3 ms·
>Do you drive a car? If so, you're choosing to use a technology with a catastrophic failure mode triggered by obvious mistakes. So the answer is clearly "yes".
by cookiecaper 11y ago
>Do you drive a car? If so, you're choosing to use a technology with a catastrophic failure mode triggered by obvious mistakes. So the answer is clearly "yes".
The difference being that even the most gnarly multi-car pile up doesn't directly involve more than a few dozen individuals. The worst macro-level effect is making everyone 30 minutes late when the interstate backup.
"Catastrophic" failures in cars are very localized when compared to the catastrophic failures we've seen in nuclear plants, which cause the permanent emergency evacuation of millions of residents overnight and quarantine zones that must be kept in place for decades.
Nuclear power is no joke. Look through the pictures of Fukushima or Pripyat if you don't believe me. Nuclear is way too dangerous to be trusted and doesn't have a place in civilian power generation, no matter how many times people swear "this time we've got it guys, I promise we didn't overlook anything obvious, I promise that we have a super-stable cool new design". These promises can't be trusted when such catastrophic failures are a realistic risk.
- zurn 11y agoBoth "worst car accident" contenders here have bigger death tolls than Chernobyl and Fukushima combined: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/9856/which-single-car-accident-in-history-caused-the-most-deaths https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/9856/which-singl... This doesn't really matter though since it's a meaningless safety measure to compare "worst accident per machine" between a single car and a power plant serving a million people. By this measure biking is much safer than train riding. Here's some more useful stats and trivia about death tolls and power generation: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... http://io9.gizmodo.com/5783526/what-is-the-worst-kind-of-power-plant-disaster-hint-its-not-nuclear http://io9.gizmodo.com/5783526/what-is-the-worst-kind-of-pow... By "death toll per single machine", hydro would be the worst energy source, beating nuclear by 3-4 orders of magnitude.
- andrewprock 11y agoI don't think death toll is the catastrophic aspect of nuclear failures. Rather, it is rendering large swaths of productive land unusable. Chernobyl rendered an area about the size of Rhode Island, Samoa, or Luxembourg unusable.
- zurn 11y agoHere again nuclear is much better than eg hydro by TWh.
- shkkmo 11y agoSo I take it you are also against hydroelectric dams? The worst catastrophic failure of a dam killed 170k people and displaced 11 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_... The problem with nuclear power is not the danger, but the fear of the uneducated and the misinformation that is ironically spread by environmental advocacy groups.