Or various equipment malfunctions and employee errors. Or are humans infallible now?
The number of safety backups in place is good enough to make both equipment AND human error highly unlikely.
Let me put it this way: You would be very hard pressed to break a nuclear power plant by yourself.
Dave, have a word with yourself.
Why? Are you saying that I should know that you can break a nuclear power plant with ease?
I'm saying that stating the blindingly obvious isn't helping to move the debate along. Especially when it isn't relevant.
I'm not sure there is a debate.
All forms of energy production will destroy the environment around the power plant if something goes wrong. (or as a normal effect of operation.) Singling out one is just pointless.
No, what you said is an individual would have a hard time breaking a power plant.
Anyhoo, all forms of power change an environment. I think 'destroy' is a strong word. More like changes. Take the hydro plant in China. The three gorges dam. Seems like a reasonable way to harness 'clean power'. But it actually changes the local weather.
http://esd.lbl.gov/files/about/staff/normanmiller/MillerJinTsang-GRL22Aug05.pdfEnvironmentalists are up in arms. But realisitically, they got exactly what they asked for and then weren't happy.
Energy by its nature is harnessed by a rate of change. So something has to happen and you need to leech a bit of that to store power. So you can't complain when something changes. Coal into soot, uranium into a depleted isotope, the distribution of water in an area, the local wind near a wind farm. The key is just to find the solution that will bother you the least. and most of the time, that's nuclear.