[mpweiher]

The problem is that the cost of an accident is also not driven by facts but by politics and emotion.

And that makes the cost of an accident not just much higher, but also essentially incalculable. "How irrational are the public and the pandering politicians going to be this decade?" is a difficult variable to price into your models.

And since the costs are, in fact, largely driven by the politics and irrational public fears, it actually makes sense to have the public bear those costs...in a weird way.

[LorenPechtel]

Witness Fukushima. The correct answer was to stay put. No food production in the area but the city was fine. All the Fukushima deaths were due to the evacuation.

[piva00]

The cost is poisoning a large swath of land for centuries to come. It's not just politics and emotion, it's transforming a large area of a country into a completely unproductive land, for centuries, where no one can live or work at...

How can you not be a afraid when the potential damage is so large? And I'm an advocate for nuclear power, I believe we should've invested in it decades ago to avoid the worst of climate change to come, I just can't agree that the whole issue is "politics and emotion", that's just shoving the real problems with nukes under the rug. Cost of maintenance, cost of decommissioning, baseline factors required for safe operation (including the socioeconomic and political environment of the country a reactor is at), sourcing of fissile material, permanent deposits for nuclear waste, etc.

[mpweiher]

> The cost is poisoning a large swath of land for centuries to come.

No it's not. For example, the vast majority of the soil "cleanup" in Fukushima is completely unnecessary, as was most of the evacuation. Another example: the fishermen of the Fukushima prefecture are suffering. But not because there's anything wrong with the fish, it's that people are afraid.

Fear of nuclear kills far more people than nuclear does.

Even the Chernobyl "red zone" has been shown to be net beneficial to the wildlife there. Hardly a sign of "poisoning".

Again, you are speaking from emotion, not fact.

> It's not just politics and emotion

Not just, but mostly.

> How can you not be a afraid when the potential damage is so large?

Because the potential damage is not actually "so large", as has been amply demonstrated by now, see in particularly Fukushima, but even Chernobyl. Never mind non-events like Three Mile Island.

And fear is never a good reaction, because it leads exactly to the distortions of perception that you are demonstrating.

[piva00]

> For example, the vast majority of the soil "cleanup" in Fukushima is completely unnecessary, as was most of the evacuation.

Can you provide sources for this claim?

> Even the Chernobyl "red zone" has been shown to be net beneficial to the wildlife there. Hardly a sign of "poisoning".

There's still no scientific consensus about the effects of radiation on fauna in the CEZ [0]. You have an opinion but we still haven't figured out how damaging the radiation there is for animals or not. I'd rather not have humans living around a potentially dangerous poisoned area until the effects are understood.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265931X1...

[mpweiher]

The basis of the cleanup and evacuation requirements is the Linear No Threshold model, which assumes that even the tiniest amount of radiation has adverse health effects. There is no empirical basis for the LNT model at very low doses, so it's essentially made up.

And in fact, the LNT model greatly overestimated the casualties from Chernobyl, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There's tons of references for this on the web, see for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk...

Also from there:

"It is believed that the health effects of the radioactivity release are primarily psychological rather than physical effects. [..] However, people who have been evacuated have suffered from depression and other mental health effects."

The same was true in Chernobyl, check the WHO reports that came out every decade. Each subsequent report reduced the estimated number of casualties linked to radiation by an order of magnitude, while the psychological impact increased.

> There's still no scientific consensus about the effects of radiation on fauna in the CEZ

While there is no scientific consensus on the details, there is consensus that the red zone is not the poisonous wasteland you claimed. The wildlife has absolutely thrived.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/chernobyl-animals

https://www.wired.com/story/chernobyl-exclusion-zone-rewildi...

[piva00]

Wildlife has thrived due to a lack of humans, not because radiation isn't dangerous. There are mutations abound in animals from the CEZ.

A question I'd have for you would be: are you willing to live with your family an extended period of your lives in a place with a radioactive event like the CEZ?

[mpweiher]

> Wildlife has thrived due to a lack of humans

...and due to it not being a poisonous wasteland where life cannot thrive. As evidenced by it thriving.

> not because radiation isn't dangerous.

Somehow you slipped in the assumption that the radiation is definitely dangerous. Why? What is the evidence? The fact that wildlife is thriving?

And of course I never claimed the wildlife thrived because of the radiation.

Though of course there is evidence for the therapeutic effects of low-level radiation, for example:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14673618/

> A question I'd have for you would be: are you willing to live with your family an extended period of your lives in a place with a radioactive event like the CEZ?

Straw-man.

"This is not my preferred place to live" ≠ "This is place is uninhabitable".

For example, there are tons of places in my city where I wouldn't want to live. And yet tons of people do live there.

And I am sure there are tons of people who wouldn't want to live where I live. Even though I think it's pretty nice.

If the place is cheap, green, slightly hilly but not too much, with water nearby and excellent transportation options but no noise: sign me up! Certainly if the radiation is at levels of some of the stuff they're removing from Fukushima Prefecture (less than the background radiation in Denver and many other places).

[LorenPechtel]

Most of the exclusion zone is back down to what is considered safe levels--and that by the LNT numbers which almost certainly overstate the risk. (The basic problem is that while we have many data points that suggest LNT is wrong to derive better data requires a *very* large test that would be extremely expensive.)

Don't grow food, take care when messing with the soil. There are areas you certainly don't want to be digging as the orcs found out the hard way last year. It's like asbestos--harmless in place, dangerous if messed with.

[LorenPechtel]

Coal has already poisoned the entire world for centuries to come.

Consider the advice about not eating too much in the way of predator fish. That's because of contamination, mostly from coal plants.

Chernobyl is as bad as a nuke plant accident can be. Whether the core actually went prompt critical or destroyed itself just before doing so we will probably never know, but that's the worst that can happen. You simply can't shift the multiplication factor fast enough to make a bigger boom. Chernobyl is a drop in the bucket compared to what coal has been doing for ages. You can't get a China Syndrome accident, a molten mass digging it's way down will change shape as it goes--either going subcritical and quickly running out of heat, or going prompt critical and destroying itself.