Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that case, there's plenty of data that shows the plane is safer mile-for-mile. There have been enough flights (of all jet models, not just the A380) and enough crashes to provide a reasonable estimate for the odds of a crash. From there, it's basic math to prove that the motorcycle is far more dangerous. The challenge with nuclear energy is we don't have a big enough sample to say with certainty, just from the dat…
I see what you’re saying, but it seems impossible to prove it literally cannot happen if you just assume every safety system we put in place all fail at once, which is _possible_ I guess. We live with worse tail risks daily though: we have nuclear weapons in the center of Europe (could be misused, there could be an accident, etc.), we have labs that handle or create deadly pathogens (there could be a leak, etc.), we…
I basically agree that it's on the "worth doing" side given the right conditions are met. These conditions plainly weren't present in the USSR in the Chernobyl days, and probably aren't present everywhere nuclear plants are operating today either, but that's not a reason for a blanket anti-nuclear stance given its many benefits.
My point is simply that comparing historical results isn't relevant to the tail risk discussion. Pro-nuclear people should stop using this argument imo--it makes it seem as though they don't understand the position they're arguing against.
Sidenote on nuclear weapons: my sense is almost everyone does agree that the tail risk of a disaster is unacceptably high, but because game theory makes a drawdown extremely difficult, they're considered a grim necessity. If we could somehow destroy all nukes simultaneously and make it impossible to build new ones, we'd increase humanity's odds of survival quite a bit by doing that.