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Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

This conclusion (i.e. that nuclear power is too safe) could very well be correct. But I’d like to see it underpinned with more solid economic reasoning. For example, while few people die from nuclear accidents they tend to be enormously costly. It may not be rational to spend billions of dollars to prevent one death, but it may well be worth billions of dollars to prevent the Fukushima disaster.

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> but it may well be worth billions of dollars to prevent the Fukushima disaster.

Let's see about "Fukushima disaster".

Built in 1982. In 2012 was hit by a 9.0–9.1 undersea megathrust earthquake (preceded by a 7.2 foreshock two days before, three 6 earthquakes on the same day, and hundreds of aftershocks in the next days) and immediately after by a 14-meter-hight tsunami.

The earthquake exceeded plant tolerances (ground g-forces of 0.56, 0.52, 0.56 vs the seismic reactor design tolerances of 0.45, 0.45, and 0.46) and the tsunami (built to withstand 10-meter tsunamis, tsunami was 14 meters high).

So, the disaster is literally a black swan by definition. The aftermath is: 1 person dead due to actual incident, 2000 dead due to evacuation.

Now imagine if some other power sources were approached this way: Th Banqiao and Shimantan Dams disaster of 1975 killed at least 240 thousand people. We should never build another dam again, it's too dangerous.

People have preferred ways of dying. Dam flood vs nuclear radiation. Human driver vs robot. It's a legitimate trade-off between how much you value likeliness vs method. It's annoying that many people don't (or won't) separate those ideas.

So very true. The pandemic was very eye opening to me in this regard: many people make no distinction whatsoever in how or why you die, or at least in how or why other people die. It’s truly disturbing…

But they're mostly so expensive because of irrational overreaction.

Just like the (vast) majority of negative health effects from both Chernobyl and Fukushima were from the evacuation, not from the radiation.

Fear of nuclear is far deadlier than nuclear.

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