Indeed! Nukes provide about 60% of the low-carbon energy in the USA. They emit about 12 gCO2-eq/kWh (vs. 40 for solar PV, 11 for wind, 490 for gas, 820 for coal). They net save millions of lives simply by displacing air polluters. They contain and pay for all their waste (where other energy systems dump their waste right into our lungs where it kills hundreds of thousands per year). Accidents have hurt relatively few people (0 died or will die from Fukushima, while a gas explosion just happened and we already forgot about it).
The operating plants now are struggling because fracked gas pulled out the electricity revenue rug below their operating costs, and post-9/11 upgrades have been expensive for operation and maintenance.
But the capability of atomic energy is just so darn intriguing it's hard to just give up on fission now, even though it advanced fission has struggled through the years.
While accidents are rare, with their incredibly high cost (in this case: a city of 50,000 people that cannot be inhabited for a time longer than all of human history), they need to be even rarer.
First of all, the threat we're up against is global warming and air pollution which is currently killing hundreds of thousands of people, right now, per year.
Also, you're assuming a linear no-threshold radiation dose response, which is very hard to find support for at the low dose rates now present at Chernobyl. As someone else in this thread pointed out, that's like assuming hundreds of people would die per year from handshakes due to linear health response to Newton's laws.
Indeed, it appears that human presence was more detrimental to life than radiation [1].
The engineering cost of dealing with Fukushima and Chernobyl are aboslutely eye watering.
I would agree that the human reaction is sometimes irrational, but that needs to be accepted. Human life is not a lab controlled experiment where people will always behave rationally.
The cost of the status quo where we mostly burn dead dinosaurs for electricity costs a lot more and is not getting any less costly.
Given the choice of waiting for wind/solar to become more worthwhile as oil extraction slowly becomes more expensive and prices slowly rise (aka the status quo) or pulling the trigger on nuclear now it shouldn't even be a choice.
I am actually in favour of developing nuclear energy. And I think we should also invest in renewables. And one day I think that another nuclear station is going to fail and will need to be made safe. Those things are not inconsistent.
Ok, but would you agree that we should also expect to not overdo cleanup efforts by several orders of magnitude without reasonable evidence that low-dose radiation is dangerous after collecting multiple decades of data. I don't think infinite-duration irrationality in the face of data is necessary.
A focus of the engineering efforts at Chernobyl and Fukushima are to make sure that higher risk contamination is avoided. So the current radiation impact is not the issue. It is the potential impact that is addressed.
I hope that one day Chernobyl and Fukushima can be repopulated, and agree that may be safe. I don't think that makes any difference to the actual cost of the event. Nor, would it be wise to presume that a subsequent event could be safely handled without an evacuation. But that is one for politicians to decide.
Chernobyl was terrible design, and we’ve come a long way. Fukushima would be a better example of a modern design failing, and even then there are much more fault-tolerant designs.
We certainly aren’t going to be building any more Chernobyls for commercial power generation.
I wouldn't consider Fukishima modern either, it began construction in 1967, with the actual design plans being a bit older. That is like 25 years from the first nuclear reactors, we are now 50 years of research and technology beyond fukishima. Yeah it has had some upgrades, but you can only modify an already existent reactor design so much.
chernobyl had known reactor design flaws at the time of the accident. even then, there were designs for fail-safe reactors instead of fail-deadly reactors. those have only improved with time.
"habitable" is not the same as survivable. Generally the term habitable means safe for society, so while you may quibble over what exact standard to use the dangers around Chernobyl are MAGNITUDES higher than the dangers of smoking. More like guaranteeing cancer in <20 years.
Here's another data point: Even by your definition, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are habitable today, less than 100 years after having been hit by nuclear bombs. Ground zero in those cities are thriving tourist zones. Yes, radiation is dangerous, but the dangers of nuclear power have been VASTLY exaggerated by left-wing propaganda.
If radiation sickness is your concern, then you're better off replacing coal (which spews radioactive material into the air all day every day) with nuclear (which does not normally, and even with the very few nuclear disasters in Earth's history doesn't do so at anywhere near the scale of coal).
20,000 years is way off. Here's a report by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) [1]. The main radio-isotopes after the Chernobyl disaster were (see p. 2):
"The total release of radioactive substances was about 14 EBq1 (as of 26 April 1986), which included 1.8 EBq of 131I, 0.085 EBq of 137Cs and other caesium radioisotopes, 0.01EBq of 90Sr and 0.003 EBq of plutonium radioisotopes. The noble gases contributed about 50% of the total release of radioactivity."
Iodine-131 has a half-life of only 8 days, and it cleared up long ago. The only going concern is Caesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years, and needs 300 years to go to 1/1000 of the initial levels and 600 years to all but disappear. The other radioisotopes were contained to the location of the reactor. The only one that will be there for millenia is a decay product of Pu-241, namely Am-241 with a half-life of 430 years. However, as stated before, that is localized to the nuclear reactor itself. It will reach a maximum about 100 years after the event (so about 70 years from now).
I believe that it is true that nobody has died from acute radiation exposure at a civilian US nuclear power facility. There are still fatal industrial accidents at nuclear facilities from more mundane causes, like accidentally falling equipment:
The reason I bring this up is because the "deaths per terawatt hour" comparisons often used by nuclear proponents omit non-radiation fatal accidents in the accounting for nuclear but include those accidents for renewables. See e.g.
It says that US nuclear has a mortality rate of 0.1 deaths per 1000 terawatt hours. Since US nuclear power generates about 800 TWh per year, that implies a fatality rate of about once every 12 years across the whole US fleet. But as shown above the Surry Nuclear Power Plant alone has had 6 workers die from accidents (though none involved radiation).
Nuclear power is very safe in any case; the real menace is combustion-based energy sources. It's just going too far to say that "not a single person died" from US nuclear power. Job site deaths from crushing, burns, falls from high places, etc. are still deaths. That modest number of accidental deaths would be a rounding error for coal, but it really matters at the low end with nuclear and renewables, precisely because the indirect pollution deaths are so much lower for non-combustion electricity sources.
We all know how enthusiastic governments are to admit fault, there are probably many more.
One I'm familiar with in the US:
"The Sodium Reactor Experiment-SRE was an experimental nuclear reactor that operated at the site from 1957 to 1964 and was the first commercial power plant in the world to experience a core meltdown.
There was a decades-long cover-up of the incident by the U.S. Department of Energy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory#...
nickik's claim was that no one has died in the US from civilian nuclear. Your links are for the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a military experimental research facility.
If there have been any deaths from civilian nuclear, I would like that information to consider.
The operating plants now are struggling because fracked gas pulled out the electricity revenue rug below their operating costs, and post-9/11 upgrades have been expensive for operation and maintenance.
But the capability of atomic energy is just so darn intriguing it's hard to just give up on fission now, even though it advanced fission has struggled through the years.