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Comment by Cwizard | Hacker News Reader

What I don’t understand is how those two incidents are even relevant. Chernobyl happened because of a faulty design + mismanagement and Fukushima was located on a region prone to earthquakes/tsunami’s caused by earthquakes. The factors do not really apply to Germany. And even if it did, the deaths caused by those accidents were quite low. Meanwhile coal pollution is killing people by the thousands but this is somehow ok?

I think the sole reason the west moved away from Nuclear is because it sounds scary and because the oil countries had a strong interest in maintaining the non-nuclear status quo.

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> What I don’t understand is how those two incidents are even relevant. Chernobyl happened because of a faulty design + mismanagement and Fukushima was located on a region prone to earthquakes/tsunami’s caused by earthquakes.

To use an old phrase, shit happens. When it happens where a Nuclear Power Plant is, the happening continues for a very, very long time. That kind of liability is not worth the risk and of course there are other power solutions than the fossil/fuel nuclear divide.

There are ways to design a nuclear plant that reduce the probability of shit happening by orders of magnitude. We should focus on building plants that can shut down using only passive systems with no human action.

The irrational fear-factor associated with anything nuclear is highlighted by how much attention Fukushima, the nuclear disaster, which gravely injured like a dozen people, gets relative to the earthquake and tsunami causing it, which killed 20k people and leveled a huge stretch of coast.

If you asked 100 random people on the street, I'll bet most would say the Fukushima nuclear disaster killed hundreds or thousands of people.

As a single data point, I just asked my wife (who, for background, is well educated and pays close attention to the news), and her guess was "hundreds".

The modern mass media has a lot to answer for.

Did the media (in 2011) state that 100s or thousands died?

Media, perhaps, but interest groups probably share more of the blame, because the FUD originates with them. E.g. Greenpeace claims one million deaths from Chernobyl, GSS claimed something to the effect of "more than 1.5 million with most of the damage still to come" a few years ago. I almost can't blame people in an environment like that when they think TMI or Fukushima killed hundreds or thousands and gave a lot of people cancer or whatever.

> Meanwhile coal pollution is killing people by the thousands but this is somehow ok?

Pitting nuclear against coal is fighting a straw man. The alternative is renewables. With a tiny fraction of the negative side-effects either nuclear or of fossil energy brings.

> Meanwhile coal pollution is killing people by the thousands but this is somehow ok?

There is a tram going on a track, killing 10 children each week. You can switch it yo another track where it has a small chance of killing a thousand and you will be blamed for that.

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