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Comment by robviren | Hacker News Reader

Worked in nuclear power for five years and wish people could divorce themselves of bias when considering power. When you plug things in it has a cost greater than the dollars you are paying. In raw deaths per megawatt nuclear wins above all else. I'm not saying we should avoid solar and wind. I'm saying we should dive headlong into every form of power that seems a reasonable risk to human life and the environment before 1000+ human death wildfires, starvation, and every other natural disaster becomes common place. Belching coal exhaust or gas turbine exhaust into the air seems a careless act when I have personally sat inside, on top of, under, and to the side of nuclear reactors and have yet to fall over dead. Spent fuel can be handled and most import you don't need to breath it and it doesn't warm the planet. Everything has a cost and I would gladly bare the cost of nuclear for a world worth living in.

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The problem is not deaths per megawatt. Nor bias.

Look at the economic disaster that is Vogtie.

People need to be reasonable. If we want nuclear, the government will need to pay for it. Right now everyone's waiting for energy investors and the financial engineering that backs them to throw money into nuclear. It won't happen. We want rich people to throw their billions at nuclear for a return years and years from now, instead of spending it just slapping up some windmills and getting a return next month.

T Boone Pickens was one of the most conservative energy investors that ever lived, and he was slapping up windmills left and right. That won't stop until the tax payer agrees to insulate investors from any losses.

Everyone's saying, "We want nuclear." But when we give them the financial consequences of nuclear like we did at Vogtie, they get pissed. You can't have it both ways. You want it? Cool. Don't complain about being told you have to pay off your region's reactors.

A little more cooperation from everyone on the finances would go a long way here.

Get rid of the red tape and nuclear becomes much cheaper (over time).

Fukushima is what happens when you get rid of the red tape, go look at the cause of the accident and you will see why the red tape exists [1].

The Japanese tax payer is still paying for this disaster, and the environment is paying in more ways imaginable, all of the cleanup operation so far has been running on fossil fuels and it's an significant amount of cleanup still going onto this day, hundreds of thousands of tons of top soil have been moved around the country and stored in disintegrating plastic bags which end up in rivers, for example.

People avoid buying produce and seafood from the area too which has had enormous impact on the economy and tens of thousands of people have been displaced with little to no compensation or anywhere to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#200...

You mean the disaster that killed between 0 (from radiation) and 2000 (from the evacuation) people? Compared do the literal millions that die every year from fossil fuel pollution?

It would take about 10x the amount of nuclear power plants that we currently have for global energy to be totally nuclear. If we therefore 10x every single nuclear reactor disaster from the past 70 years (~ how long since the first production plant came on line in the USSR), global deaths would be between between 80,000 and 40,000,000 (using the implausibly high Greenpeace estimate of Chernobyl associated deaths).

I think that all of those estimates are implausibly high, but even if we just take the 40,000,000 number, the most ridiculously, obviously wrong number, the estimated deaths every year from fossil fuel pollution (not climate change...direct particulate matter air pollution) is between 2 and 8 million every year. So go ahead, tell me again how we can't afford to relax safety standards on nuclear power.

Zero deaths is debatable, and it is only possible due to a trillion dollar cleanup cost.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup, "In 2016, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry estimated the total cost of dealing with the Fukushima disaster at ¥21.5 trillion (US$187 billion)" (with breakdown following). Hyperbole does not serve to convince intelligent people of your point, much less your objectivity in the matter.

ASME estimated closer to US$500b:

https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/arti...

JCER estimated from US$470b to US$660b

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi...

The official govt estimates have risen from $50b to $100b to $200b and are probably too low.

ASME estimated more, right after the disaster, and they were proven wrong.

Actual paid-out amounts after a decade were Y12.1tn - less than $90bn.

Of course because it’s a political issue and japan is extremely conservative you won’t really know the exact figures.

The trillion dollar cleanup was necessary because of the tsunami which killed 20,000 or more people. The Fukushima 1&3 hydrogen explosion didn't flatten half of the Japanese Pacific seaboard, the tsunami did.

But you bought fossil fuels into it. I didn’t.

I love how people just armchair from across the pacific that the nuclear incident was no big deal, don’t worry about it…I mean it didn’t even cost much ? Lol

Fukushima is what happens when you build a nuclear reactor on a literal fault line + tsunami zone.

(In Japan's defense, the whole country is a fault line. But the US doesn't have that problem.)

If you read the Wikipedia article you’d know that the earthquake didn’t cause the meltdown specifically. Not even the tsunami itself did.

Fukushima is what happens when it is prohibitively expensive to replace your known-unsafe reactor with a new one.

Admiral Rickover (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover), the father of the nuclear navy would disagree with you, but probably in a much more nuanced way than direct contradiction.

It is not the red tape, but the difference between oversight and culture. You can not regulate safety and expect safety. Safety does not come from oversight. Safety comes from culture and a shared culture of responsibility for safety.

Therefore the adversarial nature of red tape, implying an entity that does taping and therefore bears primary responsibility for safety, encodes within it the set of incentives that will result in eventual doom because alignment is always for cheaper and not for the long term. Safety requires individual responsibility and therefore a culture of responsibility, not to shareholders or next quarters profits, but to a set of values such as safety and competence.

This hearing where the head of the nuclear navy tells congress about their philosophy of safety is very much worth a read: https://web.archive.org/web/20060629082752/https://www.navy....

The end result is that if you are talking about red tape at all then you have not reached a state of understanding because you must breach the topic of culture and alignment. Capitalist alignment of nuclear energy directly results in disaster. A culture that venerates next quarters profits should not run 30 year+ programs for which failure can result in centuries of contamination.

Do you want people cut from the same cloth that the people who run BP are cut from running nuclear? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill

A congress that asks for cheaper will get cheaper. Unfortunately what is cheap in dollars can be expensive in property, lives, and well-being. A simple word like cheaper is too naive.

Votgle 3 has been running for almost a month. It started construction August 26, 2009 and is finishing $17B over budget so far, total about $30B. It bankrupted "Westinghouse Electric Company".

Compared to the forever/oil wars it seems like a pretty good deal, to be honest.

If we had not invaded Iraq we could have built 30 Votgles. USA has spent 2-3 votgles on Ukraine so far since the war began.

Interesting analysis. Indeed without the need for oil and gas, Russia would not have the cash to invade Ukraine.

Or a motive to secure the resources lying beneath the east of the country.

But there is money in oil and gas, big money, which is why you don't get nuclear...

> USA has spent 2-3 votgles on Ukraine so far since the war began.

We all know this isn't even remotely the case, right?

People might not be aware, but the bulk of the support given to Ukraine has been military surplus gear, rather than cash. The US has sent tens of billions in cash for humanitarian and some military support as well, but the bulk of what’s counted in the $100B+ of aid has been in the form of weapons and ammunition and vehicles.

Most of which we were going to decommission anyway which would have cost us money. (With the patriot missile battery being a notable exception)

Yeah, it is profitable for the US that Ukraine people keep getting slaughtered.

How?

higher or lower?

Isn't US energy generation ~1200GW? If a Vogtle is 1.1GW - 30 of them isn't even 3% of US energy generation.

We'd still need a ton of oil...

A lot of this is not inherent to building nuclear reactors. We've regulated nuclear power to the point where it's cost prohibitive. If we required every solar panel installer to have a phd, and only let them work 1 hr per day solar would be incredibly expensive too.

Imagine we were willing to accept the same death rate as natural gas. Reducing regulations to the point of having 100x more nuclear incidents. How much cheaper would they be to build?

The problem with nuclear accidents is the consequences can be so catosrophic that it's virtually impossible to accept failure. Irradiate a few hundred sqkm in an accident and you easily exceed every other expense of building the plant (being generous).

It's funny how usually people argue for more regulation of side effects, but as soon as nuclear gets involved it's the reverse. Nuclear must be absolutely safe, because no one but the government (and by extension, the general populace) can afford the expense of insuring it. Reducing regulation is tantamount to giving investors permission to pull as much money as they like out of the plant and leaving us with the risk.

We also know that corporations are going to be corporations. The business guys will eventually take the wheel and absent sufficient regulation they will inevitably cost-cut and corner-cut their way to disaster. It’s totally predictable.

If there is ever even a remote profit motive, everything, including safety, will eventually be thrown under the bus to maximize profit. It’s how all businesses are run.

If we had built 30 Votgles they wouldn't have cost $30B each. One of the huge problems with modern Nuclear plants is there is no economy of scale. They're all bespoke projects with fresh people re-learning the skills of the past. If they were being mass produced there would be an established industry with veterans working on most of the plants, saving enormous amounts of time and money.

This is where Wind and Solar are really winning. The industries building them are growing mature and as a result efficiency goes up and costs go down.

This was the promise of nuclear microreactors: that they could be mass produced in a factory and shipped where needed. But it seems like they're never going to get off of the ground.

Korea and China build nuclear at scale. It has not gotten cheaper for them. In china it has failed so spectacularly that they've now switched back to building more coal instead of nuclear. The reality is that politically required regulation makes nuclear completely uneconomical. The only solution is a political movement that lessens the regulatory burden.

That's simply not true. China is building more nuclear power:

https://archive.ph/W7JFd

Also note they're nowhere near as costly as Vogtle.

Not sure why you're framing iraq and nuclear as either/or. The US is energy independent. The Iraq war was not necessary to secure our oil needs. There's no reason to believe we would've built more nuclear had it not happened.

Because it was a pointless war based on lies that stole $1T from the american people.

  > Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Obviously it was a pointless war. That doesn't mean that if it didn't happen we'd spend all the money that went to it on nuclear. If we spent a trillion more on renewables we'd be far further ahead than if that money went to nuclear.

> That won't stop until the tax payer agrees to insulate investors from any losses.

What does this mean? Are corporate structures (corporations, LLCs, etc.) insufficient as liability shields?

If nuclear is going to happen it should be a campaign to improve & get better. Today & long term. Systems like Integral Fast Reactor & then PRISM & S-PRISM & so many others show huge promise at being absurdly safe & being able to help us burn existing waste, without having to deeply enrich: a huge win. But no one is going to foot the bill, no one is going to take risk on advanced nuclear, when we're not even sure about the plodding low effort ultra-lofi nuclear we still can't do cost effectively today.

I agree so much, this needs to be a bigger collectivized effort if it's going to happen. Ideally it should be something we can as a civilization improve on, where we keep improving together. Making a bunch of new proprietary designs then having 20 years of patent protection before anyone else can try & iterates or improve is a death knell for the industry as a whole. But no commercial entity is going to choose to participate in this prisoners dilemma today.

This is the classic anti-nuclear rhetoric

Always bring up the cost of nuclear power plants and the time to build them, but ignore that all the power plants built in the US in recent years use 1950s technology and are made expensive by 50 years of excessive regulation driven by fear.

Theoretically the regulation was known at bidding time and factored in. Or they didn't understand them and were caught by surprise. Or perhaps they did understand and lied by underbidding?

I was anti-nuke when I was younger but recognize we fucked up terribly by not getting nuclear right and have now cooked the planet.

The appealing solution (to me) is to get SMRs into play with their associated promises of cost control and safety. My understanding is the blocker is really the existing insiders of the nuclear industry who see it as a threat to their work.

I wish regulation worked that way! Regulations change all the time - if not in law certainly in practice/interpretation.

That is what makes industries with heavy regulation such risky investments.

I searched for info on the cost overruns and it appears that management failures contributed significantly. An anti-nuke lawsuit didn't help but appeared to be $1B in impact.

We see consistently that big projects never come in on time and budget, which is why SMRs are the only economical way forward.

To further your point, almost all nuclear power plants to date have essentially been customized, one-off projects built by inexperienced teams.

If we built exactly the same design tens to the low hundreds of times by the same handful of teams, the cost per unit would be dramatically lower. This is especially true of the modern, safer, and more cost effective designs.

Have any of these modern cost effective designs been built yet?

All of the third generation EPR projects being built in Europe have run hugely over budget. I really thought if anyone could build nuclear plants cost effectively it would have been France so it's really made me lose hope in nuclear power.

Wind and especially solar were massively subsidized for decades before accumulated innovations from the subsidized at-scale manufacturing, and economies of scale, pushed prices per unit down to levels that are competitive in the market.

What nuclear needs is massive subsidies, especially in reactors using small modular designs that are more amenable to mass-manufacturing techniques and transportability, and it needs them sustained for decades until the competitive forces of the large market for SMRs has brought the price of reactors down to levels where they're competitive in the market without subsidies, at which point the growth of privately funded nuclear power would be self-sustaining.

The question is will these massive subsidises be better spent on nuclear or renewables and storage?

Over the years nuclear has enjoyed enormous subsidies. If it were not for the huge decrease in costs for renewables over the past couple of decades and huge increase in cost for nuclear I’d be much more enthusiastic about nuclear power.

On both. Oil, gas and coal are the enemy here, not nuclear.

I can’t believe that people are still arguing against nuclear. It’s an extremely proven technology. It can be built fast, cheap and safely.

I’m completely against closing existing nuclear plants as they are doing in Germany. The big problem with new nuclear energy seems to be build cost so it makes sense to get as much as we can from existing plants.

But at the end of the day real resources matter. Where should labour effort be directed? Costs reflect that effort.

I’m not against nuclear but if redirecting effort (money, labour) from nuclear to renewables and storage seems likely to reduce co2 emissions faster then let’s redirect that effort. It’s fine for cool technologies to be abandoned when cheaper alternatives come along.

If it’s possible to come up with a far cheaper form of nuclear power then great! But it’s hard to compete with the big fusion reactor in the sky.

I don't think we can go wrong having more options, so yes I'd support giving nuclear the same amount of subsidization that solar/wind received, and targetting it at the SMR market to get the benefits of standardization and off-site construction.

The best case scenario is solar/wind, along with their associated storage systems, continuing to see rapid cost reductions, and nuclear, through SMRs, becoming vastly more affordable alongside them.

The two classes of electricity generators would each find ideal use-cases and produce an energy system that provides electricity at a lower cost than either could provide on their own.

To expand a bit more on nuclear: we've never made a good effort at bringing down its cost. The SMR option I outlined is the route to achieving that. Giant plants built mostly on-site just don't benefit from large markets the way transportable goods that can be built off-site do.

The SMR industry needs subsidies while in its embryonic stage to have a chance of showing what it can do, with respect to cost-effective electricity generation, when it's more developed.

Nuclear is massively subsidized and still no one wants to build it.

Nuclear has been blocked in numerous places for decades—including in countries where it was successfully increasing electricity output—and the subsidies it's received have been nothing compared to those solar/wind receive(d).

The subsidies have also not been directed at the SMR market, which is the only one that has the potential to see exponentially declining costs like what's seen in wind/solar.

What about China? UAE? These countries actually know how to build large scale infrastructure projects and are highly successful building nuclear power plants.

> made expensive by 50 years of excessive regulation driven by fear.

they're expensive because we can't build ANYTHING big in this country without cost overruns.

Correct. All the "cost estimates" are far higher than the ACTUAL COSTS with 70-year-old technology.

Maddening.

Completely agree those costs are insane. The US cranked out the currently functional reactors at a fraction of the cost. We have collectively offshored all knowledge and skill on massive building projects and have become weak at dedicating ourselves to tackling complex projects. I don't have a solution to the human problem of building these things, but it is a human problem, not a problem of the technology. I would not be surprised if it is eventually found that oil and gas secretly crippled the building of all modern reactors to keep people dependent. Though incompetence is probably a more likely answer.

We have a simple problem. Either we shift our power supply to something that won't kill us or we all start getting used to the idea of living on a hostile planet. I feel that this problem should be taken on as seriously as defending against a hostile nation and pour the resources of the state into a solution. Only when we rebuild our knowledge and skill can we tackle this.

I have some hopes in small reactors we could factory build and crank out of an assembly line. But I think the politics of this are still too difficult to even matter. People would rather throw their hands in the air giving up and die in a fire than have the risk of radiation in their neighborhood. Only the kids growing up today watching the world end will probably get their will together to change what is happening. We have failed them

Cannot recommend this podcast enough: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/nuclear-power-isnt-perfect-...

It goes into detail about the argument you are proposing.

Plus then we could get more Fallout themed public places which IMO is a huge plus

big oil astroturfed a campaign against nuclear in the 70s. It was framed as hippies warning nuclear would mean certain death for everyone.

that perception stuck

It was not big oil that pushed the anti-nuclear campaign. It was environmentalists. And they're still active today, sometimes pushing for solar. Sometimes fighting solar and windmills to protect wildlife.

Now I'm sure some oil and gas companies decided to fund some of these groups because they saw these people could be useful, but that doesn't mean the movement was astroturfing.

It was both. And in addition, some of these so called environmental organizations were funded by big oil.

If big oil writes an environmental organization a check that doesn't make it astro turfing.

Astroturfing is pretending their is a movement when there isn't. The anti-nuclear movement was real, big oil just wrote some of them checks because they realized what was bad for nuclear was good for them.

I agree.

Kremlin also played a role in this.

We need to shift from thinking of solar/wind as "electricity sources" to thinking of them as "fuel sources". The marginal cost of producing a transferrable fuel from solar/wind is already lower than current electricity prices. The challenge is the capital expenses on equipment (hydrolyzers, fuel cell etc.)

Of course the article is just a puff public opinion piece. It doesn't change the economics:

Point ONE: nuclear is more expensive CURRENTLY that solar/wind. SOlar/Wind is currently the cheapest by far, and here's the scary thing for gas turbine: solar + storage is very close to druopping under gas combined cycle generation. Look up Lazard 2023 LCOE study. Solar/Wind have dropped to 24$ per MWHr. The cheapest nuclear produces is $141/MWHr. That's right, nuclear is almost 600% more expensive.

Point TWO: Say you miraculously got 100 billion dollars through congress for new plants to start immediate projects. Not a single reactor will come online for 10 years. Now, look at the cost improvement rate of solar, wind, and storage for the last 10 years. 10% year-on-year improvements or more. Even if we had half of that for the next 10 years (and there will be 10 more years of cost improvement), solar / wind very likely will be HALF the current cost.

So you'd have 100s of nuclear plants come online in 10 years generating electricity that costs 10-20x more than electricity from wind/solar. That simply is not a viable national power strategy.

If we had these plants already because construction started in the year 2000, that would probably be a different story.

The only hope for nuclear is probably in about 15-20 years where the cost improvement curves finally stabilize for wind/solar, and then a stable price point can be targeted with new nuclear designs. I personally think that only something like a novel MSR/LFTR which can scale down to mass producable sizes, uses all the fuel, breeds. doesn't have solid fuel rod reprocessing and waste transport/storage, and can use the Brayton cycle for more efficiency has a chance of competing with mature solar/wind.

Puff pieces like this are really about the current nuclear plants and keeping them on funding life support, which I generally support for now. The industry sees that Lazard LCOE curve just like any other person would: do you want to pay solar/wind costs for electricity, or 6x that for nuclear?

The existing nuclear industry can't survive without subsidies.

Lazard only does LCOE for short term storage, since there is little to none long term storage.

The final price does not depend only on the production price. You cited Lazard 2023: if you read the firming intermittency price estimations, you figure out that solar and wind in the California grid costs 2/3 times more than when just considering the LCOE. Solar and wind production can be cheaper, but the final price is way higher, and it further increases when renewables take a larger share of the energy production.

Typical FUD numbers.

1. "Cost estimates" are more expensive than solar/wind. You know what they are also more expensive than? The historical costs of ACTUAL 50-year-old plants.

2. Average construction time for a nuclear plant is 6-8 years, with many built in half that time. [1] You can build over half a dozen generations of nuclear power plants before my 401(k) matures.

[1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...

Your cost comparison does not factor in the grid storage required to convert unreliable solar+wind into 24/7 power. You can only directly compare $/MWHr when the proportion of unreliable energy is small, and offsetting reliable sources (i.e. when the cost of electricity is roughly constant). When all generation is unreliable, there's a huge question mark - how long can the grid weather dark, windless days? What's an appropriate safety margin, and what happens when you breach it?

From your own source, the Lazard 2023 LCOE study: "Most LDES (long duration energy storage) technologies have not yet reached commercialization due to technology immaturity and, with limited deployments, seemingly none of the emerging LDES technologies have achieved the track record for performance required to be fully bankable."

Ideally we'd have a combined approach - nuclear base load, renewables and grid scale storage to reduce the number of expensive nukes we need. That way you'll always have at least some power. But we don't have grid storage yet. And without storage, there's not much point in offsetting the output of nuclear plants, since fuel costs are so minimal - you might as well run all the nukes full tilt, all the time. So really, the only sensible thing to do is build primarily nuclear, and renewables in proportion to our ability to deal with wildly fluctuating energy supply.

Doesn't really make up for the fact that nuclear is 6x more expensive than solar. I really think synthfuels or all the hydrogen stuff going on (or the CO2 --> propane story also on the board today) will far outperform nuclear in grid leveling/storage.

Nuclear simply needs a reset to figure out how to make it economical. I love nuclear power in theory, there is simply so many more orders of magnitude of energy density and long life that it has to be viable somehow.

Again, I'm in favor of keeping the current nuclear plants operational. But build out a substantial new build of nuclear plants? Absolutely not. Research reactors, long term R&D / national laboratory projects on advanced nuclear? 100% support it, to the tune of a billion per year or more.

I would say that 24/7 power you can have using real technology that actually exists today makes up for any claims you might make about "6x more expensive". More expensive than what? Magic non-existent grid storage?

It's all very well saying you think that "synthfuels" and "hydrogen stuff" WILL outperform nuclear, but the practical upshot is that you are arguing in favor of sitting around twiddling our thumbs hoping some new technology will save us, when we could be building nuclear plants. What do you suggest we do now that will substantially eat into fossil consumption?

Go ahead and pretend grid storage is some pretend technology and isn't in actual production use.

That is honestly unhinged, and if nuclear proponents thing grid storage is some far off technology, they are more divorced from th economic reality than I thought.

Nuclear is 141$ per mwhr. Solar +storage is $45. Solar/wind are $24.

This pattern of improvement isn't some new phenomenon, and you can't pretend these are made up figures. Is storage pricing new? Yeah. Is the cost of battery backup going to drop? Virtually guaranteed with new sodium ion techs and the other stuff in the pipeline.

Attitudes like this frankly just validate that the entire current generation of the nuclear industry simply has a flawed and obsolete structure and outlook. They are simply ossified in a huge regulatory capture wall.

Your bet is based off of magical batteries from the future. This is not at all a coherent counterargument to nuclear. Nevermind the very concept of having redundant systems, or admitting the possibility of nuclear getting cheaper.

You can easily be accused of Silicon Valley style innovation delusion. As if something being older or more "regulated" means it is bad. It is the same delusion that got Uber to lose billions until they changed the same per ride as any taxi company. In reality, facts don't care about how you think the world works.

How much of the current low cost is due to the currently low storage requirements? As the share of energy production from the unreliable renewables increases, the demand for storage will increase as well.

How do the costs compare when you factor in enough storage and overbuilding to reliably cover the inherently unpredicable generation downtimes?

> If we had these plants already because construction started in the year 2000, that would probably be a different story.

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today."

I assure you people 20 years from now will be posting the exact same sentiment - "we should have started building nuclear reactors in 2023".

What is the major cause of solar death? Roofing falls?

Opportunity cost in locations solar isn't so efficient.

Nuclear is a good "filler" for environments that aren't conducive to other renewables.

Amazingly enough, yes: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/07/2020-fatalities-for-us...

Yep, and the major killer with Wind is people falling off of the turbines.

Hydro is extremely safe except for a handful mass casualty incidents that completely skew the numbers. Nuclear is in the same boat, with really just 1 significant incident.

I think if we're honest, it's obvious what the average voter is scared of. If you separate these deaths into workplace and bystander deaths it paints a different picture.

It's still clear that any form of fossil fuel is the loser. Sure, maybe in terms of bystander deaths solar or wind are slightly better than nuclear but both are orders of magnitude better than anything that involves burning. The amount of pollution and radiation that burning fossil fuels emits is orders of magnitude more harmful to the general public than anything that solar, wind or nuclear does.

Do we count the people who drown in the reservoirs?

>In raw deaths per megawatt nuclear wins above all else.

Just a quibble here: your post is obviously pro-nuclear-power, however this sentence seems to claim that nuclear power causes more deaths than any other power source, which is not what I think you meant.

I think that depends on your perspective - specifically, whether you think more deaths or fewer deaths is winning:)

Death, the heavy metal solution to climate change.

I believe the OP is saying that it "wins" by having the fewest deaths per TWh, and it does - it's the same as solar and wind. [1]

By far the worst is coal which [1] has conservatively at 25 deaths per TWh vs nuclear at 0.04.

The worst nuclear incident of all time killed 4000 people, and Fukushima killed exactly 1 person. The third-worst, Three Mile Island killed 0. This isn't even low sample size. Nuclear has generated 20% of the entire US power demand for decades.

Even if you attribute all the deaths from the bungled evacuation of Fukushima to nuclear power (2300), 10X more people would have died in the normal course of operating a coal power plant at the site over the course of the reactor's life (1485TWh from 1979 to 2011 @ 25 deaths/TWh = 37,000).

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

I treat public industry estimates of death from nuclear power which the same integrity I treat the fossil fuel industry reports on climate change. They are both intrinsically motivated to systematically deny the ill effects. And if you dig into the deaths you’ll find that basically any plausibly deniable cancer death is discounted. And accounting for disasters like Fukushima will try to discount deaths due to evacuation afterwards to bad policy arguing that somehow we should have let everyone to stay in the area be irradiated.

The estimates also suffer from minimization from bad human intuition - as there will be years of future deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima but because they are both difficult to peg and small at any single point in time they get discounted.

In general the strategy is very similar in deniability effectiveness to the chemical industry in cancers and other illnesses from exposures from everything like pesticides to PFAs.

Ditto - and the same with the claims of solar and wind companies because of - [Goodhart's Law - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

      - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

But even if we take that view, how many deaths would nuclear have to have caused to break even with fossil fuels? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... puts nuclear at 0.03 and hydropower at 1.3. So it is ~50 times less than hydro. That's a lot of wiggle room!

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