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Comment by zamazingo | Hacker News Reader

When something happens in these plants, it's not like a power line is cut off and so the fridge goes out for a few weeks.

You end up with large aread becoming inhabitable for hundreds of years, surrounding land and underground water contaminated, loss of human and natural habitat life from hard to document illnesses, etc.

Are you suggesting cutting costs in nuk plants as an efficient population control technique?

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When a hydro plant fails, hundreds of thousands of people could die as a direct result. And they have. Where is your outrage?

That's bad of course. But after a short time people can live there again. If something like Chernobyl or Fukushima happens the land is lost for decades and has a very huge impact (fallout, radioactive waste, groundwater contamination, etc.). You may argue that these are just two big incidents but with all the old plants with bad condition (e.g. Beznau, Fessenheim, etc.) in mind I'd say we'll see more bigger incidents in the next years.

In most discussions the time is ignored. Nuclear power plants already produced waste for many generations which is irresponsible.

You're seriously comparing thousands of dead people favourably to thousands of displaced people?

Both incidents kill many people. Hydro plant failures in short term - Nuclear plant failures in long term. Both is bad. But additionally nuclear plant failures also make the affected environment for a long time unusable. And I'd say harm more people because of the long term effects.

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

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

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

The problem with trotting out the Banqiao Dam as proof of the dangers of hydroelectric is that it was a dual-purpose dam built to prevent downstream flooding as well as providing power, and it failed due to mismanagement of the flood control aspect. So even if nuclear power had existed at the time, and even if the idea of building a nuclear power plant with the same quality of engineering used in the dam wasn't a utterly terrifying idea that would make Chernobyl look safe, not using hydroelectic power wouldn't have solved the problem. The dam would still have been built and those hundred thousand people would still have died due to dam failure, all that would changed is that nuclear proponents couldn't point to their deaths as proof nuclear is the safer option.

From 1: The total number of deaths, including future deaths, is highly controversial, and estimates range from "up to" 4,000 (by a team of over 100 scientists[9][3]) to the Union of Concerned Scientists estimate is approximately 27,000 based on the LNT model[10], to 93,000—200,000 (by Greenpeace[11]). Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, published by the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, but without NYAS explicit approval,[12][Notes 1] is a 2007 Russian publication that concludes that there were 985,000 premature deaths as a result of the radioactivity released.[13]

From 3: It has been reported that 90,000 - 230,000 people were killed as a result of the dam breaking.

I don't see your point

I made my point, I can’t help you if you refuse to see it.

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