But why not same scrutiny for coal?
Absent that, when a coal plant goes badly wrong, the damage is small enough and localised enough to be affordable.
When a nuclear plant goes wrong, the upper bound for error includes both Chrenobyl and also "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" followed by terrorists repeating the Goiânia accident somewhere.
Making all the failure modes not happen is expensive.
p.s. ICE cars are literally spewing cancer fumes right into kids faces. 0 fucks given. If anything people try to frame EVs as actual devil.
I swear HN is infested with bots now.
It isn’t going to kill me via the route you suggest: by giving kids cancer.
It’s Christmas very shortly, try not to be this much of a cunt around you’re family.
Wait till you meet your attitude!
It's cancerogenic. Namely causes leukemia. 20k deaths per year in US alone.
But yeah, throw some jokes around. Maybe something about lead retarding detonation?
Not that I could've enforced it for all those years even if I had an army, as coal was dominant for so long for the same reason it is now being rapidly displaced: cost.
The Goiânia accident caused four deaths.
The Chrenobyl reactors weren’t even housed in containment buildings, they were housed in what’s best described as a shed.
Got any real complaints?
And why was that allowed? Because of quality regulation?
Others I guess the answer to your question is: fuckwit communists were running the place at the time.
Aside from that, “because communism” is not a serious answer.
This reads a bit like "why do we need a QA department when we don't have any bugs"?
The reason nobody stole the stuff from reactors is because everyone has, by international law and also nonbinding recommendations, security and armed guards making sure they don't. These are not free.
The Goiânia accident was stupidity, not malice, so you can't predict how many people would die if it was done maliciously from how many were killed. My understanding is what keeps people (relatively) safe from this type of attack at the moment, is the public deployment of radiation sensors since 9/11, which we know about because of people with radioisotopes in them for medical reasons getting caught by them. These are not free.
The Chrenobyl reactors were housed in what’s "best described as a shed" because that was cheap. Same for all of the other design issues with those reactors: it made them cheap.
The rules that make reactors expensive are written in incidents.
For starters: I think clean coal is absolute nonsense (I’ve cited the White House’s outrageous stance on this several times on HN) and people brush away the environmental, social, and general health impacts of coal to their own peril. We know the harmful impacts. We know the body count. We have alternatives and it’s time to move on.
I am absolutely 100% critical of the coal industry/power - far more than I am of nuclear. It doesn’t even compare.
So to answer your question:
> But why not same scrutiny for coal?
I’ll give you the same answer I give every person who gives me this tired refrain without ever even trying to suss out what I think about coal: I am. You are misinformed. And it has no impact on my desire to demand the highest safety standards for nuclear power.