Comment by Kon5ole
12 hours ago
>The Banqiao dam failure killed 250,000 people in a single incident.
The incident was a typhoon that caused 60 dam failures in a densely populated area prone to flooding. Estimates range from 26000 to 240000 people dead, but rationally one has to assume the typhoon would have caused some damage in these areas even without the dams.
So claiming this was a single hydro dam causing 250 000 dead is hardly rational.
If you live in a narrow valley downstream from a dam you are aware of the danger. You as an individual can take action to protect yourself. If you live upstream by even 10 feet you are in no danger at all from the dam.
With nuclear, people in Scotland are in danger from a plant in the Ukraine, can't do anything to protect themselves from it, and have to live with the consequences for 30+ years. That's much worse by any metric.
Deepwater horizon was bad, but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl or Fukushima. Also it wasn't a power plant, not even indirectly as oil is mostly used for transportation, not electricity. Chernobyl and Fukushima were power plants.
So again, there is just no comparison between nuclear plants and any other power plant. Nuclear really does have a unique level of risk.
Risk is often defined as consequence x likelihood, and for nuclear the consequence is immense. Meaning effort has to be spent keeping the likelihood extremely small, in order for the risk to be low.
This has to be accepted and considered in any discussion about nuclear power. Pretending it doesn't exist is not rational.
> The incident was a typhoon that caused 60 dam failures in a densely populated area prone to flooding.
So we're not counting natural disasters that cause power infrastructure failure? I take it you don't consider the events of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami to be a nuclear accident then.
> With nuclear, people in Scotland are in danger from a plant in the Ukraine, can't do anything to protect themselves from it, and have to live with the consequences for 30+ years. That's much worse by any metric.
And people in Scotland are in substantially greater danger from the emissions of coal plants in China, and will be until the world stops burning coal.
> Deepwater horizon was bad, but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl or Fukushima.
It was much worse in terms of environmental impact, particularly the area impacted.
> Also it wasn't a power plant
I don't see any reason to limit the discussion to electrical power plants.
> Risk is often defined as consequence x likelihood
I was being generous in only looking at consequences without considering likelihood. The consequences are no worse than the dominant alternatives, but the likelihood has been astronomically less, hence Nuclear has been the safest power source ever utilized by mankind. So yes, in a way nuclear's risk is unique - uniquely low. I fully agree this should be accepted and considered in any discussion.