Use of nuclear technology gets green light in Rwanda

I agree, the externalities are seldom felt in real time; in fact some of us were/are addicted to the smell of 103 Octane, it burns sweet. And the cancerous nature of them is often never a big concern, even from someone like myself who worked in a lab diagnosing Leukemia and Lymphoma at one point; but the key difference is that we can undo the green-house emission and carbon footprint through effective infrastructure, optimized utilization and prioritization of it as wel ultimately transitioning to EV.

Just look at how much better the air quality is from people WFH, this can be reduced even further if we simultaneously undertook a large enough planting of trees and plants in Urban areas with CO2 requisitioning centric crops, like hemp, to remediate soils and our air.

With Nuclear getting it wrong once, be it from Natural causes or Human error, has dire consequences that can't be undone even if its deemed to be 'contained': just look at Chernobyl during the fires this year. We were in no way ready to deal with that issue given a simultaneously dreadful pandemic sweeping the Planet.

When it comes to Energy usage, I think we have to move away from solely a short-sighted quick profit based calculus, and look at it more through risk assessment approach. Where rather than think about spending money in some study looking at the affects of near extinct squirrels we see this for what it is: a very volatile planet that is hostile to Man's infrastructure with ever-changing variables.

I think that's the biggest underrated opinion of all as it shatters the conveniences of modernity in the West we've all come to expect.

And yet your anecdotal evidence is much better at estimating risk than it?

Yes.

> In the case of a melt down, as San Onofre is both on the Pacific coast line as well as along the San Andreas fault line so it was just a matter of time, we would all die. Some slower than others, but death was the most likely outcome due to radiation exposure as an evacuation plan would fail.

This is disinformation and has absolutely no basis in fact or reality.

San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) shut down in 2012 and was replaced (partially) by a natural gas power plant in Carlsbad. There is no possibility of meltdown. Even if there were, the impact would not even approach what you are describing.

> football fields worth of solar farms

Football fields would be tiny in comparison to the immense amount of land that would be required to replace Diablo Canyon with solar panels. Solar Star generates one eleventh the power of Diablo Canyon over the course of a year and occupies almost four times the space. Solar Star produces only about 42% as much energy in December as it does in June, while Diablo Canyon operates consistently pretty much year-round.

A single plant powers 9% of California with near-zero carbon emissions.

Also some of the soviet bomb development efforts caused wide scale contamination, sometime even in inhabitted areas.

Compared to the sites in the US related to nuclear weapons, like Hanford, and the (literal) fallout from above-ground nuclear weapons testing?

It's also quite likely that accidents related to nuclear weapons are under-reported, especially outside of the US, for all the obvious reasons.

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

This is a common trope, but that answer is that insurance companies are required to hold enough capital to pay a claim regardless of what the probability is. So if you want someone to carry a hundred billion dollars worth of insurance, even if the probability of the event was one in a trillion, the insurance would still be prohibitively expensive because you'd have to pay the time value of money on the hundred billion dollars the insurance company has to hold in order to cover a potential claim regardless of whether one ever comes.

This is why the government insurance thing. The federal government is large enough that it isn't necessary to make them hold that much capital in reserve ahead of time in order to trust their ability to pay a claim, which solves the problem.

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

(I know the premise you were responding to was standing right next to ground zero, where you would have been vaporized, but I think it's worth mentioning that not all of the people killed died like that.)

In true Soviet fashion some libraries had all material on radiation removed after the accident.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident (famous story which has become something of a creepypasta but does contain)

If you drink the FSB tea, I'd suggest finding a tall building.

If you want to include all forms of "home" power generation, including heating and cooking, then wood fireplaces are mass-murderers, killing tens of thousands due to particulate pollution and carbon monoxide poisoning. Not to mention homes burning down and killing the occupants.