[drvd]

If a dam burst it kill a lot of people in short time. And 36 hours later rebuilding the infrastructure and towns begins.

If a reactor bursts it might not kill lots of people but it will devastate a large area for a very long time. We still do not know internal details about the Fukushima reactors because not even robots can go there.

A dam burst is a nightmare but it is a nightmare which is easy to clean up afterwards. A reactor catastrophe is a nightmare nobody knows how to clean up at all.

[mseebach]

Not quite. The majority of deaths from the Banqiao Dam burst was from subsequent epidemics and famine. The 11 million displaced also weren't exactly spending three nights in a hotel, then going home.

The construction of the Three Gorges (2012) dam flooded 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages, as well as 1,300 archaeological sites, and caused relocation of 1.24m citizens -- this is permanent and was done entirely on purpose, planned years in advance. Fukushima (2011) has a 20km exclusion zone that is now gradually being reopened a few years later, and 100,000 persons are still displaced.

One of these are acceptable collateral damage in the battle against climate change and the other is so bad that it constitutes conclusive evidence of the fundamental futility of the very technology itself. But you need to drink a lot of koolaid to see which is which on face value.

[fusiongyro]

Water is less scary than uranium. I agree with you, but it seems to be futile to convince people because there's just more movies about the harm of radiation than deaths by flooding. They keep rebuilding New Orleans and living in coastal Florida too.

[mseebach]

There's a chicken-and-egg situation here -- people are never going to get comfortable with nuclear while politicians are leading the FUD-charge.

[x0x0]

Yet we keep being told, "Oh no, it's safe this time. Really." and then Fukushima happens. Not to mention cleanup costs that started at $50B are now estimated to surpass $0.2T. I would be surprised if they don't double a couple more times before all is said and done, and that's fractions of a trillion dollars.

[mseebach]

Because compared to the cost of climate change, really is was safe this time, even after Fukushima. And a substantial fraction of the cost is due to extreme, very likely unwarranted caution, motivated by an unreasonable level of, exactly, fear.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/13/is-it-sa...

[fusiongyro]

The point I'm trying to make is that every system has risks and externalities, but for some reason they only get added up when we're talking about nuclear.