this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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Those wind turbines and solar panels also get constructed, and affect a much larger area. It's not an obvious comparison
Duh, Yes things have to be built. A Windmill is built in a few weeks by way less people and has no risk of exploding into a huge cloud of death.
Obviously building one wind turbine is less disruptive, but you need hundreds to get the same output, and they only work when it's windy.
It's always windy. We live on a spinning planet.
Solar needs sun. Nuclear needs water to cool. Hydro needs water.
If you combine solar and wind you can replace many nuclear plants by just using the space we are already using.
There are a lot of good arguments for wind, and I'm not arguing against it, but density and consistency are well known issues. You absolutely cannot replace a nuclear plant with a wind farm of the same size and get the same output. That's not necessarily a bad thing, wind farms can often coexist with other land uses, but that's still a disruptive environment.
It's good to put pressure on nuclear, the reason it's so incredibly safe is because it's highly regulated, but to completely ignore it is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The question isn't "are nuclear plants perfectly safe", the question is "will adding nuclear plants to our energy portfolio reduce the risks from climate change enough to offset the risks they introduce."
I think, in that framework, replacing existing coal power plants with modern nuclear reactors is a huge overall benefit.
Wind and solar are great but there's still a lot of work needed on storage and transmission before they can be viable grid scale. Realistically, saying no to nuclear doesn't mean more wind, it means more natural gas. And those LNG tankers really are floating bombs.
A dam has a higher probability of exploding than a Nuclear Reactor. A WIND TURBINE has a higher probability of exploding than a Nuclear Reactor.
I havent heard of a Wind Turbine causing Fukushima. I think it was Nuclear.
What was the other one... Chernobyl Wind and Solar Farm?
Wow two whole accidents in a hundred years? One of them didn't hurt a single person? The other only killed 30 people? Crazy! That's SO dangerous?
What...? Coal mining killed a hundred thousand people in the last century? In the US alone? Wind turbines kill a few dozen a year in just the UK alone?
Aren't you forgetting something?
Liquidators also died way after the explosion from having to clean up all the rubble.
You can still not live in the area and will probably not be able to in many lifetimes.
Oh man one whole accident from obvious negligence which is easily resolved by the absolute most basic of regulation. Are you implying we're as bad as the USSR when it comes to basic safety? There have been hundreds of thousands of reactors going perfectly fine since then. Modern reactors can literally not fail in the same way that caused Chernobyl.
i didnt know that ~440 with 60 being constructed is equal to hundreds of thousands.
And i also don't understand why an incident such as chernobyl or fukushima is just "not a problem" at all to you.
It's also not been one...
You're forgetting Kyshtym,Windscale,Three Mile Island,Church Rock and again, Fukushima.
And those were just the bad incidents.
I meant to type "or" not "of."
Kyshtym was not a nuclear reactor and was also in the USSR.
Windscale had nobody be injured or die in the moment, but POSSIBLY a hundred due to long term radiation, though this is disputed.
Three Mile Island had zero injuries and zero deaths. The issues it had were entirely due to badly designed control panels and multiple human errors in succession, which has been addressed. Every single one of its safety systems worked perfectly as designed, but one stupid dude did the wrong things at the wrong times and fucked it up. Even then, again, it was an incredibly benign accident.
Church Rock isn't even a nuclear reactor.
Fukushima, again, was quite benign. Nobody died and (iirc) nobody was injured. Its safety systems worked exactly as designed and the only issue was bad placement and not being built to survive the possible tsunamis that it may face, which is easily resolved through the most basic of regulation.
Yeah, there's some cleanup in these, but in everything but Chernobyl the surrounding area is perfectly fine. If these are your "bad incidents" then I really wonder what you think of the thousands of people that are actively dying per year putting up and maintaining windmills.
No it's an uranium mine and a Plutonium Plant. What do you need those specific things for?
Do you want me to list notable deaths in nuclear maintenance?
You guys are all so dense...
More people have died working in Wind than Nuclear. And Nuclear has lower carbon emissions than Wind Turbines to boot. I'm not arguing we shouldn't be using Wind Turbines, we absolutely should, but the best, cleanest energy grid human kind can hope for right now is a combination of Solar, Wind and Nuclear, because each of three has very distinct advantages and disadvantages that complement each other while doing the least ecological and environmental damage compared to other alternatives.