Three Mile Island had two close calls. The first was the reactor was only 30-60 minutes from going into complete meltdown. The second was potentially using a faulty crane to remove the lid of the reactor vessel. Either one of those would have made large areas of dense urban area unlivable.
Quick googling shows wildly different numbers, but the lowest study in top results says 1 million per year from coal alone.
All global warming + pollution is way higher. One study estimated 1 in 5 deaths. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...
> South Australia is at the vanguard of the global energy transition, having transformed its energy system from 1% to over 60% renewable energy in just over 15 years.
> By 2025/2026, the Australian Energy Market Operator forecasts this could rise to approximately 85%.
> South Australia’s aspiration is to achieve 100% net renewables by 2030. In 2021, South Australia met 100% of its operational demand from renewable resources on 180 days (49%).
https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/modern-energy/le...
> South Australia’s aspiration is to achieve 100% net renewables by 2030
That link you sent is bleak. They just now are hitting the point where renewable generation causes excess energy during peak solar hours sometimes. They have no concrete plans to store at the scale required to actually get through the troughs. They are just now beginning to kick the tires on storage projects which is where much of the southwestern US was a decade ago.
Like, I just don't understand your negativity. Projecting to reach 85% renewable penetration in ~3 years and it is a bleak outlook? You're looking for a magic finger snap and it is 100% tomorrow?
Without massive storage, yes. The 60% it picked up is the easy part of the demand that follows the renewable production. The last 40% is 95%+ of the difficult work.
The difference here is making a rocket that gets to space vs one that achieves orbit. They seem similar but they aren’t even in the same league.
>Like, I just don't understand your negativity.
It’s not negativity, it’s what has happened in every country that is a decade or more ahead of Australia here. Australia is not magic, it has nighttimes and slow winds like every other place on the planet. This problem has plagued everyone at the head of the technology curve here and there still isn’t a solution. What do you think Australia will do differently?
So I ask again: just what horrible public-relevant accident is supposed to have nearly happened here? I can't imagine anything that would have caused anything catastrophic. The lid falling back onto the reactor vessel wouldn't be that.
If what you say took place, along with the solar and wind power advances that happened, we'd at least be looking at a lot longer warming runway than we are today.
Not to say there isn't a lesson to be learned, obviously, but to say the plant couldn't deal with an outage is ingenuous at minimum.
Did you mean "disingenuous"? "Ingenuous" means lacking in guile or craftiness. "Disingenuous" means having the intent to deceive, and is used much more often.
For example some natural disaster, which across ubiquitously deployed nuclear would occur every day somewhere on earth.
If they did go ahead without safety measures, and had an incident, the plant would likely be shut down, and then you have the domino effect that Fukishima had (e.g., Germany shutting down all their plants). Nuclear can be viable when both proper safety can be ensured economically, and when that surety can be shared by its voting population