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

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

> 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.