[ben_w]

Chernobyl's political nonsense was mostly down to the USSR wanting to deny that anything had, or possibly could, go wrong; if anything, the exclusion zone is the opposite of the western nonsense about nuclear power.

It's our unique freedom-themed nonsense, not the Soviet dictatorial-nonsense, which means we have radiation standards strict enough that it's not possible to convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant without first performing a nuclear decontamination process due to all the radioisotopes in the coal.

That said, perhaps that's actually a problem with the coal plants rather than nuclear standards: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4

> When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.

Relative to coal, absolutely. But don't assume western countries are immune to propaganda on these things, nuclear reactors are there for the spicy atoms, not the price tag or public safety.

[panick21_]

Nuclear plans have objectively made power generation save and clean. When they were built in the 1960-1990s the were objectively the best and cleanest energy that saved a gigantic amount of lives.

The exclusion zone is nonsense because many that live in that zone has lower cancer rates then those outside. The idea is based on a invalid assumption about radiation an a linear relationship between radiation and harm. An I do think the standards we apply are to extreme in many cases mostly dating back to this misunderstanding about radiation.

As for the locality to nuclear plants and cancer, this is as far as I know been shown in many countries and as far as I know at least can mostly be explained by nuclear plants usually being built in industrial areas that often used to have coal plants and other industry going on.

> nuclear reactors are there for the spicy atoms, not the price tag or public safety.

Not sure what 'spicy' means in this context. In terms of price tag they are objectively a fantastic deal if built in larger numbers. Even in places where they were not built in the numbers they did in France, they are good life time deal, and give relativity stable long term prices.

And they don't have to be 'there' for public safety, they just need a good record on public safety and they do.

In places like Austria and Germany we have many known cases where a nuclear plant was planned and was prevented by activists, only to be replaced by coal, in both cases impacting 10000s of lives being worse financially in the long term.

[panick21_]

What I didn't mention, in terms of propaganda, the anti-nuclear people are way ahead of any pro-nuclear propaganda. Its not even remotely close. The anti nuclear-weapons movement an environmental movement from the 1970s spread myths that are still repeated an often with emotional attachment.

My parents who lived in central Europe during Chernobyl hate nuclear power, while believing lots of nonsense that was in the news back then.

[ben_w]

I have heard that the anti-nuclear propaganda is funded by other nuclear states, because of the aforementioned value of reactors (and their scientists and engineers) to weapons programs.

I have no idea if that's true, but it sounds very plausible.

However, if it was true, it would make it very much easier for governments to justify big spends on pro-nuclear propaganda. I mean, the USA managed to make test-detonations into a tourism opportunity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Las_Vegas#Atomic_te...

[ben_w]

> Nuclear plans have objectively made power generation save and clean. When they were built in the 1960-1990s the were objectively the best and cleanest energy that saved a gigantic amount of lives.

Yes indeed. But that wasn't why they were built*, and that safety comes with an enormous cost. Ironically not including the exclusion zone, even with that included the amortised cost is quite small, but rather all the things that Chernobyl didn't have but should've plus all the international inspections and regulations to make sure nobody's secretly got a weapons program, either deliberately or via organised crime.

* Even just plain simple diversity of energy supply is good, as per another comment I made on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47309196

> The exclusion zone is nonsense because many that live in that zone has lower cancer rates then those outside. The idea is based on a invalid assumption about radiation an a linear relationship between radiation and harm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samosely

That's a tiny sample size, consisting of people who are in poverty (and already mostly elderly) and can therefore be expected to have unusual health outcomes. Which could be higher or lower cancer rates, depending on what else is going on. Like, cancer won't get you if you pickle your liver too hard first with moonshine.

Though yes, the linear relationship between radiation and harm is known to be an oversimplification.

> Not sure what 'spicy' means in this context.

Radioisotopes. They're really useful for a lot of stuff, but the options for making them are mostly "fission plant" or "particle accelerator". This includes but is not limited to weapons.

> In terms of price tag they are objectively a fantastic deal if built in larger numbers. Even in places where they were not built in the numbers they did in France, they are good life time deal, and give relativity stable long term prices.

The cheapest are cheap, but the average and the trend line says they're mostly now a worse option than PV+batteries. Your milage, as the saying goes, may vary, so I wouldn't be even mildly surprised if e.g. Alaska says "hydro and nuclear" given this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alaska_electricity_genera...

> In places like Austria and Germany we have many known cases where a nuclear plant was planned and was prevented by activists, only to be replaced by coal, in both cases impacting 10000s of lives being worse financially in the long term.

Indeed. It was terrible for the environment and general population health that we didn't have a huge roll-out of nuclear power up until the 2010s when renewables got interesting.

But unfortunately, although even the full cost (both monetary and to lives lost) of Chernobyl would, if amortised over all reactors, be much smaller than for fossil plants, the scale of that accident would have been an existential threat to many smaller nations. Arguably, it was existential damage to the USSR, even. People don't want to be subjected to someone else's game of Russian Roulette, not even when the overall odds of survival go up.