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Comment by lioeters | Hacker News Reader

> nuclear accidents are almost entirely hypothetical

Nothing to see here.

> Serious nuclear power plant accidents include the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011), the Chernobyl disaster (1986), the Three Mile Island accident (1979), and the SL-1 accident (1961).

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This is the same tiring argument - using plane crashes to say that flying is unsafe, because it makes headlines once a crash happens, while tens of thousands of people die every year on the roads. But hey, diffuse deaths, nobody cares about it.

So the anti-nuclear guys keeping point at the same list of 3-4 incidents time and time again, unable to recognize the ridiculousness and weakness of their argument - and the fact that their opposition to nuclear actively kills people year after year.

stupid comparisons, ironic... how many planes are there? How many of them crashed? And now ask yourself the same thing for nuclear plants

Actually, your comparison between planes and cars is quite adapt. The airline industry likes to use death per km as a measure and you are correct they come out very safe with that measure. However, experts have argued that it is a very flawed metric because of the vary different distances covered by both means and the way risk is distributed (i.e. for flying the risk is almost entirely in the starti g and landing phase, while for a drive it is evenly distributed over the trip). If you use a metric like deaths per hour flying does not look so much more safe that driving actually (essentially the same as driving) [1]

[1] https://observer.com/1998/03/driving-versus-flying-the-debat... couldn't find a more up to date source

But people generally aren't choosing between driving somewhere 120 miles away or flying somewhere 1150 miles away. Generally, someone already has a destination in mind, and then chooses whether to drive or fly to get there. That makes deaths by time an extremely flawed metric, and deaths by distance the correct one to use.

Maybe yours is a US perspective, but I never decided between flying and driving. I fly when driving or the train typically does not make sense, i.e. flights over 800km. I'm not sure even in the US is such a decision, most people will not drive from the east to the west coast, while only a small percentage of people would take flying from e.g. LA to San Diego over driving

All of those accidents combined killed less than 10% of the people that are killed by fossil fuel pollution every single year. Most nuclear accidents are entirely hypothetical.

Has affected millions of peoples health already and whole ecosystems. And the consequences will cumulate from this thousands of years. Count that in your equation and get more informative numbers.

Whose health? Any actual data?

I think GP was talking about CO2 (affect millions already, will still be present in a thousand years)

This is in dollars, but 10% of healthcare spending in the US equates to a good amount of health I reckon https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...

I was asking about the GP's assertion about health impact of nuclear.

The dispersed fallout? Hard to quantify because of it's dispersedness and long term slowness. But it is for example plutonium and we know it's effects on life on Earth, so one could proceed from there with some math and futurological trend extrapolation. And simply by using the knowledge we have about plutonium mixed with common sense.

i’m not at all anti-nuclear but i’m not sure what you mean by

> most nuclear accidents are entirely hypothetical.

i also agree that fossil fuels kill a lot of people as well, only in slow-motion and we have some form of weird disconnect when something happens in slow-motion vs quick.

but again, nuclear accidents are not hyperbole nor are they hypothetical. again, i’m not anti-nuclear, i suspect we need a mix of strong decentralized renewables such as solar/wind and a filler of nuclear.

i’m no expert on nuclear accidents but my cynical take is that the building companies/orgs probably cut corners on safety in order to save money. and maybe that could be a area to improve safety—significantly overbuild on safety features. like i said tho, absolutely not an expert.

Just the nature of a plant requiring active management (and power) to prevent meltdown is a weak point. The reasonable answer to this concern imo is explaining how passive safety systems have advanced and are implemented in new reactor designs, and how plants are built so when intentionally attacked or incidentally damaged a meltdown or release of highly radioactive material does not ensue, especially for folks advocating for the widespread adoption of nuclear energy worldwide. Strikes me as odd that the typical response is instead 'but this old energy generation tech which we all agree needs to go has downsides'.

If we remove Chernobyl from this list, we'll find that probably just 1 person died from radiation after power plant accidents.

Fossil plants are killing millions of people every year.

During heatwave this year, when we had temperatures around 43C for almost 2 weeks, hundreds of people died in my country because our energy grids were overloaded and ACs turned off. And many people can't even afford to pay for AC energy bills anyway so they don't use it. Our energy needs are growing every year and energy production can't keep up.

We NEED cheap energy that nuclear can give. This is the matter of survival at this point.

SL-1 killed three people. However, it was a military reactor, not civilian.

If you have to resort to "it's better than fossil fuels" you have damned nuclear with faint praise. And you have also wasted our time, because nuclear is competing with renewables now, not with fossil fuels.

Okay, how about; it's safer than literally every other method of energy production? Less deaths per thousand terawatt-hours produced (90) than wind (150), solar (440), or hydroelectric (1400).

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

I already addressed that argument.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295591

If a statistical human life is worth $9 M, then 440 deaths per thousand TWh adds $0.004/kWh to the cost of solar. This cannot overcome the large cost advantage solar and wind have over nuclear in most places (even with storage costs included). Also, the 440 figure is, I believe, assuming rooftop solar. At scale to power the world solar will be mostly ground mounted.

If you don't agree with that statistical value, and think it should be higher, why you've just argued we're not imposing enough safety systems on nuclear plants -- because $9 M is the value the NRC uses when determining if additional safety systems are warranted.

And I happen to think the NRC is wrong and the vast number of safety regulations imposed on nuclear power is harmful to the ultimate goal of getting off coal as quickly as possible. We should be building more nuclear reactors, even if we lower safety standards to do so, to reduce dependency on fossil fuels and the ongoing ecological disaster they entail. But that won't happen because both fossil fuel lobbyists and environmentalists loathe nuclear power.

Decades of accumulated safety regulations have added massively to the capital costs to nuclear reactors and offer covering fire for fossil fuel lobbies to continue to distract people with renewables, which are always just around the corner and about to overtake everything (between 2009 and 2019, the global share of energy produced by renewable sources has risen from 7% to 10% - a real green revolution!).

But here's the real kicker - when nuclear reactors get taken offline, as happened in California and Germany recently, they are replaced by fossil fuels. Not solar. Not wind.

You can't count solar or wind deaths at present because neither is a viable power system.

To count deaths you need to look at a whole system--solar, wind + the gas plants that cover the gaps, or the hypothetical storage system that covers the gaps. Since we can't count deaths from a tech that doesn't even exist it's solar + wind + gas -- and most of those deaths will be from the gas.

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