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I agree with you in general, but I think the massive failure mode is less about deaths and more about making large swaths of land in the world entirely uninhabi

• onepointsixC 5y ago
  In fear of making small area's of land uninhabitable by humans for a short period of time, we are making the entire planet uninhabitable by humans permanently.
  • borski 5y ago
    I don't disagree with you. I'm just trying to very clearly state that the "worst" failure modes are not equivalent.
• deleted 5y ago
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• loeg 5y ago
  > I think the massive failure mode is less about deaths and more about making large swaths of land in the world entirely uninhabitable by humans. Are you talking about the land required by solar/wind generation? I wouldn't say it makes it uninhabitable by humans, but I wouldn't want to live under a big turbine.
  • borski 5y ago
    I'm talking about the failure mode of a nuclear plant exploding. Windmills and solar farms can be dismantled and moved. Nuclear plants, once a catastrophic failure happens, infect all the land around them for many miles and there is ~nothing you an do about it. See: Chernobyl. That said, this is extremely unlikely given everything we know now and how technology has progressed. But the 'uninhabitable wasteland' is the failure mode people are worried about.
• annexrichmond 5y ago
  don't have the numbers on hand, but if you compare energy output per acres, wind/solar farms are no competition to nuclear. I wonder what those numbers look like once you amortize those failure modes.
  • borski 5y ago
    This would be an interesting analysis - agreed!
• panick21 5y ago
  Many people live in the exclusion zone just fine. Their rates of cancer are not higher then anywhere else. Much of that area could be inhabited just fine. And again, that's like saying 'Early Zepplins destroyed to much stuff we can never use airplanes again' as if the reactors there are in any way comparable to modern reactors.
  • borski 5y ago
    This would be news to me! Sources please? I'd love to learn more about that. Also, your analogy doesn't hold; the failure mode of 'early zeppelins' or pretty much any other technology is very temporary. Nuclear fallout is very long. I agree technology has gotten better. To be clear, I think we should build more nuclear plants. But it is false to state that the failure modes of wind/solar and nuclear failures are ~equivalent.
    • panick21 5y ago
      Not that temporary for people who died. Actually look into modern GenIV reactors and try to come up with scenarios where a large numbers of people die. Its basically impossible. Maybe if you use multiple terrorists and multiple natural catastrophes in a coordinated you might get somewhere. Any practical failure mode would not leave the exclusion zone of the plant. And even those are incredibly unlikely. The thing is there is simply nothing that convince you otherwise. If you believe the only relevant argument is the very maximum damage possible no matter the circumstance then I lost the debate. The question to me is what is the practical danger and how many people would die if you powered a whole country of 300 million people with a technology. With GenIV nuclear plants you could power 300 million people for 100 years and the expect times you would have a Chernobyl style event would still be far below 1. The expect number of people to die would be far smaller then wind as well. If you include home solar, it would be less as well. Maybe centralized solar is comparable. Edit: You can lots of articles and reporting on them. Its mostly people who just never left. The area is depopulating as people die of old age and there is no migration to the area.