Comment by Tepix
16 hours ago
Is it unnecessary burden? We've had major nuclear accidents despite regulations and that was before 9/11 and dron wars.
16 hours ago
Is it unnecessary burden? We've had major nuclear accidents despite regulations and that was before 9/11 and dron wars.
What's the fatality rate per GWh of civilian nuclear power in the US vs. other forms of power generation?
Nuclear and renewables are far, far safer than fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels and biomass kill many more people than nuclear and modern renewables per unit of electricity. Coal is, by far, the dirtiest.
https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#safety-of-nuclear-...
Are you rhetorically or actually asking? I'd guess significantly lower than coal and gas, and in the ballpark of (but still higher than) solar and wind combined (in the expected value, i.e. probability of a Chernobyl-like disaster times the death toll of that).
No member of the public has died from civilian nuclear power in the US. Significantly more people have died installing solar panels by falling off of roofs.
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Tiring with arbitrary limitations to exclude major accidents of a fleet in the hundreds.
The difference between renewables and nuclear power is who gets harmed.
When dealing with nuclear accidents entire populations are forced into life changing evacuations, if all goes well.
For renewables the only harm that comes are for the people who has chosen to work in the industry. And the workplace hazards are the same as any other industry working with heavy things and electric equipment.
> For renewables the only harm that comes are for the people who has chosen to work in the industry.
We are definitively not including hydro power and their dam projects in that category.
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> When dealing with nuclear accidents entire populations are forced into life changing evacuations, if all goes well.
There have been multiple nuclear accidents in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_t...
Which of them resulted in "entire populations [] forced into life changing evacuations"? Which ones were the implied something worse than that and what happened then?
> For renewables the only harm that comes are for the people who has chosen to work in the industry.
Solar panels are essentially semiconductors. "Silicon valley" is called that because they used to actually make such things there. You can tell from the number of superfund sites.
"The newer ones are safer" has a certain symmetry to it, right?
> And the workplace hazards are the same as any other industry working with heavy things and electric equipment.
Those things are actually the dangerous things though? There were no fatalities from Three Mile Island but a plant worker at a nuclear power plant in Arkansas was killed and several others injured when a crane collapsed and a generator fell on them. Power company line workers have a worse-than-average fatality rate from getting electrocuted.
The definition of “major accident” used in nuclear is orders of magnitude more strict than in any other industries though, which distort the picture.
The worst nuclear accident involving a nuclear plant (Chernobyl, which occurred in a country without regulation for all intent and purpose) killed less people than the food processing industry cause every year (and I'm not counting long term health effect of junk food, just contamination incidents in the processing units leading to deadly intoxications of consumers).
In countries with regulations there's been 2 “major accidents”: TMI killed no one, Fukushima killed 1 guy and injured 24, in the plant itself. In any industries that would be considered workplace safety violation, not “major accident”… And it occurred in the middle of, and because, a tsunami which killed 19000!
I'm actually happy this regulation exist because that's why there ate so little accidents, but claiming that it's still hazardous despite the regulations is preposterous.
I am pretty sure we dont need to evacuate large areas and keep sarcofag over former food processing plants.
The chernobyl was poisoning Russian soldiers by the start of Ukrainian invasion when they were dumb enough to sleep there.
Your "large area" is actually tiny, and the solution is to... not go there. Yeah, all you have to do is not go to a very specific tiny area in Ukraine. I think that's quite easily manageable.
As usual, when such things are mentioned, you lack any and all sense of scale and statistics. Just pure fearmongering.
Look at the number of all nuclear plants over their entire lifetime and divide their benefits by the cost of what, the two or three major incidents you can think of? This simple calculation alone makes your arguments utterly ridiculous. We accept 1000x the risk and cost of that on a daily basis, in e.g. driving, gas and coal plants.
Go ahead and evacuate to get away from the negative effects of soot, tire dust, CO2, and all the other fun pollution that's spread out over the entire atmosphere. Good luck living on Mars.
> I am pretty sure we dont need to evacuate large areas and keep sarcofag over former food processing plants.
If we only tolerated the same long term risk level for food, you wouldn't be be eating anything but organic vegetables. The fact that we put a sarcophagus to prevent material from leaking is just the reflection of the accepted limits. Flint water crisis was much more dangerous than leaving Chernobyl without the latest sarcophagus but nobody cared for a decade.
> The chernobyl was poisoning Russian soldiers by the start of Ukrainian invasion
The stories of acute radiation poisoning have been debunked repeatedly, there simply isn't enough radioactive material left there to cause such symptoms (it's still a very bad idea to eat mushrooms or the meat of wild animals living there, you'd risk long term cancer, but nothing close to acute radiation poisoning, it's simply not possible from a physics standpoint).
And again, we're talking about an accident that happened in Soviet Union on a reactor absolutely not designed with safety in mind and with a Soviet party member who threatened the engineers into bypassing safety mechanism in order to operate outside of the design domain of the plant. And the resulting accident was nowhere near close to the Bhopal catastrophe.
Chemical site have deadly accidents every other years and nobody seems to care but they'll obsess about nuclear ones even when they barely kill anyone. And chemical plants accident do leave long lasting pollution with durable health effect, but we don't permanently evacuate the places because we tolerate the risk.