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Comment by jerome-jh | Hacker News Reader

From the top of my head, for about 300 nuclear power plants around the globe, there have been 3 core meltdown accidents. It is a 1% catastrophic failure rate. It is quite bad!

Whatever the circumstances of these accidents, human nature and unexpected events allowed them to occur. Just like every accident, you can say after the fact they could have been avoided. However it is impossible to revert the consequences of a core meltdown at human time scale.

I am not anti-nuclear at all. But I certainly wonder what kind of organization is required to operate it safely.

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Meanwhile coal power alone is causing 60 deaths per day (20k per year). And that’s a conservative NIH number, not a biased nuclear industry estimate.

3 meltdowns in the past 60 years with minimal loss of life (even including Chernobyl, an outlier for so many reasons), is a massively safer alternative than the status quo.

See my brown bear vs car comparison above/below.

Also, solar causes less deaths, according to your counting method.

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

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

Analogy doesn’t work, it’s deaths per TWhour that matter.

Solar, wind, and nuclear are all within error of each other in that counting. Three points on that:

1. Almost ALL of that is due to Chernobyl, which has to be recognized as an outlier for multiple reasons. Both in that it should never have happened, and that had they a containment shield it wouldn’t have been any worse than 3MI or Fukushima.

2. Both wind and solar have a lot of industrial and resource extraction costs & pollution that are not being counted here.

3. Land use and environmental impact are a far worse story for wind and solar.

1. I am with you in that nuclear plants should not explode.

2. Yeah, and nuclear plants have a lot of costs which are not accounted, like the already mentioned unaffordable insurance costs that are passed on to the taxpayer in the event of an incident.

3. Land radiation and environmental impact are a far worse story for nuclear in case of an accident.

Yet somehow fossil fuel doesn’t have to pay for all the cancers they cause…

Don't get me wrong, I am not a supporter of burning fossil fuels. I am discussing which technology should be used to generate electricity. And I consider renewables to be the more pragmatic strategy. Mostly not because they are cleaner or cheaper, but because they are more decentralized, can be built quicker and are easier to replace. I am pro nuclear power plants as long as they are built far away from where people live, including the waste disposal.

Edit: to be more clear, my long term earth vision is: everything runs using electricity. No coal, no other fossils are burned. Electricity is mostly generated using wind, water, solar.

Solar & wind are not as decentralized as you think when you consider resource extraction. I think SMNR would meet your criteria for safety and a distributed grid.

Total amount of reactor*years so far is roughly 20000. 3 core meltdowns amounts for 0.015% per reactor per year.

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