If anything you're more pointing out how hysterics over nuclear safety ended up endangering lives in practice by promoting the use of more dangerous forms of energy which don't arouse public fears as much since they kill people in an indirect and gradual way with unclear causation. Whereas nuclear kills people directly and suddenly with obvious causation.
Relying on past frequencies for future risk assessment is dangerous, especially when there is this high of a cost. Especially on the organization level of the decision makers: Maybe on average the risk for the global population is acceptable, but if a country like Germany loses part of its territory to a nuclear accident, that would be huge tragedy for the country and its economy. Germany is NOT replacing nuclear with lignite 1:1, much less in the long term. Anyone who says so is lying. And even those plants MAY have more risk, but that risk is hugely more predictable!
Sure nuclear meltdowns making territory unusuable sucks, but the mining does actually present a fair amount of ecological damage itself, and I think there's more metrics than potential territory loss. Notably lignites causes more radiation to enter the atmosphere, but unlike nuclear, this isn't neatly concentrated in one area people can just stay out of, which isn't conducive to people not dying.
I could maybe humour the argument that nuclear waste storage (Even accounting for these being very little of it, there will be very little of it for a very long time) or especially nuclear power plants encouraging nuclear weapons development being fat tail risks, but accidents, no. We're never going to see dramatic nuclear meltdowns even get close to causing the death toll of lignite, it just is way too implausible.
At least with Chernobyl, you can escape contamination by avoiding Bavarian mushrooms.
That right there is a big fat lie and makes all your arguments worthless.
In the end, the high impact risks of nuclear are of extremely low probability, and they compound better than fossi fuels: we have 1 30km-radius exclusion zone and some smaller non-exclusion cleanup efforts for some 1PWh(? can't find the number right now) of energy total. When an event like that happens, the affected population is tiny, and they are able to move out at a moderate one-time cost.
Meanwhile, fossil fuel generation downsides are inescapeable: every plant decreases the quality of life for every person, and we cannot escape it. How many people have died early because of the unescapeable, permanent health damage for each PWh of energy produced? There's no exclusion zone at all, so there's no ability to pay a one time price and be spared the long-term effects.
Which kind of generation has "this high of a cost"? What should be the average damage to the population which we take as a baseline?
We've had 60 years of nuclear and thousands of reactors. Still waiting for those terrorists I guess.
> as supposed to the also criminal but less intentional neglect in the case of Fukushima
Which is also a load of bull, mostly. I wish all criminal neglect was on the same level as Fukushima, really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35711895
So go ahead, show us the estimates. And if you say that estimating is impossible, then why do you insist my estimate is wrong? Sorry, I'm not buying the "impossible" part. Show us the data and the reasoning.
Yet you repeat the lie that coal power is the only alternative to nuclear. That convenient lie is the core assumption between most or all your arguments.
And if there are wrong assumptions stopping a wrong estimate, then certainly replacing them with right assumptions will make an estimate less wrong?
Also, please show where I say that coal is the only alternative or shut up. I'm only talking about coal because it's such a weak hill you chose to die on.
How many people do you think have died from nuclear reactor accidents the last century? I ask because they're shockingly few.
In fact more people have died from radiation from coal plants than from nuclear plants.
The safety argument isn't based on numbers, but on fear.
And the reason why there were so few fatalities was because huge chunks of land have been evacuated every time and costly cleanup operations have been undertaken. The risk is not just lives lost, but rather the impact on those countries' economy.
Only if you believe the official numbers about Chernobyl, which are worthless. The Soviet Union and later Russia was not being transparent.
> The safety argument isn't based on numbers, but on fear.
Very well-founded fear, based on how bad nuclear accidents can be, how bad people suck at adhering to safety protocols when there haven't been accidents for a long time, and the possibility of such accidents even being caused intentionally.
Take the worst number you can possibly imagine and then compare it with known numbers for hydropower. I'll take nuclear, thank you very much.
And you have sources on this except opinions and FUD?
It's not for me to prove or disprove your statements. You provided them, it's on you to provide evidence for them.
No more of this whatsoever, please.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines badly and frequently—mostly on the nuclear topic, about which you've been perpetuating vast and dreadful flamewars—but also on other topics. This is seriously not cool.
I've therefore banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
No more of this whatsoever, please.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: you've unfortunately been doing this in other threads too. For example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35555288
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35554829
This is well into the territory where we should probably ban an account. I'm not going to do that right now because you've also posted good comments (especially on other topics). But if you don't stick to the site guidelines in the future, we're certainly going to have to. Please remain thoughtful and respectful in the future, stop calling names and attacking others, and don't post any more flamewar comments.
To the best of my knowledge China has had none and South Korea have had none and the Russians (non-Soviets) have had none.
The Fukushima incident was a result of regulations being too weak or ignored and the government not keeping good enough tabs on the operator. I really don't think the Chinese government does a better job. They suck at regulating and enforcing plenty of things they care about.
Because coal plants have been allowed to remain after forced closure of nuclear plants, safety is not the actual reason why nuclear plants are removed in Germany.
The idea that coal power is less safe is bullshit. Nuclear power carries tail-heavy risk, coal plants have much more predictable risk. Nuclear power is only safer if you assume nothing happens that didn't happen in the past few decades and nobody actually deliberately blows up a nuclear power plant. Once you can't assume both, all risk calculations for nuclear power are meaningless.
And you are still lying about coal being the only replacement for nuclear.
But read the article and look at 2020-2022: coal energy generation increased while nuclear decreased:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
This is a situation incompatible with a policy of increasing safety. Increasing safety means shutting down unsafe sources while keeping or rolling out safe sources, which is the opposite of the short-term trend. So the short-term policy goal was something other than safety.
"the short-term policy goal was something other than safety"
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2023/01/luetzerath-protest...
German TUV director on nuclear power plants: "The plants are in a technically excellent condition," Joachim Buehler, managing director at TUEV, told Reuters, adding that an extensive check, which is usually done every 10 years, was necessary but could be done within a few months.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germanys-gas-crisis-...
So far everything works well for Germany. Relying on Russian gas meant cheaper power for quite some time. Hard to tell if alternatives would have fared better. Hindsight is always 20/20. Putin's invasion of Ukraine is irrational from any standpoint and not expecting him and his country shooting themselves in their feet that way wasn't illogical.
You are completely wrong there, Austria is the biggest anti-nuclear zealot in EU, they are the reason why investments into nuclear are not considered green (effectively stifling development of it).
Right now electricity maps shows that France produces 60% of electricity from nuclear, imports zero from Germany, and exports 6% of generated electricity to UK.
Also right now Germany generates 26% from coal and 9% from gas.
There's definitely a pattern there.
0.18% of power generation
> how many due to planned maintenance and underinvestment of France govt last 10 or so years
And that is the main problem.
Fun fact: In the last 20 years France has reduced its nuclear power output by just about the same total amount as Germany.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-energy-generation...