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

Post by indymike » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 7:15 PM UTC

qayxc wrote: post #76

macspoofing wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Go ahead and keep arguing about whether or not nuclear is a good idea. Earth doesn't care. The water will be lapping at your feet soon. How's that for externalizing a cost to future generations? Agreed. The reality is there is nothing like nuclear energy. We lost (and continue losing) decades of nuclear development and deployment due to the anti-nuke movement (environmental or otherwise). This resulted in hundreds o…

> The diesel-powered carrier needs to refuel every few weeks, while nuclear-powered carrier needs to refuel every 20 years. True, but while refuelling only takes hours, ROH operations on a naval reactor are usually scheduled to last 46 months [edit] and cost several billion dollars [/edit]. That's just insanity :D

Post by tester756 » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

indymike wrote: post #96

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #51

Not sure I've seen a HN post before where so many people in the comments have clearly not read the article. Not even the summary of key points right at the top. The piece is not anti-nuclear. Also, risk is not binary. Finding out the true risk of something does not mean it's high risk and therefore negative. You can assess the risk of something and conclude that the risk is low and generally overblown, which is the p…

Perhaps because you have to have a Medium account to read the article? I'd love to read it, but I don't love the idea of logging in to Medium to do so.

Post by DangitBobby » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 7:46 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #102

DangitBobby wrote: post #85

IIRC we were incredibly lucky that Chernobyl didn't turn into a much more severe global disaster. What happens in a worst-case scenario meltdown? I know we have a very pro-nuclear crowd here, so I am ready for an onslaught of information.

Hmm...Chernobyl pretty much was the worst case. And, like Fukushima, the impact of the reaction was much more severe than the impact of the radiation. [I looked at The WHO reports that were published every decade. Each one downgraded the estimated impact from radiation dramatically, whereas the health impact of the evacuation became more and more apparent].

Post by merpnderp » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 7:52 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #25

Seems like a very one-sided article that focuses predominantly on health risks and points out that relocation might not have been warranted and seems to suggest that this shifts the calculus. There's however not just health risk but also economic risk. There's different estimations of how much the entire Fukushima catastrophy cost but estimates range from dozens of billions of dollars to hundreds of billions[1]. And…

Post by bb88 » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 7:54 PM UTC

acituan wrote: post #93

bb88 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel you're being pedantic here. When bridges fail, they don't affect potentially millions of people's health. Nor does when an ATC system fail at an airport -- traffic can just be rerouted to other airports.

> When bridges fail, they don't affect potentially millions of people's health. If you are saying bad policy decisions are inherently less scaling than nuclear disasters, I would remind you the Great Leap Forward and the tens of millions of people dead as a result of the famine in just a few years. Sure that was an outlier event, and so was the nuclear disasters of past. The problem is, with nuclear there seems to be…