The part everyone forgets is that there have been plenty of other power plan disasters far worse than Chernobyl and most of them were Hydropower. Judging nuclear power by Chernobyl is an absurd proposition.
Exactly this. Nuclear is held to an absurd different standard to all other forms of energy generation.
If we consider damage to wildlife: fossil fuels, in particular oil, kills millions of birds and fish. Nuclear? Zero as makes no difference. If anything, nature is thriving around Chernobyl. Wind farms routinely kill birds, and no outcry, but cover the birds in a bit of oil, and it's front page.
Deaths mining uranium again, practically zero since such little is needed, vs the thousands of deaths mining coal, or drilling for oil.
Deaths through breathing in pollution? Fossil fuel plants have and are killing millions of people, and quite literally, the planet.
I believe Chernobyl + Fukushima accidents combined have directly killed less than 100 people. Greenpeace would have you believe that millions will die from cancer, but that's strongly disputed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
Anyway, nuclear power GENERATES heat and electricity, so it increases global temperature, while renewables are CUTTING part of solar energy, so they decrease global temperature.
Do you know why solar panels looks dark, almost black? Because they absorb as much solar as they can. IN real life if you cover surface with panels, albedo would decrease and system as a whole would absorb MORE solar energy. But part of absorbed energy would be converted to electricity and do some work. At the end it all would be heat, so on pure heat basis solar panels would increase temperature
• https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/2017-s...
• http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=15%20terawatts%2F%28sur...
And also even taking your argument at face value, I fully believe a handful of 20,000 year dead zones would be superior to global warming at our current rate. The alternative we get now is way more than 20,000 years of wrecked biodiversity almost everywhere.
How is the orange website so full of self-avowed rationalists so incapable of comparing sudden and quick vs slow and steady harm...
Quarter-million people killed, 7 million houses destroyed. Thats enough to wipe a small coutry, like Czech Republic, off the map.
Horrible dam failures don't do that, though of course there's a massive human cost for infrastructure failures like that. There's nothing like the "this is not a place of honor" warnings (for regions contaminated with nuclear waste) for dam failures, e.g.
https://www.dw.com/en/in-europe-1-in-8-deaths-linked-to-poll...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...
Our fear of nuclear power plants is irrational. We should be improving this technology not abandon it.
And, Chernobyl seems to thrive, just without humans.
https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/00000154-1bd...
However, just as nobody seriously tried to run a national power grid on PV 30 years ago because it was too expensive, today nuclear is the expensive white elephant of power that can only be justified by other benefits such as weapons and radioisotope medicines.