Comment by Kon5ole

>No, I'm not. Pick whatever estimate of deaths from Chernobyl you like.

That's the lawyer definition though - because some 50 people sacrificed their lives and because we spent 600 billion euros on remedies during the first 30 years, nobody can prove how bad it might have been.

But scientists will tell you how much caesium and iodine was released per day of that fire burning, the force of the steam explosion that might have been, how close it was to the contaminate the ground water supply and so on.

Then doctors will tell you how that would affect the people living in the fallout areas, and for how long the ground and food supply would be affected.

So if you let go of the lawyer definition, estimates are easily in the double-digit million dead.

Which we risked for a grand total of 28 TWh of electricity produced from Chernobyl.

And that's the bigger point here - even if the risks were way less than they actually are, the payoff is not worth it. Electricity generation causes less than 1/4 of the co2 emissions in the US - road transportation alone is a larger source.

Nuclear is not and never was a solution to global warming. Best case it helps of course, but only until something happens like Fukushima or Chernobyl. The billions spent on those two incidents alone would have had a bigger effect if they were spent subsidizing electric cars, solar panels, battey production and such.