Which statistics? Rate of unintended explosions?
I believe the "steel man" argument is that living next to a nuclear power plant exposes you to unknown tail risks.
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.