> Chernobyl only took out 10,000 square miles because they got lucky. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a tenth of that - 1,000 square miles. 10,000 square miles

> Chernobyl only took out 10,000 square miles because they got lucky. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a tenth of that - 1,000 square miles. 10,000 square miles is the total from one accident per decade and an average exclusion zone duration of 100 years. > If they didn't drain water tanks it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable. It would have made a large part of the continent have higher radiation doses, but even with linear-no-threshold I don't think that France/UK/Spain/Italy would have been uninhabitable. Or even close to that. And the point was, even with the most incompetent leadership we've seen at a nuclear power plant, that didn't happen. > Also, using 17,500 square miles doesn't equal damage. The land could be reclaimed in negligible time by removing the panels, unlike nuclear contamination. Well, sure - you can take the solar panels and move them somewhere else if you want. But if you're using solar for power, you can't really get rid of them - just move them around.