this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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Nobody claims it was harmless, but it sure was very low on the harmless scale – especially if you compare it with every fear monger's favorite, Chernobyl.
In all the famous cases, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Sellafield, it was close enough to a real disaster. Sure, only some people died, some more got radiation poisoning, cancer, even more lost their pets, their homes, their livelihoods, quite some animals died… thank god that’s “low on the harmless scale”.
Thing is, most types of power generation have some kind of issue. Of the cleaner options, hydro, tidal, and geothermal can only be built in select places; solar panels create noxious waste at the point of manufacture; wind takes up space and interferes with some types of birds. Plus, wind and solar need on-grid storage (of which we still have little) to be able to handle what's known as baseline load, something that nuclear is good at.
Nuclear is better in terms of death rate than burning fossil fuels, which causes a whole slate of illnesses ranging from COPD to, yes, cancer. It's just that that's a chronic problem, whereas Chernobyl (that perfect storm of bad reactor design, testing in production, Soviet bureaucratic rigidity, and poor judgement in general) was acute. We're wired to ignore chronic problems.
In an ideal world, we would have built out enough hydro fifty years ago to cover the world's power needs, or enough on-grid storage more recently to handle the variability of solar and wind, but this isn't a perfect world, and we didn't. It isn't that nuclear is a good solution to the need for power—it's one of those things where all the solutions are bad in some way, and we need to build something.
And don't forget the trillions and trillions it has already cost and will cost in the future to clean this shit up. But that gets paid by the taxpayer, so that's OK, right?
Exactly. There’s a reason no insurance company wants to take on nuclear power plants and countries have to.
In Germany, the state paid for all the research and development and then gave it to the companies for free. Then they massively subsidised the construction of the plants. Then the private companies got to reap the profits while the plants were running. And now the government is stuck with the bill for decommissioning. Totally not a racket.
Easy: don’t decommission.
Plenty of really dumb takes here but this one takes the cake. Congratulations.
That’s only if you assume we all agree that nuclear energy is a threat to humanity.
Don't worry it probably won't be long before the houthi rebels or some other terrorist state backed crazies manage to successfully launch an attack on a nuclear power station somewhere then you won't have to keep hearing about three mile island, chernobyl, Fukushima, the windscale fire, sizewell leaks, or any of the other times nuclear power has gone dangerously wrong.
Thankfully Isreal doesn't have nuclear power plants because it's obviously too dangerous, let's hope Russia, Iran, China, or any other well funded powerbase don't get pushed into a corner and see funding an attack on a western nation as a viable response. Or some wacky religious group, race war proponents, attention seeking crazies or any of the usual suspects get as lucky as the 911 hijackers.
It's been an issue in the Ukraine a couple of times already. So far, nothing has come of it.
Lots of people claim it was harmless because relatively few people died. They have to focus on just one statistic (and a very unreliable at that) to prop up their delusions.