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Technically 1960's-era, since there weren't any commercial nuclear power plants in WWII, but what's a couple decades between friends...
"We don't build nuclear reactors like this any more" is true, but I personally don't find it terribly comforting.
The three major nuclear accidents in my lifetime (TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima) were all caused by some combination of design flaws and operational errors. In other words, human error. It's possible to come up with safer designs, but it's not possible to eliminate human stupidity.
Creating a controlled nuclear chain reaction is inherently dangerous. That's why we encase reactors in solid concrete chambers with 12-foot thick walls.
Flying an airplane is also inherently dangerous, and we've had a lot of success improving the safety record of aviation (not perfect, but darn good). However, that safety has been at the cost of thousands of plane crashes over the years which have allowed us to find even the crazy and obscure failure modes and design around them.
We can't afford the number of nuclear disasters it would take to discover the unknown failure modes (and that's assuming we fix them when we find them: you can make a pretty good argument that "giant earthquake followed by massive tsunami on the coast of Japan" is something the designers of the plant could have reasonably expected might happen someday).
IMHO, the way to make "safe" nuclear power is not to design a plant which somehow can't fail, but to find a nuclear reaction path which doesn't create tons of highly radioactive byproducts. That way even a catastrophic failure would have far fewer consequences; the cost of failure could be acceptable. Thorium reactors, unfortunately, don't meet this criterion since they produce Uranium 233, Cesium 137, Strontium 190, and all the other nasty isotopes which make today's reactors such a problem.
"We don't build nuclear reactors like this any more" is true, but I personally don't find it terribly comforting.
The three major nuclear accidents in my lifetime (TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima) were all caused by some combination of design flaws and operational errors. In other words, human error. It's possible to come up with safer designs, but it's not possible to eliminate human stupidity.
Creating a controlled nuclear chain reaction is inherently dangerous. That's why we encase reactors in solid concrete chambers with 12-foot thick walls.
Flying an airplane is also inherently dangerous, and we've had a lot of success improving the safety record of aviation (not perfect, but darn good). However, that safety has been at the cost of thousands of plane crashes over the years which have allowed us to find even the crazy and obscure failure modes and design around them.
We can't afford the number of nuclear disasters it would take to discover the unknown failure modes (and that's assuming we fix them when we find them: you can make a pretty good argument that "giant earthquake followed by massive tsunami on the coast of Japan" is something the designers of the plant could have reasonably expected might happen someday).
IMHO, the way to make "safe" nuclear power is not to design a plant which somehow can't fail, but to find a nuclear reaction path which doesn't create tons of highly radioactive byproducts. That way even a catastrophic failure would have far fewer consequences; the cost of failure could be acceptable. Thorium reactors, unfortunately, don't meet this criterion since they produce Uranium 233, Cesium 137, Strontium 190, and all the other nasty isotopes which make today's reactors such a problem.
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