4 ms·

You could say the same about almost all types of industrial, chemical and medical waste.

• jasmer 4y ago
  Nuclear has a fundamentally different risk profile. Nuclear failures mean possibly a hugely disproportionate number of deaths, entire regions unusable, and very risky externalizations such as someone using waste to make most of Manhattan unlivable, which is absolutely a possibility that exist, and does not for almost all other technologies. People here are talking about 'irrational fear' (?) it's 'irrational' not to account for those things. There are possibly ways to mitigate it but there are externalizations with Nuclear that cannot be avoided.
  • sofixa 4y ago
    > entire regions unusable True. > hugely disproportionate number of deaths Not really true. As a reference, the Bhopal industrial disaster killed an estimated 20-25k people, with official numbers at 7.5k, with more than 500k with non-fatal poisoning. Chernobyl, where everything that could go wrong went wrong, coupled with massive design and human flaws, resulted in around 4000 deaths as of today according to the WHO. Of course the density isn't really comparable, but it kind of is because nuclear power plants don't need a lot of employees and are usually far away from big population centers. The evacuation of the zone around Fukushima, and an oil tank fire caused more dead than the nuclear accident in the power plant, all caused by the same earthquake+tsunami.