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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

The main problem of course is that coal is killing much more people than any nuclear disaster ever did (per unit of energy delivered).

But because it’s so spread and so normalised and not so bombastic, we don’t even consider it.

The number of lives saved by using nuclear energy is easily in the tens of thousands even with disasters like Chernobyl.

Although of course it has to be stated that the USSR moved to heaven and earth to solve the problem… and if they hadn’t, then the entire continent might be dead today.

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And brown bears are less dangerous than cars because fewer people are killed by them. If you see a car, RUN. They are dangerous. Brown bears, not so much. Go ahead, pat their fur, statistically this is safe.

It’s important to understand the qualifier per unit of energy.

The correct parable for you would have been the number of bear deaths vs interactions with bears weighed against number of car deaths vs interactions with cars.

You mean, number of deaths per incident? Yeah, that makes sense.

With that logic, we should put 100.00% of all public funding into protecting us against world ending asteroids.

One day we might wish we did.

Not apples to apples.

Just being near a potentially aggressive bear is a bad situation.

Being near a car or a nuclear power plant is not a bad siuation.

Of course you should run in the other direction if you're close to a potentially aggressive bear.

Same thing if you're in the path of an out of control car, or near a nuclear power plant accident.

But you've got to separate the "probability of bad situation occurring" from the "severity of the bad situation when it does occur".

You generally can't really pet a wild brown bear, since they are not interested in humans and would avoid you. You can't run away from it either, since it can outrun you easily

By your logic, it's wrong to spend many billions per year on traffic safety. It should go into bear safety instead.

"Average deaths per TWh produced" is a good yardstick to me.

This analogy is probably wrong.

No. You just have an irrational fear of brown bears.

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