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> Climate change will slowly roast us all to death, a nuclear failure will, instantly fry us all to molten pulp, I know which one I prefer.

If you believe that even the worst nuclear accident at power plant will "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" in any appreciable range (while climate change is worldwide), the you are mistaken

> death/cancer rate of all exposed nearly 100%.

It is completely untrue. Even among https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators it is not true.

> If you believe that even the worst nuclear accident at power plant will "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" in any appreciable range (while climate change is worldwide), the you are mistaken

I am not wrong, in a world dotted with miniature fission reactors, as the most extreme pro-fission people would like to favor. If you can build one in space, and it powers the whole earth, that's obviously a very different story than building them every city block.

I am also not wrong about the effects of radiation on the human body, when used as a bomb nuclear weapons literally melt people into goo, ofc with a reactor there are various safeguards but the thing causing the flesh-melt is still occurring, so maybe less instantaneous melt and more gradual boils and blisters leading to severe internal cancers as your cascade of nuclear reactors around the city all blow in a beautiful chain reaction...

> It is completely untrue. Even among https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_liquidators it is not true.

It's not untrue if you define exposed, not to be disingenuous, but those actually exposed to the reactor meltdown, did not survive. Those experiencing second hand exposure in e.g. the town, obviously did not all drop dead, but had increased risk of cancer, death, and those globally exposed, well many fewer dead or at risk of cancer.

So unfortunately when speaking so imprecisely it actually is true, just not in the way you imagine. Even your wikipedia article admits among the liquidators the death rate was almost at least 20% by some estimates, and I would presume these people are wearing some protective equipment, so calling them "exposed" is somewhat disingenous in and of itself...

I'm sorry. I'm probably more antinuclear than you but a lot of the things you are saying are just ignorant.

For example nuclear bombs melting flesh is because of the extreme heat, nothing that is unique to the nuclear process.

You'd be a more effective advocate for anti-nuclear viewpoints by learning some stuff first.

Ok, well would you mind linking some good starting materials?

And I think you maybe are more ignorant than you care to admit as well:

"is that a very appreciable fraction of the energy liberated goes into radiant heat and light"

https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/med/med_ch...

To me that doesn't sound like "oh man the temperature in the room just went up", more like "oh man I just got a really bad sunburn".

> is that a very appreciable fraction of the energy liberated goes into radiant heat and light

That's exactly what I said in my previous comment:

For example nuclear bombs melting flesh is because of the extreme heat, nothing that is unique to the nuclear process.

You see exactly the same "flash burn" characteristics from other very hot weapons eg thermobaric explosives.

The unique thing about nuclear bombs is their scale and the fallout afterwards (both of which are horrific). That "melting flesh" thing is caused by the extreme heat, not by some magic "it's nuclear" thing.

Heat is not light, that is not exactly what you said. Sorry. You didn't even mention light.

Physically as well as "mechanically", I suppose, they are very different things. Heat cannot travel at the speed of light, light can. Light can impart heat, but it is a partical-wave with various properties, heat is a general statistical statement about a set of particalls. They are not the same thing at all.

Now, as for how a sunburn works, it's not about heat. The reason you wear sunblock even on a temperate day (cold, even) but with lots of sun, is because UV light, not heat, burns your skin.

So, yeah, actually, this is different from a pure thermobaric explosive, if you want to get technical.

Now I understand you want to argue about whether "melting flesh" is unique to nuclear bombs - I never said it was. The output of a nuclear weapon, or reactor, is pretty darn unique, compared to a traditional heat thermal heat source. I don't think I ever even implied that there was some magical property of nuclear weapons which makes them "melt flesh".

You claim to be anti-nuclear yourself but you seem more interested in classifying the possible things which could be flesh melting, and/or you seem to have little to no knowledge of actual physics, thus I have extreme trouble taking you at your word.

Heat and light are exactly the same thing.

Heat is just longer wavelength electro magnetic radiation than visible light.

UV is shorter wavelength EM radiation, so same thing (not quite sure why we are talking about sunburn though).

It outputs a bunch of other EM radiation too. That's what an EMP explosion is - one desiged to maximize EM radiation in frequencies likely to destroy electronic equipment.

I sort of assumed people on HN knew this.

If you use unexpected definition of "exposed" then it would be better to mention it directly...

Yeah, obviously direct exposure to core kills. In the same way being pulled through hydropower turbine kills, and ending in furnace of gas/coal/wood heated power plant will kill you.

Nuclear power still has vastly lower death ratio per produced energy than other ways generating power anyway.

> I am not wrong, in a world dotted with miniature fission reactors, as the most extreme pro-fission people would like to favor.

You would be still wrong. Building atom bomb factories doubling as power plants (Chernobyl design) in every city, and then deliberately triggering such catastrophe in every single one still is not getting this result.

With miniature fission reactors - also not.

You would not get "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" even in case of deliberate use of all nuclear weapons by omnicidal world government trying to murder as many people as possible.

Perhaps I am wrong to the degree of which we are doomed in various scenarios, but I am not wrong that serious effects would occur.

My concern is - catastrophic chaining failure of nuclear plants, which I must assume you would not think would be a good thing, and would cause 'grave public harm', better? Not arguing over exactly how flesh melted the general populous is.

If you remove "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" and replace with "fry us to molten pulp", that may be more true, I don't know that the general public will care much if it is 10% of the populous or 100% of the populous who is getting fried by radiation burns and subjected to carcinogenic materials which we have no methods to contain, effectively it might as well be everyone.

> hydropower turbine kills, and ending in furnace of gas/coal/wood heated power plant

Sure, but we can drain water, and we can put out fires (water, flame retardants). We can manage these systems. Nobody but the most crazy out-of-touch pro-nuclear person is going to try to claim that we can directly control neutrons, free particles, or the half lives of deadly carcinogens, or that we can filter them from our water supplies.

I am primarily complaining about claim that everyone could die.

That would not happen even in an outright full scale nuclear war.

Exact way of dying (starvation, frying, flash frying, whatever) is not so important to me.

> catastrophic chaining failure of nuclear plants

That is also not going to happen. Even misdesigned soviet atomic bomb factory operating in insanely unsafe mode by incompetents managed to avoid this.

> Nobody but the most crazy out-of-touch pro-nuclear person is going to try to claim that we can directly control neutrons, free particles, or the half lives of deadly carcinogens, or that we can filter them from our water supplies.

The same applies to flood from collapsed dam or emitted CO2 or radiation emitted by coal power plants.

So how do you think that we should solve energy storage? Both batteries and dams are dangerous and can lead to disasters. Dams failing have killed way more people than nuclear ever has.

Batteries are dangerous? What do you mean by that?

> Dams failing have killed way more people than nuclear ever has.

And this solely due to one incident under communism where damn was not maintained.

Well the 2900 people who died in the Johnstown dam failure immediatly come to mind.

But its much, much worse than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure

If had the same risk management mindset for dams as we do for nuclear, we would also be banning hydroelectic.

Well first of all energy storage, is not production, but as you asked:

1) Reduced need for energy storage. Right to repair for everything, write code that is efficient and lower power, distributed systems which don't require complex centralized systems to run. Taxes on unused compute cycles to help create incentives for this, perhaps.

2) For actual energy storage, something like the sand heat system recently put into use in Scandinavia, or the mechanical earth dams (store energy in potential energy mass, less dangerous than an actual water dam, a lot easier to build). For immediate electric storage at scale you can do e.g. saline water storage tanks which hold mild electric charge, who knows maybe there is some inert chemistry which could be devised for a safer transportable version of a lithium ion battery...

3) For energy production, I am a long time advocate of geothermal. There's no real downside, besides digging holes and I guess maybe a well collapse, but you're limited to loss of whatever is in the whole/immediate surrounding in the case of a cave in, there are no engineering problems to solve except pumping water around, which is a well known task. Solar/wind for ships, airplanes, space vehicles, electric/hydrogen for storage/consumption scenarios where the grid is not accessible (remote locations e.g. the poles, alaska, siberia, African/Asian planes)

> write code that is efficient and lower power, distributed systems which don't require complex centralized systems to run.

huh?

It's marginal compared to the other power expenses to be sure, but computing is another rising power cost. Besides my AC, and cooking, I don't have any regular power expenditures other than digital devices, so it seems reasonable to me to want to optimize power expenditure there.

Regarding the distributed vs centralized, the reasoning is large data centers are inefficient and could be replaced mostly with local, low power systems which are barely on at all, versus constant-on, constant-ready server rack systems.

This is a really lazy response, but given the possibility that you genuinely don't understand the gp: Writing better software and reducing the (currently massive) waste of energy on enterprise bullshit and cryptomining would have a meaningful impact on international energy usage, and so help climate change.

> mechanical earth dams (store energy in potential energy mass, less dangerous than an actual water dam, a lot easier to build)

a lot easier to build?

This claim seems wrong, given that pumped-storage hydroelectricity is in actual use, when this is purely theoretical.

"mechanical earth dams" gives info about water dams - is it existing even as a theoretic design?

https://www.energyvault.com/gravity

Its a company with as I understand it proven designs.

Besides, the concept is trivial and applicable and replicable by almost anyone. I don't understand why there is so much skepticism around these things...

Nuclear energy as a concept is trivial. There are a lot of details between "concept is trivial" and "it's practical at scale"

> Besides, the concept is trivial and applicable and replicable by almost anyone.

Has anyone made one operating at major scale? And comparable to say serious pumped storage? At their page I see only "demonstration unit".

I suspect that either it is not solved, expensive or not trivial. And not replicable or there is nothing to replicate or not worth replicating.

For comparison https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrownia_Por%C4%85bka-%C5%B... can operate at 500MW for 4 hours, was build in 1979 and is a normal pumped storage battery (large enough to be classified, operated and treated as a power plant).

> Death rate 100%

Pretty sure the death rate is 100% for exposure to literally anything given enough time...