Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear

Long term storage of high-level nuclear waste is not a technical problem - there are a number of viable solutions. All of them boil down to "dig a deep hole and put the nuclear waste there."

The only problem is the political problem of choosing the sites.

> because "nuclear" is a scary word owing to activist efforts decades ago.

Right, activists... not those pesky meltdowns spewing radioactive waste across Europe and into the pacific, it was the activists.

The article doesn't fairly compare with the risks of say, oil. Look at Exxon for a good example of how costly (and seemingly never ending) the damage and cleanup can be. And what to make of the earthquakes caused by fracking?

I live in an area with multiple nuclear plants. We've never had an issue with them, although there was one false alarm. Even then, nobody seems to feel very unsafe about it around here. Property values are just as high as they always were.

We did have a natural gas plant blow up. So I'm not very convinced of the nuclear dangers by comparison. Especially since nuclear technology keeps getting better, safer, and more efficient. That can't be said for much of the fossil fuel industry.

>..Wind turbines kill a negligible number of birds compared to other threats.

The source you list gives an estimate for bird deaths that is an order of magnitude less than the Audubon society or the US Fish and Wildlife service. But the issue isn't so much the number of birds, but the type:

>...Although fatality rates for raptors may be lower compared to passerines, raptors are especially vulnerable to collisions due to their flight behaviors. Given the life history traits of raptors (i.e., long-lived and low reproductive rates) their populations are more at risk of decline from the number of different sources of impacts that affect these species on a daily basis.

https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/...

This isn't to say that means we should drop wind, but we shouldn't hand wave away the issue.

>...It's not actually known definitively how many people Fukushima killed, but it is known definitively that the final economic costs wildly outweighed the "cheap" energy it produced.

The death rate from Fukishima is far less than the death rate from any properly working fossil fuels source (or wind or rooftop solar for that matter)

>...but it is known definitively that the final economic costs wildly outweighed the "cheap" energy it produced.

This is an argument to move away from 50 year old plant designs into something more modern and even safer.

>...And considering the number of accidents to date - and their economic cost - nuclear certainly isn't safe either. Is it really a good idea to create pools of extremely toxic heavy metal waste which is also radioactive?

In terms of safety, no major power source has as good of a safety record as nuclear. In terms of nuclear waste, as many people have already said in this discussion, it is very low volume, could be recycled right now and eventually most of it can be used as fuel on 4th gen reactors.

>...It also isn't cheap. Renewables have been consistently undercut the cost of nuclear electricity, and that's without any significant push towards an improved smart grid, a combination of centralised and local distribution, and clean pumped storage facilities that would be possible with a Green New Deal.

It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. But what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Is your fear of nuclear power so great that if you had to choose, you would prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?

Yeah it’s called “kick an old can” down the road rather than throw it away.

It’s easier to rewrite some words on paper than do actual planning, and implementation of upgrade work.

A rich nation seeks financial efficiency, circling around tried and true solutions, whittling them down to pointless husks. Costing it self reliability and resiliency.

With big projects like nuclear plants and nation states, only so much whittling of resiliency can happen before ... poor. The structural support fails and the systems is no more.