[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462961....
Nuclear is, depending on what stats you use, either among the safest or actually the safest energy source.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
(And the top 3 are so close that differences are essentially noise)
And Concorde was retired because they could no longer operate it, for example no spare parts.
And of course you now have aviation startups trying to tap the same market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#Accidents_and_inciden... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590#Conclus...
And it was caused by a DC-10!
They should probably have added the Kevlar lining on the fuel tanks a bit earlier, though.
And yes, caused by debris falling of a DC-10.
1975 Chinese Dam fails
150K deaths 4.6 million homes destroyed 11 million people displaced
Number of countries getting out of hydro: 0 ( in words: zero )
Japan and Ukraine are both among the countries that signed the “tripling nuclear by 2050” pledge. My guess would be that they have the best information on the risks of nuclear.
It looks like a derailment and OPs argument still stands, imho. The only thing is that you can add results of radiation throughout generations, where people develop mutations and/or die early. None of those cases are in the handy graphic from above, which only counts immediate deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building
Your "results of radiation throughout generations" line doesn't really make sense. Don't go into the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. That's it.
You don't get much radiation from other nuclear power plants and certainly not "throughout generations". You do from radon gas in the basement in some parts of the world, you do from coal smoke (a tiny bit), and you do if you live in an area with a high background radiation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Iran#Radioactivity
And what else? Yes, the evacuation around Fukushima. They panicked and evacuated far too many :(
The west never built reactors that dangerous, and nobody operates reactors that dangerous (that type was fixed).
Anti-nukies have this feeling that anything nuclear is categorically more dangerous than anything non-nuclear.
They imagine the exclusion zone around Chernobyl to be a liefeless wasteland out of a dystopian sci-fi movie, when in reality it is a thriving wild-life reserve where you might have a slightly higher statistical risk of cancer.
And you are absolutely right: they evacuated way too much. In Chernobyl as well.
In both cases the negative health effects of the evacuation were far more severe than the negative health effects of the radiation.
Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have evacuated at all, but a whole lot less.
Numbers don’t lie.
I know. It is incredibly dishonest to use Chernobyl as an argument against nuclear power.
> thriving wild-life reserve
I know.
> where you might have a slightly higher statistical risk of cancer.
I know.
> In Chernobyl as well.
I know.
> In both cases the negative health effects of the evacuation were far more severe than the negative health effects of the radiation.
I know.
> Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have evacuated at all, but a whole lot less.
Absolutely agreed.
> Numbers don’t lie.
I never really trusted 7.
Why did you do it then?
I didn't.
Also, the argument that "event x is not valid because it can't happen this way anymore" is as useless as the initial promise of safety. Some things don't happen this way. Others can still happen, and it can still end up being disastrous. There is always the human and nature factors. You just can't ignore them. Sure they are unlikely, but they still can happen and all those unlikely things that can happen to renewable sources are just by far less terrible than what can happen if you have a nuclear reactor around.
This is why your number games will never end up being fruitful. People who usually play those games accuse their adversaries as ignorant, when in fact they are the ignorant ones.
Pretty representative.
https://www.chernobyl-international.com/
> Or how nuclear power in France can go wrong if you didn't have either a Chernobyl scenario in mind or
I'm no nuclear scientists, but even they were unable to prevent the accidents which happened. So what's your point? Or didn't you get mine?
LOL.
Just tried a browser that goes through their illegal consent page without giving consent and it's actually worse than I had imagined.
It's all about orphans in Belarus, which for some reasons becomes "the Chernobyl region". No connection to radiation or the nuclear accident whatsoever. Certainly no "results of radiation throughout generations"
Oh, one claimed connection: "The effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on the Belarusian economy prevented building and repair efforts, leaving many orphanages and Day-Care Centres poorly equipped,..."
Yeah...no.
Trying to verify those claims brings up articles that link back to this "charity". Nicely circular.
And of course what effects there are are socio-economic effects of the evacuation and stigmatization, not "results of radiation"
For example:
"The widespread public image of socially and economically depressed territories with traumatized populations often prevents economic activities from developing in the affected communities."
Of course the effects of the fall of the Soviet Union and the dictatorship in Belarus vastly exceed the effects even of this stigmatization.
We have similar effects in Fukushima, for example the fishermen have been negatively affected. Not by radiation, because the fish are totally fine+safe, but by people not wanting to buy fish from "Fukushima", because of their irrational fears.
So it all goes back to my old observation:
Fear of nuclear energy is vastly more dangerous than nuclear energy.
This is not the only charity, and seriously? You didn't know why Belarus? You are not aware of damages to the genome? Why do you even participate in a discussion around this topic? WTF are you doing here? Do you get money for this?
Lying about "generational radiation damage", for example.
Citing sources that in no way support those claims.
Where does this unconstrained hatred come from?
You know why Chernobyl was a disaster.
You know fully well why it has got nothing to do with the safety of current Western reactors, older Western reactors (except for some of the very first test reactors from the 40's and maybe early 50's), or even older Soviet reactors. It was a completely f*cked up design that nobody in the West would have allowed.
You know fully well that it is an argument designed to mislead.
You know fully well that you are the one misleading people here.
Especially with far safer, cleaner and cheaper alternatives already there and being rolled out in months instead of years....madness.
This must be a joke...and just like nuclear: I'm out here.
For environmental reasons, for example. Meanwhile, France is heating up rivers, so fish have to die for their failure to diversify and move on to future tech.
Your derailments are weak. Your argument that 11 years are "ok" remains, and no dam will ever make this madness better.
Nobody even remotely sane wants to die in a car crash either. Yet we drive cars.
Nobody even remotely sane wants to get poisoned by arsenic. Yet we make semiconductors, including solar panels.
Nobody even remotely sane wants superfund sites that have long term cleanup requirements. Yet we have them.
etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites
Herfa-Neurode stores enough arsenic to kill the entire world population. And tens of thousands tons of extremely poisonous heavy metals.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode
Making solar panels produces a lot more arsenic as waste than nuclear does per kWh.
You are under the illusion that other industrial processes don't have negative consequences. They do. And on balance nuclear is better.
You know how much soil is contaminated by arsenic and heavy metals used in the production of solar panels or wind turbines? I don't either, because it isn't in the news. When an installer falls off a roof, it doesn't make the news.
And the other thing that people don't understand is the energy density of nuclear. A single nuclear power plant is definitely much more dangerous than a single solar panel or a single wind turbine. But you need so much more of the latter two than the former that it evens out (or more than evens out).
I would think that hackers can figure out this sort of simple arithmetic.
Nobody is saying that the accidents are not bad. However, they are not actually that bad. And certainly not nearly as bad as laypeople think. And more importantly, there is nothing that has the perfect safety you appear to demand of nuclear. These things are tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs are very much in favor of nuclear.
As evidence, I present you Ukraine: the country that had the absolutely worst nuclear accident in the history of the world. Unstable reactor, no containment, authoritarian government with horrible crisis management. And yet, they kept their nuclear reactors. And not just that, they are among the 22 countries that have pledged to triple nuclear output by 2050.
What do they know that you do not?
As further evidence, I present you Japan: the country with the second worst nuclear accident in history. The accident you keep citing as so incredibly horrible that no sane person could possibly invest in nuclear. Of course the Tsunami was far worse than the nuclear accident, and the nuclear accident only happened because the Tsunami overwhelmed the protective infrastructure, as it overwhelmed the protective infrastructure of various non-nuclear facilities.
And yet, Japan is going with nuclear, and also happens to be among the 22 countries that signed the COP28 nuclear pledge to triple output by 2050.
What do they know that you do not?
The countries with the most experience with nuclear accidents are aware that these are tradeoffs, and have come to the conclusion that the tradeoffs favor nuclear.
This "assessment" is base upon a single image which is being handed up and down the nuclear astro-turf, and it's ignorant and disrespectful. There are still victims of Chernobyl out there, and there will be for generations.
You can give them some money to append for the use of this meme: https://www.chernobyl-international.com/
And not only there: https://culturacolectiva.com/en/history/mexico-radioactive-m...
https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1007843
> And the other thing that people don't understand is the energy density of nuclear.
Sure they do. They don't care because you know what's even better? The sun in the sky, for example...
> Nobody is saying that the accidents are not bad. However, they are not actually that bad.
We currently have a country full of reactors which are beyond the time they were supposed to run. Failures, accidents, shutdowns, global warming, etc. are happening to them, but the country doesn't have a diversified energy generation infrastructure. They'll keep it running. Accidents will keep on happening.
Meanwhile, the world keeps on turning. Global conflicts are coming nearer. Mad dictators waging wars, drones, hackers, machine learning, are happening. Why would any sane person even think about keeping or even BUILDING new targets in a densely populated area??
> As evidence, I present you Ukraine: the country that had the absolutely worst nuclear accident in the history of the world. Unstable reactor, no containment, authoritarian government with horrible crisis management. And yet, they kept their nuclear reactors. And not just that, they are among the 22 countries that have pledged to triple nuclear output by 2050.
They didn't have a choice back then. Now they have other things to care about. Like invading troops hiding their tanks and ammunition WITHIN their nuclear power plants! How the hell is this supposed to be an argument FOR nuclear?!?
Btw: I doubt they'll have even a fraction of the required money to build a single reactor in the future once the war is over. Renewables are incoming.
And yeah...gota love that "pledge": https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/11/nuclear-energy-cop28-el...
Nuclear has peaked, and even China invests much more in renewables than it said it would invest into nuclear. (The rest has other use: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/19/major-expansion-chi...) Time's up. Taxpayers will not be ready to waste money on those nonsense projects if the alternatives are cheaper and faster to build.
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/02/21/wind-solar-in-china-gen...
https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718
https://www.ft.com/content/2bccd67f-a3c6-48d1-baa5-8ef9d54cd...
> The countries with the most experience with nuclear accidents are aware that these are tradeoffs, and have come to the conclusion that the tradeoffs favor nuclear.
No they didn't. They greenwash regulations, rip off taxpayers, renationalize companies responsible for construction and maintenance because they can't survive on their own. It's a complete failure and the time is up.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/dead-horse-also-ran-or-unicorn-h...
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/World-Rep...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuclears-share-world...
Incorrect. This assessment is based on the actual data.
> https://www.chernobyl-international.com/
A "charity" that's a .com domain and has an illegal "consent" form. (Not all consent forms are illegal, but that one clearly is). Yeah, sure what more reliable source could there possibly be?
I actually went through the reports by the WHO. The official reports they did every 10 years after the accident. Did you? Were you even aware of those reports? They are on the WHO website.
Each subsequent report lowered the estimate of "negative health effects" from the previous report by an order of magnitude. Yes, that's a factor of 10. Each one, and there have been a number of them. By the last couple, the negative health effects of the evacuation were significantly higher than those of the accident itself. Which has also been the case in Japan.
> > And the other thing that people don't understand is the energy density of nuclear.
> Sure they do. They don't care because you know what's even better? The sun in the sky, for example...
Thanks for so skillfully demonstrating how the lack of understanding of energy density looks like in practice! Very much appreciated.
> [Ukraine] How the hell is this supposed to be an argument FOR nuclear?!?
Everything you say should be, in your world, the best reasons for getting OUT of nuclear. Yet they are not just not getting out, they want to expand.
Maybe they know something you do not?
>> The countries with the most experience with nuclear accidents ... favor nuclear.
> ...greenwash, rip off, renationalize ...
To which you have exactly no response, except that they must all be corrupt and ignorant. Really? That's your position? You know better, the people who actually do have first hand knowledge and hundreds if not thousands of experts know nothing and are all corrupt.
Hmm..
Or maybe, just maybe, they know something you do not.
And no I didn't go through the WHO report (just like you didn't....you didn't even know why Belarus is a topic here so stop lying!), I know people PERSONALLY who are affected by that. Now what? What graphic will you pull out now?
In my previous comment, I brought up several sources to support my arguments. You have nothing here. Nothing besides the disgusting attitude you bring up towards those who suffer the technology you worship.
That's why the US government passed the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act - to give nuclear power plants a free pass for any damage done costing over $300 mil so that sophisticated private insurers who can measure the risks wouldn't run a mile.
The real test to new design safety would be to repeal the act and see if sophisticated private insurers will cover them. So far the nuclear industry seems shy about putting extra skin in the game to prove that they're as safe as they claim they are to the general public, though.
They'd rather just pretend the act/subsidy doesn't exist.
But deaths is a pretty good high order bit.
Whole towns have been resettled for lignite coal and for other mining activities. Not just once many, many times. And guess where the power to make those cheap Chinese solar panels comes from? Coal.
So, yes almost certainly towns have had to be evacuated and abandoned, not due to solar industry accidents, but due to the solar industry working as intended.
And there are other effects:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/dark-spot-solar-energy-industr...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/12/clean-energy-china-xinj...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2021/06/21...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/climate/electronic-marvel...
How many died from the nuclear reactor meltdown vs the flood?
there was (an earthquake + tsunami) AND A NUCLEAR ACCIDENT IN FUKUSHIMA IN WHICH 15000 PEOPLE DIED.
Now this is technically not a lie, just a "slight" skewing of emphasis and grouping, but it's how we've managed to anchor in the German population the "fact" that there was a horrible nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima where tens of thousands died, which we think was caused by a Tsunami or something, but that part doesn't really matter.
When, to belabor the obvious, that is not at all what happened. The Tsunami killed over 15000. The accident at the plant caused by the Tsunami killed no one. The over-eager evacuation, on the other hand, has been made responsible for a number of deaths.
So of course, technically it is true that there was a natural disaster and also a nuclear accident caused by that natural disaster. A lot of accidents were caused by the natural disaster that day, so singling out just that one seems a bit weird. And yes, the natural disaster was made slightly worse by every piece of technical infrastructure that failed to withstand this unprecedented earthquake + tsunami. For example all the seawalls built around towns that were, like the one around the plant, built to handle 7M waves. And were swept away by 14m waves that proceeded to kill thousands.