[JohnHaugeland]

The Fukushima cleanup, unique in history and resulting from radically unlikely natural disasters, cost less than half what the fuel it replaced that decade would have

This is without considering the cost of climate change or all those prevented deaths

[natmaka]

The tsunami was the secondary cause, and believing that no-one could predict such a tsunami is misleading.

Proof: another nuclear plant was less distant from the tsunami and survived, because someone (Y. Hirai) foresaw it and could impose his views: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...

The hard truth is: even a predictable cause can trigger a disaster. And many aren't predictable.

Fukushima is by many criteria a "lucky" case, as many reactors were properly shutdown when the wave came, operators reacted globally adequately...

The question isn't "is a disaster possible?" but "when, and of which magnitude?".

This patently insufficient ability to foresee also sheds a light towards the "we know that dangerous nuclear waste will not be a problem for anyone during the next 100000 years or so".

Renewables can do the trick without all those threats.

[JohnHaugeland]

Your stories notwithstanding, every renewable deployment in history has failed to reach zero carbon.

 

> The question isn't "is a disaster possible?" but "when, and of which magnitude?".

Yeah. And solar out-kills nuclear by a factor of nearly 20.

Your problem is that you're trying to consider nuclear in isolation, with no null hypothesis.

Every single replacement causes more death and more radioactive waste, no exceptions, even when you fold in the worst nuclear disasters in history.

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> Fukushima is by many criteria a "lucky" case

This is an absurd and incorrect viewpoint. Please do not hold yourself forwards as knowledgeable in these matters.

The Fukushima design was well known to be flawed, and the United States had been suing Japan to shut it down for ten years before this happened.

The seawall did not meet Japan's national standards.

You might as well call Union Carbide lucky. Go be an apologist on someone else's time.

[natmaka]

> every renewable deployment in history has failed to reach zero carbon.

No energy production mean reached zero carbon. Nuclear is far from this goal and cannot attain it on any financially realistic way.

Even France, which produces most of its electricity using nuclear reactors since the 90's, couldn't. Proof (red surfaces represent fossil fuels used for electricity production in France): https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/editi...

In France the 'nuclear success story' led to a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") stating that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewable sources must replace it.

The fraction of consumed energy produced by renewables is booming, even in good old Europe. Proof: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/nrg_ind_ured/...

Overall there is a working and more and more adopted way to build future energy systems... and another one...: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...

> solar out-kills nuclear

This is false, as any serious meta-study shows: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Moreover those victims are past ones, and a new major nuclear disaster may cause many victims while solar-panels induced major disasters aren't even possible.

[pydry]

Every nuclear disaster is unique yet nobody is willing to bet on any of them being the last. Fukushima was also unique in that it caused coal usage to skyrocket in Japan - a problem Germany is not currently suffering from.

To me, the way to prove that something ISNT safe is to shout loudly about how safe it is and to absolutely refuse to shoulder the costs of anything going wrong.

This is what the nuclear industry does and the government backs them.

[JohnHaugeland]

> Every nuclear disaster is unique

No nuclear disaster in history has added up to a bad single bus accident.

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> and to absolutely refuse to shoulder the costs of anything going wrong. \n This is what the nuclear industry does

This is, of course, the exact opposite of true. Nuclear power is the only kind of power expected to carry full disaster insurance (not even dams, which have death counts in the six digits.)

[natmaka]

Victims: there are dissenting opinions, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

No, nuclear isn't fully insured, in any nation (there are funds, providing for damages up to a low-caped total amount).

Power-producing dams failures are very rare and preventable, and albeit they are way more numerous and old than nuclear reactors the history path is clear: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

> dams, which have death counts in the six digits

This Banqiao case is a fluke, in similar conditions anything would go boom with way less latency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301436

[JohnHaugeland]

> Victims: there are dissenting opinions

Nobody cares. There's truth.

No evidence exists of these fictional things you're trying to discuss.

Anti-vaxxers speculate that vaccines secretly killed millions of people. That seems absurd, no? Like. We'd be able to find them?

Then why does this seem any different?

We're able to find evidence of deaths from 20,000 years ago, in caves, buried under 500 feet of dirt

Why can't any of the anti-nukes find any evidence of these giant mysterious waves of death during our lifetime?

When do you apply skepticism?

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> Power-producing dams failures are very rare and preventable

Dude ... no.

Go learn about Banqiao, which alone killed more than 10x as many people as all non-hydro energy disasters of all kinds put together.

Dams are the single most common form of power source failure by nearly two orders of magnitude.

Six of them have happened in the last ten years, five of those in first world countries.

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> This Banqiao case is a fluke

No, it's not. There are three other six figure death rates from dams, as well as 55 five figure and almost 800 four figure.

They fit the Zipf distribution essentially perfectly.

Also, holy shit, Chernobyl actually was.

Get it together. You're making things up.

[natmaka]

Russia's demographics show surges of deaths during this period, there is no doubt about it. The causes are a matter of polemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#After_W...

Russian Academicians publish a scientific meta-study about Russia, let me prefer this over "JohnHaugeland" bluntly pretending "nobody cares".

Past victims statistics: I referenced Ourworldindata's work, their detailed work seems pretty clear to me and you didn't propose any counter-argument

Banqiao: the perspective ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301436 ) seems clear to me, "no it's not" is IMHO, at best, a rather weak counter-argument.

[JohnHaugeland]

I'm not interested in holding a discussion with someone who denies the Banqiao dam burst deaths, and wants to take unsourced blog statistics by a single dude over the World Health Organization and the United Nations

I am not interested in someone who says "here's a list of numbers, the United Nations must be wrong, the causes are a matter of polemics."

Polemics are generic archetypal verbal attacks. The United Nation's health statistics do not get interpreted in terms of verbal attacks.

You make vague references to "Russian academicians" and claim they said things, but don't provide evidence. The Russian academics still haven't admitted Kyshtym happened.

There is a point at which if someone listens to clowns but not the world's authorities, they and everything they believe should just be discarded without further commentary

The science is clear: arguing with an anti-vaxxer or a flat earther just drives them further into their delusion. The common sense is also clear: the regular person does not get satisfaction, but rather more frustration, at the end. The current position of psychology is that the reason anti-vaxxers exist is that they have genuinely mis-identified their addiction to argument as being seen as knowledgeable, and that even when legitimate experts show up with evidence, their unwillingness to budge convinces them that they're even righter. They really think this makes them look good.

Psychology currently frames this as the result of severe self doubt, as "you need to argue with me so that I can show myself that I could win."

Of course I'm not going to waste my time arguing with someone who denies basic facts, and refers vaguely to evidence they haven't provided. Nobody should. That's how you get flat earthers.

Deniers don't deserve argument, and trying to talk to them like normal people hurts them mentally.

[krageon]

> radically unlikely

It's an island nation, and we're calling a tsunami "radically unlikely"? Given the time frames involved in cleaning up an event like what happened in Fukushima, once every 100 years is not very unlikely.

[imtringued]

You could have replaced all nuclear power plants with new ones for the cost of the fukushima cleanup.

As always your theoretical modern designs that are safe are useless if you are still running power plants that are older than chernobyl.