To be fair people were fine with multiple Chernobyl’s amount of damage every years from burning coal.
And other disasters like Three Miles Island very insignificant.
And other disasters like Three Miles Island very insignificant.
Do you have a source for that? I'd be very interested in a study that quantifies the damage of coal plants in terms of famous nuclear disasters.
If it's not the important issue justifying nuclear over coal, why bring it up?
Nuclear was the only viable green option back then. It failed because of mass psychosis and because it was more expensive than coal and gas.
Of course it’s too late now. But had nuclear plant construction continued to grow at the same pace as in the 60s and 70s CO2 emissions from power generation would have be been solved by the 2000s.
> adding pollution control to coal plants
Even if it was 100% effective that would do nothing to slow down climate change.
But the mass psychosis after Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl made nuclear expansion very expensive politically and financially (of course not saying that all of the additional safety regulations which inflated costs were not necessary). It would be rather silly to claim that it didn’t tip the scales at all.
You're spinning a comforting story to allow you to evade unpleasant realities. I would have thought "everyone is crazy but me" would have set off red flags for you, but apparently not.
I repeated that cost (of course only if externalities, that hardly anyone was fully aware of back in the 80s, are excluded) was the primary reason why nuclear failed. Do you really think that public opinion had no impact and did not accelerate it, though?
> "everyone is crazy but me"
Is that how you feel? Must be interesting..
We see plans for nuclear go up and down based on economic conditions. Public opinion doesn't seem to have any effect on that. The nuclear renaissance was going great when natural gas seemed like it was running out. It collapsed when fracking made gas cheap again. Today there's concern for AI power demand and nuclear seems to be getting traction. Public opinion isn't driving any of that.
There was a period when being a pro nuclear liberal/central-left politician was politically suicidal.
> connected the dots and shown that had any tangible effect.
It’s not my job to put in significant amount of effort to try and change your opinion (which is worth exactly as much as mine is).
> The nuclear renaissance was going great
That’s an exaggeration. Even back then nuclear was hardly seen as cost effective without a lot of squinting. The number of new reactors was hardly significant.
> Public opinion isn't driving any of that
You mean currently? Perhaps. Don’t see how is that an argument when talking about the 80s.
> Public opinion doesn't seem to have any effect on that
That obviously not true. Unless you ignore how, when and by whom the decisions to close the remaining nuclear reactors in e.g. Germany were made. Especially considering that then (before cheap renewables were available) we already knew that nuclear was cost competitive if negative externalities are accounted for (which was only partially the case back in the 80s).
You cannot show any good evidence for it, though. You can merely assert correlation (if a bad one, given that nuclear was in trouble long before TMI or Chernobyl).
It's clear what's going on here: the actual situation, that nuclear has failed economically, is completely unacceptable to you, so you are confabulating a fantasy that something else caused nuclear's troubles. It's wishful denial of reality to preserve the illusion that your energy waifu has any chance.
Surely you must be trolling? Or you just can’t read? How many times did I repeat that?
> It's wishful denial of reality
I mean you are literally looking and what I wrote and seeing words that are not there.
e.g. NIH estimates 460k excess deaths (just in the US alone) between 1999 and 2020 were caused by emission from coal plants. And that’s the period when coal became relatively “clean”.
So it must have been much worse back in the 70s and 80s.
The highest estimate for Chernobyl is 60,000. But 16,000 is probably more realistic.
Nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
It may. I don’t think that’s the consensus view though and again something being well-known doesn’t make it the consensus.
I’m not saying that WHO’s and IAEA‘s figures are perfect and flawless but they aren’t widely challenged either.