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Comment by lelag | Hacker News Reader

Thinking about it makes me mad. For all their renewable production capacity they still average over 300g of CO2 / kwh with all the gas and coal they burn. All of it, credit to the german green movement trying to save the planet from... Not sure. Even assuming the occasional Chernobyl/Fukushima-level disaster, as terrible as those catastrophes are, nuclear plant accidents are localised and will never threaten mankind survival. Climate change IS threatening our future, however.

And don't get me started on the political cost which the news make so obvious now.

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A big percentage of mushrooms and game is still not fit for consumption today in Germany because of Chernobyl. So it's not just local.

And even if, Germany is more densely populated than the Ukraine. The Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine is the same size as the state of Saarland.

The externality of emitting 1kg of CO2 has been evaluated between 10000 usd to 100000 usd. Assuming the lower range, the 300 millions tons of CO2 produced by the german electricity production accounts for 3x10^15 USD per years. That's 789 times the german GDP per year taken away from future generations. Now compare it to the GDP of Saarland.

Found the source at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-020-02785-4.

So I made a mistake and it's for 1 ton not 1 KG but my point rest, even divided by 1000: Germany destroy close to their GDP per year with their electrical production emission, which is in my book worse than potentially, loosing a region if you are unlucky.

Please name a source of that. The environmental department of the german government estimates about 640 euro per ton for the next 100 years.

https://www.presseportal.de/pm/62786/4789535

As I answered to my own comment:

> Found the source at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-020-02785-4.

> So I made a mistake and it's for 1 ton not 1 KG but my point rest, even divided by 1000: Germany destroy close to their GDP per year with their electrical production emission, which is in my book worse than potentially, loosing a region if you are unlucky.

What does not fit for consumption mean?

Are there more ionizing radiation in a German mushroom or boar than in an average banana?

Yes, a banana has an effective radiation close to 0 because our bodies evolved to hold its level of potassium in homeostasis. Your body already has radioactive potassium in it. When you eat more potassium, the excess is excreted and the amount of radionuclides in your body stays the same. Caesium-137 on the other hand is drastically more radioactive and stays longer in the body.

Seems that caesium-137 is also excreted pretty quickly:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137

Still even though it's hard to find good numbers, and the average seems to be ~ banana / kg. I believe there's at least reports of mushrooms and boars with ~10-100 times the radiation of an average banana.

I don't think it's actually possible to show any health effects of that amount of radiation, even if ingested (and excreted) but it's more than the average banana.

/remindme 10years

/remindme in 80 years

If I have to choose between an additional 3 Fukushima and the loss of thousands of costal cities due to sea level rise, I know what I'm choosing.

This study predict than sea level could rise by 2m by 2100 displacing up to 187 million people. Fukushima displaced about 160 thousands.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6561295/

Pick your poison, wisely.

It’s probably easier to deal with sea level rise since it’s slow motion. If there’s a Fukushima every year.. wow.

I assumed 3 events in the next 80 years.

There's been 25 years between Chernobyl and Fukushima, and assuming we build new reactor, there is no reason to imagine it would happen more frequently. Why do you think there could be a catastrophe per year ?

The world uses 18 TW of primary energy, which is about 6,000 1GW(e) reactors. This is more than an order of magnitude increase over current nuclear power reactors.

Also, many of those reactors are going to have to be breeders. Accidents in fast breeders are potentially even worse than Chernobyl.

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