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Imagine a 1970s Lada Niva. It’s boxy, it’s loud, and it lacks modern airbags. Now, imagine that Lada is a nuclear power plant parked on a tectonic fault line. Every time the neighbors try to tow it to the scrapyard, it just coughs a cloud of steam and keeps on chugging.
Welcome to Metsamor, the Armenian Nuclear Power Plant (ANPP).

In the 1970s, most countries shopping for their first nuclear program just took what Westinghouse or GE was selling. South Korea bought the Westinghouse reactors — Kori-1 and Kori-2 — but then also bought a CANDU 6 from Canada.

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Rancho Seco wasn’t killed by a meltdown, a design flaw, or some exotic physics problem. It was killed by a ballot box.

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One of the most serious Soviet naval reactor accidents didn’t occur at power — it occurred during refueling — and it remained largely hidden until after the Soviet Union collapsed.

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If most reactors are clean, disciplined engineering decisions… Atucha I is what happens when a design meeting refuses to end.

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