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by nancybelowzero 635 days ago
I wonder how the stats stack up between damage from all the worlds nuclear accidents, and damage from the sun ($ spent to restore degradation of materials from UV, skin cancer, etc.) Bit moot since the sun can't be switched off.
2 comments

UV is definitely higher -- there are about 300K new skin cancer cases per year world wide and about 60K deaths per year from it. Most (although not all) of these are due to UV exposure. That being said, before you blame the sun itself, a lot of this is due to ozone depletion (which is still a thing even though sometimes people make it sound like the problem is solved just because the ozone hole is shrinking)

https://www.wcrf.org/cancer-trends/skin-cancer-statistics/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

Don't forget to account for the approximately 100% of the global food supply which needs sunlight to grow.