This one is about the nuclear accidents, and is a record of all the key events during those accidents. It covers the six major disasters in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. This is something which was something more relevant to read with the war going around a nuclear power plant, and thinking about one miscalculation which can lead to another disaster, which will be unfortunate given that both the sides had been witness to one of the worst of the six.
Doesn't make sense to go through a summary of all six here but the main reason which one can gather is that the designs were not perfect. They were/are the best of their times but sometimes even the best is not enough. Some of these designs flaws got aggravated by human error in handling the setup which eventually come to a shape of a disaster followed by evacuation, casualties, and long term after effects.
The science of Nuclear is quite old since we started understanding how we can harness the energy at an atomic and sub-atomic levels. But putting this into action was always a challenge. There were multiple designs which tried to operationalise the whole process but none of them is meltdown proof. In fact, the latest one at Fukushima was caused by a rare (not unforeseen) external cause, tsunami.
There is always a balancing act to find out what factors of safety we can play with. Choosing between a less efficient and more polluting fossil fuel energy against a more efficient and less polluting but with catastrophic long term consequences is not an easy.
But there is optimism in expecting a future technology which will be better controlled (not meltdown proof) which comes with discipline of operations, and prepared for the possible natural or other events.
Peace
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