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by ben_w 1161 days ago
Sure, it's a perfectly reasonable question and I ought to have justified it better.

Ok, so, total energy produced to by all nuclear reactors in the world in 2021 was apparently 2,653,344 GWh[0]; if there was a Chernobyl-scale disaster every year, that would add just under $0.30/kWh to the cost of electricity[1]. As reactors didn't have such a poor MTBF even then, I think a decade is a less unreasonable guess for rate of exploding, which is 3ยข/kWh.

This may seem too concerned with dollars and not enough with lives, but similar things can be said in favour of lives cost per unit of energy produced, and again that's in favour of a yearly Chrenobly over all the fossil fuels, though not the renewables: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... (I remember an older version that had much worse PV death rate, justified on the grounds installing stuff on rooftops is dangerous).

Like most arguments in favour of nuclear, it's more about the world we used to live in than the one we now live in; if you'd asked me 10-15 years ago, I'd have been all-in on nuclear to save the planet, but now, I think we have better options. But these were my reasons for being pro-nuclear at the time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24790%20billion%2F2%2C...

1 comments

A commendable answer, thanks. The issue of lives I skipped as the deaths from chernobyl were counted in wiki as 60 to 60,000. Can't really conclude much from an error bar of 3 orders of magnitude.