That's true. If we estimated the risks for the next 100,000 years then these numbers would change immensely.
A hundred years of burning coal has damaged our atmosphere a little bit; doing the same for another hundred thousand years would be absurdly catastrophic to our ecosystem, killing and displacing billions.
You'd also need to look carefully at hydro as well, as thousand-year-old mega-dams begin to randomly fail.
Nuclear risk will probably be lower as the shockingly naive Soviet-era and 1960s-era designed reactors are all replaced with new designs built with immensely improved understanding of nuclear physics, materials design, computer augmentation, and local climatic risks.
You’re on the money, and it’s the result of things like coal and dams facing inherent technical challenges to safety and externalities, versus nuclear which primarily faces political challenges. Keeping waste rods on-site is stupid and dangerous, but it’s a consequence of people and their politicians incessant NIMBYism.
Well, the WHO estimates of total casualties of Chernobyl were consistently and significantly downgraded every decade after the disaster as more data of the actual effects came in, so it seems like we are currently vastly overestimating the risk.
It now happens to be that the indirect, psychosocial effects of the evacuation and economic losses due to the plant closure caused way more total health problems than the radiation. We now see similar trends at Fukushima.
And no, that doesn't mean that radiation isn't dangerous, people definitely died from radiation in Chernobyl (not in Fukushima), particularly the personnel and rescue workers.
However, the danger of low-level radiation seems to be vastly overstated. The Linear Non-Threshold Model (LNT)[1] for radiation damage seems to simply be wrong, which is not surprising as it was never based on data in the first place.
That of course also affects how we should think about nuclear waste, as the idea that we have to isolate it 100% from contact with the biosphere is predicated on the LNT.
And as someone pointed out, if we actually crash back down to a Bronze-Age society, nuclear waste will be the smallest of our problems, whereas if we remain an advanced industrial society, we will be able to deal with it, better each year.
However, the bigger point about nuclear waste is that there is just so incredibly little of it. With BFR, we can probably start chugging the worst bits of it into the sun if we don't want to re-process.
In fact coal plants actually produce more radiation:
I thought about that. It is a bit ad-hominemy but the argument stands. This is a longer version without the ad hominem. No proposed electricity solution with a 100,000 year risk assessment exists. All infrastructure related to power distribution and generation such as dams or existing transmission gear, the fundamental constructs of power consumption would be open to question from the plastic insulation on wires to the energy cost of digging cobalt to the ecological damage of dam construction and mining.
If a 100,000 year cost is applied to things the reductionist result is to promote a reduced societal load which demands de-population and inevitably less enemy eating and since society is not on a path to either it's probably legislated or enforced. It's the Indian emergency and forced sterilization.
