3 ms·
> The cost, in lives, of a major nuclear containment failure is easily in the millions to tens of millions The worst of the worst, Chernobyl, where there was a
by sofixa 4y ago
> The cost, in lives, of a major nuclear containment failure is easily in the millions to tens of millions
The worst of the worst, Chernobyl, where there was a design issue, the design skimped on many safety features, and everyone involved was incompetent or ignorant, result in a few tens of direct deaths and few tens of thousands of premature deaths. Where are you getting millions from?
Specifically regarding Fukushima, less people died from the nuclear disaster caused by the tsunami than an oil tank fire caused by the same tsunami.
- andrewla 4y ago> Where are you getting millions from? We have deliberately initiated containment failures for military purposes -- we know what this looks like. After Chernobyl we were told that it was a design failure compounded by human failure, etc., etc., and that in a modern reactor, meltdown was simply not possible. Then Fukushima melted down. So my priors right now are that we can not place a good bound on the total odds of a meltdown. How confident are you that with a modern reactor a meltdown is impossible? How confident are you that in a meltdown scenario the impact will be small?
- greyface- 4y agoCan you provide a specific source for the "millions to tens of millions" figure?