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Fukushima shows that even early nuclear reactors are incredibly safe. You take an aging plant based on an outdated design, construct it in an unsafe location, t
by chroma 3y ago
Fukushima shows that even early nuclear reactors are incredibly safe. You take an aging plant based on an outdated design, construct it in an unsafe location, then hit it with the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, then hit it with a 20 foot high tsunami, and then it explodes... and what were the casualties? One worker and maybe 50 early deaths due to cancers. A typical coal power plant kills more people every year from the air pollution it spews out. And don't forget that the cause of the meltdown was an earthquake and tsunami that killed 20,000 people!
If we judged other forms of power generation the way we judge nuclear, we simply wouldn't have electricity.
- ImaCake 3y agoAbsolutely agree with this take. Coal power plants are a public health disaster on the scale of leaded petrol and no one talks about it. Even wind turbines have a terrible impact on birdlife. The arguments against nuclear are irrational; future generations will wonder what was wrong with people in the late 20th century.
- chickenchicken 3y agoIt shows that the people who considered the location and plant to be safe enough to be wrong.
- wskinner 3y agoIf your standard for “safe enough” is that no one will directly die or be injured, ever, then the only feasible solution is no electricity at all.
- d_sem 3y agoPeople often fail to compare the opportunity cost of alternative methods to nuclear power. At that time the alternative to nuclear was coal power plants. Radioactive carbon isotopes have harmed many times more people than Nuclear.
- ImaCake 3y agoCoal dust, sans radioactive stuff, and coal burning emissions also exact a terrible toll on respiratory health. A lot of people have died, or had much worse lives, thanks to the widespread use of coal.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoDon’t leave out the coal miners. The history of oppressive companies, grueling work conditions, constant possibility of death through any number of horrible circumstances, and the lifelong damage of unprotected mining on the lungs has harmed generations of families should never be forgotten.
- azinman2 3y agoMeanwhile as a population they’re voting for people who want more coal mining. They are 6 figure jobs in a depressed economic area.
- reducesuffering 3y agoAnd yet, what if that labor went into nuclear construction instead? How many 6 figure construction jobs is many multi-billion $ nuclear plants?
- azinman2 3y agoWhat percent of coal miners do you think could make that transition?
- defrost 3y agoMost of them; deisel mechanics, electricians, explosives techs, train drivers, riggers, machine operators, etc. What, tell me you don't think coal miners have pick axes and chip coal out of tunnel walls into sacks.
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- cauch 3y agoThe number of nuclear plants is so small that any example is statistically anecdotical. Yes, Fukushima did not kill much. Is it because the nuclear is in itself super safe, or is it because we were lucky? We would need ~100 Fukushima before even having a rough estimation. I think risk cannot be counted as "number of deaths", but as "capacity of losing control". Cars and cows kill a lot of humans. Yet, their risks are controllable: it is not true that if just few things change or if the circumstances are slightly unlucky, suddenly, they will do 1'000 times more deaths. With this way of thinking, we can understand better why scientists are worried about pandemic rather than common cold, even if before the last pandemic (and maybe during, whatever) common colds was killing more. And it works with coal too: unpredicted effects of global warming are a way of losing control, and it is why scientists are so adamant about stopping using coal. I don't think it is true that we have judged the other forms of power generation differently than the way we judge nuclear. We judge the same way: based on our current understanding of how easy it is to keep or lose control. Sure, coal is dangerous and has unpredicted effects. But the reason it was treated differently is because the capacity of losing control with coal were not at all obvious from the start, while they were written in black and white from the start for nuclear.
- jychang 3y agoNuclear plants produce 68% of the energy in France. If that’s not statistically relevant, doubling the number wouldn’t be statistically relevant either. For that matter, even in the USA, nuclear power produces about 10% of all electricity. Multiply that by 10 and that’s the entire population as a sample.
- cauch 3y agoThat's not at all the point. Imagine the following game: you throw three dices. If the three dices are not ending on 1, you win 1 dollar. If they are ending on three 1, you lose 100'000 dollars. If you throw the dice ten times, you will, with high probability, not have three 1 (the probability of appearing is 0.5% per throw). You will probably need to throw more then 10 times before loosing. But when loosing, you will lose a lot too, which makes the bet intrinsically a bad idea (the win does not justify the risk if unlucky). France has 56 nuclear plants. 56! It's totally unreasonnable to draw conclusion on intrinsic safety of the nuclear plants on such a small number. The fact that you cover the full population with a small number of plants does not change that: it does not change the fact that you cannot conclude scientifically. The same way it is incorrect to say "I only need 3 throws, so it means that the 1-1-1 bet is intrinsically a good idea". (PS: please do not answer about "loosing 100'000 dollars, but with nuclear disaster, it's not that bad", it's not the point. The point is that statistics is a large number game, and that we just don't have a large number of nuclear power plants to do statistics with them)
- wkat4242 3y agoHuman deaths aren't the only measure of safety. Pollution into the ocean from Fukushima was huge, unfortunately. Just because it's not as bad as Chernobyl (which was as worst-case as it gets) doesn't mean it's safe.
- gggmaster 3y agoWhy this is downvoted? Propaganda from Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs?
- Manuel_D 3y agoIt's huge, but it's dispersed across the massive volume of water in the pacific. Charts like these are scary, until you read the legend and realize that even the bright orange areas indicate concentrations only 0.1% higher than the typical pre-fukushima concentrations of radioactive isotopes: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/west-coast/science-data/fukushima-radiation-us-west-coast-tuna https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/west-coast/science-data/fukus... Eat a banana and you'll receive a dose larger than anything related to Fukushima.
- twelve40 3y agoMaybe, but i think the argument in this thread seems to be that NRC creation basically killed the whole industry. Which is complicated, because you still want safety improvements over Fukushima, but not at the cost of basically halting any new development for decades if not ever.
- HackOfAllTrades 3y ago"If we judged other forms of power generation the way we judge nuclear, we simply wouldn't have electricity." Yes, of course. I can only imagine the deaths and destruction that tsunami would have caused if it were a wind or solar plant. /SARCASM you idiot!
- rationalist 3y agoI recall seeing some statistics that the death per kilowatt ratio of different means of energy production is higher for all other forms of electricity than nuclear. No need for name-calling here.
- favflam 3y agoHave you considered the costs to contain and clean up Fukushima? The financial costs and loss of lands for decades is a heavy hit for a country to take. Japan passed a special tax to pay for the disaster (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversary-tax-analy-idUSKBN2B12UD https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversa... ). From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup) >In 2016, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry estimated the total cost of dealing with the Fukushima disaster at ¥21.5 trillion (US$187 billion),... The Soviet Union, in part, collapsed from Chernobyl. There is a huge fat tail risk on nuclear power. Roughly and a bit sadistically speaking, coal kills people predictably at a "death-from-car-crashes" rate. There is no fat-tail, you just have a high rate of cancer,etc. It is like letting people driving cars and accepting the 40,000/year deaths from accidents as the price.
- preisschild 3y ago> maybe 50 early deaths due to cancers No long term deaths have been recorded yet.
- pfdietz 3y agoThey will never be recorded, because they are lost in an ocean of cancers that normally occur from other causes. That doesn't mean regulators can ignore them. Radiation is not a criminal defendant who must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.