With a failure rate of 1% for commercial reactors, calling something 'safe' is - frankly - ridiculous.
You wouldn't fly planes if they had that failure rate.
It's not just the death count for which, btw, we still don't even have reliable numbers!
What we do have is: Uninhabitable regions, radioactive boars decades after Chernobyl roaming Bavaria (google it), countless cases of cancer, highly radioactive waste we don't know what to do with, billions and billions of tax payer dollars spent on clean-ups, not just for accidents, but for decommissioning plants, plants on fault lines that are ticking time bombs.
Nuclear power plants rank first in the amount of economic damage done.
And you are seriously calling for mass adoption?
The engineers and scientists who built Fukushima and Chernobyl thought: Yup, perfectly safe and clean.
It makes me mad hearing younger people falling for the propaganda of nuclear power lobbyists who didn't have to live through these accidents.
We have plenty of space and money to turn our grid into 100% renewables, that are safe and cheap.
All it would take is the political will to do so.
The times to propose an outdated, dangerous and hard-to-control technology for commercial power generation are over.
> It's not just the death count for which, btw, we still don't even have reliable numbers!
We don't have reliable numbers because the effect of leaked radioactive materials on public health is so low that it's hard to distinguish it from background noise.
I don't believe the 1% number is accurate, but it's a lot higher than people might believe. From 2016:
our range of models suggests that there is presently a 50% chance that (i) a Fukushima event (or larger) occurs every 60–150 years, and (ii) that a Three Mile Island event (or larger) occurs every 10–20 years.
So, an event that kills zero people could happen every 10-20 years, and another event that kills zero people could happen every 60-150 years? That is certainly alarming.
The shift from nuclear to coal in Germany and Japan after Fukushima has caused on the order of 10,000 deaths.
The total number of deaths caused directly by the actual accident at Fukushima was what, one? We'll perhaps have a couple of hundred in the years to come, but that's two orders of magnitude fewer anti-Nuclear activists have caused.
It's not only about deaths. The area around the plant is now uninhabitable and they haven't solved the problem of what to do with the melted cores at the plant. You permanently lose a large swath of land. With coal you can just shut it off and the problem goes away.
And why is it always between coal and nuclear? With enough investment and infrastructure, renewables can serve the need as well.
Yea your right then political atmosphere around both of those situations had absolutely nothing to do with the engineering of the plant and therefore had no impact... ️
There are more industrial accidents in every other power generation source that hurt and kill more. 100% renewals is 100 years out.
> It makes me mad hearing younger people falling for the propaganda of nuclear power lobbyists who didn't have to live through these accidents.
Actually, no one in the West ever thought that the RBMK was a reliable design which is why it was never licensed outside the USSR.
> We have plenty of space and money to turn our grid into 100% renewables, that are safe and cheap. All it would take is the political will to do so.
Germany will have spent more than 500 billion Euros by 2025 for their shift to renewables, yet they are still among the dirtiest producers of electricity:
Germany emits 400 grams of CO2 per kWh on average, France just 50 grams. At the same time, the kWh in Germany costs 31 cents while it costs only 17 cents in France:
> The times to propose an outdated, dangerous and hard-to-control technology for commercial power generation are over.
No, they are not. See my links above. Any country which is actually serious about reducing their CO2 emissions in the electricity sector is massively ramping up the construction of nuclear power plants:
Russia, Finland, Egypt, India, Bangladesh, Czech Republic, Poland, France, the UK, Turkey, Japan, China, the US, Belarus, United Arab Emirates etc. They are all building or planning nuclear power plants.
Germany is the big outlier in the list of the biggest industrial countries and it's just a matter of time when they're joining back the countries who are building and operating NPPs again.
There is simply no alternative, the shift to renewables causes new fossil plants to be constructed which is something we need to avoid by all means if we want to save the climate.
I fear Germany will never build another nuclear power plant again. The anti-nuclear propaganda has become a religion now, any argument about safety is ignored mumbling the mantra "but they said Chernobyl/Fukushima was safe", any argument about economy is ignored with "but renewables cost nothing". Since no rational argument can be won, and since no nuclear counter-religion is on the horizon, nuclear will not happen here, at least not in this century.
Ok, tell me. What are we going to with all the methane and hydrogen that we generated with our power to gas plants if we don't build more gas plants? How are we going to shut down coal plants if we don't have a flexible grid? For reference, an operating coal plant displaces renewable energy because its output cannot be regulated fast enough. Gas plants allow greater grid flexibility.
You wouldn't fly planes if they had that failure rate.
It's not just the death count for which, btw, we still don't even have reliable numbers!
What we do have is: Uninhabitable regions, radioactive boars decades after Chernobyl roaming Bavaria (google it), countless cases of cancer, highly radioactive waste we don't know what to do with, billions and billions of tax payer dollars spent on clean-ups, not just for accidents, but for decommissioning plants, plants on fault lines that are ticking time bombs. Nuclear power plants rank first in the amount of economic damage done.
And you are seriously calling for mass adoption?
The engineers and scientists who built Fukushima and Chernobyl thought: Yup, perfectly safe and clean. It makes me mad hearing younger people falling for the propaganda of nuclear power lobbyists who didn't have to live through these accidents.
We have plenty of space and money to turn our grid into 100% renewables, that are safe and cheap. All it would take is the political will to do so.
The times to propose an outdated, dangerous and hard-to-control technology for commercial power generation are over.