[vidarh]

For what magically safe alternative?

(no, you don't avoid all deaths with hydro, wind or solar either; in fact hydro has historically been one of the deadliest power sources thanks to the Banqiao accident where a dam failure killed 171,000 - even excluding that, though, hydro is far from free of deaths)

EDIT: Since I was being a bit snarky: The point is last I heard the number of deaths from installation of rooftop solar is higher than the number of deaths from nuclear power plants for equivalent amount of energy. Nuclear gets the headlines because the nuclear incidents we hear about are big and scary and rare and get hyped up.

You don't get massive worldwide news coverage because some guy fell off a roof while mounting solar panels and died. But he's just as dead, and it adds up.

You can't ignore the small incidents if their rate is high enough.

Overall, you could have meltdowns on a regular basis and nuclear would still be one of our safest alternatives. Chances are it will also be one of the alternatives with the lowest environmental impact: Less radioactivity released than coal, by orders of magnitude; far less land area affected by development than hydro, wind and solar.

[Zardoz84]

Fusion. Every ten years, plasma physics say that we would have fusion on the next ten years. :D

[adrianN]

Maybe if we funded it appropriately. Actual funding has been really low:

https://imgur.com/sjH5r

[emp_zealoth]

It is quite depressing. The other day I've been reading an article about MRAP vehicle program - Wiki said the cost was estimated to be 50 BILLION

[HCIdivision17]

I had always heard it as thirty years. The ten year estimate seems to be a newer development! (My guess is that fusion is becoming less theoretical and shifting into an engineering problem; still hard, but a bit more deterministic.)

[marcosdumay]

Well, once we have fusion we'll certainly discover taht it isn't completely safe.

That's because nothing on the scale we need is safe.

[afterburner]

Are you including the effective body count due to increased greenhouse gas emissions (for coal) and cancer incidence/habitat destruction (nuclear)? Not to mention the economic damage of the incredibly expensive reactors (nuclear) and pollution (coal), which can probably be abstracted into a body count as well due to poorer health and living conditions from pollution/wasted societal resources.

[vidarh]

> cancer incidence/habitat destruction

The are both far worse for coal than for nuclear.

But no matter what you include for nuclear, you won't get the numbers very high.

> Not to mention the economic damage of the incredibly expensive reactors (nuclear)

It's not at all clear that nuclear is any more expensive than the alternatives if you accounts for the externalized costs of e.g. the huge bodycount from the alternatives.

[afterburner]

You are assuming I am comparing nuclear to coal, or coal to nuclear...

You must be reading some pretty rosy estimates on nuclear energy compared to renewables if you think the costs make nuclear look good. And by costs I include dollars (the wastage of such having an impact on all our wellbeing as well by diverting from better solutions).