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Last week, the subject of nuclear power came up on the culture war thread. As with all my other online places, all the comments when I looked were pro-nuclear. It seems that every place I see online has a pro-nuclear community.
I'm more of a fence-sitting non-expert, so I thought I would take this opportunity to ask about the give the anti-nuclear concerns that I don't usually see the pro-nuclear community addressing.
First off, safety: it's true that nuclear has a much better safety record so far, but nuclear seems to have the potential for black swan disasters in a way that coal is not. Is this true? If so, the record so far is not a good way to analyze risk. If nuclear power comes into common use, we should expect to have the power plants occasionally sabotaged or targeted in war and frequently run under oversight even less competent than the Soviet Union was, among other things. To bring me away from fence-sitting towards pro-nuclear, I would need to see a safety argument that addresses the disaster possibilities both accidental and intentional.
Second, what's up with nuclear waste? Specifically, if the waste is really a nothing burger, as I see argued often, why do I see (other) experts talking about how to communicate how bad it is to people ~10k years in the future. What are those other experts thinking and why are they wrong?
It feels like that, but the number of direct, identifiable deaths from nuclear power plant accidents is tiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll
Fukushima, which is the big one in living memory for most people, killed, directly…one person. Maybe. Arguably.
Now, scale that way up, and who knows. Maybe there is a big black swan lurking out there, but it’s hard to predict that…and it’s hard to predict how a more mature nuclear reactor industry could design systems that are much more fault tolerance.
It may only be "in living memory" for us geriatrics, but there's another one that you probably should know of, since HBO made a miniseries about it which was released shortly after the Game of Thrones final episode. You may have heard of "Chernobyl".
(some extreme geriatrics such as myself also remember Three Mile Island, but it killed nobody)
How many people has Chernobyl killed? Hydroelectic dams have killed many thousands:
St. Francis Dam, 1928, 431 people
Dnipro Dam blown up by RKKA, 1941, 3000 people? 20000 people? (no one counted Soviet civilians during WWII)
Möhne Reservoir bombed by RAF, 1943, 1579 people
Vajont Dam, 1963, 1917 people
Banqiao Dam, 1975, 26000 people killed directly (PRC number one!)
Machchhu Dam, 1979, at least 1800 people killed
Sayano-Shushenskaya Dam, 2009, 75 people killed
I think the argument, at least as presented in the Miniseries, is that without the massive sacrifices of the people responding to the Chernobyl disaster the actual impact would have been cataclysmic.
So its one of those "it only turned out okay because a lot of people were aware of the danger and worked hard to prevent it" things.
That part was a lie/fantasy. Maybe plausible in story-lie but not describing reality at all.
Even intentional release of all irradiated material directly into atmosphere by deliberately mixing it with flammable material and burning it would not cause what was described there.
Not doing anything with burning power plant would be even less problematic.
(yes, it would kill many people - but would be nowhere close to various fantasy stories about irradiated magical ghouls roaming Europe that some present as actually likely)
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