[electricEmu]

Well, damming rivers turned out to be a bad idea in cases so (Washington State)[https://relay.nationalgeographic.com/proxy/distribution/publ...] is undoing them. Wind turbines require surmounting large technical hurdles with storing energy. Solar takes a lot of resources/space. Heck, in 50 years we might be in a dust bowl and solar doesn't even work.

Why would you suggest we prevent using all appropriate options at our disposal? Why not push for using a different type of fuel instead?

I didn't grow up during the nuclear scare times. Fukushima wasn't great, but it wasn't so horrific either. If it gets us off coal and natural gas then I'm down.

[mikelyons]

Fukushima isn't over, we don't know what it will have done in the next 50 years yet.

[saulrh]

Estimates of excess deaths due to nuclear, counting chernobyl, are the lowest of any energy technology. This isn't even counting the part where no new nuclear reactor could possibly be as unsafe as Chernobyl or Fukushima in the same way that no modern car could be as unsafe as as a car from the 1960s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U

[mikelyons]

There are fates worse than death.

[TeMPOraL]

Don't go there, unless you want to talk about the lives of coal miners.

[baldfat]

My grandfather's dad died in the coal mines. They dropped his body off on the sidewalk infron of the house. His mother married two more times and the other husbands also died in the mine. My grandfather then worked from age 7 to 21 in the mines. He died at 88 from Black Lung induced Lung Cancer.

Yeah coal mining sucks.

[coldtea]

>This isn't even counting the part where no new nuclear reactor could possibly be as unsafe as Chernobyl or Fukushima

That's what they say after every accident too. "This time, with the new designs, it's different".

[opo]

A dangerous plant design like Chernobyl would have been illegal to build in any western country, so not sure why you think it is relevant to any other country. Accidents from hydroelectric plants have killed orders of magnitude more people than even the largest estimates of deaths from Fukushima (or even Chernobyl) - are you also opposed to hydroelectric power?

[tibarun]

https://r3---sn-5hnedn7s.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expir...

[fnord123]

Lying about diesel emissions is also illegal. Whoops!

[saulrh]

Um. This isn't something where you can just run your reactor in different configurations at test time and run time. The technology has come a long way since the 1960s and the math and science have advanced transformatively. Building an unsafely non-compliant nuclear plant would be like building a diesel car and then trying to tell the regulators that it's electric. You can do some fudging, sure, but things like the sign of the void coefficient are effectively impossible to lie about.

[dotancohen]

And it is different. Cars still crash, but for any given crash speed ťhe survivability of any given class of car is two orders or magnitude better than its 1950s counterpart.

[15155]

Which "new designs" have failed catastrophically?

[coldtea]

The recipe for the catastrophe is design + time, so it's not like "new designs have fewer failures" offers much comfort. Of course they would.

Plus, previous installations had fewer potential non-design-related issues, such as terrorism, which (in today's nihilistic "more possible damage, including innocents and even myself" way) wasn't as much a thing in the 60s and 70s.

[saulrh]

If you want to talk risk-of-terrorism, look at dams, not nuke plants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

[ploxiln]

... very likely less than coal power plants will have done.

[mikelyons]

Agreed, I'm not pro-nuclear in opposition to coal. But good point.

[coldtea]

>Why would you suggest we prevent using all appropriate options at our disposal?

He already answered that: because not all options are appropriate.