Hacker News Reader

Comment by xupybd | Hacker News Reader

To your first point: Yes, but if Nuclear plants were more common less fossil fuels would be burnt. Hence anti-nuclear sentiment has led to more climate change.

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.

View on HN

I would argue that Fukushima was a pretty good example of how safe nuclear power is. The damage was very well contained, and the evacuation measures caused more harm than the primary danger.

I'm pretty pro-nuclear, but a couple hundred billion dollars of damages, a couple dozen direct deaths, some people getting maimed, and causing thousands of deaths by displacing a large population is a catastrophe by any stretch. Yes, fossil fuels may be worse per unit of energy generated, but they are never quite this spectacular in a single event.

All avoided by not building a nuclear power plant on the coast in a subduction zone prone to intense earthquakes and massive tsunamis

Yes, but all accidents (not just nuclear) seem to have simple, stupid, easily-avoided factors in retrospect.

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.

There have been some pretty spectacular oil rig disasters with huge oil spills and >100 direct deaths. I would count those on the same scale. And those are in addition to the huge numbers of deaths every year and the contribution to global warming.

I wouldn't, though, because they don't have the impact on the population at large and don't cost nearly as much. Yes, maybe they impact other industries or recreation in an area for awhile.

Yes, it's estimated Fukushima will cost a little over double you're worst oil spill. https://theconversation.com/five-years-after-fukushima-there...

But we happily live with oil drilling and transport.

Countries like France show how safe nuclear can be.

A fossil fuel plant operating nominally without any incidents will impact the entire population as the fossil fuels are consumed and the byproducts of their combustion emitted. The number of QALYs / DALYs / deaths lost that are directly attributable to air pollution is absolutely staggering.

The magnitude of the risks we're contemplating when we're discussing nuclear are completely insignificant in relation to that.

Yes, "Yes, fossil fuels may be worse per unit of energy generated, but they are never quite this spectacular in a single event."

> but they are never quite this spectacular in a single event.

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.

Catastrophic, and also much more frequent!

So far.

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.

The death tallies are statistical noise compared to normal cancer deaths, etc, and can't be differentiated.

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.

In the mean time keep enjoying yearly trips to tropical locations where you can soak up the sun and enjoy some BBQ.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com