[fsh]

It is quite misleading to only focus on deaths due to nuclear accidents. Fukushima may not have (directly) killed anyone, but the cleanup is hideously expensive (estimates say many hundred billion dollars). Containing Chernobyl costed a few percent of Ukraine's pre-war annual budget. So far, roughly one in a hundred power reactors have blown up. If this is priced in, the economics get even less favorable.

[olejorgenb]

From https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/reactors.html#tab=duratio... there has been 649 reactors operating giving 0.3% "blown up" (calling fukushima blown up is misleading IMO, but ok). Still quite high when looked at from this angle, but not 1/100.

I'm quite sure, but not 100% that the above number does *not* include research reactors. If it makes sense to include those into the statistics is less clear.

[fsh]

Fukushima had three meltdowns (reactors 1-3), and a hydrogen gas explosion that damaged the spent fuel pool of reactor 4. Together with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, this corresponds to roughly 1% of all commissioned reactors suffering catastrophic failure with significant radiation release.

[godelski]

You both are making statistical errors. You've aggregated the data improperly. As I mentioned in the original rant, this calculation throws out the temporal component and thus 80 years of development and research. Safety has greatly increased over the last 20 years, let alone 80.

Don't aggregate out time

[reso]

Yes, and these death-based analysis' also ignore the fact that both Fukishima and Chernobyl could have been much, much worse if major interventions were not made at the right moment. I always think about the Fukishima engineers who got the instruments in the control room to turn on by wiring them up to car batteries. If the team on duty that day was just a little less resourceful, the story gets much worse. Those incidents should be seen as a lower-bound to the danger not an upper bound.