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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

I'd much rather be involved in a hydro-electric disaster than a nuclear one though...

Hydro disasters can be dams bursts and are no joke! Thousands dead, towns wiped away, stuff like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_Machchhu_dam_failure

Luckily not that common especially with well-maintained dams. But it was a huge fear with the Mosul dam in Iraq, which was expected to put over a million lives at risk during the ISIL insurgency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosul_Dam

I'm not anti-hydro at all! But it's important to understand how powerful these dams are...

GP was saying, I think, that they'd prefer a quick violent water surge over slow radiation poisoning. You can say good bye, but you might have to do nothing else but saying good bye for an awful low of time (perhaps to similarly doomed people).

I don't have data but I assume that most immediate dam breach deaths are from acute force trauma (and then drowning) rather than from just drowning. Less similar to the slow death of being without a boat in the middle of an ocean than to the hypothetical of getting stomped by the Terry Gilliam foot in Flying Circus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Suddenly, Chernobyl doesn't sound that bad anymore.

When you consider that the elephant’s foot nearly contaminated the water table, it sort of does.

Are you really? If you’re involved in nuclear accident, you get to live anywhere from days to months to years to decades. Even in the worst of the worst cases (you literally touched the fuel rod), you will have time to say farewells to the family, perhaps even write a will.

With hydroelectric accident you drown. The end.

I'm not scared of dying. I am scared of dying slowly and painfully as I burn from the inside out.

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