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Comment by petschge | Hacker News Reader

While dam break cost lives, there is crucial differences that are never mentioned by the pro-nuclear crowd on HN.

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.

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Chernobyl's exclusion zone was ~1000 mi^2, consisting of ~120,000 people. The Oroville dam evacuation zone is ~250mi^2 encompassing ~180,000 people. Floods are no laughing matters; the Chinese decision to break the levees of the Yellow River during the Second Sino-Japanese War is credited with killing 400,000 people or so and rendering millions homeless, and the land was unusable for the better part of a decade, not "a month."

> 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.

Strengthening your point on the persistent anti-nuclear "uninhabitable for millennia" myth, check this recent article out [1]. The wildlife at Chernobyl is thriving. There are far worse energy accidents in other industries that cause far more and widespread damage.

[1] https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/worlds-worst-energy-ac...

Chornobyl's exclusion zone covered small part of contaminated area only. My parent's home is in contaminated area, but nobody was evacuated. Cancer rate is 2.5x larger at average in four regions of Ukraine, which are near to Chornobyl. I saw 6m (20 foot) wide circle of dead grass at about 800m from my parents home, where a hot particle landed. Both my neighbors are died because of cancer. I live in clear region, but my lungs was very radioactive for few years, because of my visits to parents.

> Cancer rate is 2.5x larger at average in four regions of Ukraine, which are near to Chornobyl.

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.

In Ukrainian. See graphic at page 235 (Thyroid cancer level growth since tragedy).

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.

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