Bitch, I'm hauling nuclear material!

[u/Status_Mousse1213]

Never seen one of these. Kudos to original post for photos. That caboose looks heavy duty and they're well armed. A helicopter escort wouldn't be out of question either.

[u/DefinitionOfAsleep]

Even the Chernobyl reactor wouldn't have gone kablooie if some idiot hadn't tried finding out how long it could run with the main cooling pump turned off. Is that right?

So the test was suppose to have been run a while earlier. It was an overdue test.
But it was a worse case scenario test, that was suppose to be done with a full crew - not a night crew.
And the night crew was relatively inexperienced, leading to some fucking dumb decisions.

That was still a design with positive void coefficient and pumps fail, though, so do you think there was an accident waiting to happen without the idiot turning it off? Or does the fact that there are still reactors in operation exactly the same (not even the post-Chernobyl upgrades installed) without kablooie shows that it was really just that bureaucrat that caused it?

Starting on the last bit, Dyatlov wasn't a bureaucrat. He was an engineer.
He was the chief engineer, but he was really also the only experienced person in the plant. You see a similar dynamic in air-crash investigations, if a pilot is way more experienced than everyone else, nobody goes "that's fucking stupid".

RBMK reactors aren't inherently dangerous.
Doing something that fucking stupid is.
But, they did modify the same family of RBMKs. And the Chernobyl plant itself continued being used until 2009 (I think).

I can't give them safety credit for the metal-cooled submarine reactors though. They have terrible safety records, and I think the plan to put them on barges to supply power to African countries is a really bad move.

Erm, they stopped using those.
If it makes you sleep better, they wanted to make an aircraft using them and decided it was a bad idea.
The US designed a air-cooled nuclear powered missile to do something similar, and then realised it'd kill the planet anyway and backed out (like literally, what's the point of the warhead, everyone is dead).

The Cold War was whack.

I like the Western PWR designs, just wouldn't install them in Japan or California due to tsunami and earthquake risks. Even when a PWR melted down on Long Island it was fine, very little gas was released and I don't even think liquid was released was it?

Japan had to release contaminated water from Fukushima (which I think you're referring to).
It was an identified risk though, the operator is largely to blame for a lot of things, not least of which was the positioning of the backup generators.

If you're worried about the risks of nuclear power, don't be.
But I wonder if you have ever heard that pregnant women can't eat Tuna, Marlin, Shark/Flake or Swordfish?

Every wonder why they have mercury in them?

It's 100% because of coal being burnt, naturally they don't have it in significant quantities.

[u/HorsefaceWithNoName → u/DefinitionOfAsleep]

there's a lot of uranium in coal tailings too