"Nuclear power is a potential safety threat, *if* something goes wrong. Coal-fired power is *guaranteed* destruction, filling the atmosphere with planet-heating carbon when it operates the way it's supposed to". (Bill McKibben)
Same for fossil gas, by the way.
@kravietz Nuclear power is guaranteed destruction as well… Creating nuclear waste lasting for centuries and other than CO2, we don't even have a remote idea on how to get rid of it.
And no, hiding it in the ground is not a great answer as all temporary depots have shown.
I think we have to come up with better solutions there.
@pro @kravietz So, I just spend some time reading about full cycle nuclear power strategy and the first thing that sticks out is: Even for the "little" amount of nuclear waste that France produces, it has no final destination.
And another point I came across, due to the "statistics being an asshole the risk of an incident increases drastically with every new power plant, The incidents of Fukushima and Chernobyl were no exceptions, they were statically "expectable".
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00963402.2016.1145910
@pro @kravietz I don't know of any coal, wind or solar energy incident, that made it impossible for humans to live in an area as big as Chernobyl.
I mean if you want to live with the risk, fine, go ahead. But please somewhere not even remotely close to me? like further away than Chernobyl, because we still had their nuclear cloud over here and are still recommended to not collect mushrooms in the forest, due to this nonsense.
@sheogorath @pro Here are some case studies of fatal accidents in solar industry https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CCDPHP/DEODC/OHB/FACE/Pages/Solar.aspx
And obviously, we should not panic around that because *every* human activity can potentially result in harm and death. Keeping them safe is a task for healt & safety. The problem is that accidents in nuclear industry are singled out and presented as something immensely dangerous and deadly, when they are not.
@kravietz @pro I think the major difference is 1st party impact vs 3rd party impact.
The number of people that are at least subject of a nuclear incident is by a magnitude of hundred thousands when not millions higher than the number of even hundreds of solar or wind industry incidents.
https://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/backgrounder/en/
https://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/a_e/fukushima/faqs-fukushima/en/
And we can safely expect another incident within the next 15-20 years.
No, we cannot. Because accidents happened to old reactors built and operated in risky locations, and the industry has learned from it.
Nothing that happened in Chernobyl and Fukushima can ever happen in any reactor operated in France, UK or Germany, because they were built specifically to be safe.
Note that even Russia, with its long tradition of negligence, had no nuclear power safety accidents since Chernobyl.
The point is that nobody is building reactors such as in Fukushima and in such places.
The problem is that Japan had not much other choice back when they built it - they were cut from resources, and took the risk. The risk has materialized eventually, but that was their bet.
@kravietz @pro Well, according to the ASN the scenario like Fukushima is still not impossible. Even when the protects where improved a lot.
An example for this is the 1999 incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blayais_Nuclear_Power_Plant#1999_flooding
The current ASM report from 2018 talks a lot about improvements that were done after Fukushima, which shows that there is still room for improvement.
By the way, the point of the statistic is not that an incident will happen the same way as in Fukushima, but with a similar impact.