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Comment by derlvative | Hacker News Reader

Are there any risks that are real and not just in people's minds?

A significant portion of Taiwan grew up during authoritarian rule, and the anti-nuclear movement was heavily tied to the democracy movement of the 1980s-90s - especially because CKS tied his own ambitions to nuclear capacity - both for energy and potentially weapons.

It's very difficult to separate the two given that the 80s-90s generation is in power in Taiwan.

That's a long way of saying that it's just inside people's heads.

And that's a long way to say that you don't care about people's experiences.

What else is important?

Was Fukushima real or just in people's minds?

Fukushima was perfectly fine after the earthquake. The tsunami is what provoked the accident by knocking out the backup generators.

This is not a scenario most plants are remotely vulnerable to. It's reasonable to ask if peoples' worries about a Fukushima repeat are grounded in reality.

Fukushima is simply a good example of how dangerous and expensive nuclear can be when unknown unknowns rear their head.

There are countless black swan events that are exacerbated by having nuclear around.

What was real was that a bad design that the company operating the plant was warned about repeatedly, survived an earthquake, but didn't survive a tsunami. As a result, there was an evacuation. And nobody died from anything directly related to the power plant itself, only due to the evacuation. Multiple times more people died in an oil tank fire in another city due to the same earthquake+tsunami. And during its lifetime Fukushima saved countless lives by not emitting air pollution.

On the "generating reliable power for a country" scale, everything is a tradeoff. There is no perfect solution that just works with no downside, especially in geographically challenged countries such as Japan.

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