this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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This is exactly why I love nuclear
And who can forget the classic, "Where is the waste from fossil fuels? Take a deep breath, it's in your lungs. Where is the waste from nuclear power? Where we store it."
Yes there have been disasters but the waste from those are tracked, in a specific location, and can be cleaned up. The default state of fossil fuels hits every living breathing thing on Earth.
And even factoring in the impact from disasters nuclear is still the safest. And we have even safer designs for reactors nowadays then the reactors that had those disasters.
Nuclear suffers from the airplane fallacy where when something goes wrong it tends to go really wrong and a lot of people die at once and it makes the news. But fact is, many orders of magnitude more people have died from fossil fuel plants, mining, byproducts, and combustion. They just die slower, in smaller groups, so it doesn't get reported on as easily.
looks doubtful
I mean, I agree with your broader point that it gets a disproportionate amount of coverage and scares people, but I dunno about nuclear accidents killing people quickly and at once.
I mean, Chernobyl was the worst nuclear incident, ya? Like, there were definitely some people who were killed right there, but it was a pretty small group, even so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster
So, immediate deaths were about 30. I mean, that airline crash we had out in those Spanish islands, whatsit called....
googles
Yeah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
I mean, that killed about 20 times the immediate number of deaths in Chernobyl. I guarantee you that that collision didn't get twenty times the media coverage or concern of Chernobyl.
Even if we use the highest estimated total death figure listed above for Chernobyl for the "increased death rate from minor effects around the world" -- 60,000 -- and I suspect that that's being awfully pessimistic -- it kind of gets dwarfed by how many similar deaths around the world we casually ignore from coal power and the like due to particulate emissions.
googles
If one's worried about death rates, nuclear's at about the bottom of the list.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Isn't it even safer than wind energy ?
And now we're in an age of nuclear fusion. My kid or grandkids may live in a world powered by even cleaner reactors. Which is great because they will probably have to live entirely indoors.
Eh, I feel like we've been in an age of nuclear fusion for decades, it's always just around the corner...
But maybe this latest set of breakthroughs will be it. I'll believe it when I see a production scale plant.
It has value in terms of research but I’ve seen no evidence that we’re even remotely close to hooking a fusion reactor up to a grid.