[legulere]

That statistic is only about deaths. You still have to deal with nuclear accidents leading to evacuation of huge areas happening once around every 30 years (unknown unknowns and what not).

Germany has a high population density. Such a catastrophe happening in Germany would lead to millions getting evacuated.

Another issue is the safe disposal of nuclear waste. It might seem like a low risk, but over the huge timespan nuclear waste needs to be safeguarded that risk adds up. Of course there's also other sources of nuclear waste, but it's best to keep the amounts low.

Last, nuclear currently in the west runs into economic problems. New reactors are plagued by enormous cost overruns and struggle to compete with renewables. But also old reactors are starting to become prohibitively expensive to keep running.

[asdff]

That's a good point, maybe we should also be evacuating huge areas around dirty power plants considering we are aware of the harm they cause to the nearby population?

Nuclear waste is a non issue. If you want to make it perfectly safe and untouchable to most bad actors, you can always dump it into a trench in the ocean. The radioactivity will not penetrate far through ocean water and will be less than other sources of radiation in the ocean today. The only reason why we do things like keep it stored on site, is because its still useful material that can be used in future reaction designs, and throwing it into the sea would be a waste of resources we worked hard to extract from the earth in the first place. I also have not seen any examples in history of people taking waste from a powerplant and turning that into a weapon against other people. So far in history, the only time nuclear weaponry has been used against humans was when it was built by an American arms factory, which is pretty remarkable considering the inherent violence that many of the elite of our species rely upon to maintain their power.

[legulere]

Particulate emissions are a solved problem nowadays For coal plants at least in Germany (see the purple bar in this graphic https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...). Traffic, wood burning and dry goods like gravel are the biggest sources currently. The bigger issue is the CO2-emissions.

You’re not thinking far ahead enough for nuclear waste. Bad actors aren’t the only issue. It’s entirely possible that people don’t know what they have in front of them, as can be seen with the Goiânia accident. Places for storage can turn out to be unsafe, for instance in Asse, an old salt mine in Germany there was a water breach leading to the creation of a radioactive salt slurry.

We have to safeguard nuclear waste for thousands to millions of years. So far states have only existed for hundreds of years in a consistent form. 30000 years ago Neanthertals still roamed the earth. It’s not impossible that societal collapse somewhere hinders safekeeping leading to containment of large landscapes.

[raxxorraxor]

> you can always dump it into a trench in the ocean.

It took a long time to ban dumping barrels of nuclear waste, sadly that isn't true for waste water yet.

And yes, this will all go into the food chain and will have repercussions. For virtually forever.

Of course the waste is a problem, we have 1 or 2 permanent storages in the world and there is a reason for that.

[Cwizard]

I'd much rather be evacuated (and live) than die from air pollution.

[Manuel_D]

Nuclear waste is disposed of by being buried underground in a region with impermeable bedrock. Short of deliberate excavation, or a direct meteor impact, there is no scenario in which this waste gets brought back to the surface.

[lm28469]

> Another issue is the safe disposal of nuclear waste.

And coal waste isn't an issue because it's filtered by our own lungs, right ?