We could pretty much save the world with fission today, but we don’t because politics. I’m not confident that we’ll actually adopt fusion even when the tech is ready.
Fusion doesn't suffer from those problems.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
It will be impossible to re-populate land up to six miles from the Chernobyl for the next 10,000 years, and it will probably be the same for Fukushima
Along with that, zones that can be repopulated are suffering much higher risk of cancer and misc health issues.
The safety margins are big because the risks are tremendous, not because people love to waste money.
There are still humans living within the exclusion zone, still humans working at Chernobyl where three reactors continued to operate after the accident, the vast majority of gamma from the site is from an isotope with a half-life of 30 years, and the background radiation within the exclusion zone is provably less than the background radiation you find when living in high altitudes.
Chernobyl was the absolute worst case in that it had no containment whatsoever, and Fukushima was an absolute worst case for a western reactor in that it couldn't SCRAM and cool properly with multiple backup systems failing, but the implication that large tracts of land are uninhabitable for tens of thousands, or even hundreds of years is patently false.
In addition, there are no attributable deaths to either accident among the general population. Radiation doses in both cases were very low in the context of the general population surrounding these plants.
The fact is that more people died from the sudden evacuations and stress of relocating than died, or will die, from the radiation levels.
But I can't seem to be able to find the original, even on Greenpeace
You might be right on this
I think you need to spend more time reading about chernobyl.
Many, many of the cleanup workers at chernobyl in the weeks and months following the disaster were normal people who were essentially gang-pressed into service and handed a shovel.
All of those people wrapping tree trunks in plastic and burying them were not all soldiers or paid, professional firefighters. These people were worked until they literally fell over and died in hospital shortly thereafter. I would characterize these people as part of the "general population".
I recommend _All that is Solid Melts Into Air_ and _Voices from Chernobyl.
>These people were worked until they literally fell over and died in hospital shortly thereafter.
It's more accurate to say that they were literally cooked. It's horrible, but that's what the Soviets did, and continue to neglect many who are still alive. Their sacrifices prevented the absolute worst outcome of that disaster, and they certainly deserve all recognition they can get. And for leaving the liquidators out of that comment, I apologize.
The real stories surrounding the accident and the cleanup certainly are terrifying. The control room in particular and the imagery of several individuals being totally and instantly vaporized will always stick with me.
By that argument, I should also be accounting for the climate change effects of carbon fuels, the mining impact of basically everything including what renewable plants are made from (IDK about most, but turns out uranium’s easier and safer to mine than coal), and the environmental damage caused by us using so much energy.
I argue the reason for tight regulation is an entirely different risk: political risk. People fear it, demand control over it, vote for politicians who implement it. It’s not like any German reactor could’ve suffered tsunami-induced damage, but tsunami-induced damage in someone else’s reactor resulted in no more German reactors. A tsunami which, for the record, killed at least 15,895 people and caused a lot of environmental damage from all the consequent chemical spills. Yet no grand public international outcry against chemicals which can be spilled by a tsunami.
Humans are interesting, what we consider to be a risk or not. :)