Thanks for this.
For those interested in radioactive wastelands, the current TV series ‘Chernobyl’ seems very good, and so is the book ‘Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe’ by Serhii Plokhy
By reading these two sources I can get both sides of the story and see the arguments for and against.
This is how debates usually work.
A tangent, but this mindset of "there are always two valid sides at the extremes and we need to present both" is said to be a huge burden on the reporting about politics in the US, it makes the most extreme viewpoints visible and supported the rise of the fascists in the GOP. I agree.
Dismissing anything as "propaganda" gets us nowhere.
For what it's worth, I smelled what's up right when he talked about chernobyl right below the The Shocking Truth subheadline. The way the deaths are calculated is highly disputed, and he does not reflect that properly, instead presenting the pro-nuclear viewpoint as truth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19927377 links an article that covers that in a way more balanced way.
I (temporarily) removed it because I claimed the referenced article only talked about cancer death rates instead of cancer rates. That was a mistake on my part.
It's too black and white to see a controversial debate in "true" vs "false" statements. I mean "vaccines may have serious side effects" is not a false statement, however if it's the only statement it omits other also true statements such as "measles may cause serious complications" and the numbers / statistics comparing the two.
The argument is that the disasters typically demonstrate that even when things go horribly wrong nuclear is still better than business as usual (once considered in an appropariate global context). Business as usual is basically a disaster every year, when compared to nuclear.
The economic costs of mining coal/petroleum alone are catastrophic if there was a way to avoid it (eg, by mining uranium instead, which requires a fraction of the effort). Extraction is a huge waste of time and resources assuming that there is a way to avoid doing it. All the personpower and capital could be deployed to doing other things if it wasn't being used to dig big holes.
In fact, residents of Colorado, where radiation is higher because of high concentrations of uranium in the ground, enjoy some of the lowest cancer rates in the U.S.
It links to https://coloradosun.com/2019/02/04/colorado-skin-cancer-rate... titled Colorado has the highest per-capita rate of skin cancer, thanks to sunshine and high elevation, which does not mention Uranium at all. The article does mention a low percentage of people diagnosed with cancer, and a death rate declining faster than average. However, this gets attributed to factors like low obesity and smoking rates and above-average health care coverage. If that's accurate, the article doesn't really allow us to come to any conclusions regarding background radiation effects on cancer rates except that they are less impactful than smoking...
The source is saying that they have one of the lowest cancer rates and that the effects are all non-radiation based.
Shellenberger didn't provide a reference for Colorado having high background rates - but it does seem to be correct [0].
[0] mtnweekly.com/mountain-lifestyle/health/radiation-levels-in-colorado-highest-in-world
No one talks about how TMI almost breached it's containment. And never talk about how down river from TMI is Chesapeake Bay.
In addition, there are two major aspects one must take into account. First, some power generation methods kill people during normal operation (coal pollution kills millions as a matter of course), no disasters required. Second, the already improbable sequence of events that led to the meltdown of the RBMK reactor at Chernobyl is simply not possible in current nuclear power plants (even in the few remaining RBMK reactors still operating upgrades have fixed the issue).
Whatever you think of nuclear energy, the fact of the matter is we need power generation facilities and there is no such thing as perfect safety. Nuclear power should be evaluated in the context of the options we realistically have, not against some unattainable ideal of perfect, infallible safety. There are reasonable economic and technical arguments against nuclear power. Chernobyl isn't one of them.
It shocks me that so many (loud) proponents of nuclear power plants are still around - especially on HN. I wish you all would have lived in Europe at the time of Chernobyl.
"Electricity produced from natural gas has the lowest risk of the 11 technologies (five conventional, six non-conventional) It is a factor of about two lower than the next highest, nuclear power Third is a non-conventional system, ocean thermal, which can convert the temperature differences of ocean layers into electricity. Most other non-conventional systems have far higher risk. However, the highest of all are coal and oil, with risk about 400 times that of natural gas."
I get the feeling that this study from the 70s doesn't have all the facts that are relevant today.
I think the three coal-powered thermal plants within the city limits of Chisinau did (and are still doing) way more damage than Chernobyl ever did.
No one is advocating for coal here. It's terrible.
That is exactly what is happening. Japan is building new coal plants to make up for the lost capacity from nuclear.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/bucking-global-trend...
Had the exposed 100s of tons of stored-in-the-air waste fuel rods lost their cooling water, they might have melted into huge blobs of uncontrollable, unquenchable masses, throwing uncountable curies of radiation into the atmosphere. We all were very -lucky- that they didn't. And it was nothing but luck. Luck is not inherent.
The problem is when these dice are rolled, every living organism on the planet has to live with the outcome. Some call that an acceptable risk. Sounds crazy to me.
The reason is because humans don't think very well at the large scale, and tend to obsess over the small.
In this case, there are massive positives to nuclear and people focus in very hard on the literally-happened-twice-with-pre-CAD-designs accidents. These accidents are bad, but pale into insignificance compared to the good that these nuclear plants have done. And Fukushima was in the context of a disaster that was outside design spec, so it arguably does represent a significant improvement over Chernobyl. The design specs for nuclear plants have been continuously tightened, so I doubt it would have been possible with a modern design.
Everything about the Fukushima disaster suggests that the response has been a bit paranoid. Objectively speaking, the evacuation was overzealous and according to the comments here today the Japanese government decided that the standards around what was acceptable background radiation were too unreasonable so wound them back.
Compare Fukushima to global warming (which I am occasionally assured is an civilization level threat). The civilisation level threat is business as usual, the nuclear solution is a Fukushima-city level threat. Governments routinely sign up for risks that are more likely and more expensive than Fukushima; albeit more spread out in time. Given what the environmentalists are saying about Global Warming it is clearly the case that everyone who could should have switched to nuclear power back in the 90s.
Even now, when it is starting to look more obvious that solar is the path we will choose, it is still a pretty reasonable suggestion that the environmental costs of mining, producing and installing the solar panels will outweigh the damage done by a nuclear disaster, just in a less concentrated fashion. Given that the Chinese have demonstrated how quickly a new city can be built the argument in favor of solar is - ironically - mainly economic rather than environmental.