FaeTaleDream t1_is9m2p7 wrote on October 14, 2022 at 8:59 AM

Reply to comment by DrarenThiralas in Ethics of Nuclear Energy in Times of Climate Change: Escaping the Collective Action Problem by CartesianClosedCat

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

DrarenThiralas t1_is9p3bg wrote on October 14, 2022 at 9:43 AM

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.

FaeTaleDream t1_is9rnce wrote on October 14, 2022 at 10:18 AM

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.

DrarenThiralas t1_is9sknw wrote on October 14, 2022 at 10:30 AM

> 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.

FaeTaleDream t1_is9utgu wrote on October 14, 2022 at 10:57 AM

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.

DrarenThiralas t1_isa310b wrote on October 14, 2022 at 12:20 PM

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.