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Comment by zmix | Hacker News Reader

> Chernobyl

Fukushima? Three Mile Island (partial only, though)? That's a (partial) melt-down every 24 years, if we start counting the nuclear age with 1945 and count till today.

If we use the numbers for civilian power plants, we need to start with the commision date of U.S.S.R. power plant "Obninsk", wich was connected to the public grid in 1954. If ending the count today, that would be 21 years. Or, if we take the last melt-down as the reset value for our clock, we will find it at 19 years, for every (partial) meltdown. With more than 500 new nuclear power plants either planned or in production, well....

Let's see, whether Molten Salt Reactors are going to show as an overall positive development...They would make things, as far as I am informed, at least a little bit safer, till we have real fusion power.

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You've exhaustively listed every nuclear accident recorded and said, "That's a melt-down every 24 years" as if that were something terrible. The numbers do not support you. Nuclear has less deaths per kilowatt hour produced than coal by orders of magnitude, and even kills less people than hydroelectric, solar, or wind power.

Even if we did consider deaths from catastrophic events somehow "worse" than the occasional, not-so-newsworthy death, look at the Banqiao dam breakage. That's rarely brought up as an argument against hydroelectric power.

Nuclear is hated due to superstition and fear-mongering. Please don't add to it; it's our only thoroughly demonstrated alternative to large-scale fossil fuel consumption.

Except for renewables.

No, surprising though it may seem, renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and hydro have all caused more deaths proportional to the energy they have produced than nuclear.

OP wasn't referring to deaths, only that its a demonstrable alternative [1]. Some deaths might be warranted over a fuel that has no waste disposal method.

[1] Nuclear is hated due to superstition and fear-mongering. Please don't add to it; it's our only thoroughly demonstrated alternative to large-scale fossil fuel consumption.

Not true. Hydro is a great example. The majority of hydro deaths are caused by dam failures. The most deadly dam failure in the world was the Banqiao Dam. It's failure caused 85,000 direct deaths and an estimated 150,000 deaths due to famine caused by destruction of cropland. Even in the US, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure lists 498 deaths in the US alone since 1945 while generating significantly less power than nuclear has in that time. And that doesn't include the tens of people who die in boating accidents related to dams every single year.

Not all damns are hydro power plants, many are just for water, the kind of steady water supply that nuclear and coal energy need.

Then China had to rebuild the dam in the same location a few years later because, without the flood control that Banqiao Dam was built to provide, there was regular and catastrophic downstream flooding. Anyone who blames those deaths on hydroelectric power is being less than honest. The alternative wasn't those people not dying; the alternative was them dying from dam failure anyway, but without the dam providing power in the meantime. The dam failure seems to have been a direct result of trying to use it to control downstream flooding.

Mentioning Fukushima while talking about Germany demonstrates his point that it's hysteria. Fukushima happened on an island that has regular monsoons, is prone to tsunamis and prone to earthquakes.

Germany is fucking boring. The rains here are moderate. One half of its coast line is a barely connected inland see that has almost no flood/ebb. The other half is protected by the UK from strong water movements. And earthquakes here, if they ever happen, are absolutely tiny.

You'd need to multiply your prediction there by maybe 100 to balance out just how much safer germany is as a country compared to japan.

I agree with rcoveson. I see your stats and say "world-wide we ONLY have an accident every 19 years? Wow that's amazing, we can produce all of our energy without carbon and only deal with one accident in the world every 19 years! Hell yeah, we solved this energy problem!" (Yes I'll agree the rate would go up as we add plants but still, that is an incredibly encouraging stat, not a depressing one)

That's known as the Gambler's fallacy. Basically, "Assuming that whatever happened before will happen again (e.g. I got away with murder last time so it'll be fine for me to murder someone again now)". Just because there have been failures doesn't mean there will continue to be failures. Consider the industry evaluates each of these issues and knows how to prevent against them in the interim. Not to mention ongoing science to improve the efficiency and stability of these systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

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