ones caused all the trouble.

And by human error, do you mean the idiots who decided to build a nuclear reactor on a major fault line?

I believe the engineers messed up some settings or a test at Chernobyl, causing it to overheat and blow up and shit.

I was talking about Japan.

Oh, well, the only human error in Japan was waiting too long with retiring the outdated facilities. With the human error thing, I mainly meant Chernobyl.

I know but I was just mentioning that it was a pretty bad idea to place a nuclear reactor on a major fault line.

According to Wikipedia the construction of the plants began in 67. Now as far as I understand it the plants did everything they were supposed to shutting down after the earthquake. However, when the tsunami came it flooded the backup generators needed to keep water pumping through the reactors. Once this happened the fuel rods got hotter and hotter without anything to cool them down, eventually causing a meltdown. Chernobyl was caused due to both human error and design flaw.

Yeah, that indeed is quite a bad idea. Still, these facilities are built to withstand earthquakes, and as Sisyphus said, it was mainly the water from the tsunami that did the damage.

Yeah, that's a lot better explanation than the one I posted.

Fully support this as the lesser evil while we at the continue to develop and build renewable energy sources. Those sources would then eventually take over all production of energy(hopefully)

Um... Japan is an island. The entire thing only exists because it is on a fault line. What did you expect them to do? Build it in China?

See Japan?
No, you don't, because it is covered in the fault line indicator.

Or... Japan could just not use nuclear power.

I actually agree with this. Countries or areas that are geographically unstable should not build nuclear power plants. It's simply too hard to predict(too many variables) what's going to happen.

If only Japan could turn earthquakes into power then they would have infinite power.

Well, there's probably a way to turn the energy from the shocks into electrical power. The thing is that earthquakes don't happen all the time, they vary in strength and tend to mess up infrastructure...

Except in Japan they get earthquakes everyday practically they might not be big but they are practically a daily occurrence somewhere in Japan.

Well, for that matter, Japan has to get their energy from somewhere and they are big on the environment, so things like coal are unacceptable. With their manufacturing infrastructure, they consume too much for just wind, solar, and hydroelectrics and all of those are just a suseptable as a nuclear plant to an earthquake. Moreso in fact.

Now that I think about it, how are the advances in tidal energy going? Japan, being an island, could profit from that if the methods used now are efficient. The problem is of course the earthquakes, which will probably substantially damage the facilities...

They're THAT frequent? I seriously did not know that. In that case, it might be worth looking in to.

Donno. Haven't heard about it for a while.

Idk if they can effectively turn earthquakes into power, but being on a fault line Japan has plenty of geothermal opportunities.