Nuclear pollution is scary but coal pollution isn't? I bet coal pollution has killed way more than nuclear pollution per plant.
You may well be correct with respect to pollution - I don't know and certainly would find it tricky to determine (is there a consistent measure of "negative environmental impact" for comparing such things?).
However, with respect to catastrophic destruction, this recent example at a coal plant [0], pales in comparison to something like a Chernobyl or Fukushima.
[0] https://reneweconomy.com.au/worlds-newest-and-most-expensive...
That's not a catastrophic destruction, merely a generator explosion.
Wikipedia has articles on mining and energy accidents, and you can see there are far more catastrophic one with coal:
I support expanding nuclear energy in areas that are capable of doing so, but there are some places where nuclear would be an absolute disaster far beyond what coal could ever be.
I can’t see it happening in the current anti-nuclear climate but I think it’s fixable.
do you know why there is no article how bad coal is? because everybody knows but unfortunatly most people do not understand how fucking bad fukushima even is, people like you that try to make nuclear look cool just because there exists something worse does not make nuclear look cooler.
Because reams of news articles are written about one but not the other, feeding the incorrect perception that one is vastly more dangerous than the other.
There is no way to control the impact to the environment - areas immediately surrounding a coal plant have much higher cancer rates, the ground & streams becomes toxic, wider areas have heightened acid rain risks. Then you get to impact on the global climate. All this in a perfectly operated idealized plant.
In a nuclear plant that is run properly, not even perfectly, produces radioactive waste. No atmospheric pollution, no water pollution.
Major "normal" failures cause radiation leaks. These are so rare that the events are individually named. Accidents that result in atypical operation that don't even harm the plant, let alone cause external impact are all recorded, and systems are updated to prevent recurrence. Even major events like three mile island have not caused any excess deaths or cancers.
Catastrophic failures have basically be down to understood design flaws: Chernobyl had an RBMK reactor with know flaws, Fukushima had emergency generators in the basement despite being advised to place them higher up. Precisely because of flooding concerns.
As for waste: Nuclear waste is of course hard to manage, with most "solutions" being "bury it". Whatever the end solution is, we know it won't be as horrific as a coal plants solution: aerosolizing it and pumping it into the atmosphere.
A lot of noise is made about decommissioning a nuclear plant. Decommission a nuclear plant means deconstruction of the reactor and removing the remaining waste. There is no need to remediate the land itself. No one talks about decommissioning coal plants as they simply don't: the land on and around the site is left permanently toxic.
And most people have zero idea how bad coal is.
How many lakes and streams has nuclear destroyed? Nowhere near the number that coal has between both acid rain and mine runoff. The Monongahela river and its tributaries still have enormous sulfate loads.
How many people have died of nuclear radioactivity? Nowhere near the amount that have died of black lung.
And this is before we start talking about just how bad the pollution in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, etc. used to be and how many people died from that.
People don't understand even the tiniest fraction of how bad coal is. Nuclear power, even with accidents, is a saint compared to coal.
That being said I still think that nuclear is our best option.
Coal is killing the planet now.