Neither choice is good, but the odds of survival are much higher with the first choice than the second. Nuclear power accidents and use of nuclear weapons are not really comparable – as bad as nuclear power accidents are, use of nuclear weapons is far more deadly.
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 the case of an explosion above the ground, ground zero is the point on the ground directly below the nuclear detonation and is sometimes called the hypocenter (from Greek ὑπο- "under-" and center).
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.
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1660web-81...
Basically, 3 lumberjacks went into the woods, found a strange metallic thing that was warm to the touch, slept next to it. The report has incredibly graphic images of how their skin looked due to radiation exposure, don't scroll down to that section if you cannot look at gore. But essentially - the issue wasn't the initial damage, the issue was that the affected areas just wouldn't heal no matter how many skin transplants were done, literally rotting away while alive.
When I was a kid my dad told me a story about people finding glowing objects and taking them home and giving their whole family radiation poisoning. (In hindsight, I think he was probably describing the Goiânia accident in Brazil in 1987, which would have been recently in the media at the time he warned me). Like most people, I never found any glowing object but if I ever did I would have known to leave it be, get the hell out of there, and then call the authorities.
In true American fashion they paid a bit of money, and said come back in 5 year's everything will be totally normal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll
In the cold war, both sides where just disgusting, in fact the US was most of the time the aggressor and the soviets had to be on the defense side (because near absence of money flow)
The US was no saint during the Cold War but the Soviet Union was so much worse. Trivial Example: Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen are still alive, but the people they betrayed were executed in the basement of the Lubyanka - without trial.
>because near absence of money flow
Communism giveth, communism taketh away.
See that's the problem, extreme capitalism is absolutely the same..talking about supporting the UAE, attacking Irak (because OIL...not Human rights) the US is the example of a absolute extreme money and might centrist Kingdom (with a better marketing than the soviets)
PS: Please ask the Vietnamese people if the US the French or the Soviets are the worst
PPS: And the US eats his children (witch are good ones) alive...what a shitty society you made, russia is just a tick worse nowadays. You as a nation had the chance to make this planet a better place, but no you spit out billionaires like a assembly line.
Hiroshima on the other hand - you dont want that. Last year we visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial museum and it was a very very heavy experience...
"A millisecond of brilliant light and we're vaporized. Much more fortunate than the millions who'll wander sightless through the smoldering aftermath. We'll be spared the horror of survival." - WarGames, 1983
I believe the "steel man" argument is that living next to a nuclear power plant exposes you to unknown tail risks.
But who is advocating for coal in lieu of Nuclear, other than say China?
This is such a red herring, that no one in their right mind is trying to use coal as alternative, I mean even Texas with a dreadful position on environmental damage (see examples like COVID) and is swimming in oil--they had 99 cent gasoline before the pandemic--is moving towards wind farms.
Even the Gulf States see the writing on the wall and are moving on to other investments in Aerospace and mining asteroids in space.
Germany, for example, is literally dismantling their nuclear energy program and the slack is taken up with coal. Due to self-named "green" advocacy.
Or anyone arguing against nuclear in the developing world, for example. The status quo is coal.
As of 2016, Germany generated ~40% of its electricity from coal [1]. At the same time, France generated 72.3% of its electricity from nuclear (2016) [2], and 1.18% from coal [3].
Yet you will see people straight-up praising Germany for its anti-nuclear stance.
People who advocate against nuclear, yet stay silent on coal, are contributing to our coal-burning world, whether they realize it or not. Actions speak louder than words.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Electricity_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France
[3] https://www.climatescorecard.org/2020/04/france-aims-at-clea...
I don't, and I wore the 'Atomkraft, nein danke' patch too while I lived there and installed solar on several sites for the Farm owners I worked for; the State may have subsidized solar a lot, but as you said they have gaps and they just import the energy from France's Nuclear behemoth despite this policy. I lived and worked in Southern Germany 30 Km away from the border of France near Alsace and this was common knowledge when I lived there. The mother of my friend who I worked for was a politician of the Green Party, and this was one of the point of contentions she and I would argue over; the facade of doing something while only externalizing the issue.
This was the same in my hometown with the nuclear plant in Orange County, we ended up paying Mitusbishi Heavy Industries for a f'd re-design, paid Edison more for electricity, and had our lives impacted with the radiation leak and our surf spots closed off so that we could subsidize and help offset the energy needs of the greater San Diego region; specifically Camp Pendelton Military base, which was/is the biggest domestic concentration of Marines on US soil for a mobilization point into the Pacific region where Obama had placed his military focus on early into this administration.
Turns out the grid could handle it without the need of SONGS as its been shutdown, and they restarted natural gas plants in OC as result.
> People who advocate against nuclear, yet stay silent on coal, are contributing to our coal-burning world, whether they realize it or not. Actions speak louder than words.
Agreed but this is portraying things in a false dichotomy, I'm for advocating the use of all renewable in conjunction of having fossil fuels be the (limited) back up for when its needed to fill the gaps. I really do not think we will 100% remove ourselves on fossil fuel, airplanes will likely never be EV, nor cargo crafts for Sea Freight, neither will propellants for rockets go away either. In fact I see it going up in fact as SpaceX makes progress with Starship and increases its manifest, and at the tail end of the consumer market motorsports people like myself will always have a need for it.
There are far too many variables to realistically think Fossil fuel will go away 100% in any of our Lifetimes, my friend is finishing his BSc in renewable energy/EE and just got accepted to a Masters program in Iceland focused on geothermal and even he says the same thing. Albeit incredibly reluctantly.
As a resident, have they made appeals to explore geothermal? During the 'Genpatsu Hantai' protests after Fukushima in 2011 so many people were committed to making that happen, the Abe Government was stalling things for TEPCO but I thought by now their would be at least some exploration, my cousin did his Civil Engineering degree under a professor who was part of a team doing those studies in Japan before Fukushima. Things were promising.
What happened?
Japan is tricky, it has very few if any natural resources, but Nuclear only ever made up 30% of its energy needs in its peak. In the time from 2011 to now you'd think more viable projects for geothermal would have been made, rather than relying on coal being brought in from Sea freight for their energy. Japan has always been in a precarious situation when it came to Energy creation, its the commonly told reason (US oil embargo) why it attacked Pearl Harbor; although this entirely negates that the supposed 'neutral' US was already involved in fighting the Japanese Imperial Forces in China under the AVG. Then again Fukushima residents still reside in a version of their own FEMA camp after all these years.
Found this on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_Japan
Apparently there is opposition from local people that large scale geothermal energy development could disrupt natural hot springs that they often depend on with their livelihood.
BTW, you can kinda feel the energy crisis while in Japan - you will quickly notice how solar panels are places on any unused flat land that is available & there are many solar water heaters (that could save quite a bit of electricity and gas for water heating).
It's very easy to beat down the strawman of pollution.
The risks of living next to a coal plant are rather well understood.
The worst case scenario of living next to a coal plant is very different from the worst case scenario of living next to a nuke.
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.
Have you ever lived near a Ppwer Plant? I have, the worst one in the US actually, and it leaked so much that it had to be shut down after continual incompetence, corruption and violations. I actually think its an apt metaphor, if only due to Human error.
Worst yet is that most are built around coastal areas and the infrastructure is such that there is only one way in, and without any connecting freeways around the area for many miles. I was trapped in my car coming back home several times during massive fires with no way to get home other than to stay on that freeway for 7 hours inhaling smoke all the way there, my hair smelled like a bbq pit for a week.
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.
When you see this as soon as you walk out the door, and can't tell why and how to react that is then you can comment on what is an awful metaphor or not, until then you have no real idea what it feels like:
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
I also know people from Fukushima, they came to our town in 2011 to warn us, and my friends wife is from Fukushima prefecture and was close enough from the plant to be affected by the Tsunami, it wiped away her family business and home, and all of these people feel the same.
Statistics are only a cursory form of understanding a subject and hardly comprehensive.
Nuclear technology is fine for non-terrestrial purposes, like Mars colonization, we have so many better options on this planet that it baffles me why such short shortsightedness prevails, other than abject greed.
Hell, Elon refuses to use it on Mars, and would rather have a football fields worth of solar farms, which may be a mistake due to weather based outages that are likely to occur, but is also a keener insight as to how myopic this technology is in the Hands of Humans from one of the most cunning people on this Planet.
And yet your anecdotal evidence is much better at estimating risk than it?
Seeing as how my anecdotal situation was a first hand account of the many perils it entails, briefly outling why some of us still have bad PTSD about it, and how that situation ultimately led to the closure of the plant, I'd say: absolutely.
You have a very glib understanding of this situation, and it shows if you still ask such a vapid question.
You have no idea of the amount of corruption that goes on with the NRA at all. Just look how they're handling the wasted material, they're literately burying in casks on site it leaving it in pools and saying 'well, that's good enough' along one of the most active fault lines in N. America right net to the Pacific Ocean!
Edison try to wash its hands of the situation entirely by blaming Mitsubishi who also tried to remove itself from any culpability... and this has gone until recently, like last month. All while nothing got done for nearly 7 years.
And in Japan its worse with the Nuclear village and TEPCO's influence on the Abe cabinet.
You may not know this, but back in 2011 many Japanese women refused to have children after Fukushima, and not just those from Fukushima prefecture (a country with already horrible fertility rates) because of the fallout they saw first hand with the birth defects of the Hibakusha. The amount of deformed babies from WWII is staggering, the amount of displaced people is terrifying, but the fact that they allowed for this technology to be used for commercial applications in a country where Nuclear bombs were used against them in Warfare all while geo-thermal literately covers the entire country is just fucking CRIMINAL.
I still remember 3/11 vividly, as the leak at San Onofre happened not long after and we had to take to protesting against SONGS at personal danger to ourselves--they started to monitor and follow anti-nuclear protestors that later led to mass detainment and interrogation.
I'm sure you can grasp all of that by looking at a spreadsheet on excel.
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.
I uprooted my entire Life because of this situation and how badly it was handled by the local Government, Edison, Mitsubishi, NRC etc... I lived in a neighborhood with mainly workers from SONGS! I had conversations with one of the lead engineers (one my neighbors) from Mitsubishi where I tried to get as much information as I could to make my eventual decision to leave.
I was an activist on the front line, I was there and I lived in San Clemente: How are you going to tell me what happened? Because you read something you think you have greater insight on the situation than someone who lived it on a daily basis?
> Football fields would be tiny in comparison to the immense amount of land...
You took what I said out of context, that was in reference to Mars colonization.
Again... this is horrible post and you should be downvoted and be ignored entirely on the matter and perhaps on any other subject if this your approach to argument/reasoning.
IOW, one could argue that the metaphor is making nuclear power plants out to be safer than they are.
It's true that coal is awful, too. But I think that it would be callous to simply dismiss the rather arresting psychological impact of entire communities being rendered uninhabitable at a single stroke. Why what happened to Pripyat or Fukushima is known to basically everyone, while what happened at places like Aberfan and Centralia seem to have become subject matter for Atlas Obscura, I couldn't quite say. Perhaps it's the greater scale of the individual events.
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.
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.
Carrying that amount of insurance is prohibitively expensive independent of the risk. Require the oil companies to carry enough insurance on every well to cover a claim the size of Deepwater Horizon and see how fast it destroys them.
Bad analogies are bad.