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Comment by pinkmuffinere

16 hours ago

> Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.

Is this really true? We seem to have a pretty large disaster perhaps every 15-20 years (3 mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima), which makes me think that it is either correctly- or under- regulated. Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…

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pinkmuffinere

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Moldoteck  8 hours ago

In Fukushima zero people died from radiation. If we regulated everything to a similar point (cars, planes, fossils), you'll start living like a monk. Fossils aren't just worse but orders of magnitude worse

hdgvhicv  15 hours ago

Fukushima killled a couple of people? More died that day from car crashes.

  • myrmidon  2 hours ago

    This is incorrect and naive.

    Fukushima prefecture itself counts a total of ~2100 disaster related deaths of which ~1350 are "nuclear plant related". This is somewhat of an upper bound with lots of indirect deaths mainly as a result of having to evacuate an entire city, but the nuclear meltdown was a major component of making the tsunami disaster significantly worse (locally).

    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...

  • ppsreejith  14 hours ago

    You're right but this seems difficult to estimate. From the wikipedia* article:

    > ... Despite this, there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out. ...Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds.

    > ...For evacuation, the estimated number of deaths during and immediately after transit ranges from 34 to "greater than 50". The victims include hospital inpatients and elderly people at nursing facilities who died from causes such as hypothermia, deterioration of underlying medical problems, and dehydration. The old people and already sick, were more likely to be injured because of being relocated than damaged by radiation.

    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...

    • hdgvhicv  14 hours ago

      So a couple of orders of magnitude below the number of deaths caused by things like car crashes in Japan in a single year.

    • Moldoteck  8 hours ago

      Per UN no deaths are recorded nor will be recorded due to the low dose.

      Evacuation wasn't necessary, govt enforced it deliberately. If ppl weren't evacuated in such a rush(or not at all), they would have been fine

      The low dosage claim is shady considering we have parts of the world with higher natural background radiation and in some cases cancer rates are lower there

      Still, even by wildest estimations nr is fairly low

azan_  15 hours ago

> Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…

It is what we want to replace with nuclear power, so that's exactly the bar we should jump over. So let's say it: all of these disasters did not cause even 1/1000 as many deaths as coal power plants.

  • pinkmuffinere  15 hours ago

    I agree coal power plants are much worse. As an aside, I’m not convinced that’s the bar we need to clear. I would think we need to be safer than solar power, since that’s the source that’s actually growing rapidly. If we’re going to add new power generation, I think it’s probably a trade off between nuclear and solar.

    And anyways this isn’t the claim I was disagreeing with — the parent claim is that nuclear is regulated “beyond what's necessary to ensure safety”. I just don’t think that’s the case. As dramatic as it sounds, we regularly have nuclear disasters.