13 ms·

> The "you can't be 100% sure" argument is impossible to defeat, and I don't think this design will move the needle. You can thank Greenpeace and CND and their

> The "you can't be 100% sure" argument is impossible to defeat, and I don't think this design will move the needle. You can thank Greenpeace and CND and their misinformed campaigns for that. Meanwhile fossil fuels have killed tens of millions of people, billions of animals, and changed the climate. All directly or indirectly. Somehow, it's a version of the quote "Kill one man, and you're a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you're a conqueror", a few deaths due to Chernobyl, and people are focused on it. But those dead miners? Or those old people with lung disease? Or those thousands of miles of bleached, dead coral? Where's the outrage for that?

cm2187 2y ago
The energy that killed the most directly is hydro electricity. When a dam fails, it kills thousands to hundreds of thousands.
- DrBazza 2y ago
  "Directly", perhaps. But hydro is still responsible for far fewer deaths than gas, oil, or coal: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- butlike 2y ago
  While that's horrifying, the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles into the atmosphere or water which sparks conversations about global catastrophic disaster
  - troupo 2y ago
    > the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles into the atmosphere Why are we still building coal plants then?
  - cesarb 2y ago
    > While that's horrifying, the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles Another way to put it: if the worst case happens, and a dam breaks and floods a large area, you can immediately go there and walk all over the damaged area with little more protection than a pair of sturdy boots. The worst you'd find would be things like transformer oil and some generator lubricants.
    - Vecr 2y ago
      You know, and all the dead people. Or the people who die in the evacuation.
  - shagie 2y ago
    > the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles into the atmosphere I would urge you to look at https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/ and compare the lines: Living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant for a year (0.09 µSv) Living within 50 miles of a coal power plant for a year (0.3 µSv) https://isnap.nd.edu/assets/255639/radioactivity_lecture_18.pdf https://isnap.nd.edu/assets/255639/radioactivity_lecture_18.... https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/43/035/43035329.pdf https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/... (which concludes with "Thus, Malaysia needs to consider the possible future study of radiological impact from airborne routine discharges of coal-fired power plant.") https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S096980431300273X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09698... - "Detailed studies on naturally occuring radionuclide emissions due to a 2420 MW coal-fired power plant in Malaysia." --- I'm personally much less worried about the radioactive materials from a uranium nuclear power plant than I am from coal or bad decisions on how to dispose of radioactive waste products. We'd likely lower our radioactive footprint by completely switching from coal power to uranium.
    - cesarb 2y ago
      The parent comment is not comparing coal and nuclear. The parent comment is comparing hydroelectric dam failures with nuclear power plant failures (on normal operation, neither nuclear power plants nor hydroelectric power plants leak any significant amount of radiation into the atmosphere).
  - LorenPechtel 2y ago
    But coal most certainly does. A nuclear plant that emitted like a coal plant would be shut down pronto. And consider the Palo Verde nuclear plant. They had to get an NRC exemption on radioactivity of their discharge water. They had a little problem: their intake water didn't meet the discharge water requirements. They're using reclaimed sewage water--and getting the radioactivity that goes down the toilet from nuclear medicine patients.
- olddustytrail 2y ago
  Actually that's completely backwards. Hydro is the only source that has saved thousands of lives (beyond the production of electricity element) by preventing flooding and providing a secure water supply.
- natmaka 2y ago
  Even neglecting debates about the real amount of victims from nuclear accidents, the hydro case is highly debatable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35521090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35521090
  - cm2187 2y ago
    Not sure how the cultural revolution has anything to do with the number of people exposed to be killed in case of failure. In any case that's the worst one but not the only one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
    - natmaka 2y ago
      Pretty sure that the Cultural Revolution ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution ) induced such a chaos that tackling this dam's problems was much more difficult. List: the low amount of victims (given the amount of existing dams and electricity produced/stored) and the causes (many acts of war) seem enlightening to me. Moreover this list is laughable: Malpasset, for example, was not a hydroelectric station.
ViewTrick1002 2y ago
Great that the alternative today is renewables then. No need to compare against fossil fuels.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  Renewables don't provide base load capacity, though. What do you do when it's dark and the wind isn't blowing? You either burn some carbon or split some atoms. Those are currently the options available.
  - RandomLensman 2y ago
    Why is using stored renewable energy (e.g., chemical, physical) not an option?
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      I don't know. Why aren't they? We could be using them now at scale, if they were, but we're not.
      - RandomLensman 2y ago
        I guess, fair amount of NIMBY there (if you don't like wind power next to you, you also don't like storage next to you in a lot of cases), some subsidies might also have had some effects on storage vs production built. Not everything is capital efficient in all places, too, of course.
      - oezi 2y ago
        But we are. The world is moving rapidly there. 66% of daily electricity in Germany is renewable. California is building batteries at neck breaking speeds: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/25/california-achieves-major-clean-energy-victory-10000-megawatts-of-battery-storage/ https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/25/california-achieves-major-...
        2y ago
lawlessone 2y ago
Some of it was Kremlin propaganda. They supported anti nuclear stuff , anti renewables stuff and anti fossil fuel extraction stuff. The end effect being people in Europe would be dependent on buying natural gas from Russia.
- pydry 2y ago
  That quite the conspiracy theory.
  - zweifuss 2y ago
    Sergei Tretyakov made such claims. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Tretyakov_(intelligence_officer) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Tretyakov_(intelligen... Stasi and green activist contacts are also documented. (Most funding came from fossile fuel orgs/persons, not eastern block.) https://www.dw.com/en/study-confirms-that-stasi-infiltrated-greens/a-36024911 https://www.dw.com/en/study-confirms-that-stasi-infiltrated-...
    - pydry 2y ago
      >Sergei Tretyakov made such claims. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Tretyakov_(intelligen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Tretyakov_(intelligen... I didn't see anything in that in that wikipedia article about it. Besides, the claims of defectors are frequently exaggerated and fall apart. They have a strong tendency to try to say what they think their audience want to hear. >Stasi and green activist contacts are also documented. (Most funding came from fossile fuel orgs/persons, not eastern block.) https://www.dw.com/en/study-confirms-that-stasi-infiltrated- https://www.dw.com/en/study-confirms-that-stasi-infiltrated-... This article is 0% about the conspiracy theory and 100% about how the stasi tried to infiltrate a political party - which is, yes, quite plausible. As I said, it's quite the conspiracy theory.
      - aguaviva 2y ago
        The Stasi infiltrated and tried to influence every organization they could get half a toehold in, in both the BRD/DDR. That doesn't mean they favored (or otherwise sought to promote) all of the aims and goals of the organizations. Or even any of their aims, necessary. Their primary goal in doing so was, first and foremost, that of their very motto: To know everything
teachrdan 2y ago
> You can thank Greenpeace and CND and their misinformed campaigns for that. I always think it's funny when HN thinks that Greenpeace is omnipotent. Their very first campaign in 1971 was against commercial whaling, which still hasn't stopped more than 50 years later. Greenpeace also has a decade-long campaign against oil, which has not exactly succeeded. Why are HN readers so quick to think that Greenpeace is all powerful? Or is Greenpeace just a convenient boogeyman to trot out whenever anyone is critical of nuclear power?
- rockemsockem 2y ago
  True, the Sierra Club has done much more to twist the opinions of green-minded folks. I think it's because Green Peace's stunts against whaling got them lots of press and made them the most famous of the green organizations.
  - teachrdan 2y ago
    This still fails to address the fundamental question: Why do so many HNers think that environmental groups have infinite power to shape public policy around nuclear energy, while they have failed to succeed in any number of other campaigns, including ones that are more serious (climate change) and/or self-contained (commercial whaling)?
    - kimixa 2y ago
      I'd suggest it's because the public discourse around these things are dominated by the talking points pushed by those same groups. They may not be the only driver of that discourse, or even the primary origin, but they're arguably the face of that viewpoint.
    - realusername 2y ago
      Because being against nuclear was and still is to some extent the core idea that unites all green parties. There's nothing else they all agree on and nothing else that defines better the green vote. Because of that, the green parties in most countries sold their votes in exchange of policies against nuclear as a first priority.
captainkrtek 2y ago
Spot on. I think as humans we respond to acute pains (ie: natural disasters, nuclear reactor meltdown) cause we can observe extremes in real time. But the heat cranking up year over year, wildfires getting worse year over year, its gradual but far more lethal. We are numb and ineffective at responding to the slow threats I fear, government/corporations are also not incentivized to care it seems.
RandomThoughts3 2y ago
> You can thank Greenpeace and CND and their misinformed campaigns for that. You can thank the USA and the war against Japan for that. It’s pointless to try to ignore that Hiroshima and Nagasaki did happen. That’s the paradox. Nuclear fission probably would never have become viable without the massive investment in its weaponisation but the same weaponisation made it unpalatable as a source of energy. I think there remains a deep seated association between nuclear energy, the nuclear weapon armed powers and imperialism amongst the members of most green parties, which are all historically alter-mondialist.
- preisschild 2y ago
  No you can't. Nuclear power plants werent very connected to nuclear weapons and the public didnt think of nuclear weapons when thinking of power reactors. Only after anti-nuclear misinformation got huge starting in the 70s.
  - RandomThoughts3 2y ago
    The key to understand what started in the 70s is obviously the Vietnam War. The fact remains that nuclear opposition is rooted neither in safety concerns nor in environmental impacts. If you ignore that, you are condemned to always miss the point - which is often happening when people discuss the nuclear question to be fair. This is not a battle of reason but a confrontation between two incompatible moral frameworks.
natmaka 2y ago
It is not about "fossil fuel or nuclear". Fossil fuel has few (and fewer and fewer) advocates. it is about "renewable or nuclear", and the trend is clear: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electricity?country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr... ... even in the most heavily nuclearized nation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewables-nuclear-line?country=~FRA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa... ... even in the most touted nuclear-leading nation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewables-nuclear-line?country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
wkat4242 2y ago
It's not just about death counts. It's about pollution as well. Chernobyl has polluted a huge area which is closed off to this day and won't be able to be used for decades more. Fukushima pollution is all over the Pacific. And dismantling is a huge cost that is often left to the state because the operators don't bother factoring it in.
- chickenbig 2y ago
  > Chernobyl has polluted a huge area which is closed off to this day and won't be able to be used for decades more. Unless you give credence to Moller & Mousseau's contested research, Chernobyl's exclusion zone is a wildlife haven. > Fukushima pollution is all over the Pacific. Detectable/attributable is not the same as significant. That especially goes for the tritium releases which are a non-event. > And dismantling is a huge cost that is often left to the state because the operators don't bother factoring it in. The UK has the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Liabilities_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Liabilities_Fund, and in the USA the NRC keeps track of decommissioning funding https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html .
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > Chernobyl's exclusion zone is a wildlife haven. Even then, that may say more of the negative impact of human industry and urbanization on those species and their habitats, as opposed to the safety of any isotopes.
snapplebobapple 2y ago
It's just a common glitch in human thinking and happens multiple times a day in your life. We constantly swap much lower expected value catastrophic events for much higher expected value dispersed bad events. We almost always socialize costs much larger in aggregate but much smaller individually to avoid costs much larger individually but much smaller in aggregate. You see this in traffic laws every day with lower speed limits being preferred over a slightly higher chance of someone being killed in a car accident. You see this in food and medical regulation constantly, you see it in environmental rhetoric, etc. It's just basically the way a majority of humans work. Something breaks in our mind when we try to compare high cost but extremely low probability things to anything else.

cm2187 2y ago

The energy that killed the most directly is hydro electricity. When a dam fails, it kills thousands to hundreds of thousands.

DrBazza 2y ago
"Directly", perhaps. But hydro is still responsible for far fewer deaths than gas, oil, or coal: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
butlike 2y ago
While that's horrifying, the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles into the atmosphere or water which sparks conversations about global catastrophic disaster
- troupo 2y ago
  > the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles into the atmosphere Why are we still building coal plants then?
- cesarb 2y ago
  > While that's horrifying, the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles Another way to put it: if the worst case happens, and a dam breaks and floods a large area, you can immediately go there and walk all over the damaged area with little more protection than a pair of sturdy boots. The worst you'd find would be things like transformer oil and some generator lubricants.
  - Vecr 2y ago
    You know, and all the dead people. Or the people who die in the evacuation.
- shagie 2y ago
  > the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles into the atmosphere I would urge you to look at https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/ and compare the lines: Living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant for a year (0.09 µSv) Living within 50 miles of a coal power plant for a year (0.3 µSv) https://isnap.nd.edu/assets/255639/radioactivity_lecture_18.pdf https://isnap.nd.edu/assets/255639/radioactivity_lecture_18.... https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/43/035/43035329.pdf https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/... (which concludes with "Thus, Malaysia needs to consider the possible future study of radiological impact from airborne routine discharges of coal-fired power plant.") https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S096980431300273X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09698... - "Detailed studies on naturally occuring radionuclide emissions due to a 2420 MW coal-fired power plant in Malaysia." --- I'm personally much less worried about the radioactive materials from a uranium nuclear power plant than I am from coal or bad decisions on how to dispose of radioactive waste products. We'd likely lower our radioactive footprint by completely switching from coal power to uranium.
  - cesarb 2y ago
    The parent comment is not comparing coal and nuclear. The parent comment is comparing hydroelectric dam failures with nuclear power plant failures (on normal operation, neither nuclear power plants nor hydroelectric power plants leak any significant amount of radiation into the atmosphere).
- LorenPechtel 2y ago
  But coal most certainly does. A nuclear plant that emitted like a coal plant would be shut down pronto. And consider the Palo Verde nuclear plant. They had to get an NRC exemption on radioactivity of their discharge water. They had a little problem: their intake water didn't meet the discharge water requirements. They're using reclaimed sewage water--and getting the radioactivity that goes down the toilet from nuclear medicine patients.
olddustytrail 2y ago
Actually that's completely backwards. Hydro is the only source that has saved thousands of lives (beyond the production of electricity element) by preventing flooding and providing a secure water supply.
natmaka 2y ago
Even neglecting debates about the real amount of victims from nuclear accidents, the hydro case is highly debatable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35521090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35521090
- cm2187 2y ago
  Not sure how the cultural revolution has anything to do with the number of people exposed to be killed in case of failure. In any case that's the worst one but not the only one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
  - natmaka 2y ago
    Pretty sure that the Cultural Revolution ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution ) induced such a chaos that tackling this dam's problems was much more difficult. List: the low amount of victims (given the amount of existing dams and electricity produced/stored) and the causes (many acts of war) seem enlightening to me. Moreover this list is laughable: Malpasset, for example, was not a hydroelectric station.

ViewTrick1002 2y ago

Great that the alternative today is renewables then. No need to compare against fossil fuels.

CamperBob2 2y ago
Renewables don't provide base load capacity, though. What do you do when it's dark and the wind isn't blowing? You either burn some carbon or split some atoms. Those are currently the options available.
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  Why is using stored renewable energy (e.g., chemical, physical) not an option?
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    I don't know. Why aren't they? We could be using them now at scale, if they were, but we're not.
    - RandomLensman 2y ago
      I guess, fair amount of NIMBY there (if you don't like wind power next to you, you also don't like storage next to you in a lot of cases), some subsidies might also have had some effects on storage vs production built. Not everything is capital efficient in all places, too, of course.
    - oezi 2y ago
      But we are. The world is moving rapidly there. 66% of daily electricity in Germany is renewable. California is building batteries at neck breaking speeds: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/25/california-achieves-major-clean-energy-victory-10000-megawatts-of-battery-storage/ https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/25/california-achieves-major-...
      - 2y ago

lawlessone 2y ago

Some of it was Kremlin propaganda. They supported anti nuclear stuff , anti renewables stuff and anti fossil fuel extraction stuff. The end effect being people in Europe would be dependent on buying natural gas from Russia.

pydry 2y ago
That quite the conspiracy theory.
- zweifuss 2y ago
  Sergei Tretyakov made such claims. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Tretyakov_(intelligence_officer) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Tretyakov_(intelligen... Stasi and green activist contacts are also documented. (Most funding came from fossile fuel orgs/persons, not eastern block.) https://www.dw.com/en/study-confirms-that-stasi-infiltrated-greens/a-36024911 https://www.dw.com/en/study-confirms-that-stasi-infiltrated-...
  - pydry 2y ago
    >Sergei Tretyakov made such claims. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Tretyakov_(intelligen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Tretyakov_(intelligen... I didn't see anything in that in that wikipedia article about it. Besides, the claims of defectors are frequently exaggerated and fall apart. They have a strong tendency to try to say what they think their audience want to hear. >Stasi and green activist contacts are also documented. (Most funding came from fossile fuel orgs/persons, not eastern block.) https://www.dw.com/en/study-confirms-that-stasi-infiltrated- https://www.dw.com/en/study-confirms-that-stasi-infiltrated-... This article is 0% about the conspiracy theory and 100% about how the stasi tried to infiltrate a political party - which is, yes, quite plausible. As I said, it's quite the conspiracy theory.
    - aguaviva 2y ago
      The Stasi infiltrated and tried to influence every organization they could get half a toehold in, in both the BRD/DDR. That doesn't mean they favored (or otherwise sought to promote) all of the aims and goals of the organizations. Or even any of their aims, necessary. Their primary goal in doing so was, first and foremost, that of their very motto: To know everything

teachrdan 2y ago

> You can thank Greenpeace and CND and their misinformed campaigns for that. I always think it's funny when HN thinks that Greenpeace is omnipotent. Their very first campaign in 1971 was against commercial whaling, which still hasn't stopped more than 50 years later. Greenpeace also has a decade-long campaign against oil, which has not exactly succeeded. Why are HN readers so quick to think that Greenpeace is all powerful? Or is Greenpeace just a convenient boogeyman to trot out whenever anyone is critical of nuclear power?

rockemsockem 2y ago
True, the Sierra Club has done much more to twist the opinions of green-minded folks. I think it's because Green Peace's stunts against whaling got them lots of press and made them the most famous of the green organizations.
- teachrdan 2y ago
  This still fails to address the fundamental question: Why do so many HNers think that environmental groups have infinite power to shape public policy around nuclear energy, while they have failed to succeed in any number of other campaigns, including ones that are more serious (climate change) and/or self-contained (commercial whaling)?
  - kimixa 2y ago
    I'd suggest it's because the public discourse around these things are dominated by the talking points pushed by those same groups. They may not be the only driver of that discourse, or even the primary origin, but they're arguably the face of that viewpoint.
  - realusername 2y ago
    Because being against nuclear was and still is to some extent the core idea that unites all green parties. There's nothing else they all agree on and nothing else that defines better the green vote. Because of that, the green parties in most countries sold their votes in exchange of policies against nuclear as a first priority.

captainkrtek 2y ago

Spot on. I think as humans we respond to acute pains (ie: natural disasters, nuclear reactor meltdown) cause we can observe extremes in real time. But the heat cranking up year over year, wildfires getting worse year over year, its gradual but far more lethal. We are numb and ineffective at responding to the slow threats I fear, government/corporations are also not incentivized to care it seems.

RandomThoughts3 2y ago

> You can thank Greenpeace and CND and their misinformed campaigns for that. You can thank the USA and the war against Japan for that. It’s pointless to try to ignore that Hiroshima and Nagasaki did happen. That’s the paradox. Nuclear fission probably would never have become viable without the massive investment in its weaponisation but the same weaponisation made it unpalatable as a source of energy. I think there remains a deep seated association between nuclear energy, the nuclear weapon armed powers and imperialism amongst the members of most green parties, which are all historically alter-mondialist.

preisschild 2y ago
No you can't. Nuclear power plants werent very connected to nuclear weapons and the public didnt think of nuclear weapons when thinking of power reactors. Only after anti-nuclear misinformation got huge starting in the 70s.
- RandomThoughts3 2y ago
  The key to understand what started in the 70s is obviously the Vietnam War. The fact remains that nuclear opposition is rooted neither in safety concerns nor in environmental impacts. If you ignore that, you are condemned to always miss the point - which is often happening when people discuss the nuclear question to be fair. This is not a battle of reason but a confrontation between two incompatible moral frameworks.

natmaka 2y ago

It is not about "fossil fuel or nuclear". Fossil fuel has few (and fewer and fewer) advocates. it is about "renewable or nuclear", and the trend is clear: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electricity?country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr... ... even in the most heavily nuclearized nation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewables-nuclear-line?country=~FRA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa... ... even in the most touted nuclear-leading nation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewables-nuclear-line?country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...

wkat4242 2y ago

It's not just about death counts. It's about pollution as well. Chernobyl has polluted a huge area which is closed off to this day and won't be able to be used for decades more. Fukushima pollution is all over the Pacific. And dismantling is a huge cost that is often left to the state because the operators don't bother factoring it in.

chickenbig 2y ago
> Chernobyl has polluted a huge area which is closed off to this day and won't be able to be used for decades more. Unless you give credence to Moller & Mousseau's contested research, Chernobyl's exclusion zone is a wildlife haven. > Fukushima pollution is all over the Pacific. Detectable/attributable is not the same as significant. That especially goes for the tritium releases which are a non-event. > And dismantling is a huge cost that is often left to the state because the operators don't bother factoring it in. The UK has the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Liabilities_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Liabilities_Fund, and in the USA the NRC keeps track of decommissioning funding https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html .
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > Chernobyl's exclusion zone is a wildlife haven. Even then, that may say more of the negative impact of human industry and urbanization on those species and their habitats, as opposed to the safety of any isotopes.

snapplebobapple 2y ago

It's just a common glitch in human thinking and happens multiple times a day in your life. We constantly swap much lower expected value catastrophic events for much higher expected value dispersed bad events. We almost always socialize costs much larger in aggregate but much smaller individually to avoid costs much larger individually but much smaller in aggregate. You see this in traffic laws every day with lower speed limits being preferred over a slightly higher chance of someone being killed in a car accident. You see this in food and medical regulation constantly, you see it in environmental rhetoric, etc. It's just basically the way a majority of humans work. Something breaks in our mind when we try to compare high cost but extremely low probability things to anything else.