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Comment by spark3k | Hacker News Reader

Even when we think things can't go wrong, and we think that we've thought of all the ways they could go wrong if they did, they still manage to go wrong. Everything goes wrong. Why do we need to pick a mind-bogglingly expensive technology where going wrong means catastrophe?

You can set your watch by the regularity at which the nuclear lobbies throw a "for the sake of climate change" article in a respected publication.

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Because in practice/empirically it is safer than the alternatives even when things do go wrong.

And they go wrong very rarely.

Statistics won't help you if one of those "every 20 years" disasters hit a highly populated area like Europe. The technology will still look "safe" on paper but you'd have depopulated a huge area and maybe even killed people or keep on killing through cancer.

This is not "statistics" it is simple facts. Japan is highly populated.

"Very rarely" is not enough to justify thousands of years of uninhabitable square kilometres.

Except that doesn't happen.

The former inhabitants of Pripyat and the Fukushima exclusion zone are thrilled to hear that.

That's not really true. Nuclear kills about as many as RE https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

But those numbers are essentially cherry-picked. They include just production of energy, like falling into the furnace? Consider about externalities. Mining, shipping. Then add in environmental erosion resulting in lower lifespans around the globe. Then failure/interruptions that endanger folks during cold snaps/heat waves. That's a big one - petrochemical plants can be down 30% of the time (nuclear < 2%) leaving grids endangered.

And of course its per-terawatt deaths that are interesting, not totals. Other wise you just have (literally) a heat map!

Mining and shipping is required for all forms of energy. Of course it's gonna be per twh because that is the only way to measure that makes any sense.

Kurzgesagt has a great video explaining everything here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM

Mining and shipping are very, very different by source - every watt of coal is shipped. Only the machinery for solar is shipped. Nuclear fuel is shipped in pounds not megatons, but they are fantastically dangerous pounds. Etc. Utterly different in effect on risk.

The linked chart seemed to list totals. Did it have per TWHr? I missed that.

If you want to talkt about emissions instead here is a great summary from the Swedish Life cycle analysis by energy source: Nuclear: 6g CO2/kwh Hydro: 9g CO2/kwh Wind: 13g CO2/kwh Solar: 24g CO2/kwh

This includes everything from construction to mining. The data comes from Swedens state run energy company Vattenfall LCA report https://www.vattenfall.se/foretag/miljo/epd/ and here is a an article that summarizes it https://blog.karnfull.se/blog/kaernkraftslogik-1-klimatsmart

But if you change the measure of safety to: square kilometres rendered uninhabitable, or potential to be rendered uninhabitable, for tens of thousands of years then nuclear fission is dead last and always will be.

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