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There are certainly high risks with nuclear power, but accidents with a large loss of life also happen with other energy production methods. Also, a big acciden
by gsliepen 5y ago
There are certainly high risks with nuclear power, but accidents with a large loss of life also happen with other energy production methods. Also, a big accident like Chernobyl sounds horrible, but people forget that burning coal produces a lot of pollution (including radiation!) that over time kills much more people.
To get a perspective of how nuclear accidents compare with those of other energy production methods, have a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
- Ekaros 5y agoI wonder if we were to count total loss of life in maintenance and installation of solar, wind and hydro. How much worse would nuclear do. At least per energy produced. The worst case for hydro at least is immense, possibly multiple millions death in some cases.
- masklinn 5y agoAs of 2020, nuclear energy's death toll (including Chernobyl and Fukushima) was roughly the same as the combined death toll of solar and wind (resp. 0.07, 0.02, and 0.04 deaths per TWh): https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy Hydro is also surprisingly low at 0.02, though failures are absolutely catastrophic I guess they tend to be out of the way and fairly local: so a dam failure will take out a village at once, and do extensive geological-scale damage, but not much more.