alt Hacker NewsYou are making a common mistake, your source does only considers things that have happened, not things that could happen. But we know what could happen, which is why the security standards have to be high for nuclear power.
You are making a common mistake, your source does only considers things that have happened, not things that could happen. But we know what could happen, which is why the security standards have to be high for nuclear power.
A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions. We can imagine reasonable numbers of accidents and still be sure that it would be dramatically safer than fossil fuels, even ignoring climate change.
And the land rendered uninhabitable would represent less land lost than is expected to be lost from sea level rise, most of which will be extremely hi-value coastal areas.
There is no way you can run the numbers where nuclear, even with dramatically reduced safety standards, is not preferable to fossil fuels. By making it so expensive with such heavy regulations, all we have done is forced ourselves to use the worse-in-all-possible ways fuel source for most of a century, causing millions of premature deaths and untold billions in environmental damages.
Over-regulation of nuclear is high up on the list of greatest civilizational blunders humanity has ever made.