> Also accidents side effects are downplayed so much it's insulting

I think you might have fallen for media bias. While the nuclear industry doesn't have anything resembling a flawless safety record, it's still orders of magnitude safer than all mainstream power sources which see no scrutiny due to the dilution of their impact.

Nuclear accidents are viewed as bad in the same way that airline crashes are viewed as bad, despite airlines being the safest mode of transport and safer than the car journey to the airport. They are extremely rare, and they impact >100 people when they happen so they're always newsworthy. Unlike the 4.6M people that die due to fossil fuel related air pollution worldwide at a steady state each year.

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

I'm not pro or anti nuclear. I'm just a random AU citizen following the gradient descent path towards a future that least fucks our children.

What bias ?

Telling the population the border is safe knowing it's not and then they get cancer is quite factual.

I'm not talking about potential risks, I'm talking about actual confirmed events and the way they have been handled. It's not speculation, it's history.

The problem here are not the victims. It's not the risk or the stats. It's respect.

E.g: I can read your comment calmly. My friends with his scar in the throat and his helicopter pilot career down the toilet ? He would insult you and you would lose any chance of convincing him and hence his social network about nuclear.

So yeah, the pro nuclear community has a serious communication problem.

> Telling the population the border is safe knowing it's not and then they get cancer is quite factual.

It's not so clear cut. Thyroid cancer rates started increasing dramatically almost everywhere in the world in the mid 80's. Diagnosis rates in the US for example have tripled since 1980, in South Korea they have gone up 13x since 1993. Meanwhile the mortality rate has been completely flat. The most likely cause of this is increase in both screening and the sensitivity of testing [1]. There is also a current debate about if we should be screening / treating thyroid cancer the way we are, i.e. it seems like we're detecting a lot of innocuous thyroid cancers and then operating without need resulting in unnecessary life long complications for the person.

This is why there is a lot of research out there indicating that the vast majority of the increase in thyroid cancer diagnosis in areas like France is unrelated to Chernobyl.

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i5745

I understand your reasoning, but my point is precicely that it's the way we talk about this that is important.

This is the official story we had after tchernobyl:

https://www.bastamag.net/IMG/png/journal_televise_antenne2.p...

This is the reality we measured:

https://img.lemde.fr/2016/04/26/0/0/956/687/688/0/60/0/cb64c...

It is worst than this, of course, because some plants accumulate radioactivity and we ate them. No recommendation had been given to the general population at all.

The region with the most thyroid cancers in the 20 years following is the Isère, at the center east of this map.

Now let's say we end up calculating that the actual number of cancers is, let's say, 100 more in France because of the cloud. It would not be much, and would not be worth acting on it: the flu would be more dangerous.

That's not the problem.

The problem is the way we communicate on this.

I've seen the exact opposite in the general media - when Fukushima was occurring people were buying iodized salt in North America out of panic (I was working at a drug store at the time, I watched it happen). If anything, when people think of nuclear power they only think of the accidents.

I had a cousin in CA worried about Fukushima defend her concern by saying that she had a Ukrainian friend whose family was affected by Chernobyl. Two guesses as to how effective it was to tell her that Chernobyl was freaking IN Ukraine and that CA is as far from Fukushima as New York is from Chernobyl.

Most people make decisions based on a hazy blur of random exposure to flashy stories, not anything remotely resembling rational adult thought. I don't know what the solution is to nuclear's PR and political problems, but I know that it isn't anything that requires a third grader's level of critical thinking ability.

I don't know about France but in the U.S. nuclear plants are required to put money aside for decommissioning. They were also required to pay into a fund for long-term waste storage, but since the government shut down its long-term waste facility and companies have to store waste on site, a court decided they shouldn't also have to pay into a fund that's not doing anything.

Regarding Chernobyl, I'll just mention it was used both for power and weapons production, and lacked basic safety features including a containment dome.

I'm pro nuclear and french. The media are terrible when speaking about nuclear, but the communication around nuclear is not bad. There is some obsfucation using technical jargon, but almost nothing is hidden. IMHO France has made a big mistake when it has stopped building plants. Now, we have lost most of our know-how. I think the future is solar power and that a nuclear plant build now will become obsolete before being amortized. It is too late to build new nuclear plant and maybe a bit too early to build solar plants.