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You can't wipe a continent out with the worst case coal plant failure. A reactor going critical and exploding, however "impossible" would do just that. Look at
by dismayedjim 6y ago
You can't wipe a continent out with the worst case coal plant failure. A reactor going critical and exploding, however "impossible" would do just that. Look at the Saudi plant going up. It is jokingly referred to as "a car with no seatbelts".
- lambda_obrien 6y agoResearch what a critical fission reaction is, then come back and figure out why your sentence doesn't make sense.
- ashtonkem 6y agoYou’d be surprised how many people die every year from coal power exhaust. People naturally overweight low frequency high impact events like a nuclear meltdown but drastically undervalue high frequency low impact events. Someone dying early because they lived too close to a coal plant doesn’t make the news, but in terms of actual human impact it trounces nuclear’s impact by multiple orders of magnitude.
- ben-schaaf 6y agoCoal power plants also carry a lot more radiation into their surrounding environment than nuclear power plants: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
- Vecr 6y agoYou can't even wipe out a continent with a fusion bomb, how would a nuclear power plant even have enough material to be that damaging? Yeah, it might spread a bit of radiation if the entertainments cracked open like an egg, but that would be very obvious if terrorists, say, were trying that.
- kolinko 6y agoWe are slowly wiping out the whole planet with coal now.