The video says the replacements were sometimes things like wind turbines. These tend to kill birds.
These RTGs seem quite impressive actually. Simple and easy to construct, if you have a nuclear industry. They survived for decades of being completely abandoned in a society falling apart. The biggest risk was only to people who literally broke in and stole them. There were no construction accidents creating and maintaining endless thousands of kilometers of transmission cables, no dead birds or dead maintenance engineers trying to repair a huge non-solid-state device in the middle of a Russian storm, the lighthouses presumably saved many lives and were cheap enough to build that the embattled USSR could afford to do so.
I wouldn't be surprised if a full lifecycle cost/benefit analysis that took into account the alternatives ended up being strongly positive in favour of this technology.
The video says the replacements were sometimes things like wind turbines. These tend to kill birds.
These RTGs seem quite impressive actually. Simple and easy to construct, if you have a nuclear industry. They survived for decades of being completely abandoned in a society falling apart. The biggest risk was only to people who literally broke in and stole them. There were no construction accidents creating and maintaining endless thousands of kilometers of transmission cables, no dead birds or dead maintenance engineers trying to repair a huge non-solid-state device in the middle of a Russian storm, the lighthouses presumably saved many lives and were cheap enough to build that the embattled USSR could afford to do so.
I wouldn't be surprised if a full lifecycle cost/benefit analysis that took into account the alternatives ended up being strongly positive in favour of this technology.