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I'm just not convinced by the argument "Nuclear power is safe as long as we don't make any of the mistakes of previous generations". Chernobyl didn't make the

I'm just not convinced by the argument "Nuclear power is safe as long as we don't make any of the mistakes of previous generations". Chernobyl didn't make the mistakes of Windscale; Fukushima didn't make the mistakes of Chernobyl; and future nuclear power stations won't make the mistakes of Fukushima (hopefully). It's possible that the track record for nuclear plants, and handling radioactive waste, is getting better, but it's also possible that on the scale of hundreds of years, there will be new things that go wrong which we didn't predict. I'm not asking for perfection, though. All I'm saying is that nuclear energy has a history of costing more and being more deadly than its proponents claim, and it's already too expensive to build (both generation and waste storage) at scale, safely, and on time in nearly all countries.

pornel 4y ago
Count how many people have died in these accidents directly and possibly from thyroid cancers, and compare to lung cancers attributed to coal. Coal kills way more people. It's killing right now. There are estimates that more people died from fuel poverty due to closure of Fukushima and subsequent raise in fuel prices, than the Fukushima accident itself. Coal power plants release more radioactive pollution than nuclear power plants, simply because coal is never 100% pure and the sheer volume of coal burned. So you are demanding perfection. Your fear of hypothetical future risk of harm is perpetuating the actual harm currently happening.
- ask_b123 4y ago
  Here's the comparison: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
  - kromem 4y ago
    Great link, as the data is normalized to per watt.
tomComb 4y ago
Costing more, Yes, but being more deadly, No.