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Comment by piquadrat | Hacker News Reader

Hydro plants (specifically, dams) can be very disruptive to the local environment. You're flooding entire valleys.

They can also pose a substantial danger in the case of failure, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam (~2000 casualties, vs Fukushima Daiichi's estimated death toll of ~500).

(I'm a big fan of hydro power, just saying it also has its draw backs)

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The number 500 is a very rough estimate. The vast majority of deaths considered to be related to the nuclear failure involved old people who had to be evacuated, and then died due to stresses or medical problems during the evacuation. The number of deaths attributed to actual radiation exposure is ONE.

While the death toll of nuclear accidents is relatively low, their economic cost seems to be staggering. The Japanese authorities enforced a 30km exclusion zone around Fukushima; if an accident of similar size had happened to the Beznau nuclear plant, the entire city of Zürich could have fallen inside the exclusion zone. Just think of the real estate value vaporized. Even if it's one event in a thousand years, I'm not sure it's worth the risk.

Fun fact, there were serious plans in the 1950ies to build a nuclear power plant right in Zurich, primarily as district heating for ETH Zurich.

https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.... (page 83, German)

Well, in this case the flooded area was under water before as well... just frozen water. So I assume the environmental impact would be small, here.

Also I would assume, the higher up the mountain the dam is build the smaller the impact due to less flora and fauna.

I'd argue though that the 500 in Fukushima's case don't include the ripple effect of dying fish, hurting the environment and making products more radioactive, which then get shipped all over and cause cancer in people (I'm exaggerating but you get the gist).

Just like the estimates for building dams don't include the ripple effect of dying fish, dying fisheries, and the health impact on fishers. (Or the relocation of people to create dam lakes, leading to stress-related deaths just like Fukushima relocations might have...)

My point: Once you go into small and hard-to-quantify large-population effects, your error margins become ridiculous and you can pull out any conclusion out of your hat...

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