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Comment by greenthrow | Hacker News Reader

This is nonsense. If you're going to cite arbitrary "N+1 days of bad weather" then I can cite "N+1 severe natural disasters" where the nuclear reactor is engineered to withstand N. And unlike the theoretical "disaster" due to extended bad weather taking renewables down, this has actually happened in recent memory with Fukushima. And this was a true disaster, not just a power outage.

Nuclear is not safe. Every time proponents say "new designs are safe" eventually a new disaster proves this lie. Then the nuclear proponents say "oh well that was an old design, new designs are safe!"

Nuclear is too expensive. Renewables even with storage are way cheaper! We can way over build renewables. We can distribute them, because "bad weather" is regional. All for much cheaper than nuclear.

Stop pushing this out-dated, unsafe and expensive technology. Its time has passed.

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> Nuclear is not safe

Nothing is 100.0% safe - but as far as I can find nuclear comes incredibly close[0] even when including Chernobyl and Fukushima.

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Taking about just deaths is misleading. Accidents in other energy sources don't render 1,000 square miles of land uninhabitable.

In terms of single-incident, I believe hydro takes the lead due to the Banqiao Dam failure (floods over 12,000 square kilometers killing ~30k directly then ~100k more from water contamination and famine). But even that's still dwarfed by the more gradual impact of climate change on the planet from fossil fuels.

Dam failures absolutely destroy vast areas and can contaminate them with oil and gasoline by flooding settlements. In fact hydroelectric power has killed a surprising amount of people.

> Accidents in other energy sources don't render 1,000 square miles of land uninhabitable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

  The grid came within minutes of overloading and shutting down completely, which would have required a slow and costly black start.

That would have rendered 268,596 square miles uninhabitable, at least for several weeks plus recovery time.

How about https://www.ferc.gov/media/winter-storm-elliott-report-inqui... ?

Focusing on deaths is a nice trick of the nuclear industry because the largest negative impacts of their disasters and even non-disaster costs of operation are still terrible but do not manifest as immediate deaths.

> but do not manifest as immediate deaths.

This isn't just counting immediate deaths - else it'd just be ~30 for Chernobyl and ~0 for Fukushima.

In fact, Fukushima's death count seems to primarily be down to that "people had died indirectly as a result of the physical and mental stress of evacuation" - which I feel should at least partially be put on the tsunami that killed 20000.

Suppose you have a devastating earthquake that wrecks renewable power sources in an area. Bad part is you're out of power for a good while. But the second-order risks are very low - maybe some people are killed by falling wind turbines or solar panels, but there isn't any equivalent of radioactive contamination making the place uninhabitable for years.

Banqiao Dam failure alone flooded over 12,000 square kilometers, killing ~30k directly then ~100k more from water contamination and famine.

Even solar still requires various minerals the extraction and processing of which has environmental impact - like tailing ponds of toxic substances that frequently leak, particularly from earthquakes and extreme weather.

But to be clear, the human and environmental impact of solar, wind, nuclear and hydro pales in comparison to that of fossil fuels.

I specifically made my comment about wind and solar. I am not a big fan of large scale hydro for just this reason, as well as the impact on aquatic ecosystems.

> I specifically made my comment about wind and solar

You said "Suppose you have a devastating earthquake that wrecks renewable power sources in an area" - hydropower is considered renewable. I also did address a similar risk of solar (barely anything compared to fossil fuels, but same applies to nuclear).

To be fair, the unsafe designs are all 50 years old because of FUD from incidents that are also generally pretty old. I’m not sure it’s comparable to modern designs - this isn’t a “new iPhone every year” deal.

Get out of here with this lie. Before the disaster, nuclear proponents cited Fukushima as an example of how safe modern nuclear was.

I think everyone knew the Mark I boiling water reactors designed in the 1960s was not a “safe by default” design. Open to receipts if folks with some understanding of nuclear designs were on record before that touting its safety.

"Citation needed" is the lamest response. I am not your personal Google assistant. Nuclear proponents just like you cited Fukushima as a hallmark of reliability to "disprove" its dangers to me. There were articles highlighting it. These are obviously hard to find now with the digital rot of the last decade. Sorry I didn't print out copies to hand out to you many years later.

People touted the safety of cars in the 1920s. Compared to today’s standards, they were wildly unsafe. The mere fact people were wrong before doesn’t mean they are wrong today. “What some people once said” is not as strong an argument as “designs are demonstrably better engineered”

That doesn’t mean there is no risk. It’s still ok to be scared of nuclear power for new unknown reasons. But let’s not pretend that designs aren’t wildly better now.

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