It is statistically safer than almost anything even if you take Chernobyl and Fukushima into account.

Nuclear energy fear reminds me of people that are afraid of planes.

It is like if there is a crash it is going to be very bad. But it is also true that your chances to have a crash in a car is just higher.

What do you mean by "safer"? Less accidents compared to eg coal plants?

No exploding coal plant will render a whole region unlivable for >30 years. Both happened at Tschernobyl and Fukushima.

I guess deaths per energy unit produced ?

According to this [1], for every death caused by nuclear power, 350 people die because of coal power.

Note that most of these people died as a consequence of Chernobyl accident (~4000 vs ~500), so by current standards Nuclear Power is probably even safer.

The issue with nuclear is that deaths are concentrated in a few "big" accidents, that have much more visibility and leave a lasting impressions, thus scaring the population much more. (This is not unique to nuclear power though, something similar happens with plane vs car travel: the latter causes generally more deaths, but plan accidents are more newsworthy).

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

Exactly this is what I meant.

Areas around coal power plants can exceed radioactivity limits for nuclear power plants, due to trace elements in the soot landing back down. Never mind all the other stuff.

That’s pretty nasty, I’d rather be close to a nuclear power plant.

I did not know this.

Coal plants might render the entire planet unlivable within the next century. When weighed against the theoretical worst case impact of climate collapse, the theoretical worst case impact for nuclear power (that is, every single plant exploding and contaminating a 30 mile radius) is still vanishing by comparison.

> No exploding coal plant will render a whole region unlivable for >30 years

Unlivable for humans. The exclusion zone around Chernobyl became a de facto wild-life sanctuary. To the extent that some environmentalists now argue benefits of officially maintaining it as one indefinitely. Human supporting activities such as farming, mining and habitat expansion often come at a serious cost to local ecosystems. Nature ends up flourishing over time in humans excluded regions exactly because they are unlivable for > 30 years.

As pointed out by others, one effect of burning coal is the concentration of its radioactive elements in fly ash. And since less care is taken, more radioactive material ends up released into the environment by coal plants than nuclear plants. It's worth pointing out however, when contrasted with background, risks from exposure to radioactivity is not significantly raised by living near coal plants. The real killer from coal is pollution. Having said that, accumulation of fly ash over time could be a concern, especially wherever it gathered under non-uniform dispersal. As far as I know, this is yet to be shown.

Perhaps a stronger example of society's inconsistent reasoning about radioactivity exposure is inhalation of tobacco smoke. It's curious that information on the significant amounts of radioactive material in tobacco smoke did not percolate widely and probably would not have changed habits anyway, given its known carcinogenic nature was already not enough to do so.

I mean, the radioactive material in tobacco smoke is already included in the carcinogenic nature of smoking, right? So knowing about radioactive smoke might enable us to explain the dangers more precisely, but it doesn't change risks, which were previously known.

Checkout deaths per capita statistics

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

Coal plants release ash into the air and groundwater continuously, in the course of normal operation. This ash is around five times more radioactive than soil.

Instead coal plants working normally slowly pump more radiation into atmosphere than occasionally exploding nuclear plants...

burning coal kills people and does a whole lot of damage just by running normally. it doesn't have to explode

Sure, I just wanted to point out the sentiment which I feel most have. Smoking was also scientifically safe in the 70s.

The point is that there was never a time where Nuclear became unsafe. It was never a lie.

The reverse of your analogy would be if cigarettes were actually good for you but we banned them because two people died of lung cancer.

That's not accurate. By the 1960s and 70s, the scientific consensus [1] not only strongly believed smoking was a causal factor in lung cancer but also knew it contained radioactive isotopes of Polonium (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2509609/) and lead.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/history/inde...

The number of people displaced by coal is lower. Nuclear does well on deaths, yes.

We were talking about deaths or displaced in the first place? By a measure of deaths, nuclear energy is very safe.

Is that why it is impossible to insure a nuclear power plant on the private market?

If fossil fuel power plants were legally responsible for harm caused by their carbon emissions, they would also be impossible to insure.

Who compares against fossil plants nowadays? Except wanting to put a carbon tax on them to account for that issue you mention.

Truly, it's new built nuclear compared compared to renewables, storage and long-distance distance transmission. Spatial and temporal arbitrage of energy.

Germany is shutting down nuclear and replacing it with coal and gas. The comparison to fossil fuel is incredibly apt.

Going by the German energy usage there's no replacement using fossil plants being done. It's all displaced by cheaper renewables, especially coal and old nuclear plants.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

This is a silly move IMHO. The mix to go for should be clean + backup nuclear.

Being impossible to insure is related more to a high degree of synchronization of risk pools than overall danger of death. Death rates are averages - it is possible that one person dying per time period is rate-equivalent to the whole town dying at once in a once-in-a-tens-of-millenia event. But the risk exposure in that event is quite different.

You can get life insurance/death benefits as a mercenary or even as a centarian. It will be expensive because of the high risk of payout but you can get it. Because while it is probable that you will cack it from being so damn old/being a combatant in unstable regions with lesser support it is extremely unlikely every mercenary or centarian they have insured will die at once.

A couple of years ago there was a study about what this kind of insurance would cost: about 72 billion Euro per year.

> The study proves for the first time the years of market distortion in favor of nuclear energy and at the expense of the competition, said Uwe Leprich from the Saarbrücken University of Technology and Economics. "The study also shows that if you look at the economy from a regulatory perspective, nuclear energy is not competitive."

https://www.manager-magazin.de/finanzen/versicherungen/a-761...

Well, if that is true, why not deregulate? Let us see what happens.

I would just do one thing myself: I would make mandatory to label products with the pollution manufacturing process: this used coal, this used nuclear, this used blabla. This is the amount of waste produced to the environment. And let people choose, with the appropriate information.

In that setup, if nuclears are not worth, they would disappear by themselves.

To a first approximation, Fukushima did not cause any harm. I view the plant iself as a success story, given ancient reactor design etc. etc.

I think a lot of half-paying-attention people confused the reactor and the tsunami. Of course the news coverage and in-hindsight-unnecessary evacuation didn't help either.

Fukushima’s design was not a success, and exposed new failure modes which hadn’t been fully understood. In response, nuclear operators around the world have spent billions to upgrade their safety systems.

For example: https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/fukushima/canada-i...

"did not cause any harm" - for a very loose defintion of harm. Sure it could have been much worse. But enough ground and water was contaminated, and much more will be in the future when they run out of storage.

And how much ground water is contaminated with fossil fuel extraction?

Radio contamination is at a different level

and who has actually been directly affected by this? I think it's your definition of harm that is too loose and overly inclusive.

Your average oil spill does 100x more damage to the ecosystem and economy than fukushima

So Fukushima did no harm, because the 100 000 people who had to be evacuated were not harmed?

They didn't need to be evacuated, or at least not so quickly --- at least in hindsight.

I'm trying to compromise a bit with the "at least"s :)

'Not any harm' is quite a cynic formulation. Maybe a couple of hundred deaths seems relatively few, for such an enormous event. But the impact the event had on Japan, their economy and their mental state, was obviosly the worst since WW2.

And Fukushima is still not under control.

https://apnews.com/article/world-news-japan-tsunamis-5a5a70d...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-nuclear-idUSKCN11D0...

Don't forget almost 20,000 people died in the tsunami, nuclear or not!

I think the 6-7x 9/11 is the foundation of pain, even if nuclear is an extra salient cherry on top.

> But the impact the event had on Japan, their economy and their mental state, was obviously the worst since WW2.

I don't know. For who lived near the plant and escaped, it's definitely true. But for others, Lost decades are serious than the accident.

Controversial take, but even if we had a Fukushima-level disaster every 10 years, and just dump nuclear waste into the ocean (which sounds cavalier and hand-wavy, but we've been doing that for decades no discernible ill effect) - nuclear would still be a better option than coal for base load

  > So is there a guarantee

A guarantee doesn't mean that the thing being guaranteed won't happen. A guarantee is a promise to pay someone back - when, not if - the thing you promised doesn't work. Anyone who gives you a guarantee has already saved up enough money to pay you off when the thing fails.

  > that it is safe

Safe compared to what?

People go insane about airline safety whenever one plane crashes, even though commercial passenger airplanes are 1000x safer than any other form of transportation. You could have a plane bombed, hijacked, whatever, every single day, for 10 years, and would still be 1000x safer than any other form of transport. People wouldn't think it was safe, though, because when it does fail, it fails spectacularly.

And that's the mentality of an anti-nuclear person. Who cares that the outcomes are almost always better? The one time it's not better is really scary, so I don't want it in my back yard.

There are no guarantees. You need to compare vs. the safety of burning coal, for the climate and for human health. You need to compare it with how sure you are that renewables & storage will satisfy our energy needs tomorrow, or the safety of not having enough energy to go around.

That said, nuclear is pretty safe. I would live next door to a nuclear power plant, and if I did I would be likelier to die slipping in the shower.

It's not just a matter of safety of the plans themselves.

You need safety against external threats e.g. a nuclear plant can be targeted during war or by terrorists

You need safety around illegal dumping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Illegal_dump...

Also, extremely centralized energy production creates political risks (coups, corruption, hiding mismanagement)

Nuclear proliferation risk.

Investment risk: solar keeps getting cheaper and nuclear has very long ROI that might grow indefinitely

You have the same considerations with coal waste as well.

>https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/business/article24874...

Look at how many coal ash spills there have been...and those come with nice forever things like mercury.

At least two of those points don't hold when you're talking about existing plants though. Germany already hosts nuclear weapons courtesy of the US, so where's the proliferation risk from nuclear power? And there's nothing worse for ROI than shutting down the plant.

For the other points I'd say that I'd rather build solar to replace coal plants first before replacing nuclear plants.

> Germany already hosts nuclear weapons courtesy of the US, so where's the proliferation risk?

Proliferation is not a binary 1 or 0.

> For the other points I'd say that I'd rather build solar to replace coal plants first before replacing nuclear plants.

That's a false dichotomy.

> Proliferation is not a binary 1 or 0.

I think climate change poses a bigger existential risk than the nuclear proliferation risk from Germany continuing the nuclear energy production they're already doing.

> That's a false dichotomy.

Sure we can do both, but the reality is we're not doing both. The last time Germany closed its nuclear plants they were replaced by coal plants.

Fukushima killed one (1). In the context of a massive natural disaster that killed 10000.

Three Miles Island happened years before Chernobyl and killed no one, because it wasn't a dodgy, duct-taped together soviet piece of junk.

In the last 30 years, the only nuclear power accident was Fukushima and again, caused just one victim. Fossil fuel depot fires have killed thousands more in that time.

because 0.2 million people were displaced.

... unnecessarily, because the government freaked out.