this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Well what happens in a war or apocalypse. Then we won't be able to actively cool the cores. I'm just playing devil's advocate. But isn't this one major reason against nuclear?
Nuclear plants are designed to withstand a passenger jet flying into them, as well as minor direct missile barrages.
And with modern reactors, they can't really have Chernobyl-style meltdowns — if the cooling system fails, the fission stops by itself with no active involvement required.
I.e. you have to actively keep modern fission reactors going otherwise it stops on its own, as opposed to actively keep it cooled and safe, like the reactors of the 60s/70s.
Nuclear energy has, by a staggering margin, the lowest death toll of any form of energy generation per kW produced. And almost all of these come from Chernobyl, where 31 people died due to the explosion, then a further 46 died due to radiation poisoning from the cleanup.
By far the biggest issue with modern nuclear is the cost and them taking 7-12 years to deploy, as opposed to safety. SMRs are supposed to help with that aspect, but not enough have been rolled out to get a very good picture of that.
Really we have two choices, because renewables can't provide 100% of our energy mix yet:
build out nuclear as a base energy load and massively decrease fossil fuels in the short term
ignore nuclear and temporarily build out more fossil fuel plants, hoping that planet-scale energy storage will become cheap and extremely ubiquitous in a very short timeframe.
The number of people that died on the spot, could be as low as you say. 77 people is far from being the death toll of the Chernobyl disaster, and that is taking into consideration the fatality numbers are disputed.
That green party estimate is so laughable I'm not even going to comment on it further.
The WHO states it could be up to 4,000 in the long term, but may be substantially lower. The UN Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation concluded that even this figure is far too high.
Harvard university says that 8.7 million people die from greenhouse gas emissions each year. And that doesn't even account for direct accidents from generation and coal/gas extraction. Having a nuclear base load would save millions of lives, and do a huge amount to curb fossil fuel emissions. But "greens" want us to keep burning fossil fuels.
I find it difficult to follow your reasoning. Initially you said 77 people died from the Chernobyl disaster.
Now you have opinions related to the different estimations but talk about thousands of people, without retracting your previous position.
77 people died directly. Up to 4000 (although that's a very high estimate) may die in the long term.
Millions die from fossil fuel emissions each year.
It's not hard to follow at all. You want the death toll to increase, I don't.