[mrtracy]

Nuclear actually is safe by pure incident metrics, even when counting higher casualty estimates for Chernobyl.

The safety, of course, is not intrinsic: nuclear material is obviously very dangerous, especially in a running reactor.

The safety record stems from the considerable regulation around building and operating these reactors, and the fact that the reactor has so little external surface area once running:

* A very small fuel acquisition operation in comparison to fossil fuels.

* Likewise, no externally released pollution outside of accidents, which is rare.

* sites chosen for construction are picked for their stability, and are heavily engineered, meaning you also don’t have the installation worksite deaths which run up numbers for wind and solar.

But again, this is only realized if the operational safety onsite is maintained. That said, it’s not the only dangerous power generation site: dammed hydroelectric can be a considerable danger depending on what is downstream.

In general, I think nuclear would be very popular if natural gas and solar were not available; however, the costs to keep it safe are too high for it to be economical compared to those two sources.

[aeonik]

I remember reading a list of industrial disasters, and Dam breaks always had absurdly high death tolls. I remember reading one from China that had several hundred thousand IIRC.

I couldn't find the exact Wikipedia article, but this one is still a pretty interesting read.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disaste...

Edit: I think it was this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

Though, of course, the exact numbers are contested.

[jhayward]

Attributing casualties from a dam break as energy-related is a stretch. The vast majority of dams are built for flood control. Energy production just helps pay the bills. It's not the 'purpose' of the dam.

[jauntywundrkind]

Generally I consider nuclear to be an incredible potential, hugely capable.

But civilizationally I don't see us as being able to keep doing the right thing with it. If windmills mess up and come crashing down in 20 years, there's negative impact, but locally and short term. If nuclear waste of contaminated decommissioned sites have a particularly bad day in 300 years, it could cause massive long term widescale problems for potentially centuries.

I want this to be something that governments get behind and do, want it to be a high priority that we put beyond the whims of the market. I want better realistic views of pricing in & maintaining the very very very long lived negative externalities. I want intense research in what makes good long term sense, what's sustainable.

Nuclear has so much potential, is so compelling to me. But I do not see a species organized or driven enough to meet with the very long lived complexities and challenges, do not see the appetite to do the job extremely well. We are very safe about it, but ultimately our scope is short cheap reactors, not doing nuclear in a big lasting fashion, at scale to justify figuring out systematically.

Breeder reactors remain this fancy expensive thing we once did, but don't do again. Cancellation of Integral Fast Reactor & failure to make a PRISM derivative is a really sad failure to mature; here we had a much cheaper safer proloferation-safe way to care for the whole nuclear lifecycle, and we never could muster the try, to see how we might do better. What few reactors that are getting built tend towards unambitious fuel-inefficient simple designs, that saddle us with long term problems.

Edit: -2? What nonsense. Say something! I spent the effort to lay out a view & case, have some decency, downvote-squad; contribute back.

[erentz]

I think your down votes are because people are tired of rebutting the same old anti-nuclear arguments.

"Civilizationally" The evidence is nuclear has remained safer than alternatives well over half a century even when we have failed organizationally to do the right things (e.g. Chernobyl, Fukushima). IMO let us move on and use technologies that might prevent civilizational collapse rather than avoid them and make such a thing more likely. (Although it's unlikely under any scenario.)

"Proliferation" as a product of civilian nuclear power has been studied and discussed for its entire history and has been disproven. There's no link. In general having civilian nuclear power allows more oversight by international bodies about what you're doing, whereas regimes pursuing nuclear weapons tend to pursue them in secret and using infrastructure fit for the purpose of producing weapons materials.

"Fuel efficiency" simply isn't important when the fuel is so abundant and so cheap. We can afford to worry about that in future if we ever wind up building enough nuclear power it becomes a problem. If anything this is a good reason to stop freaking out about "nuclear waste" i.e. mildly used and 95% reusable fuel and leave that where it's been sitting perfectly safe for decades, above ground.

If someone had the time they could mine every nuclear thread on Hacker News and pull out all the common tropes and rebut them someplace in a similar vein to Skeptical Science's list for Climate Change (https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php). @acidburnNSA's https://whatisnuclear.com/ might be the closest thing. But then nobody would read it, and the problem would continue.