“Safe”. Yeah. Let’s talk about Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima. All that was kinda not so safe, don’t you think?
Nuclear is by far the safest form of energy production. Even with the big accidents, the impact hasn’t been that big.
Chernobyl was by far the biggest, but that was 40 years ago, in a poorly designed plant, with bad procedures and a chain of human errors. We’ve learned so much from that accident and that type of accident couldn’t even have happened in the plants we had at the time in the west. Actually if the engineers that saw the issue could contact the control room right away, there would not have been any issue. In 1984 that was a problem, in 2024 not so much, we have more communication tools than ever. The impact of Chernobyl was also terrible, but not as bad as feared back in the time. In contrast to the TV series, not a lot of people died in the accident. With 30 deaths directly and another 30 over time. Total impact on health is hard to say and we’ve obviously have had to do a lot to prevent a bigger impact, but the number is in the thousands for total people with health effects. Even the firefighters sent in to fix stuff didn’t die, with most of them living full lives with no health effects. And what people might not know, the Chernobyl plant has had a lot of people working there and producing power for decades after the disaster. It’s far from the nuclear wasteland people imagine.
Fukushima was pretty bad, but the impact on human life and health has been pretty much nonexistent. The circumstances leading up to the disaster were also very unique. A huge earthquake followed by a big tsunami, combined with a design flaw in the backup power system, combined with human error. I still to this day don’t understand how this lead to facilities being closed in Germany, where big earthquakes don’t happen and there is hardly any coast let alone tsunamis. It’s a knee jerk reaction that makes no sense. Studies have indicated the forced relocation of the people living near there has been a bigger impact on people’s health than anything the power plant did.
Compare this to things we consider to be totally normal. Like driving a car, which kills more people in a week than ever had any negative impacts from nuclear power.
Or say solar is a far more safe form of power, even though yearly hundreds of people die because of accidents related to solar installations. Or for example hydroplants, where accidents can also cause a huge death toll and more accidents happen.
And this is even with the non valid comparison to the current forms of energy where we know it’s a big issue. But because the alternative isn’t perfect, we don’t change over.
Comparatively speaking, it’s safer than coal mining. Wikipedia Nuclear Accidents by Death Toll
200 years vs. 70 years. IDK if this is comparable. Also it is so that with nuclear accidents theres a lot of additional environmental damage, not just the human casualties.
Not defending coal mining here, coal is no good energy source by all means.
Coal is often radioactive when it comes out of the ground, and thanks to poor regulations, is often radioactive when it goes into the powerplant, leading to radioactive particles coming out of the smokestacks and landing anywhere downwind of the plants.
More people have died from radiation poisoning from coal than from all of the nuclear accidents combined. But, as you said, 200 years vs. 70 years. But, also, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than coal in this regard due to the severity of those accidents. The risk of a dangerous nuclear power plant is nowhere near as large as commonly believed. It doesn’t take long to find longlasting environmental disasters due to fossil fuels, from oil spills to powerplant disasters. They’re used so heavily that it’s just so much more likely to occur and occur more often.
All this to say that fossil fuels suck all around and we should be looking at all forms of replacement for them, nuclear being just one option we should be pursuing alongside all the others.
This is just so fucking dumb. Yeah coal sucks. We should get rid of coal as quickly as possible. But saying nuclear is safer than coal while ignoring all other forms of energy that are orders of magnitude safer is as disingenuous as it gets.
Nuclear power is actually safer than almost everything, period. Even with the major accidents. Yes, even renewables and other “green” energy.
See this comment’s chart, for example: https://lemmy.ml/comment/11910773
All of those were caused by human mistake. But this does not mean that they must be discarded. Because human mistake happens. If it is with a solar panel, it’s inconsequential. Not with a nuclear reactor. So yes, it is an issue to consider, but in truth all it means is that we have to be VERY careful
