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There's enough data today to show that it absolutely is. No air pollution, very little CO2, almost no deaths/TWh compared to other sources. Accidents have been

There's enough data today to show that it absolutely is. No air pollution, very little CO2, almost no deaths/TWh compared to other sources. Accidents have been bad but recall that fossil while operating normally kills 3.8 million/year and causes climate change. In comparison to that nuclear is absolutely pristene. Germany's choice to phase nuclear out and leave coal on straight up kills a few thousand people per year.

bildung 7y ago
> Germany's choice to phase nuclear out and leave coal on straight up Often repeated, but still wrong: Germany also phased out coal.
- pjc50 7y ago
  "Is in the process of phasing out", maybe, but it's absolutely not phased out yet. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51133534 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51133534
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Incorrect. Here's some live data for you to gander at: https://www.electricitymap.org https://www.electricitymap.org They still run over 40 GW of coal.
  - bildung 7y ago
    Yeah, sorry, native German speaker here, I got the tense wrong. Germany is in the process of phasing out coal, just as with nuclear. https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-coal-power-20190126-story.html https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-coal-powe...
    - acidburnNSA 7y ago
      Yup. They promised to phase coal out later and phased nuclear out today. Literalling killing a few thousand per year by air pollution while they're at it. It's a great anti-scientific tragedy of our times due to fear of radiation and inability to judge actuarial statistics correctly.
      - bildung 7y ago
        I'm not at all disagreeing. The coal phase-out should have happened a) before the nuclear phase-out and b) decades earlier. Processes like these tend to be pretty sluggish, the political discussions for both date back to the 1970s. Chernobyl was a big thing in German politics, and there are still some species of mushrooms that can't be eaten in the country. The actual health problems were negligible, but this isn't how politics work.
        acidburnNSA 7y ago
        Gotcha. Yeah the mental effects of Chernobyl melded with all the fears about nuclear weapons fallout, which Russians and American had been scaring people with for years at that point. The nuclear industry totally failed to recover from a PR point of view, and since then has hid under a rock rather than explained how low carbon and safe it is.
Wildgoose 7y ago
Although Germany do say they will phase out their Coal-fired power stations by 2038 - so another two decades to go. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/26/germany-agrees-to-end-reliance-on-coal-stations-by-2038 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/26/germany-agrees...
pjc50 7y ago
Nuclear risks tend not to be straight up death; the risk is that a Chernobyl type incident would contaminate a very large area of farmland with bioaccumulative fission products, eg. Cesium-137: https://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c06.html https://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c06.html The risk can't be measured in "lives per year" because for most years it will be zero. The "long tail event" is something like: each reactor has a 1/10,000 lifetime chance of an incident of releasing cs137 which will contaminate a random area of Europe in which agriculture becomes uneconomic to make safe. It's a probabilistic judgement of the type that we're very bad at dealing with.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  The numbers I'm using incorporate the UN UNSCEARs estimate of long term cancers due to Chernobyl. These are factored in. In fact, building a straight-up Chernobyl reactor that runs for 5 years and then explodes is still safer than running a regular old coal plant for 5 years. Fossil is that bad.
  - kragen 7y ago
    The concern about farmland contamination is not because people are farming around Pripyat and getting cancer. On the contrary, it's because people are not farming around Pripyat. Deaths per terajoule doesn't factor in the loss of the farmland. I think you're probably right that, even with frequent meltdowns, nuclear power would be less bad than coal. But I also think that we don't have a large enough number of disasters to extrapolate reliably. A hundred Chernobyls might produce much more than a hundred times the deaths from one Chernobyl — or much less.
    - acidburnNSA 7y ago
      Well we just had a triple-meltdown at Fukushima where the plants actually had containment domes. Estimated deaths from radiation integrated over all time? Up to 1. The difference between nuclear's safety and fossil fuels anti-safety is astounding. They are not even remotely comparable. 4 million deaths per year from fossil, year after year. Up to 4000 total deaths across the decades from nuclear. Fossil fuels are causing over 2 long-term cancer-included Chernobyls per day every single day right now. This is an important point that's hard to get through to people.

bildung 7y ago

> Germany's choice to phase nuclear out and leave coal on straight up Often repeated, but still wrong: Germany also phased out coal.

pjc50 7y ago
"Is in the process of phasing out", maybe, but it's absolutely not phased out yet. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51133534 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51133534
acidburnNSA 7y ago
Incorrect. Here's some live data for you to gander at: https://www.electricitymap.org https://www.electricitymap.org They still run over 40 GW of coal.
- bildung 7y ago
  Yeah, sorry, native German speaker here, I got the tense wrong. Germany is in the process of phasing out coal, just as with nuclear. https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-coal-power-20190126-story.html https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-coal-powe...
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    Yup. They promised to phase coal out later and phased nuclear out today. Literalling killing a few thousand per year by air pollution while they're at it. It's a great anti-scientific tragedy of our times due to fear of radiation and inability to judge actuarial statistics correctly.
    - bildung 7y ago
      I'm not at all disagreeing. The coal phase-out should have happened a) before the nuclear phase-out and b) decades earlier. Processes like these tend to be pretty sluggish, the political discussions for both date back to the 1970s. Chernobyl was a big thing in German politics, and there are still some species of mushrooms that can't be eaten in the country. The actual health problems were negligible, but this isn't how politics work.
      - acidburnNSA 7y ago
        Gotcha. Yeah the mental effects of Chernobyl melded with all the fears about nuclear weapons fallout, which Russians and American had been scaring people with for years at that point. The nuclear industry totally failed to recover from a PR point of view, and since then has hid under a rock rather than explained how low carbon and safe it is.

Wildgoose 7y ago

Although Germany do say they will phase out their Coal-fired power stations by 2038 - so another two decades to go. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/26/germany-agrees-to-end-reliance-on-coal-stations-by-2038 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/26/germany-agrees...

pjc50 7y ago

Nuclear risks tend not to be straight up death; the risk is that a Chernobyl type incident would contaminate a very large area of farmland with bioaccumulative fission products, eg. Cesium-137: https://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c06.html https://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c06.html The risk can't be measured in "lives per year" because for most years it will be zero. The "long tail event" is something like: each reactor has a 1/10,000 lifetime chance of an incident of releasing cs137 which will contaminate a random area of Europe in which agriculture becomes uneconomic to make safe. It's a probabilistic judgement of the type that we're very bad at dealing with.

acidburnNSA 7y ago
The numbers I'm using incorporate the UN UNSCEARs estimate of long term cancers due to Chernobyl. These are factored in. In fact, building a straight-up Chernobyl reactor that runs for 5 years and then explodes is still safer than running a regular old coal plant for 5 years. Fossil is that bad.
- kragen 7y ago
  The concern about farmland contamination is not because people are farming around Pripyat and getting cancer. On the contrary, it's because people are not farming around Pripyat. Deaths per terajoule doesn't factor in the loss of the farmland. I think you're probably right that, even with frequent meltdowns, nuclear power would be less bad than coal. But I also think that we don't have a large enough number of disasters to extrapolate reliably. A hundred Chernobyls might produce much more than a hundred times the deaths from one Chernobyl — or much less.
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    Well we just had a triple-meltdown at Fukushima where the plants actually had containment domes. Estimated deaths from radiation integrated over all time? Up to 1. The difference between nuclear's safety and fossil fuels anti-safety is astounding. They are not even remotely comparable. 4 million deaths per year from fossil, year after year. Up to 4000 total deaths across the decades from nuclear. Fossil fuels are causing over 2 long-term cancer-included Chernobyls per day every single day right now. This is an important point that's hard to get through to people.