* Taum Sauk hydro pump-storage collapse
* Duke Energy's 30k+ tons of coal Ash spill into the Dan River
* But that was tiny, try Kentucky's 306 million tons of coal Ash spill or Tennessee's 525 million. People can only stand and watch that unfold, no modern robot is going to stop that either.
* Gas pipes in San Bruno, New Jersey, and Colorado exploding, killing families instantly
* Deepwater Horizon and the Valdez. Again, not much to do but stand and watch as it unfurls.
I could keep Googling more but every source of energy has its gigantic catastrophes where no amount of human bodies or robots will save the day (well, I guess a large enough pile of bodies would plug a hole in a collapsing dam).
No so with nuclear. The impact is so much more serious when radiation comes into play.
> Valdez
Actually thousands of people were mobilized to contain the spill then clean up afterwards. It would have been a much better outcome if they didn't try to hide/downplay it for the first couple of days.
Just because radiation causes different constraints on cleanup than oil on a large ocean or arsenic in the water table or issues in a space rocket means it is morally worse? That's the part I fail to understand, so long as the engineering continues to behave ethically behind all the systems in their design and construction and retrofit.
Literally no-one died at Fukushima. It is the only energy disaster I know of where no-one ended up dead.
This is strong circumstantial evidence that we are being too safe, because we implicitly accept a few deaths when things go wrong in, eg, coal (pollution & extraction deaths), solar ( mainly in installations not in operating), hydro (big-time risks).
Going from 1 death to 0 deaths on this scale is a huge marginal cost. It almost certainly outweights the benefits.
EDIT: We haven't had a solar disaster yet, but coal & hydro disasters happen and can be very bad indeed.
The only reason why nuclear sticks so easily is because of the magic word "radiation". It's easier to be scared of it than sit down land learn that it is all a natural physical phenomenon, even if it originated from a man-made isotope. It's difficulty arises from the stochastic (quantum) nature of it's interactions.
Lastly, reactor designs have significantly improved since 50 years ago. New reactor designs I saw coming out of Westinghouse could lose all power and pumps and still use natural convection and reservoirs (elevated pools) within the containment to prevent any sort of critical event leading to meltdown. Imagine if we were stuck with the coal technology of the 70's. I would prefer modernizing the nuclear fleet if possible, which does include decommissioning old reactors, and closing the fuel cycle loop in a way that is proliferation resistant (some sort of pyroprocessing) unlike UREX.
Isn't simply using a non-PUREX reprocessing method sufficient? Realistically, a "nuclear club" nation like the US/France/GB only needs to ensure that the reprocessed fuel contains enough non-Pu239 isotopes that any attempt at a bomb with stolen Pu would necessarily fizzle. The fact that the nation itself could (theoretically) produce Pu239 via the process and cause "proliferation" seems far fetched in the absence of the Cold War level rivalry that was the original proliferation impetus. Warheads are expensive. Nobody who already has a bunch of them already is really interested in making more.
You missed the important lessons from Fukishima.
A major power plant suffered about the worst possible catastrophe that it could have through a combination of incompetence by the plant and its regulators. For all that, the highest estimates of death due to the evacuation are less than the deaths that come from a day of burning coal (when the coal plants don't have an accident). What about other power sources? Coal/gas/hydro all have much worse records than nuclear:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
(The accident rate is also ignoring the long term, possibly existential, threat from climate changed due to using coal and natural gas.)
Ground based solar is probably the only power source that might be safer than nuclear.
You can't really say "it's the safest kind of energy of all - except when you don't do the right thing, then it's scary" because the chance that people are going to do the wrong thing has to be an inherent part of any risk analysis.
Nuclear might be safer than coal and oil but coal and oil are established and nuclear is marginal most places. More people might die falling from roofs installing their solar panel than die from nuclear power "done right" but hey, if they'd installed their solar panels right, they too wouldn't have died either.
But finally, renewable allow relatively incremental development - you can gradually add solar panels and wind-generators and see if the investment pans out. Nuclear requires vast gobs of investment and you only learn if it's a good idea, provides good total positive returns, over a long time frame, just as you're expected to store your pollution over a large time frame.
So nuclear's prospects don't look good, don't seem like they should be good, etc.
Not only does it go wrong, we have absolutely no way to stop it. It's literally out of our control.
I was a supporter of Nuclear, though Fukushima taught me a very important lesson.
When things went bad there, we literally stood back and said "well, damn. There is nothing we can do" and watched it melt for weeks and weeks. Nobody could go in, and we had no robots that could go in and do a thing. It was lucky it's close enough to just pump endless water into it. Then a few weeks later the experts said "oh, all that highly contaminated water is going straight into the ocean. We wondered where it was going". As it were the Japanese had elderly people volunteering to go in, essentially committing suicide.
It's also worth remembering that at Chernobyl there was also nothing we could do - other than force people to commit suicide by going in where it was deadly. That won't fly today.
While the chances of things going that wrong are very low (it's only happened twice, maybe three times in history) I think the consequences are too great to justify it. We can't even control it when it goes bad!