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A comment on Sweden Gov Announces 'Massive Expansion' of Nuclear Energy. Parent comment

Re:Sweden Gov Announces 'Massive Expansion' of Nuclear Energy by Manuel_D on Thursday November 16, 2023 @06:34PM (#38297185)
Sure nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks. But there's still a strong argument to be made that nuclear is still over-regulated relative to its risks. It has the lowest death toll per watt of electricity produced of any generation source, even including Chernobyl. Furthermore, US plants built during periods of more relaxed regulation haven't seen much in the realm of harmful mishaps. Three Mile Island is a testament to safety measures - it turns out building a big concrete condom over your reactor helps contain meltdowns.
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Re:Sweden Gov Announces 'Massive Expansion' of Nuclear Energy by bruce511 on Thursday November 16, 2023 @11:27PM (#38299581)
>> nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks

to some extent this I what's happening now. If a wind turbine (or indeed whole wind farm) catastrophically fails then you can clean it up in a matter of days or weeks. The range of potential damage in space and time, is very limited.

By contrast catastrophic nuclear failure leads to immediate damage over a far larger area, and spans a much longer time (like hundreds of years. )

One can quibble about deaths from chernobyl but it displaced an entire city and rendered a substantial chunk of land unusable for centuries.

So I would argue that thd regulations are completely in line with the risks, as they stand right now.

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Re:Sweden Gov Announces 'Massive Expansion' of Nuclear Energy by Manuel_D on Friday November 17, 2023 @12:27AM (#38299927)
To the contrary, nuclear contamination can be cleaned up. Fukushima's exclusion zone was completely lifted after 11 years [1]. Pripyat was a planned city, built for the specific purpose of supporting the Chernobyl plant and it's workers. It remains unremediated because there's no incentive to clean it up, not because. Nuclear power has a smaller death toll per megawatt hour than wind, orders of magnitude less than hydropower and biomass [2].

1. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear...

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

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Re:Sweden Gov Announces 'Massive Expansion' of Nuclear Energy by bruce511 on Friday November 17, 2023 @06:37AM (#38302153)
Right. So 11 years. Versus a couple weeks. I think you're proving my point.
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Re:Sweden Gov Announces 'Massive Expansion' of Nuclear Energy by Manuel_D on Friday November 17, 2023 @12:19PM (#38306650)
Fukushima also produced immensely more electricity. Again, impact per unit of electricity produced is lower.
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