Chernobyl won’t be habitable for 20,000 years.
While accidents are rare, with their incredibly high cost (in this case: a city of 50,000 people that cannot be inhabited for a time longer than all of human history), they need to be even rarer.
While accidents are rare, with their incredibly high cost (in this case: a city of 50,000 people that cannot be inhabited for a time longer than all of human history), they need to be even rarer.
Also, you're assuming a linear no-threshold radiation dose response, which is very hard to find support for at the low dose rates now present at Chernobyl. As someone else in this thread pointed out, that's like assuming hundreds of people would die per year from handshakes due to linear health response to Newton's laws.
Indeed, it appears that human presence was more detrimental to life than radiation [1].
[1] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl...
I would agree that the human reaction is sometimes irrational, but that needs to be accepted. Human life is not a lab controlled experiment where people will always behave rationally.
I hope that one day Chernobyl and Fukushima can be repopulated, and agree that may be safe. I don't think that makes any difference to the actual cost of the event. Nor, would it be wise to presume that a subsequent event could be safely handled without an evacuation. But that is one for politicians to decide.
Given the choice of waiting for wind/solar to become more worthwhile as oil extraction slowly becomes more expensive and prices slowly rise (aka the status quo) or pulling the trigger on nuclear now it shouldn't even be a choice.
We certainly aren’t going to be building any more Chernobyls for commercial power generation.
The area around Chernobyl is habitable today. In fact, wildlife is thriving there because humans are staying away.
Here's another data point: Even by your definition, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are habitable today, less than 100 years after having been hit by nuclear bombs. Ground zero in those cities are thriving tourist zones. Yes, radiation is dangerous, but the dangers of nuclear power have been VASTLY exaggerated by left-wing propaganda.
"The total release of radioactive substances was about 14 EBq1 (as of 26 April 1986), which included 1.8 EBq of 131I, 0.085 EBq of 137Cs and other caesium radioisotopes, 0.01EBq of 90Sr and 0.003 EBq of plutonium radioisotopes. The noble gases contributed about 50% of the total release of radioactivity."
Iodine-131 has a half-life of only 8 days, and it cleared up long ago. The only going concern is Caesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years, and needs 300 years to go to 1/1000 of the initial levels and 600 years to all but disappear. The other radioisotopes were contained to the location of the reactor. The only one that will be there for millenia is a decay product of Pu-241, namely Am-241 with a half-life of 430 years. However, as stated before, that is localized to the nuclear reactor itself. It will reach a maximum about 100 years after the event (so about 70 years from now).
[1] http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1239_web.pd...
And lets remember that this was a Soviet design build as a technology to have reactor for nuclear weapons (or at least dual use).
Fukushima is the worst thing ever happened in terms of actual western civilian reactors and not a single person died from radiation.
Not a single person died in the US from civilian nuclear. It is the safest energy technology in terms of actual data.
So yes, it should be saver, but comparatively it is saver then everything else.
We all know how enthusiastic governments are to admit fault, there are probably many more.
One I'm familiar with in the US:
"The Sodium Reactor Experiment-SRE was an experimental nuclear reactor that operated at the site from 1957 to 1964 and was the first commercial power plant in the world to experience a core meltdown. There was a decades-long cover-up of the incident by the U.S. Department of Energy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory#...
Many of the workers died in their 40s or earlier, in town most of that generation dead by their 60s of cancer. Appears to still be having an affect: https://www.change.org/p/no-more-kids-with-cancer-clean-up-t...
If there have been any deaths from civilian nuclear, I would like that information to consider.
In Japan some people died of some of the consequences and government overreaction, not from radiation.
In the US, there is no case that I know of where people died from civilian reactor radiation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Nuclear_One#March_201...
Or being scalded by steam:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surry_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Even...
The reason I bring this up is because the "deaths per terawatt hour" comparisons often used by nuclear proponents omit non-radiation fatal accidents in the accounting for nuclear but include those accidents for renewables. See e.g.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
It says that US nuclear has a mortality rate of 0.1 deaths per 1000 terawatt hours. Since US nuclear power generates about 800 TWh per year, that implies a fatality rate of about once every 12 years across the whole US fleet. But as shown above the Surry Nuclear Power Plant alone has had 6 workers die from accidents (though none involved radiation).
Nuclear power is very safe in any case; the real menace is combustion-based energy sources. It's just going too far to say that "not a single person died" from US nuclear power. Job site deaths from crushing, burns, falls from high places, etc. are still deaths. That modest number of accidental deaths would be a rounding error for coal, but it really matters at the low end with nuclear and renewables, precisely because the indirect pollution deaths are so much lower for non-combustion electricity sources.