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Comment by phs318u | Hacker News Reader

When the nuclear industry feels confident enough to not need its own special law to protect it from liability in case of accidents, I’ll feel a little more confident in their safety rhetoric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

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This exists because of a cognitive bias: we tend to focus on direct, attributable harm while overlooking larger, diffuse, and indirect harm.

A nuclear plant could operate safely for 50 years, causing no harm, but if it explodes once and kills 10,000 people, there's gonna be a trial. A coal plant could run for the same 50 years without any dramatic accident, yet contribute to 2,000 premature deaths every single year through air pollution—adding up to 100,000 deaths. Nobody notices, nobody is sued, business as usual. It's legally safer today to be "1% responsible for 1000 death" than to be "100% responsible for a single one". Fix this and that law goes away.

Well, no, that's more down to nuclear fans constantly using the worst possible comparisons, and creating false dichotomies. The better comparison are renewables or natural gas, not an ancient technology literally everybody (outside of it's investors) agrees is bad and should go.

Nuclear sits just between wind (slightly more dangerous) and solar (slightly less dangerous) per unit of electricity production, all of them being much safer than hydro; and ridiculously safer than gas, oil and coal. It's a really, really safe option.

Note that these number are a bit old and since then, installation of consumer solar has increased significantly. Installation of solar panels on consumer roofs is much more dangerous than installation of solar panels in solar plants, so death rate for solar are significantly underestimated. Meanwhile accident rates of plant construction (nuclear, solar or otherwise) keep dropping.

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

So, for safety, turn off coal first, then turn off nuclear.

For safety, the order to turn things off is coal, oil, biomass, natural gas, hydropower, wind, then nuclear.

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

The trouble with liability is that if your nuclear plant has an accident and the cancer rate in the area doesn't detectably change, everybody in the area who gets cancer will sue you anyway.

That law says more about the reliability of US courts than about the safety of nuclear power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj...

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