Are you aware that the Fukushima reactor was actually 6 years older than Chernobyl?
Chernobyl's RBMK design is so dangerous that I'd call it borderline criminal - the experiments done in the night of the accident were the apex of recklessness, and the government's response was.... well, Sovietic.
Of course no matter how well you design it, people will fuck up and use it the wrong way and ignore maintenances and safety margins. And this only accounts extreme stupidity and dysfunctional management - it does not even consider deliberate attempts to blow the damn thing up (actually the Chernobyl tests could be considered that, but i mean an absolute nightmare scenario like a takeover by technically competent terrorists)
Which is why you need to take all these chances into account, add a level 9 tsunami, a comet, a once in 100000 years quake, Godzilla, a zombie apocalypse, Stuxnet, wanacry, the second coming of Christ, the Rapture, North Korea, Dr Strangelove and a dangerously bored Trump, and you engineer everything to be still impossible to blow up.
Which is what we have actually been doing. They're not getting built because certifying a new design is horribly expensive, and the anti-nuclear opposition would limit their deployment, making them anti economical, but no, we haven't stopped improving them.
Unfortunately we still run the old ones, which, like a car built in the 60s, would be so much less safe to not even be legal nowadays, but you need to take into account that they're on the road.
China is deploying some new ones, and that might cause them to be adopted in the western world (I hope).
We badly need something to bridge the gap between now and when renewables+batteries can completely fulfill demand, because meanwhile fossile fuel plants get deployed instead, and we are really fucking up the planet with those.
Chernobyl's RBMK design is so dangerous that I'd call it borderline criminal - the experiments done in the night of the accident were the apex of recklessness, and the government's response was.... well, Sovietic.
Of course no matter how well you design it, people will fuck up and use it the wrong way and ignore maintenances and safety margins. And this only accounts extreme stupidity and dysfunctional management - it does not even consider deliberate attempts to blow the damn thing up (actually the Chernobyl tests could be considered that, but i mean an absolute nightmare scenario like a takeover by technically competent terrorists)
Which is why you need to take all these chances into account, add a level 9 tsunami, a comet, a once in 100000 years quake, Godzilla, a zombie apocalypse, Stuxnet, wanacry, the second coming of Christ, the Rapture, North Korea, Dr Strangelove and a dangerously bored Trump, and you engineer everything to be still impossible to blow up.
Which is what we have actually been doing. They're not getting built because certifying a new design is horribly expensive, and the anti-nuclear opposition would limit their deployment, making them anti economical, but no, we haven't stopped improving them.
Unfortunately we still run the old ones, which, like a car built in the 60s, would be so much less safe to not even be legal nowadays, but you need to take into account that they're on the road.
China is deploying some new ones, and that might cause them to be adopted in the western world (I hope).
We badly need something to bridge the gap between now and when renewables+batteries can completely fulfill demand, because meanwhile fossile fuel plants get deployed instead, and we are really fucking up the planet with those.