Comment by jerome-jh
5 months ago
From the top of my head, for about 300 nuclear power plants around the globe, there have been 3 core meltdown accidents. It is a 1% catastrophic failure rate. It is quite bad!
Whatever the circumstances of these accidents, human nature and unexpected events allowed them to occur. Just like every accident, you can say after the fact they could have been avoided. However it is impossible to revert the consequences of a core meltdown at human time scale.
I am not anti-nuclear at all. But I certainly wonder what kind of organization is required to operate it safely.
Meanwhile coal power alone is causing 60 deaths per day (20k per year). And that’s a conservative NIH number, not a biased nuclear industry estimate.
3 meltdowns in the past 60 years with minimal loss of life (even including Chernobyl, an outlier for so many reasons), is a massively safer alternative than the status quo.
See my brown bear vs car comparison above/below.
Also, solar causes less deaths, according to your counting method.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Analogy doesn’t work, it’s deaths per TWhour that matter.
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Solar, wind, and nuclear are all within error of each other in that counting. Three points on that:
1. Almost ALL of that is due to Chernobyl, which has to be recognized as an outlier for multiple reasons. Both in that it should never have happened, and that had they a containment shield it wouldn’t have been any worse than 3MI or Fukushima.
2. Both wind and solar have a lot of industrial and resource extraction costs & pollution that are not being counted here.
3. Land use and environmental impact are a far worse story for wind and solar.
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Total amount of reactor*years so far is roughly 20000. 3 core meltdowns amounts for 0.015% per reactor per year.