It’s still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it’s pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.
Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
It’s been a while since I read about it, but iirc Chernobyl is suspected to have been sabotage because they turned all the safeties off and then basically walked away until it started melting down.
Fukushima was doomed from the start. Iirc they were told not to build the plant there due to extreme earthquake and tsunami risk, but they did it anyway.
Those two disasters were caused by stupidity and negligence. You can argue that humans can’t be trusted with radioactive materials, but the process itself is pretty safe. Meanwhile coal plants release significantly more radiation over their lifetimes than nuclear reactors do.
Sure. They did a test in Chernobyl, with an unexperienced operator. And the plant at Fukushima was there after all, warning ir no warning, so why in hell should that be safe? Ok, next one: Zaporizhzhia. Atomic plant as hostage in a conventional war. Safe? Maybe not, with that whacko as Russian president. They even blew the dam that basically provided the cooling water supply for the plant. Now downvote me again.
btw: Interesting read: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c984l87l2w6o
You can’t separate humans from any process. The risks with nuclear are the risks of the most reliable person to eventually work at the plant. It might not be today or tomorrow, but it’s a possibility.
It’s entirely possible for a natural nuclear reactor to occur. So yes, you can separate humans from the process. Make a reactor that a human can’t reasonably open and has zero chance of melting down, and you have safe nuclear.
Also yes, you can make a reactor that can’t melt down (without human interference). It’s called an RTG and they’re commonly used on spacecraft.
If you could entirely separate humans from the process, then there would be nobody to design and build it.
Then a war starts between a nuclear nation… Oh wait.