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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear has to be orders of magnitude safer because nuclear incidents have a way bigger economic impact. A gas plant or solar farm blowing up will be in the hundreds of millions of $, but Fukushima is counting in the hundreds of billions of $.

The nuclear industry has a history of creating plants which are "totally safe, really, you can trust me!" and ending up with really expensive accidents. If they can't get their shit together and get basically unlimited insurance for whatever accident might still happen, the government has to enforce safety rules for them so the taxpayers don't end up having to pay for their whoopsies over and over again.

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Really expensive accidents that cost money and very few lives. Meanwhile, coal had gotten a pass on hundreds of years of added costs to healthcare and loss of life expectancy.

Very few lives because of the high standards, loads of luck and extraordinary courage of first responders.

Lets not forget the helicopter crews at Chernobyl knew they were flying to a certain, slow, painful death and did so without a complaint. Absent those heroes nuclear's mortality record would be much worse.

Chernobyl-style reactors haven’t been built for decades and the kind of failure that happened with it has long since been addressed. We even have designs where meltdowns are basically impossible.

I agree that the people who stepped up are heroes. I don’t agree that Chernobyl’s failure has any place in the discussion about the safety of modern nuclear plants.

Nuclear power is STILL orders of magnitude safer, even when you include nuclear disasters in that calculation. Things like Fukushima should be a once-and-done, never again accident, as all nuclear plants are retrofitted to prevent this failure mode. However even if you assume that such disasters will continue to happen with the same frequency, nuclear is still safer. By a factor of like 100x.

the nuclear industry has a history of creating the safest power source ever. that is just a fact.

as mentioned, everything fossil fuel related has a massively higher death and injury cost than nuclear.

the california wildfires caused by the criminally negligent failure to maintain power distribution systems killed more people and cost more money that Chernobyl (look it up).

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