1) Burning fossil fuels is why we are facing global warming right now.
2) Anti-nuclear sentiment is why we aren't living in a nuclear waste right now. Even nuclear advocate's argument that "nuclear plants are much safer now and the accidents that happened at 3 Mile Island/Chernobyl/Fukushima are impossible now" implies that anti-nuclear sentiment was correct in the 1960's, 70's, 80's, 90's and early 2000s at the very least!
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
You're absolutely correct when you say that less regulated nuclear would have caused more incidents. You may also be correct when you say the risks aren't properly calculated at present. The thing is, that doesn't matter unless they're off by three orders of magnitude. Coal kills so many people through pollution that the world could suffer a Three Mile Island once a year without killing anywhere near as many people as coal does.
It is now theoretically possible that solar, wind, and pumped hydro could provide a substantial chunk of global baseload power. We could have gotten there decades ago with nuclear. It's the fault of the green movement that we didn't.
If Chernobyl itself was built today, without the post-accident modifications, and it ran 5 years and then exploded, it'd still be safer than a coal plant running normally.
Fossil/biofuel particulate emissions killing ~8 million people per year is no joke.
This is only based on the official number of deaths (31 I think?). This is known to be false.
Better estimates are hard, but "the Ukrainian government pays benefits to more than 36,000 widows of men who have died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster".[1]
There were also at least 200,000 people who had to be relocated.
I agree 100% we should get rid of coal ASAP! No dispute there at all.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...
Actually, it's based on the UNSCEAR number of 4000 deaths including latent cancers. Don't use the Ukraine political numbers. Use the UN panel of scientist numbers.
https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/areas-of-work/chernobyl.h...
If they used your 4000 number then Nuclear becomes twice as unsafe as solar.
(But the point here isn't the number of deaths in the past - because that was moderated by the strong anti-nuclear movements. The risk is higher usage leads to dramatic increases, because deaths are dominated by accidents not constant one-off deaths like from pollution which are more predicable)
Woah I did not realize they used that figure. Everyone agrees that there were between 0 and 1 deaths from radiation due to Fukushima (vs between 31 and 4000 radiation deaths at Chernobyl). There were deaths caused by the prolonged evacuation at Fukushima, which must be where this figure comes from.
That seems a pretty reasonable thing to consider since it is one of (or the?) major risk with nuclear power.
To your second: 3 Mile Island was not an accident that caused significant environmental damage.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec....
Chernobyl was a terrible design that should never have been built.
Fukushima is an example of the dangers. It was however hit by an earthquake 1 magnitude higher than it was designed for and a Tsunami. Given it's location it should have been designed to handle these possibilities.
I know it's tempting to say "oh, if we just don't do these 4-5 dumb things-- the risk is gone".
It's s small risk, but boy the end of the tail in what it costs is pretty dang high.
Even things like oil spills? I know it's hard (or even impossible) to reduce to "overall damage" as the common unit, but I know oil spills are catastrophic.
But we happily live with oil drilling and transport.
Countries like France show how safe nuclear can be.
The magnitude of the risks we're contemplating when we're discussing nuclear are completely insignificant in relation to that.
No death tallies from the accident will be complete until the products have decayed to background levels.
I think this study will take sometime to complete.
All you can do is look at the dose and estimate the deaths. Pretty obvious the evacuation-related death toll is going to be one order of magnitude, and perhaps 2 orders of magnitude higher than Fukushima.
Every nuclear disaster so far has been unique, and this will remain the case going forward, because the nuclear sector is always defending against yesterday’s failure mode. Nuclear power plants are some of the most complicated machines mankind has ever built. In such a complex design there are too many permutations of failures that can arise to allow for designing away all risk. We need to fundamentally accept this risk and embrace it if we are going to adopt nuclear power on a grander scale. This is a big ask on a psychological level for humanity, and that’s one reason why I think a nuclear upscaling is not going to happen. (The other is high and rising cost of construction, which is the biggest problem facing the nuclear power sector that is on them to solve.)