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Comment by ViewTrick1002 | Hacker News Reader

The difference is who gets harmed. For solar and wind the general public generally can’t be affected by any accidents because the deaths are general work place hazards coming from working aloft with heavy equipment.

For nuclear power the public is on the hook for cleanup fees from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars and the large scale accidents we have seen caused hundreds of thousands to get evacuated.

It is not even comparable. If I chose to not work in the solar and wind industry my chance of harm is as near zero as it gets. Meanwhile about all consequences from nuclear power afflicts the general public. Both in terms of costs, injuries and life changing evacuations.

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Better to compare to fossil fuels, which kill far more people and animals both directly (eg. explosions) and indirectly (emissions).

100,000 people dying one at a time over the course of a decade seems to have a lower public relations impact then 1000 people dying in a once-in-a-century spectacularly tragic accident. Even though the total casualties are higher.

Fentanyl is a prime example. I believe (from memory) over 100,000 people die of it each year in the in the US. Everyone knows it's a problem. We should "do something". But, we don't. Nobody cares enough (except as a platitude come election time). However if 1000 people died in a bomb attack (or similar) it would be top news for weeks and they would be scrambling the military and make us take our wedding rings off for scanning at airports.

It's also who is impacted, right, Fentanyl deaths are self inflicted

True. Maybe substitute car accidents.

If 10% of people who died in auto accidents each year were to perish in one horrible spectacular event it probably would be "transformative" as far as public policy.

Fentanyl is an issue because they are preventable deaths.

(Never mind that cracking down actually increases the death rate. And the fentanyl problem came about because of cracking down on heroin. Fentanyl is far cheaper to make and far easier to smuggle due to being much smaller. But it has a tendency to clump and thus when handled by street dealers they can't produce a uniform product.)

> For nuclear power the public is on the hook for cleanup fees from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars and the large scale accidents we have seen caused hundreds of thousands to get evacuated.

How much expense is justified for each life (or year of life) saved from radiation exposure by scraping up the soil and bagging it? Can we justify the evacuation of elderly from close to Fukushima on the grounds that in 20 years time they will have an elevated risk of cancer? How is that balanced with deaths caused by the process of relocation? What about the human cost of an energy shortage caused by shutting down the nuclear power stations in Japan?

The same goes for chemical cleanup (heavy metal poisoning, pesticides, dioxins, PFAs, fly-ash, asbestos).

To make the cleanup decisions we need some notion of tradeoff between cost and benefit. Otherwise we'll end up in a situation where an indeterminate amount of money can be spent on something with no benefit (other than achieving something a politician willed to happen).

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