Comment by badestrand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by badestrand | Hacker News Reader

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> I wonder what's the stigma bout nuclear?

I am sure you know the answer but because you ask for it: Radioactivity is nasty. Example Germany: When I grew up my parents couldn't pick mushrooms and I couldn't play in a sandbox because a few thousand kilometers away there was a reactor incident and the wind blew it over. Today people living near a power plant receive free jodium tablets in case there will be an accident. The government spends endless years looking for places to store the nuclear waste because nobody wants it in their backyard, obviously. The waste in the old starage, designed to last 10000 years, leaked already and noone knows how to handle it. France built most of their power plants directly at the border so that hopefully we will receive all the fallout. Uranium mining is said to be desastrous for the environment. Probably there's a lot more.

You get more radioactive elements over your life from breathing air in coal-burning country than you would from eating these mushrooms.

And it's no a one-time catastrophe result, but everyday operation.

Often quoted, and while it's true that coal fumes and (worse) the leftover slag is a huge problem, the fear of nuclear is that it's a lot more sudden. Slag is less of a risk than nuclear waste is but has to be treated similarly. Fumes are dangerous and are basically destroying the world / ecosystem, but it's a slow process as opposed to a nuclear power plant meltdown (Chernobyl, Fukushima) which cause much shorter term issues.

Basically people live to a hundred even with pollution, but life expectancy and quality of life is much lower near a meltdown site.

That said, if you look purely at numbers, nuclear (assuming it doesn't explode) is better for humanity than coal.

That said that said, loads of countries recognize how bad coal is, and it's being phased out in favor of gas and renewables.

> Slag is less of a risk than nuclear waste is but has to be treated similarly

Im my country (Poland) over 20 000 people die yearly of lung cancer. Significant percent of them never smoked cigarettes and the main reason they got that cancer was smog. Which in Poland is almost exclusively seen in winters and caused by burning coal.

Chernobyl caused up to 4000 victims according to the worst estimates (including cancer developed later).

Every year in just one country there's more victims of coal energetics than victims of nuclear power in the whole world over all time.

These issues seem insignificant compared to the problems we face.

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