Rooftop solar needs to be installed on roofs and there are also fatalities.
Hydroelectric dams can fail and there can be thousands of fatalities.
Pretty much every method of energy generation needs mine-sourced minerals, where mining has fatalities.
Literally everything humans build need mining. And nuclear needs less mining then literally every other form of energy.
Uranium mining is mostly not open pit and has very little impact on people or society. Also the quantities need are vanishingly small.
In fact, if we took nuclear seriously we wouldn't need to mine much anymore as we already have more then enough.
Chernobyl was looked at by an international panel of scientist and engineers and early death related to it are below 1500. And many of those people live to pretty old age still.
Also blaming all old people dying on the nuclear stuff is just nonsense.
The quantity of Uranium is also much larger than you're making out. A 1kw system backed by diurnal storage with lithium batteries would use about the same amount of lithium as the nuclear reactor uses in uranium. The mines are also lower impact per unit output.
Solar uses smaller quantities of everything else involved from chromium to copper to zirconium to cadmium to indium to steel or sand. The only holdout is silver, and the gap for that is getting narrower by the month.
Wind uses more concrete and more steel but less of everything else.
> In fact, if we took nuclear seriously we wouldn't need to mine much anymore as we already have more then enough.
This is just a flat out lie. But I'm glad we agree. Let's just stop uranium mining overnight, and we can see your nuclear utopia emerge.
> Chernobyl was looked at by an international panel of scientist and engineers and early death related to it are below 1500. And many of those people live to pretty old age still.
Scientists who all objected to the report that took their research out of context.
Actually one of the newest trend in architecture are large scale buildings made from (fire-proof!) wood
> Chernobyl was looked at by an international panel of scientist and engineers and early death related to it are below 1500. And many of those people live to pretty old age still.
Yeah and 600,000 people worked as liquidators.
I think a lot of those arguments (in fact on both sides) are overly nitpicky and based on niche facts making reasonable discussions next to impossible.
Nuclear seems this simplistic choice where the risk is shifted to somewhere where nobody can see it. Nobody knows about missing Core catchers, failure modes or insurance.
That said, new Nuclear plants are actually more expensive (LCOE) than other Energy forms with the exception of on-demand Gas
> Once again 'paid the (nuclear) price', is 1 death. One.
Claiming a really low number of fatalities has almost become a meme for every nuclear catastrophe. I remember reading articles of people claiming really few fatalities related to Chernobyl. But if you've watched the Netflix series, you can easily see that this cannot be further from the truth
By the way, in the same article it's also written that 'Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged[14] in the academic literature from none[15] to hundreds.[12]' ... 'For long-term displacement, many people (mostly sick and elderly) died at an increased rate ... As of 27 February 2017, the Fukushima prefecture government counted 2,129 "disaster-related deaths" in the prefecture.[21][19][22][23] This value exceeds the number that have died in Fukushima prefecture directly from the earthquake and tsunami.[24]'