[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.

[coldtea]

>Um. This isn't something where you can just run your reactor in different configurations at test time and run time.

No, but lying and having experts being, ahem flexible, about the expected safety is very easy, and par for the course when selling multi-billion dollar projects...

It's also very easy to ignore "black swan" event cases, and the potential impact to millions of lives, just because you think you've covered everything there is to cover.

[saulrh]

Chernobyl was just about the worst possible outcome of a nuclear disaster: The majority of the radiological material was swept up in a cloud of graphite dust and lofted into the upper atmosphere by a fire that burned, uncontrolled, for over a week. Fukushima happened in one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. And yet, even counting those, Nuclear is still the safest energy source we have. We can talk about black swans and fudging the estimates, and I'll admit that your line of argument would be stronger if we were talking about the very first reactors to be built, when they were still just blueprints.

But that's not the case. We have real-world evidence that we can use to calibrate our expectations against reality. The fact is that, even if you count Chernobyl and Fukushima, our existing reactors are safer than fossil fuels. And I think that you would have an exceedingly difficult time arguing that newly-built reactors would be less safe than existing reactors.

[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

[coldtea]

At least damns damage only the area relatively near them. The implications of a nuclear catastrophe can impact thousands of miles around, including major cities.

[saulrh]

Dams are built on large rivers. Inundations resulting from dam failures tend to follow the path of the river. Cities are also built near large rivers. The Banqiao Dam failure displaced fifteen times as many people as the Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi disasters combined. The impending failure of the Mosul Dam is projected to do the same.