Comment by Kon5ole
20 hours ago
You are making a common mistake, your source does only considers things that have happened, not things that could happen. But we know what could happen, which is why the security standards have to be high for nuclear power.
A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions. We can imagine reasonable numbers of accidents and still be sure that it would be dramatically safer than fossil fuels, even ignoring climate change.
And the land rendered uninhabitable would represent less land lost than is expected to be lost from sea level rise, most of which will be extremely hi-value coastal areas.
There is no way you can run the numbers where nuclear, even with dramatically reduced safety standards, is not preferable to fossil fuels. By making it so expensive with such heavy regulations, all we have done is forced ourselves to use the worse-in-all-possible ways fuel source for most of a century, causing millions of premature deaths and untold billions in environmental damages.
Over-regulation of nuclear is high up on the list of greatest civilizational blunders humanity has ever made.
>A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions
This is not true. You are using the lawyers definition of damage from Chernobyl, but the doctor's definition for fossil fuels. Chernobyl was much worse than you believe, but I don't expect to change your mind on that point here.
But why are you arguing as if it's either nuclear power or global warming?
China has added the equivalent of 25 nuclear power plants worth of solar generation yearly for the past couple of years. Not even China is able to build nuclear plants faster than in 5-6 years or so - it takes too many workers, too much resources. It's too little and too slow to make a difference.
Efen if you believe it is safe, Nuclear is clearly a roadblock, or a detour. We should instead build storage and solar, which can add orders of magnitude more power in shorter time.
(But even then we'll have to deal with global warming).
If you did what nuclear fans did and tried to cover most/all of the load with nuclear, you would necessarily need to build more nuclear power plants, which esp. in Europe would automatically put them closer to population. That would automatically increase the lives lost from catastrophies.