Lack of relible decay heat[1] cooling caused both Fukushima and three mile island accidents. Having passive decay heat removal usually decreases the probability of core damage by about 100x.
For comparison, the Banqiao Dam failure (the largest dam failure in history) killed as many people as the sum total of every nuclear power plant failure and every atomic bomb ever used, combined.
1.) Dam breaks devastate much smaller areas. So even if the human toll is the same, the amount of infrastructure lost is smaller.
2.) The area is unlivable (or even inaccessible) for a much smaller duration of month instead of millenia.
Maybe land lost "forever" (on the timescale of individual human lives) is not a big problem in some part of the world, but in densely populated areas (any they need the most power, so would have MORE reactors per area) you can not simply block off an area the size of Belgium because a reactor exploded. This makes nuclear power a lot less attractive in India, Europe or (coastal) China.
> 2.) The area is unlivable (or even inaccessible) for a much smaller duration of month instead of millenia.
Millennia of uninhabitability is anti-nuclear propaganda. Most of the zone will be reinhabitable within a century of the accident, and much of it is already inhabitable again but still excluded out of safety margin concerns.
[1] https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/worlds-worst-energy-ac...
Citation needed. WHO says up to 4000 early cancer deaths total from Chernobyl. 2.5x larger cancer fatalities would be hundreds of thousands if not millions of people which is not seen by any credible study that I'm aware of.
My ex grew up in Gomel and didn't get cancer. Neither did her parents.
http://irbis-nbuv.gov.ua/cgi-bin/irbis_nbuv/cgiirbis_64.exe?...
My brothers were unable to escape. Younger brother had problems with thyroid, but survived. (I had problems with thyroid too, but at much smaller scale). Older brother had brain surgery about two months ago, but it's unknown is it helped or not yet.
Lower than wind and solar.
If terrorists were in possession of such amounts of powerful explosives, and a capacity to place them inside a highly guarded area, they could use that to blow up a city center to a much greater destructive effect.
Practical Engineering on Youtube is a great overview of the issues we humans have with water: https://www.youtube.com/user/gradyhillhouse/playlists
Of interest here are these videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eImtYyuQCZ8&list=PLTZM4MrZKf...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EzoHXEzdwY&list=PLTZM4MrZKf...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACkiMRT0pc&list=PLTZM4MrZKf...
But the expected harm from a SNR like this having a leak is decidely not the same. Yes, the leaks may be rare, but the outcomes from such a leak occuring have Chernobyl-like outcomes in their failure trees. The probability calculus still may return that this design is quite fine, given the risk tables, but you MUST run the numbers. Hand waving is not ok here.
Similarly, most fission reactor failure modes don't release harmful amounts of contamination to the public.
More likely you have an over speed failure and the it runs out of control and self destructs flinging the blades and other heavy objects about.
100x isn't 100% though.
100 of these small reactors has the same risk as one large reactor. Perhaps higher, because like you, everyone goes around saying the risk has been designed out.
Though obviously one small reactor going boom is preferable to a big one doing the same.
The risk is that there are occasionally nuclear accidents: Three mile island and fermi 1 meltdowns, both of which killed zero people. Chernobyl, which killed ~50 from ARS and up to 4,000 early deaths over the next several decades (on top of a few million cancers that would have happened anyway in the population). Fukushima, which killed up to one person. Can anyone name any fatal natural gas explosions? Any hydro dam failures that killed 100,000? How many people per year does coal kill by operating normally (~200,000). We as a society accept certain risks from our energy infrastructure because of all the good we get from it.
Here is a plot of how many thousands of days of life are lost by various things [1]. Note that nuclear is almost ridiculously low. This chart doesn't include the impact of climate change on human lives. Nuclear fission is a climate superpower, and we cannot be justified in neglecting this natural resource because we're afraid of something going boom.
TLDR: A factor of 100x improvement in nuclear safety goes from tiny risk to supertiny. Current plants are already safer than almost everything else we know. Some studies have more people dying from installing solar on their roofs than getting killed by radiation from nuclear fission plants.
BTW: Will you move to Chornobyl to demonstrate that radioactivity is safe? Land is cheap here.
https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/worlds-worst-energy-ac...
Wildlife is thriving in my area too, because people abandon homes and move to cities instead.
However, if you like it, you can create similar exclusion zone near to you. Just vote for nuclear power and wait until next nuclear disaster.
People got cancers at increased rate, which is limited to less than two generations of damage. The range had expired a bunch of years ago.
Going into high mountains is a bigger radiation risk today.
As a bonus, you can just drive to Fukushima on a bike today and not even get a daily dose of some inhabited places in the US.
Reminder that coal has more radioactive waste over a decade than a nuclear plant does in its worst failure mode; and that worst failure mode is very unlikely with modern reactor designs (unlike Chernobyl and Fukushima)
2) All coal plants in the world combined cannot make land inhabitable for millennia.
Nice try downplaying the actual consequences of a reactor incident like Chernobyl.
Do I have to mention radioactive boars roaming in Bavarian forests again?
The billions in costs to an economy?
The only part I agree with you is that coal is a not an acceptable way to generate power.
There's now sufficiently cheap power generators that don't devastate whole areas for centuries to come. Let's use those instead of this old nuclear tech.
I highly recommend you read some recent info regarding Chernobyl [1]. I'm not downplaying it at all. I'm using quantitative numbers produced by teams of UN and WHO scientists.
RE cost: climate change will cost trillions. Nuclear power plants can prevent that cost.
"Centuries" is a persistent anti-nuclear myth. Again, see [1]. I don't think you're well justified in saying I'm downplaying Chernobyl when you're going on and saying stuff like this!
[1] https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/worlds-worst-energy-ac...