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Comment by vidanay | Hacker News Reader

With one major difference...the Mississippi River isn't subject to the same seismic (New Madrid notwithstanding) and tsunami events.

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This. Having ongoing concerns from a once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm of an event such as Fukushima in application to a facility that is not vulnerable to nearly any of the series of worst-case scenario events is simply doomerism. This is exactly the kind of mindset that has prevented the US as a country from developing nuclear power in any substantial fashion for the last 50 or so years. In that timeframe, it's not unlikely to assume we could have a much more substantial amount of our energy produced by nuclear power; if not completely deprecating coal power plants.

At the moment, barring magical energy sources that haven't been proven in any meaningful sense, nuclear technology has shown itself to have the fewest long-term consequences and the highest efficiency. However, it is unfortunately also the easiest to point to a few events in history and easily make the layman cast doubt on its safety. It's worth pointing out that the most significant nuclear accident in history took place in the USSR (which wasn't particularly notorious for its safety protocols), on a reactor that had several known design flaws that were ignored, and the only other major accident representing a one in a thousand years perfect-storm that overcame several redundancies.

This concern about "drones" in relation to nuclear power plants is borderline paranoia. Are you concerned about drones dropping bombs or somehow disabling safety systems on a nuclear reactor? Every single nuclear power in the world has nuclear power plants, so they're all equally susceptible to the same attack in the same way that they're all equally capable of responding to said attack- mutually assured destruction as it goes.

> Having ongoing concerns from a once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm of an event such as Fukushima

A lot of the world's living population lived through Chernobyl, the various incidents at Sellafield and then Fukushima. All events that "statistically" should not have happened nearly as close together as they did - and that's without taking the risk of 9/11-style terrorism, actual acts of war (see Zaporizhzhia NPP) or catastrophic earthquakes into account.

There are only two kinds of power generation that have a mass-casualty potential: nuclear power plants and dammed hydro power (as evidenced by what went on at Kakhovka Dam). We should, as a species, get rid of these. The sooner, the better.

There are more deaths directly attributable to coal fired power plants than to nuclear energy in all forms (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/archive/2013_khare...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2019/ph241/marshall2/

https://www.engineering.com/story/whats-the-death-toll-of-nu...

Fly a plane into a coal plant and nothing much (besides the death of everyone involved) will happen.

Fly a plane into an NPP and you're looking at a massive contamination issue.

Hell, I live in Bavaria, and to this day you have to inspect shrooms and wild game meat for radiation - and it's likely to exceed safety thresholds, even decades after Chernobyl.

> Fly a plane into an NPP and you're looking at a massive contamination issue.

Or not: https://bigthink.com/the-present/nuclear-power-plant-survive...

While we're at it, when airplanes were invented there were dozens of crashes relatively close to each other that killed almost a hundred thousand people (almost 100x that of all nuclear power accidents combined). Better get rid of the airplanes too. And let's not even mention cars or boats or horses. Best to just stay indoors.

Stay indoors? Do you know how many people have died to radon? From house fires?

No, it's not paranoia.

The people at the Nova music festival in Israel would have said exactly the same thing as you in the hours before the event.

Black Swans can and do appear.

Comparing a regulated industry to a terrorist event is about the most irrational thing I have read today.

I would indeed be curious about the risk as estimated by Japan and Illinois about their respective reactors before and after the Fukushima disaster, before forming an opinion on whether this is actually a problem. As you say, there's likely fundamental differences not obvious from the provided rhetoric...

However, I don't know what these drones are doing.

36 hours. That's all it takes.

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