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by jdasdf 1392 days ago
>The pro-nuclear lobby has no argument against Chernobyl~

We could have a chernobyl every year for the next hundred years, and you would cause less environment damage, and human deaths than we did by operating fossil fuel plants in 2021.

There is no argument against chernobyl because chernobil is quite frankly irrelevant beyond an economic cost to cleanup and contain, both of which can be accounted for, and arguably are already accounted for to a far greater extent than the normal operation of fossil fuel plants.

3 comments

After Chernobyl clouds containing radioactive material where blown westwards by the wind and eventually those clouds rained down over parts of Germany. To this day if you go out hunting for example wild boards in those areas they have to be tested for radioactivity before they can be processed further, since their diet mostly consists of mushrooms and plants that contain a lot of Caesium-137 from that rainfall back in 1986.
Hundreds of thousands of people dying per year vs mild inconvenience for wild boar hunters is hardly a difficult choice.
my point obviously being that this still affects plants, animals and humans in a much larger area than just the surrounding area - which makes the argument "We could have a chernobyl every year for the next hundred years" not very compelling
And my point is that the alternative also affects plants, animals, and humans in a much larger area (infact worldwide) and too such a significantly greater degree that the comparison is laughable. If there was a button that would cause us to have a chernobyl every day and eliminate fossil fuels immediately, every minute that button went unpressed would kill 15 people. The actual breakeven point is a chernobyl every 3 hours.
Nobody died in Germany from this. Yet tens of thousands have died in Germany and neighboring countries from the pollution form its coal plants that is delayed shutting down so it could shutdown nuclear sooner, and now tens of thousands more will die as Germany starts burning more of that that dirty coal again because it shut those NPPs down and even now in this crisis is hellbent on shutting down the remaining ones. But nobody cares about those deaths in Germany, nobody seems to look at those statistics when they think about their anti-nuclear legacy.
> ... irrelevant beyond an economic cost to cleanup and contain, both of which can be accounted for

In the US at least it's "accounted for" by shifting those costs onto the public [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

Yes, tell that those chernobyl children who still suffer visibly today?

Not every country has that much square meters for landfills or nuclear wastelands, too.

Nuclear won't save us from not realizing we cannot grow forever and resources are finite.

> arguably are already accounted

wtf?

I believe you missed the point. They acknowledged the terrible cost of Chernobyl but the point is it can happen every year for a long time before causing the same amount of harm and suffering that fossil burning did just last year.