[lazyjones]

> I am very concerned for the future of my children that even well educated people (I have these same arguments with my university colleagues) don't realise that.

Perhaps it's not very convincing to claim that "a few potential large nuclear explosions due to accident/malice" aren't as bad as an average temperature increase of 1 degree or so. Certainly seems borderline insane to me.

[kuzehanka]

The worst nuclear accidents that could possibly happen have already happened. We couldn't have a worse nuclear power disaster than Lake Karachay even if we tried on purpose. And yet the sum damage they caused is a negligible blip compared to how many people die due to the use of fossil fuels on any given month of any given year.

The environmental impact of nuclear power vs. fossil fuels or even renewables is just a negligible number no matter how you spin it.

I too am confused like the GP poster as to how otherwise intelligent people just break down into baseless fearmongering about imaginary disaster scenarios while ignoring that today's conventional energy industry is literally thousands of times worse.

If every single operational nuclear power plant had a meltdown incident after operating for 20 years, they'd still be orders of magnitude less damaging than what we're doing today. The environmental impact and safety numbers are just that far apart.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

[lazyjones]

> We couldn't have a worse nuclear power disaster than Lake Karachay even if we tried on purpose.

How can you write such a ridiculous sentence? We have nuclear power plants in the middle of inhabited areas with tens of millions of people who would be immediately affected by an explosion. It's a permanent subject of dispute here in Europe.

> If every single operational nuclear power plant had a meltdown incident after operating for 20 years, they'd still be orders of magnitude less damaging than what we're doing today. The environmental impact and safety numbers are just that far apart

One single accident in Europe would dwarf these inflated WHO numbers.

[kuzehanka]

> We have nuclear power plants in the middle of inhabited areas with tens of millions of people who would be immediately affected by an explosion.

Cite please. The tens of millions affected by a feasible powerplant issue. Explosion is not really in the realm of feasible unless we're talking about bombs or uncontained soviet reactors.

[lazyjones]

I'm sure you will be able to look up the location of active nuclear power plants in central Europe and determine the population figures within the range of impact of an accident like Chernobyl's if you try. Start with Mohovce (largely uncontained and litigation since 2005 or so), Bohunice, Temelin and the large cities nearby...

[Tomte]

Why would we leave out terrorist attacks? Because they destroy your argument?

[kuzehanka]

What would a terrorist do with a nuclear powerplant exactly? We've flown fighter jets into nuclear powerplants to test them[1]. They're protected by armed guards. The US has a nuclear emergency task force ready to fly pumps and generators to any plant. The best attack even a highly resourced terrorist could mount would be to damage the cooling tower and not really make any difference?

If you're imagining some kind of super coordinated military unit taking control of a powerplant yeah sure maybe? They'd be much better used just poisoning the water supply.

This is exactly the kind of baseless fear driven hypothetical sentiment that I'd like to understand.

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3072967/ns/business-check_point/t/...

[v_lisivka]

They can make "dirty bomb". I know some people which had training about how to destroy hostile Western country by using their own radioactive materials.

For example, in 2014, rebels in Donetsk had attempt to create "dirty bomb" using radioactive waste from abandoned chemical plant. Fortunately, they were spotted and stopped.

[jason0597]

A bit off-topic (but still nuclear-related): All that adds big cost to nuclear and makes it less feasible

[wtallis]

A bomb powerful enough to breach reactor containment but small enough to be smuggled past power plant security is already a nuclear bomb in its own right, and would be more effective used against population centers directly.

[tedk-42]

Explosion as in a nuclear one? Really isn't possible. The fissile material isn't pure enough.

I believe graphite rods are used as the safety to capture the neutrons in a nuclear fission reactor and effectively kill off the reaction.

Explosion as in Chernobyl level? That was basically water pressure.

[pfdietz]

Chernobyl had two explosions, a few seconds apart. The second, larger one was after most of the water had left the core. The reactor had a positive void coefficient, so losing water increased reactivity.

Of course these were prompt supercritical reactions in a moderated system, so they are not explosions in the sense of bombs, which are fast systems with neutron doubling times measured in fractions of a microsecond.

[lispm]

far from it. If nuclear fallout had been reached Tokyo, then we would talk about a much greater problem.

[ElBarto]

An accident in a nuclear plant that was constructed in a highly seismic and tsunami-prone area isn't an argument against nuclear power.

I'm sure that Germany can find a more suited location if they wanted...

Anyway, France is peppered with nuclear plants and Germany is right downwind from many of them.

[lispm]

> Anyway, France is peppered with nuclear plants and Germany is right downwind from many of them.

That's why we would like to see some of them being closed immediately.

[Gondolin]

Again, coal related death are of the order of 1-5 millions by year. By contrast the worst estimate for Chernobyl is 200000 deaths.

The closing of germany's reactor, which amount to around 60GWh, if it had been used instead to close coal based plants would have saved around 6000 lives per year. So over 10 years would have saved 60000 lives.

An average temperature increase of 1 degree would not be so bad, it would probably amount for a few million deaths and a few trillion dollar (don't forget the economic cost of displacement due to increased water level, this will concern a lot more km^2 than nuclear exclusion zone). Still worse than nuclear but not orders of magnitude more.

But the Paris agreement is about 2°C more and we are not headed to respect that, we are headed for at last a 3°C increase. This is way way worse than a 1°C increase. I am not joking about billions of death if we reach this point. What is borderline insane is not realizing the impact that climate change is going to have is nothing is done.

And I live near a nuclear plant in France which almost had an accident similar to Fukushima during the 1999 tempest. So it's not like a Nuclear accident would not affect me...

[lazyjones]

> we are headed for at last a 3°C increase. This is way way worse than a 1°C increase. I am not joking about billions of death if we reach this point. What is borderline insane is not realizing the impact that climate change is going to have is nothing is done.

It's beyond borderline insane how people make up these "billions of deaths" numbers with a straight face.

[DennisP]

Then you should read the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, one chapter per degree.

Billions of deaths at three degrees is probably overstating things, but three degrees does bring massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of refugees. At four degrees, billions of deaths doesn't look that unlikely, and it starts getting hard to imagine how modern civilization could survive. More than that is unthinkable.

The book is a decade old but more recent work hasn't improved the outlook at all.

[Gondolin]

Of course I am not stating that billions of death would happen overnight, like if we had a supervolcano explosion.

Instead, it would be gradual, over 20-25 years. But you are right that I am overstating things, when I write billions I think 'between 100 Millions and 1 Billion'. (Recalling that over 25 years, air pollution alone is responsible for around 100 millions deaths). It would depend on the exact temperature change: 3°C or 3.5C.

And total civilisation collapse in unlikely (I hope!), except if there is a feedback factor in global warming and we head for 4°C or more.

[lazyjones]

> Then you should read the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change

No thanks. He's a journalist and political activist, reading his foregone conclusions from selected papers he claims to have read is a waste of time.

[DennisP]

His account matches well with everything else I've seen on the subject. Well-referenced journalism isn't a bad way to get at the truth, right-wing bloviating to the contrary. And you could always look up a sampling of the sources to check up on him.

But of course, sticking with your own forgone conclusions is clearly better.

[vlehto]

"Climatic changes already are estimated to cause over 150,000 deaths annually."

https://www.who.int/heli/risks/climate/climatechange/en/

Ten fold increase over the next century seems believable given that the projected effect has hardly started yet.

[lazyjones]

> Ten fold increase over the next century seems believable given that the projected effect has hardly started yet.

Good example for how these numbers are pulled out of thin air: take an old WHO estimate (which includes Malaria deaths), multiply by 10 for the heck of it and sum over 100 years...

[vlehto]

Predicting the future is always very imprecise. Take a look at the work of Thomas Malthus for taste.

If you want accurate numbers, could you first give accurate numbers of future dangers of nuclear? I want precise calculations based on reality. My hunch is that the number is zero, can you prove otherwise?

I would also appreciate numbers on things like why we have the time to dabble with renewables? Why it's going to be cost effective? How the power storage is solved? And how much land and natural resources are going to be used?