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by palata 6 days ago
Again, destroy a dam and you get a catastrophe. Don't do anything in particular and watch how many people die in the mid-term due to climate change.

It's all about risk management.

3 comments

The most deadly industrial accident was the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 26,000 to 240,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

The dam is built to protect from floods.
Yeah but the risk management of a dam is ridiculously small compared to waste which will be dangerous so far into future that we might not know if people will even know what it is.

A dam damming water at a hill is obvious.

Some warm stuff set up like something really special, is not.

Yet dams have killed more people than nuclear plants.
They have been around a bit longer don't you think?

How many nuclear actually killed is unknown because it's not as easy as: something happens, people drown.

It's more like: something happens, a few die fast, the rest dies earlier, their children live shorter or have disabilities, their children also, and so on. Meanwhile collecting waste which will do the same for later generations who might not remember what nuclear energy even is.

> How many nuclear actually killed is unknown because it's not as easy as: something happens, people drown.

Did you even bother to read about how we estimate the casualties of nuclear incidents? It really sounds like you didn't, and just shared your first thought about it not being trivial.

> They have been around a bit longer don't you think?

How in the world does that make them less risky? If a dam collapses, it's generally very bad, even if it is an old dam.

I actually did bother.

The numbers are highly speculative and are either those you get pushed in your face by the nuclear astroturf (killed on site) or are scientific and the range is very wide since it's so hard to calculate. It's cancer and it happened in the Soviet Era.

Your whole comment didn't add anything to the discussion. What's your point?

Is this a Katrina reference?