It should be said that most of our accidents don’t result in Chernobyl like death tolls, but then, Chernobyl is in a class all its own.
As bad as TMI was, and it’s the first one that came to my mind, it didn’t have any direct deaths. It was ridiculously close to having a massive death toll, and it cost like 2 billion to clean up over… decades…?
Pretty sure people kill more people than any other cause combined.
Could be wrong. Depends if you count manufactured famine and healthcare crises as part of that.
We should get off fossil fuels, but I don’t see nuclear as a way of doing that. Solar, wind, and hydro (tidal is interesting. Micro hydro could have uses without destroying entire ecosystems.)
.you just can’t get around needing consistent base load capacity. I wonder if the cost of a few GWh of batteries or complicated pumped dam/lake systems is reported in solar/wind figures to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
maybe once we have a huge fleet of plugged in EV‘s serving as battery storage, variable sources will make sense as primary generation
I’ll be the one to point out that TMI is exactly what you want to happen in a “nuclear disaster”. Nobody got seriously hurt that we know of, the problem was found and dealt with quickly once identified, and we’ve implemented TONS of extra safeties to make sure that can’t happen again without massive alarms and Serious Lights. Could it have not happened at all? Absolutely. But in a disaster, it’s the perfect “disaster” - nobody died, nobody got seriously injured directly, the plant got screwed up, and $2b to clean up ANY disaster site is honestly pretty damn cheap when we’re talking radioactive heavy metal remediation.
Radioactive materials (particularly gases,) were released so, it’s not quite perfect, but yes. TMI was much, much to be preferred over other possible outcomes of the accident.
We have not in fact always done better
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
57 major accidents-
It should be said that most of our accidents don’t result in Chernobyl like death tolls, but then, Chernobyl is in a class all its own.
As bad as TMI was, and it’s the first one that came to my mind, it didn’t have any direct deaths. It was ridiculously close to having a massive death toll, and it cost like 2 billion to clean up over… decades…?
There are industrial accidents, like fossil fuel plants catching fire and/or exploding, with more casualties than every nuclear ‘disaster’ combined.
Pretty sure people kill more people than any other cause combined.
Could be wrong. Depends if you count manufactured famine and healthcare crises as part of that.
We should get off fossil fuels, but I don’t see nuclear as a way of doing that. Solar, wind, and hydro (tidal is interesting. Micro hydro could have uses without destroying entire ecosystems.)
.you just can’t get around needing consistent base load capacity. I wonder if the cost of a few GWh of batteries or complicated pumped dam/lake systems is reported in solar/wind figures to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
maybe once we have a huge fleet of plugged in EV‘s serving as battery storage, variable sources will make sense as primary generation
I’ll be the one to point out that TMI is exactly what you want to happen in a “nuclear disaster”. Nobody got seriously hurt that we know of, the problem was found and dealt with quickly once identified, and we’ve implemented TONS of extra safeties to make sure that can’t happen again without massive alarms and Serious Lights. Could it have not happened at all? Absolutely. But in a disaster, it’s the perfect “disaster” - nobody died, nobody got seriously injured directly, the plant got screwed up, and $2b to clean up ANY disaster site is honestly pretty damn cheap when we’re talking radioactive heavy metal remediation.
The BP Deepwater Horizon spill cost like $60B to clean up, so even with inflation $2B is comparatively small.
Radioactive materials (particularly gases,) were released so, it’s not quite perfect, but yes. TMI was much, much to be preferred over other possible outcomes of the accident.