[legitster]

> Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials.

The actual operating costs are extremely low. Most of the cited $/kwh figures include the capital costs of the extreme 10+ year approval process. There's also no economies of scale right now.

If you add up all of the deaths directly from radiation exposure in the nuclear power industry it's literally 31 - and 28 came from Chernobyl. It's a fraction of rounding error compared to every other energy type.

Nearly all of the dangers of radiation were cooked up by the oil and gas industry based on a series of now discredited fruit fly studies in the 1950s.

[gpm]

Chernobyl killed 30 or 31 directly (i.e. acute radiation poisoning), and thousands indirectly (i.e. cancer) though the count for that is disputed... I don't know where your 28 number comes from but there's no dispute that the direct number is higher than that...

There's been a handful of other purely civilian disasters that killed people with radiation from sources meant for nuclear power, and a large number of military ones.

But if we're looking for civilian radiation deaths the majority outside of Chernobyl aren't nuclear power, they're radiotherapy, because the nuclear power industry was appropriately regulated after the early mass casualty events resulting from military nuclear reactors (e.g. the Kyshtym disaster at 200 to 8000 deaths) and the Windscale Fire at (100 to 240 deaths) and it's harder to regulate the more wildly distributed health care applications.

That we're handling things with appropriate care isn't evidence that they're not dangerous.

[legitster]

> and thousands indirectly (i.e. cancer) though the count for that is disputed

That's the thing, these numbers have been extremely inflated. The LNT model we've used for nuclear safety has never withstood any serious scrutiny. If anything, we've learned humans are extremely resilient to non-acute exposure.

Excess death numbers at places like Fukushima and Chernobyl have found almost no noticeable change in cancer rates, even for people with serious exposure.

Ironically, if you compare excess death numbers to traditional fuel sources (coal, gas, etc) they are much worse.