Comment by Kon5ole
2 days ago
>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).
No, I'm not. Pick whatever estimate of deaths from Chernobyl you like. Take the highest, most unreasonable estimate. It's still true. And yes, _now_ we have other options. In 1960 we didn't. We have nearly a century of carbon emissions and particulate deaths that were unnecessary. There are literally _millions_ of premature deaths every year as a result of fossil fuel particulate emissions.
Nuclear may not be the best option anymore (I'm skeptical that an ideal power generation mix doesn't include more nuclear than we currently have, but agree that it probably shouldn't be the primary source anymore), that doesn't change the fact that not using it for past 80+ years as our primary energy generation source was a huge civilizational blunder.