The real something for nothing

[Spongebob]

All three disasters had profit and cost-cutting as major contributors:
 - Three Mile Island had a poor design and poor training because the alternatives would have cost money.
 - Fukushima was built in where they knew tsunami was a serious risk because it offered cheap access to coolant water. Various design flaws were flagged decades before the incident but never fixed because it would have cost money. Both TEPCO and the Japanese government has admitted their failings in this respect.
 - Chernobyl is the epitome of cost-cutting leading to disaster. Corners were cut so ridiculously that the reactor lacked primary containment and had graphite moderators wed to the control rods. It was designed to fail.

Ostensibly, these things could be argued, but they are not the direct cause of any of those issues.  The designs used were the industry standard at the time.  You can't argue that a design was used to save money when it's the RAGAGEP, Recognized And Generally Accepted Good Engineering Practices.  Fukushima's issue was NOT where it was located; it was the emergency cooling system design.  It was designed such that if the pumps were flooded, they would fail and emergency cooling water would fail to flow.  Since the plant was built, there have been passive cooling systems designed.  These don't require power to dump cooling water.  You could argue it was because of costs that they didn't retrofit the plant with new technology, but then you are just arguing everything in the world is based on money.  And no, Chernobyl was not due to cost cutting.  Read about it.  It was a procedural mistake.  Basically you're just arguing that if a plant is not always fitted with the most recent technology that it's because of costs and that's not a realistic way of looking at it.

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But nuclear fusion has far more potential to provide clean energy if we can ever get it past the vapor ware stage.

Probably not what you wanted to focus on in your thread, but if we can get fusion to work-- that's it. Our energy problems are solved for at least dozens of generations. It might even be solved indefinitely provided we keep an eye on the global population.

But fusion itself is a big "if"...

Yes, fusion is the holy grail of energy production.  Despite it being beyond our grasp, it's potential makes it worth trying, despite what some bozos here seem to believe.

Not that I'll ever see it, but I believe there are even greater sources of energy that we've yet to discover, but that's for generations far in the future to discuss.

I read a lot about geothermal back when I was a teenager, but for some reason it hasn't risen above niche supply.  Not sure why this is so.  That is a very clean and steady source of energy.  Little to no environmental impact.  Also, I've seen numerous designs for harnessing air power that don't involve giant spinning blades.  I'm quite interested in these because they can be small and each home could have it's own.

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Yeah, fuck what all those engineers and scientists think. Debbie has it all figured out 

https://physicsworld.com/a/how-green-is-nuclear-energy/

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

https://sciencing.com/about-6134607-nucl...-fuel.html

What's his solution again? oh yeah something that's been debunked since the early 19th century 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...ill-wrong/

But don't you know, all those scientists types are just part of the child porn shadow government.  Their primary goal is to feed us all Soylent Green!