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Sure nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks. But there's still a strong argument to be made that nuclear is still over-regulated relative to
by Manuel_D 3y ago
Sure nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks. But there's still a strong argument to be made that nuclear is still over-regulated relative to its risks. It has the lowest death toll per watt of electricity produced of any generation source, even including Chernobyl. Furthermore, US plants built during periods of more relaxed regulation haven't seen much in the realm of harmful mishaps. Three Mile Island is a testament to safety measures - it turns out building a big concrete condom over your reactor helps contain meltdowns.
- bruce511 3y ago>> nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks to some extent this I what's happening now. If a wind turbine (or indeed whole wind farm) catastrophically fails then you can clean it up in a matter of days or weeks. The range of potential damage in space and time, is very limited. By contrast catastrophic nuclear failure leads to immediate damage over a far larger area, and spans a much longer time (like hundreds of years. ) One can quibble about deaths from chernobyl but it displaced an entire city and rendered a substantial chunk of land unusable for centuries. So I would argue that thd regulations are completely in line with the risks, as they stand right now.
- Manuel_D 3y agoTo the contrary, nuclear contamination can be cleaned up. Fukushima's exclusion zone was completely lifted after 11 years [1]. Pripyat was a planned city, built for the specific purpose of supporting the Chernobyl plant and it's workers. It remains unremediated because there's no incentive to clean it up, not because. Nuclear power has a smaller death toll per megawatt hour than wind, orders of magnitude less than hydropower and biomass [2]. 1. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear-evacuation-order-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear... 2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...