this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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It's probably useful but all I can think about is how easy it would be to become complacent and watch another meltdown happen or a major terrorist attack. All those benefits seem secondary to the possiblity of hundreds of thousands of people dying overnight from radiation poisoning.
If you want to minimise deaths/TWh, nuclear actually comes in at second place, behind solar. Including all the victims of Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear still is 1.3x safer than wind, 40x safer than hydropower, 80x safer than methane, 150x safer than biomass, 600x safer than oil, and over 800x safer than coal. Nuclear energy production looks spooky and disasters are dramatic and get lots of media coverage, but they are surprisingly uncommon compared to accidents in mines or from pollution.
I wonder whose behind all that negative coverage?
Thanks for the link.
I cannot discount the possibility of the fossile fuel lobby being somehow involved in this, but from a standpoint of pure sensationalism I can see why you would rather cover Chernobyl than the 2016 Great Smog of Delhi. The former involves a lot of topics with which the average viewer is barely familiar but still finds interesting, such as nuclear physics or engineering failures, so there's a lot of rabbit holes to be dug into. Meanwhile, the origins and effects of pollution are widely understood, there really isn't anything new to be said, and so a news story about polluted air killing 2 million Indians every year isn't so much interesting as it is just sad.
You've got a point there. There's a strong sense in which you need a sensation to sell a story and get engagement now (maybe it's nothing new but there's more to compete with today than ever). It's a terrible feedback loop. I can't say that in immune to it myself, either. So I can understand why filmmakers, etc, will go for one story over another, even if the decision maker has another reason why they prefer the anti-communist/pro-fossil narrative.