| > The practical difference is that I think there should be further research to design inherently safe approaches and processes to reduce the risk until it's orders of magnitude safer In practice this attitude makes you pro-coal (but not in a dogmatic way). In the real world, waiting for things to improve before pulling the trigger means using what's currently used until then. That has costs. What's the energy source that's most dangerous? The common sense answer is nuclear (probably because of nuclear bombs first, Chernobyl second). Some clever people might argue about coal given its high emission output. But at least by death count, the winner is clearly hydro power. Mostly due to the Banqiao Dam incident [1] which directly killed 26,000 people and indirectly killed 145,000. Of course, that incident is a mess of stupid decision after stupid decision and some might want to claim that it's an outlier. To that I will reply that the same can be said of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima (as well as every other hydro incident[2]). The fact is that the world is full of stupid. I predict that in the future there will be some solar power company that figures out how to kill a bunch of people with a battery fire. And yet, that won't change anything to my support of hydropower or solar power. Nuclear safety is a minor issue compared to its advantages over coal and other fossil fuels. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_... |