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Deaths due to radiation from Fukushima: 0
Deaths due to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami (the one that hit Fukushima): 19,759
https://www2.ans.org/misc/FukushimaSpecialSession-Caracappa....
The deaths directly attributed to the Chernobyl accident are... surprise-surprise... 30 [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...
But of course just like with Chernobyl and Fukushima you need to factor in the increased cases of cancer.
Links here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk...
Regardless, even if deaths were in the 100's, the deaths per GWh remain safer than that of coal and even, gasp! hydroelectric.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Nuclear plants when they fail, cost the most money to deal with.
Money is, at some level of abstraction, fungible with lives saved, which is why cheap to deploy, and low direct death, catastrophe proof, wind and solar (mostly solar) are the future.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Also happens to be by far the cheapest.
Even if you can handle weeklong cloudy stints, winter is especially rough due to shorter and less intense sun with much longer shadows potentially knocking out whole strings. Right now our home array gets maybe 4-6 hours of reasonably good generation per day, and it’s simultaneously the highest amount of load we see all year, due to heating needs.
We could try to overpanel so that winter load is met, and overcast generation is more sufficient, but it’s still challenging and would need an extreme amount of energy storage and land.
Also note that death per GWh on hydroelectricity are complete BS. This is easy to get wrong, but these are typically dominated by deaths from floods and dam failures (which would've happened regardless of hydroelectric use, and the dams would've been required for flood control without having turbines installed, too).
I think environmentalists do have a strong point here: If a country like Japan (known for stability and diligence) can not be trusted to be able to prevent meltdowns (flooding was a known risk after all), how could you ever suggest them as primary power source in countries where regulation and monitoring would be a corrupt shitshow, like Italy, Spain, Africa etc?
Italy/Spain is so corrupt/incompetent to run nuclear power plants? Also, sarcastically, Africa is not a country, but 50 countries with a wide variety of development.
Yes absolutely. Japan has a much more respectable culture regarding safety/diligence, and basically every italian citizen will agree on that.
If Japan had to evacuate one of ~50 reactor sites within a lifetime, then it seems ill-avised for an italian citizen to let current government (which is pretty likely to flip-flop across the political spectrum at basically double the rate of normal elections in the first place) start building a reactor in the backyard.
Note that actual numbers reflect this: Last Italian referendum about nuclear power was 94% (!!) against (admittedly shortly after Fukushima).
> Also, sarcastically, Africa is not a country, but 50 countries with a wide variety of development.
I know, my statement is about all of them. Operating nuclear plants requires long-term (centuries, not decades) trust in safety culture, regulators and operating companies. Which african nation would you suggest as a paragon for nuclearization? Egypt? South Africa? (note: this is a trick suggestion; electrical power management in South Africa is the most embarassing, corrupt shitshow you could ever imagine in a somewhat industrialized state).
(B) some people's opinion is based on emotional reaction to a technology rather than a cold calculus of how much a technology could do to reduce global warming effects and reduce humans environmental impact.
1. Google for "largest environmental organizations"
2. Select the top 5
3. Search for their position on the subject
Here's what I found are the top five largest according to a rudimentary Google:
1. Laudato Si' Movement "In addition to being unsustainable and failing to contribute to climate objectives, nuclear power is also proven to be a dangerous, dirty and expensive source of energy"
2. WWF: "Nuclear energy cannot, and must not, be considered part of the urgently required energy transition."
3. 350.org "Nuclear: a deadly and costly distraction"
4. Climate Foundation (couldn't find anything)
5. Greenpeace "Nuclear power is dirty, dangerous and expensive. Say no to new nukes."
I think the environmentalists don't like it, man. I think I've seen enough. Nuclear power must be pretty bad if it is so broadly hated. Or the environmentalists are fools.
Sources:
https://donorbox.org/nonprofit-blog/20-global-nonprofits-env...
https://laudatosimovement.org/news/laudato-si-movement-eu-ta...
https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?10992441/nuclear-net-zero-WW...
https://350.org/nuclear-a-deadly-and-costly-distraction/
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/climate/issues/nuclear/#:~:te....
1) Every GW of installed renewable power makes nuclear plants less useful (and renewables will continue to be built because they're too cheap to stop). People like to crow about "nuclear provides the baseload we need", but this is ill-informed nonsense; "providing baseload" is a privilege you get to enjoy if you are the source with the lowest marginal cost (which is absolutely not a given for nuclear power), and sure, you can operate a reactor in load-following mode by turning it off half the time but then the already bad economics become even worse. What you actually need is dispatchable power (thats cheap to install per GW, like gas) and/or more storage or better grid connectivity.
2) There is a lot of pushback from the population at large (especially in countries were regulators and operators are more corrupt/less trusted), building out nuclear plants is much more time consuming and expensive and the resistance against new sites is immense.
Alienating half your support base by suddenly championing nuclear power for basically no reason is also a no-go.
A natural disaster (largest earthquake in Japans modern history) kills a sports-stadiums worth of people and causes massive infrastructure damage with over 2000 bodies never found......
.....yet the only thing the west remembers is a single nuclear plant being knocked offline with no resulting deaths due to radiation.
For what's currently being made, the cost of PV+batteries is already on par with nuclear.
Batteries literally solve this problem more cheaply than nuclear.
And given the speed with which people have actually been building both reactors and batteries, this specific issue is also being solved with batteries faster than with nuclear, too.
> The higher the share of renewables in the electricity mix, the more storage is needed, and it grows faster than linearly.
What's needed for the grid is also less than needed just for fully electrifying cars.
> You can also not stock electricity in advance for months in northern areas.
There's a single grid connecting bits of Canada with bits of Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interconnection
Pertinently to this case, all of Ukraine is south of me (I'm in Berlin), and both Ukraine and Berlin are on the same grid as Spain and Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...
Lazard 2024, CAISO scenario: nuclear is cheaper compared to go with renewables + batteries (max 4 hours). It also does not take into account integration costs, such improving network connectivity.
It is quite ironic, because European Nordic countries do not want to build more network because of the crazy electricity spot prices that Germany has because of renewables. I live in Norway and no-one wants to further connect their electricity network to Germany, and the Swedish government blocked the construction of new connections. When Germany needs electricity, people in Oslo start to pay electricity even hundreds of times more, and when Germany has too much power from renewables, the energy price goes below zero, which means that German taxpayers are paying people from other countries to buy their discounted low value electricity, damaging the other producers. It is a terrible system, and it will only get worse without a good base load or accumulators that are not realistic for the foreseeable future. If Germany had a stable electricity production with renewables+nuclear, it would be beneficial to strength the network, which would indeed be beneficial to renewables.
If there is a place which clearly show how the fight against nuclear caused damaged is Germany: ~700 b€ between investments and subsidies to renewables, has very high emissions in the energy sector, while being dependent on Russian gas (costed ~1500 b€ in the last years) and France export of nuclear energy, high and unstable energy prices, that contributed to an industrial crisis that made France more attractive (where electricity is cheap and stable), while still failing at reaching climate targets.
The alternative would have been to keep the existing reactors open, build new ones, for a grand total of ~36 b€.
Source: doi.org/10.1080/14786451.2024.2355642
The belief that renewables+batteries alone are the only solution (even in hard to abate sectors) is not supported by real world data, nor by simulations. IPCC scenarios clearly shows that there is the need of a nuclear+renewable mix to meet the climate targets. The report from JRC recommends the same.
Historically, German citizens have chosen to be reliant on fossil fuels and highly subsidized electricity to not use nuclear energy. I just hope that at Germany will stop blocking nuclear at the EU level if other countries have different opinions on that and rather prefer not to follow the demise of the German energy policy.
Are there people who don't know the USA fills the 2000 km gap between famously snowy Canada and famously sunny Mexico?