To say nothing of waste, even when everything goes right. Nuclear is the grandaddy of instant gratification traps. Moment on the lips, hundreds of millennia on the hips. I think we can do better.

Isn’t it the case that all high-level nuclear waste generated in the entire course of human history could fit in a relatively shallow layer over a piece of land the size of a football field? (e.g. [0])

I understood nuclear to be, from most any lifecycle analysis, the modality with the fewest externalities of any grid-scale tech mature enough to field, and somehow almost cost-competitive even while regulated (as it is today) to safety thresholds many orders of magnitude more conservative than the incumbent technologies.

It sounds like you’re informed differently than me. What’d the better way that you propose in the last sentence?

[0] https://zionlights.substack.com/p/everything-i-believed-abou...

One cannot take seriously people that use the most extreme outlier event in the history of a technology as a generally representative data point for said technology.

But you do take people seriously, who make absolutistic statements like "zero environmental impact", that can be disproved so easily?

I am not anti nuclear btw. I just call out BS, when I see BS.

And I just shared what affected me personaly, if you want to know more about potential and actual disasters:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_a...

Multiply that with x, if you increase the number of plants.

And watch out for Murphy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law

It would be statistically unwise to ignore the actual data points, no? What do you suggest instead?

Not using outliers for general talking points. At all.

Or maybe not start a debate with using statements that are plain wrong?

>Uranium

Please google Thorium and Minor Actinide Incineration.

>Chernobyl

The manifest incompetencies of a literal Communist government are none of the US' concern.

Well there was Three Mile Island accident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

Another assured part of the litany invoked by anti-nuclear activists. There were no certain or statistically expected deaths from the accident and considering that it took place in a country that has been burning coal for power for a century, which has killed up to as much as 30,000 people per year in preventable deaths from inhalation of combustion products and particulates etc, bringing up TMI is trivial to dismiss.

Your argument is all true, but still doesn't go far enough. Today, plentiful nuclear energy will almost certainly make it conceivable, and maybe even profitable, to extract that century of coal burning back out of the air! Litany is exactly the right way to describe it. All over on the other side of this debate we see the pessimistic habit of mob chant suppressing reasoned imagination of a future made better by technology and determination.

The three mile island incident singlehandly shows that US' concern should be correlated to other countries nuclear incidents. Thinking that it only arrived because of "communism" is quite wrong, especially because of the technical capabilities of the USSR.

I don't see how the largest nuclear non-disaster in world history prompts a comparison between the US and the country that built the people's chandeliers and couches so large that the head of the planned economy had to give a speech declaring them too difficult to move in and dangerous to hang to be tolerated. Oh, and also their actual disaster killed an infinite multiple of people.

I'll be happy to compromise with you, though. If you support nuclear in spite of Chernobyl, I'll support the death penalty for any capitalist that oversees a nuclear meltdown not caused by an ICBM despite your lack of knowledge about the history of the USSR, and nature of communism. I might even support burning at the stake or something if that's what it takes to make the obviously correct decision for human progress. McCarthy wrote that link decades after Three Mile and Chernobyl. He wouldn't have done so if he didn't also know what I'm relaying to you now. Received opinion is the least grounded kind.

EDIT: Lol I missed what thread this was in. Again, was Three Mile Island a Thorium reactor? We'd all save so much time if questions were directed to Google instead of me.

I agree that Chernobyl is a poor reason to fear nuclear reactors. However, the argument that it was because of communism is one that has no meat and shouldn't be used to try to convince people.

Sorry, but I use a different criteria for judging the meat on the bones of an argument than if it offends your sensibilities or not.