[hello_marmalade]

The reason people are skittish about nuclear is because when it does fail, it fails catastrophically. The biggest failures in memory are all failures that risked making a multi kilometer area potentially completely uninhabitable for decades. Even if the risk is only 1%, coal is a much less scary prospect.

[tb0ne]

I understand that, but really you have the option of either going all-in on nuclear and potentially making patches of several km² uninhabitable, or going all-in on fossil fuels and making gigantic regions of the earth uninhabitable due to climate change.

It is a choice between a very local problem or a global one. There is no free lunch.

[kelnos]

No, we also have the option to go all-in on solar and wind power, and avoid both of those bad outcomes. Of course, solar and wind aren't perfect either, and have other problems that need solving (energy storage for nighttime and dark/calm days, for one thing), but "nuclear or fossil fuels" is the falsest of false dichotomies.

[belorn]

Let the marker and voters decide by removing fossil fuel from the choices. Without fossil fuels as a cheap storage solution it will be up to tax payers, investors and market operators to decide if energy storage or nuclear is the best/cheapest/technology viable solution.

As long the choice is between nuclear vs wind + fossil fuel, the discussion will be focused about fossil fuel.

[tb0ne]

You can't just snap your finger and say "we go 100% renewables now!". Germany is probably one of the country that commits the strongest to transitioning to renewables right now, and we started that process in 2011 and expect to reach 100% renewables between 2035 and 2040 the earliest. In the meantime, you HAVE to use another source.

That is 30 years for which you have decide to etiher use fossil fuels or nuclear. So do you wan't to dump CO2 into the air for 30 years and further advance climate change, plus kill millions due to air pollution? Or do you want to accumulate nuclear waste for 30 years, but have way fewer deaths and you don't worsen climate change further?

It is not a nice choice, but it is a choice that has to be made. And Germany decided to choose fossil fuels instead of nuclear.

[varajelle]

How about hydro? There have been catastrophic damm faillures in the past, too.

Not a damm failure, but last year there was ~250 death in Europe and 10 billions of euros of damages because of the floods. [1] That's much more damages than Fukushima and comparable to Chernobyl.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_European_floods

[q1w2]

See - this is exactly the kind of irrational comment that is a problem. "multi-kilometer" "1%" "catastrophically". ...these are all emotionally driven elements to an argument that does not hold water under scientific scrutiny.

Reactors like Chernobyl and Fukishima are not built today and cannot meltdown. The chance of meltdown is nearly 0%. ...and the danger of meltdown on a modern reactor is like what happened at Three Mile Island (which is basically nothing). No one died, nor was even irradiated. ...and even that type of meltdown is no longer possible.

...and finally "multi kilometer" is not even that big. The Earth is 300 million square kilometers in area. Even if your estimate was correct (which it isn't), then it still wouldn't be a big deal.

[c1ccccc1]

1% per what? 1% per GWh? Coal power kills a huge number of people through air pollution, and that's during regular operation. So for me personally, coal power is much more scary than nuclear power.