Nuclear has long had a reputation as a tech that could bankrupt a utility, which is why utilities stopped building it in the 1980s.
In the mid-2000s, in an attempt to revitalize the industry, we had an attempt to build nuclear in highly supportive communities with high levels of support from the Nuclear Regulatory Committee.
This attempt ended in yet more financial disaster. South Carolina residents pay an average of $20/month on their electricity bill for a failed project that will never produce energy (Vogtle). In order to convince the utility to take on the massive financial risk of a nuclear construction project, the nuclear industry pushed through a special bill in the state legislature that lets the utility charge ratepayers whether or not a nuclear construction project completes.
The UK started attempts at building nuclear at the same time, and though it started construction at Hinckley C, a project far behind schedule and far over budget, it has not even been able to find somebody to build at Wylfa. Hitachi pulled out.
Similarly, France, who is often an example of "good nuclear," is abandoning new nuclear because their attempts at building again have all ended in financial disaster and blown schedules.
Chernobyl, TMI, and Fukushima are not the nuclear failures that scare those who would build it. It's the financial risk that scares away investors, and it should scare us all. Dumping such high capital costs in a 50-year investment, at a time when alternatives are dropping in cost exponentially, is just foolish. It's like buying 50 years of lock-in to 386 Intel processors in 1990. Just foolish.
But what do we do in the meanwhile? What do we do if storage technology isn't able to match energy demand when the sun isn't out and the wind isn't blowing? What do we do in areas that don't get as much renewable energy? Many questions. Probably more than one sensible answer.
Renewables might not be a magic bullet. We need a plan B. Nuclear as a long term base load power source? Not as crazy as it sounds.
The lifecycle of wind and solar is typically planned to be around 25 years. Most installs are lasting longer than expected. With wind, some farms are reporting with bigger turbines even before lifetimes are over as it is the economically advantageous choice for getting more energy out of a prime location for wind. This isn't common with solar because new panels are cheaper, but so now generate much more power from the same land usage unlike wind.
Renewables are a proven option, solar has truly become a "magic bullet," in that it is the cheapest energy source in history. But it will only be one tool among many that we will use.
I would like for nuclear to be a tool, but the current generation of tech is not constructable, and the lead times are too long for it to have an impact in the foreseeable future.
At heights current generation wind turbines reach wind is blowing essentially all the time, giving them the ability to reach a capacity factor of 63%.
That's the thing I would like to see from the pro-nuclear side - not more assurances that modern reactors are safe, but a demonstration that if something does go wrong, we could actually clean it up and it won't become another permanent blight on the landscape.
Fully clean up Chernobyl (or Hanford, Washington, which wasn't an "incident" but is still a radioactive mess) and I'll support more nuclear reactors 100%.
But I want a better remediation plan than "bulldoze all the radioactive stuff into a pile, pour a bunch of concrete on top and wait for a few centuries".
Hanford is basically the same thing except that the US actually cares enough to do something about it, just not enough to do it quickly.
The cleanup for Fukushima is likely to be completed before either of them because it's a location that people actually care about cleaning up.
(https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/25/national/social... has some of that information, but you can easily find more refs comparing tritium amounts at Fukushima vs. normal release at facilities like La Hague.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Po...
Had that liner perforated, high pressure fluid from the core would have jetted straight up into the control rod mechanisms.
(and that was just the fifth most serious event at the time since 1979, the first being the TMI accident in 1979.)
> In January 2003, the plant's private network became infected with the slammer worm, which resulted in a five-hour loss of safety monitoring at the plant ....
What.
And this sort of ordeal may be way more of a concern with a nuke plant.
It’s like people want to introduce more black swan possibilities in a world already inundated with them.
Smaller forms of life have been profoundly impacted, and microbial life is so void there organic matter does not break down at regular rates. This has resulted in a buildup of petrified, dead organic matter that poses an elevated risk of wildfire. If/when it happens, radioactive material will be ejected into the atmosphere from the site once again.
Long-term research is showing that some medium-sized forms of life which we expected to do badly, such as mice and voles, seem to have some inherent resilience to radiation exposure in the area. On the other hands similar sized animals such as birds show a significantly higher rate of abnormalities.
'There's wildlife in chernobyl' is often mentioned to argue that we overestimate the harm from nuclear incidents - The reality is more complex.
It might be worth it if there was no viable alternative, but that’s a harder sale.
PS: There have also been 2 significant nuclear sub accidents, though with older designs.
Cats kill 900M birds a year, windows 200M a year, cell towers 7M a year, oil fields 1M a year
Windmills kill ~300k a year and that can be reduced 70% by painting one blade black
And you know what else kills birds and animals more? Climate change ..
That is a low estimate:
>...The most comprehensive and statistically sound estimates show that bird deaths from turbine collisions are between 140,000 and 500,000 birds per year. As wind energy capacity increases under the DOE’s mandate (a six-fold increase from current levels), statistical models predict that mean bird deaths resulting in collisions with turbines could reach 1.4 million birds/year.
Though the issue isn't so much the number of birds, but the type:
>...Although fatality rates for raptors may be lower compared to passerines, raptors are especially vulnerable to collisions due to their flight behaviors. Given the life history traits of raptors (i.e., long-lived and low reproductive rates) their populations are more at risk of decline from the number of different sources of impacts that affect these species on a daily basis.
https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/...
This isn't to say that means we should drop wind, but we shouldn't hand wave away the issue and pretend it is not an issue.
>...that can be reduced 70% by painting one blade black
A lot of different techniques have been used to try and limit bird deaths and painting blades a different color is one of them, but it doesn't reduce deaths by 70%.
But what about Terrorism ? War ? Unstable political regimes ?
All that over centuries.
How do we protect ourselves against those risks ?
I'm not saying we don't do it, but "there were only 3" doesn't feel like an honest argument.
And that sums up most opposition to nuclear right there. Fear of what maybe might could happen.
Our brain evolved the capability to explore hypothetical undesirable outcomes and feel fear of it to keep us alive, and it serves us well since millions of years. The fools that never are afraid of anything tend to have very short lives.
In what remotely plausible scenario would that have happened? Feel free to involve the USSR, reactor safety of the time, etc.
Because from what I know, the fallout was definitely not making anything nearly that large "uninhabitable". Deaths would go up, but so did they from the coal plants that were subsequently built (we're at 3 million deaths a year, if memory serves; that's the number you have to beat to make nuclear less attractive than coal from a more sciency perspective than "what maybe could have happened but didn't, ha-haa!").
If all people would just have run and quit the area letting the reaction finish.
> we're at 3 million deaths a year
Lets assume that this number is real, the comparison would be still wrong.
1) There are much more coal plants in the planet than nuclear plants so this is like saying than a car contaminates less than 1,000 bicycles. Yes, can be true but it does not mean that replacing all bicycles by cars would reduce contamination. Replacing all coal plants by nuclear plants would increase and equilibrate really fast the death-count in both groups. Absolute numbers are useless here.
2) When talking about coal plants, the short term, middle and long term effects of contamination are included. With nuclear just the first 90 days were taken. This is a shady and dishonest way to do statistics
Because from what I know, the fallout from it literally exploding is not making anything nearly that large "uninhabitable", even if we literally stand around and did nothing against it. Deaths would go up, but so did they from the coal plants that were subsequently built (we're at 3 million deaths a year, if memory serves; that's the number you have to beat to make nuclear less attractive than the technology we did build. Every year. Millions of people.).
Edit: a quick search suggests 4 million now, or another source says 10k/day which works out to 3.7 million per year (from results' summaries shown on DDG) but feel free to find reliable sources.
I think you may want to do some more googling.