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> An improbable outcome of widespread catastrophe (irradiating a million people) is and should be treated as something worse than a more-probable outcome of localized catastrophe (plane crash).

Quoting myself again:

Imagine if any other tech had the same fear-mongering. We'd never have a single hydroelectric plant after Banqiao dam failure that killed anywhere from 25 000 to 240 000 and left 11 million people homeless.

Fair about the dam. If that happened in the West then yes, it'd change things. The biggest dam failures in North America for example have never been that big. And you'd surely never get a major new dam built today anywhere near any kind of populated area in the USA.

Also, it's worth noting that nuclear disasters remain dangerous for amounts of time ranging from "one generation" to "longer than human history so far", adding an extra element of catastrophe.

The crucial difference is that people consent to get on a plane.

There are quite a few people who are afraid of flying, so afraid that they refuse to fly. That’s of course their prerogative.

The problem with nuclear power stations is that when they have serious accidents they don’t just affect the people who wanted to build them, they affect everybody, including the people who didn’t want them to be built, and even people in neighboring countries who didn’t even get a vote on it - depending on which way the wind blows.

So the nuclear power station has to be built as safely as the most fearful person demands.

> The problem with nuclear power stations is that when they have serious accidents they don’t just affect the people who wanted to build them, they affect everybody

Why do we keep building hydroelectric plants (and dams in general)? Why do we keep building coal plants which are more radioactive than niclear plants, and are often located in densely populated areas?

Why don't you apply the same logic to other things?

We are not? We are building renewables where the risks all come from the people working on the equipment. Fitting the analogy of airline safety nicely.

And yet nobody consented to climate change. I certainly didn't. They also don't consent to PM2.5 from uncovered coal trains running through residential areas. Nobody consents to being downstream of a hydroelectric dam...

I wasn’t saying that we can’t have nuclear power at all. I was saying that we can’t nuclear power that is as risky as aviation. If that makes nuclear unviable, then so be it.

Getting on an aircraft involves taking a risk. You may die. People die every year because they boarded an aircraft. The risk is small, but it’s not zero. We are okay with people taking this risk because they chose to do it.

For nuclear power, small is not good enough, the risk of a serious incident such as Chernobyl has to be effectively zero. This is very expensive.

Hydroelectric is not really comparable, if you are not happy living downstream of a hydro plant then you can move somewhere else.

Nuclear fails in unpredictable ways. When Chernobyl happened, the whole of Europe held its breath to see which way the fallout would blow. The only way to escape the risk is heavy regulation or bans.

Had nuclear plants been treated the way airplanes are treated, any fault in one plant would lead to steps to redesign all of them, present and future, to definitively avoid this fault; and frankly, the fact that this is not being done is such a massive fuckup that it's making me more anti-nuclear.

My pro-nuclear position is based on an assumption of baseline competence! This doesn't seem to actually be the case!

Incorrect, old aircraft are grandfathered into new regulations. This is why it's so hard to get the GA industry to switch away from leaded avgas, because it's almost impossible to certify new engines.

Does this apply to safety issues as well?