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DrarenThiralas t1_is7bpyt wrote

It is absolutely worth the risk. You can do the math on it, and find that statistically, oil kills a lot more people per kWh than nuclear, even when counting the nuclear accidents. Just because it kills by slowly poisoning the environment, and not with extremely rare but flashy meltdowns, doesn't mean that it's any safer. And that is without even going into the fact that modern reactors have gotten a lot safer over the last couple decades, and Chernobyl-style meltdowns aren't even remotely likely anymore - but even if they were, nuclear would still be safer than fossil fuels.

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FaeTaleDream t1_is7cb0u wrote

That is such a bad faith argument.

Of course oil kills more we use it more and used it more and are more careless with it.

The data doesn't exist on this because we've only had one "major" nuclear disaster.

So you can't use data to math this out. You use logic, you know what it does, you know the effects radiation has, you know how hard it is to clean that's what matters.

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NotACockroach t1_is7eqz0 wrote

The deaths statistic is power kWh so it's not significantly biased by the amount used.

I get what you're saying about the one big nuclear disaster, one more disaster would effectively double those numbers. However in that regard nuclear power is a victim of its own success. It's not some niche power source, it's been producing ~10% of the world's power for decades so it's not a question of small sample size. I think it's a bit silly to suggest that the lack of disasters is evidence of it's danger when it's been used so much.

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FaeTaleDream t1_is7fsd6 wrote

No one is looking at the prospect of say that Ukrainian reactor melting down from Russia sabotage the same as oil spills.

And again it's not about numbers, you can say one disaster would double it, that's not the issue, the issue is that's it. it's done, you can't fix nuclear fallout.

Imagine if enough contamination got into the ground water around New York. What then? It's not just "oh the numbers are going to increase" no it's your done. That's it.

Planes are safer statically than cars but if you put half the worlds population on a plane and said planes almost never crash so it's fine. That's not a good bet.

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NotACockroach t1_is7i2uu wrote

I don't think your listing plausible disasters for nuclear disasters. How would a nuclear power plant contaminate the new york water supply? On the other hand I can think of a different source of energy that has contaminated the water supply in real life. Nobody is cleaning the air pollution that's responsible for so many deaths worldwide out of fossil exhausts either, and that's another worldwide disaster that's already happening and responsible for so many deaths.

It seems like a number of your "it's over, that's it" scenarios that you speculate could happen for nuclear have already happened because of fossil fuels.

Not to mention global warming, you'd need a lot of meltdowns to get anywhere near the kind of long term damage that's going to do to us.

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FaeTaleDream t1_is7ir1k wrote

The reason I said underground water is because that isn't set in stone, ironically.

Fault lines happen, drilling happens, erosion happens. And this isn't taking into account air currents if it goes that way, or if misplaced waste just sits in an area. I wonder how much was dumped in the ocean honestly.

Talking about the disaster that's already happening to justify turning the other way for the potential world ending disaster of radiation is just as bad as when they did the same for Oil, Lead, Coal etc.

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NotACockroach t1_is7ljlw wrote

Speaking of bad faith arguments, we're in a thread discussing the safety and deaths and disasters of different energy sources, and when you I do exactly that you tell me I'm justifying turning the other way from world ending disasters. I'm not here telling you that you think global warming is ok because your concerned about nuclear. It must be possible to discuss the comparative risks of energy sources without trying to twist each other's words to have a go at each other.

Unless we go without energy it has to come from somewhere. If not generating energy is not an option, then the risks and harms of the alternative energy sources is relevant to any discussion of the risks and harms of nuclear.

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VitriolicViolet t1_is865l9 wrote

>No one is looking at the prospect of say that Ukrainian reactor melting down from Russia sabotage the same as oil spills.

because they are not rational.

humans are fucking horrid at accurate risk assessment: more people fear planes then cars, more people fear terrorists then police, more people fear weed then alcohol, more people fear the China then the US.

in all 4 cases the one people fear is less deadly then the other but more psychologically impactful.

we have little to no ability to actually gauge risk, its why you look at statistics not peoples feelings.

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Keepersofthearcane t1_is7e6zp wrote

This is such a bad faith argument.

There has only been one major nuclear disaster because you can engineer your way out of releasing nuclear waste into the environment, not because we dont use enough nuclear. Nuclear is the only form of power generation with enough capacity where you can contain the pollution. Solar, wind, natural gas, oil, coal(or the production of) all pollute the enviroment in normal operation. Nice try though.

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brobeanzhitler t1_is7f7aa wrote

Two.. but the second involved large-scale engineering to contain it, along with world-wide cooperation and fact sharing which was notably absent from the first incident

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Keepersofthearcane t1_is7lolc wrote

Ya I just repeating what the person said that I was commenting on. Your correct, there have been 2. There has also been breaches of nuclear waste containment(Washington State is the only one I know of but there could be more). Again, all these things can be mitigated with proper funding, engineering and oversight.

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DrarenThiralas t1_is9ktpz wrote

This argument would work, in a world where the deaths caused by oil didn't amount to, by the most conservative estimate, 38 Chernobyl disasters every year. Even if we built 7 times more nuclear plants (which is how many we would need to cover the energy currently generated by oil), do you think that would result in over 38 Chernobyl-style disasters per year? And that's just oil - coal is even deadlier than that.

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FaeTaleDream t1_is9m2p7 wrote

How do so many of you people not understand those comparisons make zero sense, you WANT this to be the case.

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DrarenThiralas t1_is9p3bg wrote

This comparison is based on reliable data - the data about the deaths caused by oil-based energy, and the data about the death toll of the Chernobyl disaster. It shows that, while you can certainly question the available data on the frequency with which nuclear disasters occur, that data would have to be off by a factor of more than a hundred before it would indicate the opposite conclusion. If that was the case, we would expect to see 2-3 Chernobyl-scale events every year with the amount of nuclear plants we have right now. It is technically possible that we've just been insanely lucky for the past 50+ years, but that's not really a possibility worthy of serious consideration.

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FaeTaleDream t1_is9rnce wrote

YEA you can certainly question it because it's bullshit. Here is the actual comparison you guys are giving.

World ending asteroids rarely ever hit the planet, so they are actually safer than fossil fuels cause less people have died to them.

THAT is the data legalism bullshit you people keep telling me.

Your data is ether wrong, politically driven and or probably done by companies who have their hands in the energy sector.

We can have multiple oil spills and disasters with fossil fuels all of that is fixable, you arn't playing with fire with radiation because burns heal. How is this hard to understand Chernobyl is SMALL compared to the Reactors we have now, what France has like a hundred of them too. Imagine if a World War actually happened.

We wouldn't need nukes to fuck the planet because our energy would do that for us once it starts getting targeted with strikes.

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DrarenThiralas t1_is9sknw wrote

> World ending asteroids rarely ever hit the planet, so they are actually safer than fossil fuels cause less people have died to them.

> THAT is the data legalism bullshit you people keep telling me.

That is not what I'm saying.

To keep going with your analogy, we are in a situation where an asteroid (actually two, for Chernobyl and Fukushima) has already hit the planet, and we have calculated how many people have died as a result of the impact. That calculation shows that oil use kills as many people as 38 asteroid impacts a year would.

Now, the probability of an asteroid impact is difficult to estimate, but we can say for certain that it's absolutely nowhere near 38 world-ending asteroids a year. This allows us to conclude that asteroid impacts are indeed safer than fossil fuels, even without knowing the precise frequency with which they occur.

Again, it's possible that the data we have is off by a factor of 2 or 3 or so, but it's not possible that nuclear disasters on the scale of Chernobyl actually occur every couple of months, and we have somehow failed to notice for 50+ years.

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FaeTaleDream t1_is9utgu wrote

Ukraine is definitive proof that as long as conflict is a possibility, nuclear reactors aren't safe because they will always be targets. And all those safety measures aren't guaranteed against direct attack or sabotage.

It doesn't have to occur constantly just once in one thousand years in a worse enough way is all it takes to make a country unlivable. That isn't worth the risk, no data represents this. It's common sense.

But common sense flies out the window when political and social narratives go against it.

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DrarenThiralas t1_isa310b wrote

Keep in mind that there has, of yet, been no actual nuclear incidents connected with the Ukraine war, only threats. Just like with nuclear weapons, nobody wants to open the Pandora's box of turning nuclear plants into military targets, because that may very well backfire on them. Russia has its own nuclear plants that it doesn't want to see sabotaged either. This doesn't mean it won't happen, of course, but the risk is much lower than you present it to be.

Besides, in a thousand years it is very likely that we will have much better technology for containing and cleaning up radioactive fallout than we do now - and what we have now is already miles ahead of what we had during Chernobyl, as was made apparent during the Fukushima incident.

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