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> if our direct neighbor country France has one of their so-low-carbon nuclear plants blow up, we are just as inhabitable, for eternity Do you have a verifiabl

> if our direct neighbor country France has one of their so-low-carbon nuclear plants blow up, we are just as inhabitable, for eternity Do you have a verifiable source for this? The impact sounds greatly exaggerated to me.

felixfbecker 7y ago
Just look at how habitable Chernobyl still is.
- yorwba 7y ago
  Yup, it's brimming with wildlife: https://theconversation.com/chernobyl-has-become-a-refuge-for-wildlife-33-years-after-the-nuclear-accident-116303 https://theconversation.com/chernobyl-has-become-a-refuge-fo...
  - _ph_ 7y ago
    Most wildlife has not long enough living spans to be affected by radiation as humans are (who have the expectancy to live longer than 70 years). And even those who will be affected by radiation wouldn't know it. Of course, absence of humans is a huge boost for any kind of wild life.
    - buzzkillington 7y ago
      Most humans born today will experience the negative effects of climate change over the next 80 years, with between 10-30% of them dying due to events caused by it. Dying at 60 from cancer is still a hell a lot better than starving at 15. And that's assuming we have a Chernobyl like even happen every few hundred square kilometers. If climate change is an extinction level even we should expect to make sacrifices like those in other events that killed millions, like WWI and WWII. I don't understand people who can think that we think we will die for sure because of climate change, but aren't willing to risk a much smaller chance of dying from nuclear accidents.
      - anoncake 7y ago
        And I don't understand people that don't make this very valid point rather than making fools of themselves by denying the dangers of nuclear power and refuting arguments no one ever used.
        anon4242 7y ago
        If there Germans managed to support themselves on 100% renewable energy I wouldn't say they needed to go nuclear again. As it is the Germans rely on more than 50% dirty energy which is polluting all of northern Europe and people ARE dying because of it. So, sure there are dangers with nuclear power if there's an accident. Ideally there shouldn't be, historically there has been a few (seven with fatal outcomes to be exact)[1]. Still with modern reactors that shutdown instead of melting down we should be able to safely handle virtually any accident. With burning fossil fuels the deaths are not _if_ there's an accident, they are a _consequence_ of polluting the air. And the 800000 annual deaths caused by coal burning doesn't even include deaths due to global warming [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident... [2] https://endcoal.org/health/ https://endcoal.org/health/
      - _ph_ 7y ago
        Yes, if our only choices were coal and nuclear, I would be strongly in favour of nuclear. Both on the direct emissions and global warming level. But the thing is, wind and solar (and quite a few other reneweable energies) are now cheaper than nuclear and don't bear the risk of contaminating large regions in case of a major accident. Of course these risks could be mitigated by different designs or just building the reactors 200m underground, but that seems to be even more cost-prohibitive, so it has not even being suggested.
        buzzkillington 7y ago
        >But the thing is, wind and solar (and quite a few other reneweable energies) are now cheaper than nuclear and don't bear the risk of contaminating large regions in case of a major accident. And are destroying every grid which they dominate. Germany, South Australia, California. When you start getting negative price events while the overall price increases something has gone very wrong with the market. A renewable network is not fit for an industrial society. You need a stable base load to run machines, like computers, elevators or hospitals. You can either try and build batteries, which costs trillions of dollars build in large enough quantities (the largest battery in the world can run South Australia for about 5 minutes), a transcontinental grid to share power, which costs trillions of dollars to build, or nuclear power, which cost billions and is something we already know how to do.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- anon4242 7y ago
  In the 30+ years since Chernobyl we could have had >400000 similar accidents and still not reach the death toll of coal burning... that's food for thought...
  - anoncake 7y ago
    The average number of deaths caused by a nuclear each year is neither "risk" (for a country) nor "of making a huge part of the country uninhabitable".
- loeg 7y ago
  Chernobyl could have been a lot worse, frankly. Other factors to keep in mind are that Chernobyl was both criminally mismanaged by the Soviets, and built using a dangerous reactor design even for gen2 reactors.
_ph_ 7y ago
Not for eternity, but for many decades. Which for practical purposes is basically the same. Large parts of Bavaria have been contaminated by the Chernobyl accident. Every single wild boar shot in Bavaria has to be checked for radiation before it can be consumed, and many of them have to be disposed off. The forests of Bavaria will be contaminated for many decades to come. So any large reactor incident in France could make parts of Germany inhabitable, and large parts unusable for agriculture. Besides that I find that an objectionable szenario, the financial damage would be astronomical

felixfbecker 7y ago

Just look at how habitable Chernobyl still is.

yorwba 7y ago
Yup, it's brimming with wildlife: https://theconversation.com/chernobyl-has-become-a-refuge-for-wildlife-33-years-after-the-nuclear-accident-116303 https://theconversation.com/chernobyl-has-become-a-refuge-fo...
- _ph_ 7y ago
  Most wildlife has not long enough living spans to be affected by radiation as humans are (who have the expectancy to live longer than 70 years). And even those who will be affected by radiation wouldn't know it. Of course, absence of humans is a huge boost for any kind of wild life.
  - buzzkillington 7y ago
    Most humans born today will experience the negative effects of climate change over the next 80 years, with between 10-30% of them dying due to events caused by it. Dying at 60 from cancer is still a hell a lot better than starving at 15. And that's assuming we have a Chernobyl like even happen every few hundred square kilometers. If climate change is an extinction level even we should expect to make sacrifices like those in other events that killed millions, like WWI and WWII. I don't understand people who can think that we think we will die for sure because of climate change, but aren't willing to risk a much smaller chance of dying from nuclear accidents.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      And I don't understand people that don't make this very valid point rather than making fools of themselves by denying the dangers of nuclear power and refuting arguments no one ever used.
      - anon4242 7y ago
        If there Germans managed to support themselves on 100% renewable energy I wouldn't say they needed to go nuclear again. As it is the Germans rely on more than 50% dirty energy which is polluting all of northern Europe and people ARE dying because of it. So, sure there are dangers with nuclear power if there's an accident. Ideally there shouldn't be, historically there has been a few (seven with fatal outcomes to be exact)[1]. Still with modern reactors that shutdown instead of melting down we should be able to safely handle virtually any accident. With burning fossil fuels the deaths are not _if_ there's an accident, they are a _consequence_ of polluting the air. And the 800000 annual deaths caused by coal burning doesn't even include deaths due to global warming [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident... [2] https://endcoal.org/health/ https://endcoal.org/health/
    - _ph_ 7y ago
      Yes, if our only choices were coal and nuclear, I would be strongly in favour of nuclear. Both on the direct emissions and global warming level. But the thing is, wind and solar (and quite a few other reneweable energies) are now cheaper than nuclear and don't bear the risk of contaminating large regions in case of a major accident. Of course these risks could be mitigated by different designs or just building the reactors 200m underground, but that seems to be even more cost-prohibitive, so it has not even being suggested.
      - buzzkillington 7y ago
        >But the thing is, wind and solar (and quite a few other reneweable energies) are now cheaper than nuclear and don't bear the risk of contaminating large regions in case of a major accident. And are destroying every grid which they dominate. Germany, South Australia, California. When you start getting negative price events while the overall price increases something has gone very wrong with the market. A renewable network is not fit for an industrial society. You need a stable base load to run machines, like computers, elevators or hospitals. You can either try and build batteries, which costs trillions of dollars build in large enough quantities (the largest battery in the world can run South Australia for about 5 minutes), a transcontinental grid to share power, which costs trillions of dollars to build, or nuclear power, which cost billions and is something we already know how to do.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
anon4242 7y ago
In the 30+ years since Chernobyl we could have had >400000 similar accidents and still not reach the death toll of coal burning... that's food for thought...
- anoncake 7y ago
  The average number of deaths caused by a nuclear each year is neither "risk" (for a country) nor "of making a huge part of the country uninhabitable".
loeg 7y ago
Chernobyl could have been a lot worse, frankly. Other factors to keep in mind are that Chernobyl was both criminally mismanaged by the Soviets, and built using a dangerous reactor design even for gen2 reactors.

_ph_ 7y ago

Not for eternity, but for many decades. Which for practical purposes is basically the same. Large parts of Bavaria have been contaminated by the Chernobyl accident. Every single wild boar shot in Bavaria has to be checked for radiation before it can be consumed, and many of them have to be disposed off. The forests of Bavaria will be contaminated for many decades to come. So any large reactor incident in France could make parts of Germany inhabitable, and large parts unusable for agriculture. Besides that I find that an objectionable szenario, the financial damage would be astronomical