A few years ago a professor from the Miami University in Ohio came to our institution to give a talk about her students accidentally found high levels of radiation in a valley nearby. After some investigation they tracked down the source of radiation to a factory that prepared nuclear raw materials during the cold war. Some of the radiating dusts got carried by the wind and affected a region of tens of miles down in the valley. Apparently the locals in the valley town are not informed and the cancer rate is relatively high in the town. For some reason their papers on this are rejected, and calls for a public investigation were buried. I am not sure what the situation is now, but it would not be too difficult to contact some faculties of environmental sciences in that university if anyone is interested.
That is it. They published a book which the article mentions. It was reported in USA Today in 2000. OP made it sound like it was still some nefarious conspiracy.
>OP made it sound like it was still some nefarious conspiracy.
"Defense industrial complex pollutes town then pretends they didn't despite everyone dropping dead from cancer" is a tempting and juicy narrative and will generally be welcomed with open arms around here even if it turns out reality is a lot more mundane (reality is almost always more mundane than the story).
Excise the part you made up and simply say Defense industrial complex pollutes town then pretends they didn't and you have an accurate assessment of what happened.
There does not appear to be any evidence they knew they were or were likely to be contaminating the site and ignored it at the time (i.e they did not act with negligence). The typical accusations, denial, lawsuit, wash, rinse, repeat cycle that tends to characterize instances when corporations act in bad faith (malice). By the time the site was identified activities that were contaminating it had ceased. It was cleaned up as promptly as a big lumbering bureaucracy (DOE in this case) can be expected to. They even expedited the cleanup at the request of the stakeholders.
This does not appear to be an example of corporate bad behavior because it is lacking in both negligence and malice.
If you want to be outraged over evil corporations go read about DuPont poisoning the water in various places. There's been a few longer articles posted here about it fairly recently and they seem to actually be acting in bad faith.
Where did I assert or imply it was or bring up anyone's competence at all?
It's really easy to sit in an air conditioned office in 2019 and look at decisions made decades ago and say "they should have known" when in in all liklihood the people doing this probably didn't know they were leaving behind an unsafe level of radioactivity.
Speaking generally about pollution, not this specific case, everybody wants to see everything as the result of some bad actor(s) so they can have someone to blame. Reality is often much more mundane. Usually either it was not widely known that the thing was dangerous at that level of exposure, the people who could know didn't want to go looking for the knowledge or society considered the pollution worth it and if it bothered you the onus was on you to limit your own exposure (social media comparison anyone?). If you didn't want to smell paint all day you didn't live downwind of the paint factory. Times have changed a lot and to try and look at decisions in the past through the lens of modern values is a fools errand, to put it charitably.
people read through their own lenses. some people read conspiracy, others see that it is generally due to circumstances and human error. perhaps, it might be somewhere in between, or perhaps both overlap in ways. i'd say people generally overestimate how 'on purpose' these things occur, but then again, with lack of clear information, both sides of the coin hold equal value...
There are alot of anecdotal incidents like that which don't attract attention for reasons unknown or because they fall short of a standard. One I'm familiar with was a cancer cluster associated with county roads, which were tarred gravel until the late 1970s. A local factory would kindly "donate" waste oil loaded with various nasties to the county, who would tar the roads with it, there were elevated rates of lung cancers along those roads. Because the "cluster" was a strip, it didn't meet a geographic threshold.
Other common nasties include old rail depots and military depots. The stuff they used to clean locomotives was awful. I read a local article about a local military depot issue and a program called "Defense Environmental Restoration Program for Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS)". The New York/New Jersey District estimates it has $500M of cleanup to do, with an annual budget of $3-5M.
it is really difficult to get people to 'admit' mistakes like this due to the long term human costs often involved. Even, people will do a lot to avoid any additional financial costs incurred when such an admission is made. Hence, academics and interested non-academic parties are often boycotted from releasing such information, or if not possible ,ridiculed / discredited to avoid such financial costs to the responsible parties.
it's a shame, and i'm not yelling conspiracy, but this is how business and politics works, and that's a shame / sad.
If anyone was interested to follow up and research the current status of this valley you note, most likely they would meet similar resistance to publish their findings.
Looking from the outside, dealing with problems of this scale have a number of aspects to them: remediation of the issue, understanding, prevention, and accountability. In this list, accountability stands out. A person or organization that makes a mistake that has already been taught the other pieces of understanding and prevention of an accident has limited need for accountability.
This is not how our society works or thinks, though. There is a strong current of punitive accountability. From a financial perspective, someone might argue that this makes sense: someone who causes harm to many others shouldn't be allowed to remain rich. However, implementing such a system means that organizations within will defend themselves vociferously.
This is why many businesses are starting to use low or no accountability systems to make sure that root cause analysis and mistakes are brought to the forefront after issues. I'm not suggesting that such a system would be easy to implement on a much larger level, especially with our level of inequality in the US, but perhaps the solution is just not to be so damn punitive, and perhaps the other aspects of issue remediation wouldn't be so damn bad. Perhaps there wouldn't be lawyers informing business owners that they can't apologize, because that is opening the doors to being completely destroyed by accountability.
On Hacker News there are relatively many people arguing for nuclear fission, I wonder if they ever factor in societial factors like these.
In an ideal society it still would be a challenge to deal with the unprocessable wastes of nuclear fission (some extremely poisonous and with half lifes well beyond thousand years). But we are far from ideal and the incentives to not just offload it onto future generations are simply not there.
>I wonder if they ever factor in societial factors like these.
Radioactive releases like this are endemic to every coal-burning power station, which while a problem for public health certainly isn't publicized like this is.
Remember, carbon emissions will also destroy the planet if the current projections are anything to go by; I think the chance (certainly less likely with modern reactor designs) that a few local areas are rendered uninhabitable is a tradeoff society will need to be willing to make when the alternative is that the entire planet be rendered uninhabitable over a significantly longer timeframe.
Any other answer just isn't taking climate change seriously enough. Reactors are ready (with the proper funding) for construction today; solar/wind designs capable of supplying the quantity of baseload power nuclear can do not currently exist and neither does power storage- and they aren't nearly as scalable as building another reactor is (mainly due to land and raw materials usage) when power demands jump because everyone needs an air conditioning to survive the summer and a local desalinization plant (or water pipeline) because the rivers and aquifers no longer provide enough water. Additionally, if an energy-intensive carbon capture technology becomes available, the only energy source capable of powering such a device at the scale required is nuclear.
We've already offloaded our waste onto future generations. Might as well use the most effective technology we know how to create to stem the bleeding a bit.
I’m in favour of nuclear, but what you say of renewables is only half right. PV is currently around 0.5 terawatts and 2018’s relatively slow growth was 27%, and at these rates it is likely to solve most of our problems before any nuclear plant not yet commissioned gets finished.
As for land usage, if the USA did this it would be smaller than the road network, rising to “about the same” if you want to replace all ICE cars with battery cars.
CO2 capture, and desalination, don’t need to be run 24 hours per day, so there’s no reason to care if they don’t have energy storage to run at night. Likewise, AC is most important when, and just after, the sun is shining, so the storage need is low.
Storage does have a long way to go before we’re out of trouble, but even if I wasn’t fairly optimistic about it, PV knocks out the worst carbon sources first, giving us more time to build — for example — your preferred nuclear reactors.
Reverse osmosis desalination needs to operate 24/7 as the capital costs are extreme.
Storage backed solar power is significantly lower than nuclear across most of the world. Further as a base load production Nuclear can’t cheaply follow demand which makes it a poor fit in a world with occasionally negative wholesale prices. That is what is stopping significantly increased Nuclear adoption.
It’s cheaper for a reverse osmosis plant to buy batteries to operate at night than shut down 1/2 the tome. Stupid incentives can change what people do, but the economy pays for the inefficiency.
It all depends on what you don't count as costs. When you take environmental impact of running a desalination plant off non-renewables, it might be more efficient to not run it at night if the wind isn't blowing. Thinking in terms of current prices doesn't make sense in the environment context.
(I agree that a lot of batteries may be a very good solution.)
> I wonder if they ever factor in societial factors like these.
This is either egregious intellectual laziness or a passive-aggressive attack, neither of which I'd like to see on HN. In any case, the answer is that we do, and fission is still orders of magnitude safer than coal.
Do you though? The cost of potential accidents is not integrated in the price. When shit happens on a large scale the company doesn't have the funds to repair the local economic loss or century-scale maintenance effort.
Which might be okay if it wasn't for certain states whose prime directive is to cover up mistakes and issues.
Otherwise this article wouldn't exist and we'd be discussing ways to improve safety. Just look how they handled Chernobyl. It was pure luck that the majority of Europe wasn't contaminated as a result of disinformation, refusal to accept help in order to appear strong, and pure incompetence on all fronts. All followed by an unwillingness to fix the problem.
Nuclear fission power in such hands is seriously dangerous. Even Belgium is holistically incapable of safely running a nuclear plant as highlighted by Tihange.
I am completely with your sentiment but the true issue is real world handling. Idealistic scenarios don't help us.
Even Chernobyl is a drop in the ocean compared to the impact of fossil fuel though. aka: The worst case scenario of using nuclear energy is less harmful than the best case scenario of using fossil fuel.
It's all about perceived threat vs actual threat. In the case of nuclear energy the perceived threats is blown out of proportion, in the case of fossil fuel it's just business as usual. I'm not saying nuclear doesn't have issues, but I'd argue that nuclear issues are manageable/solvable whereas fossil fuel issues are not.
They have other drawbacks, pollution, storage, transportation and peak production aren't solved.
In the meantime just look at France vs Germany, nuclear is a net positive in every possible metrics I can come up with. How many people died directly/indirectly in the last 60 years because of german coal industry ? Way more than in all nuclear disasters world wide. And that's for a single country.
The argument isn't that it is riskless cheap energy - but that it is far better than fossil fuels and necessary to complement other renewables in energy supply.
There is no question that there are risks and they are non trivial - but they are mostly manageable through proper regulation!
That seems like a gross exaggeration, almost to the degree of willful ignorance.
The amount of premature death as well as increase in morbidity caused by the entire nuclear energy industry in the US is significantly lower than any other source of power. Simply the steel and concrete alone required for solar power pushes it's morality rate higher.
While our current secretary of energy, Rick Perry, might have had no clue what the department of energy did when he wanted to abolish it as a presidential candidate. Nonetheless, it and other regulatory bodies are quite effective an ensuring we have safe nuclear facilities.
If the regulation worked we probably wouldn't need nuclear reactors. If the trillions spent on oil subsidies due to regulatory capture (which incurs the cost of warfare) went to renewable energy, we'd likely be close to non-dependent on oil and nuclear.
We'd still want them though - progress of civilization is predicated on increasing availability of cheap energy, and nuclear reactors are great for this - using high-density fuel to generate electricity in a safe and non-polluting way.
WRT. energy needs - pulling carbon out of the atmosphere will be energy-intensive; it's yet another reason why we need clean and cheap energy (and lots of it!). Nuclear shouldn't be taken off the table.
Seeing the shape of the slope needed now and comparing it to the shape we have needed in e.g. 2000 and knowing the current political climate in the U.S. makes me very pessimistic that the 2 deg limit will be achieved, and knowing how dramatic e.g. 4 degrees or more are going to be, I doubt anybody can expect much “progress”. More some medieval developments.
The current estimate is +3.2 deg in 2100, but it still assumes that the current actions progress:
I wanted to reply in a snarky way but your question raises a very troublesome and deep problem to which a solution if it doesn't come right way will certainly condemn our successors to basting in a hothouse earth with too little energy for a recognizable civilization.
Have you thought about what could be offered up in the way of positive incentives for responsible behavior? Do they need to be positive incentives rather than overwhelming disincentives?
Pollution and contamination are merely future opportunities for innovation. Let’s make more, bigger opportunities!—or so the founders-in-waiting may advocate
Yes, we would be all very interested to read them. I'm aware of these kinds of things happening in the 50s, but a few years ago - that's unthinkable and should lead to criminal investigation. All major media would be extremely interested and talk about it for months.
> All major media would be extremely interested and talk about it for months.
I think you meant, talk about it on page 5 of the paper or on some sidebar on the website, be enraged for exactly two days and then immediately drop the topic and don't do any followup?
It is not the case. The fact that people tend to forget news nowadays is because there are so many of them. And there are so many of them, because more people are able to break stories like that.
The situation above is a major fuck up of the local authorities. A lot of journalists out there would make a career if they break a story like that and ride the hype wave for the next year or two. So if you want to make something public it is much more difficult to stop you nowadays rather then to publish anything.
How many people had heard of Erin Brockovich before there was a movie made about it? Not zero, but nowhere near as many as after the movie.
A huge proportion of society (who are eligible to vote) don't hear about these things even after a journalist has fought tooth and nail to release the story.
People, for many varied and complex reasons, tend not to care about this sort of stuff unless it gets glamorized.
See Edward Snowden for one example. Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth, promises made and serious discussion of the problem, but is the situation now any better?
I have a feeling that the modern method to deal with PR nightmares is to acknowledge the problem, promise to fix it, and then just let the hype die before doubling down on the nefarious behavior, but with better op-sec.
If it's not obvious, I'm getting (even more) jaded about the whole issue.
The Flint water crisis took years to resolve. Authorities and businesses poison people all the time, but usually those people are poor and irrelevant enough that news coverage makes no impact at all.
The ability to walk back up a half-life and radionucleotide chain, and also map to wind, water flows, and so triangulate to a source at a given time.. Amazing stuff.
Is it too much to hope, somebody is going to do some open declaration? In times past, people felt a compulsion to report. It feels like we have had a cultural shift, and whoever has information, feels no obligation to report.
I wonder what life closer to the facility was like when this happened? How much did they get told about their exposure?
If they declined when they did it, why should they back down now? This would mean that not only they polluted the environment, but also are liars (and cowards). There is no way they'd admit that.
HN won't let you downvote comments on your own posts so I assure you, I didn't and do not think this comment was downvote-worthy. I might not agree, but it's a valid, if cynical point.
I just think that at a level where a peer review paper says "you did this" failure to respond is a fail in two dimensions: Its asocial and fundamentally stupid politically despite the "deny everything" posture every government takes, and its un-scientific: It makes it harder for other people to take your own science seriously, if you refuse to participate full-cycle in the process.
The most interesting thing I find here is that these results seem pretty conclusive that ruthenium couldn't have come from a breach in an active reactor.
There was a submission on HN a while ago (I can't find it right now) that speculated that this release was related to Russia testing a nuclear jet-powered missile. A crash after a test flight would release radioactive materials from its reactor.
This report seems to strongly point against that theory.
The event happened in October 2017. Putin presented a new arsenal of nuclear weapons in March 2018. Some kind of indirect relationship is not impossible.
Their nuclear rocket is a development effort, not an operational weapon, and they haven’t claimed to have achieved the central technical goal of making a reactor small enough to put in a missile.
It's certainly a work in progress but it seems that they have been testing at least marginally functional versions of the missile complete with nuclear powered propulsion[1].
In the immediate aftermath of the 2011 incident at Fukushima Daiichi, a hobbyist network formed around Tokyo monitoring radiation levels and publishing it online. While the act itself was heartwarming, I can very much attest that I never wish a situation where you occasionally refresh an online radiation heat map upon anyone.
Mankind can not handle the responsabilities that come with nuclear technologies. Aging and literally crumbeling reactors are kept running on extended permits granted by cabinets where the revolving door with the energy industry is well oiled. Fukushima thaught the cynical lesson that a nuclear operator can profit even more from the post-accident cleanup than from simply running the facility. Meanwhile the nuclear lobby thankfuly jumped onto the passing 'CO2 posterchild' train for a free greenwash. But hey, it is so more trendy, edgy and suave to be pro-nuke these days than to be a tired old hippie pointing out that nuclear is no free lunch.
But mankind can handle the responsibilities that come with geoengineering, such as just heating up the globe? Because that's what we've been doing for the past century.
Fukushima taught the cynical lesson that overreaction to and media-fueled mindless panic about nuclear incidents causes more damage and death than nuclear incidents themselves.
"Nuclear is no free lunch", but you get to pick what you eat for the money you have. When you compare fossil fuel burning, which involves mining and shipping stupendous quantities of fuel and releasing equally stupendous amount of CO₂ pollution (including radioisotopes!) into atmosphere, to nuclear power, which involves mining, shipping and using tiny amounts of fuel for the same energy output, and the result is a tiny amount of solid waste... well, nuclear is a no-brainer here.
"Fukushima taught the cynical lesson that overreaction to and media-fueled mindless panic about nuclear incidents causes more damage and death than nuclear incidents themselves."
Yes, but did we really take that lesson to heart? Because one can react to that in different ways. Currently I'm leaning to towards, that yes, maybe I can be confident nuclear can be engineered to (for the money we have) acceptably safe. But I'm not convinced we can manage the social cost and education effort and corruption mitigation needed. Damage and death caused by panic is still damage and death.
People forget that the real tragedy with "fukushima" was the tsunami, the nuclear thing is a minor part of that. Seriously, over 20 000 people died from the tsunami and countless more doesn't even have a home anymore. But the fact that some people will not be able to move back to their homes are the real tragedy?
Tsunamis mankind didn't create, so I think the feel is a bit different. Even though deaths from that is also our own responsibility in as far as we could have prevented them. (Building codes, zoning, early warning systems etc.)
But there is a lot of suffering involved with whole communities being erased and ghost towns - sometimes for no great reason. Some places didn't receive much of any radiation but are now dead. Even places where it's allowed now to move back to, people don't want to. Some are afraid, and some don't want to move back to an empty ghost town.
Yes, it is different. But the losses or direct consequences are not.
We are literally about to turn the whole planet into something equivalent to what people are afraid of just because of fear loosing some small communities. It is that absurd.
But then I found my answer - it doesn't matter. The Christian dogma for instance is, no we don't but God wants us to survive despite that we don't deserve it.
If you don't care for that, we will survive or not survive and either of these outcomes will be completely orthogonal to whether we deserve to survive or not.
Alternative for those not subscribing to any particular religion: we prove we're worthy of survival by surviving. If we actually figure our way out of this conundrum, go us!
While I have not been there myself the consensus is that the effective radiation dose in the area was low. Wikipedia has 5 citations backing this statement:
Risks from ionizing radiation
Although people in the incident's worst affected areas have a slightly higher risk of developing certain cancers such as leukemia, solid cancers, thyroid cancer, and breast cancer, very few cancers would be expected as a result of accumulated radiation exposures.
Sure, why not? According to data from Wikipedia and e.g. this[0] compared to the handy reference chart[1], I should expect 2-3 times the background radiation, and at worst (at ~110 mSv/year), I'm barely hitting the lowest rate linked to increased cancer risk. Assuming I avoid the hottest spots, I should be entirely fine.
(That does not take into account the possibility of suffering extra radiation damage and chemical poisoning from ingesting radioactive elements, but this becomes manageable through thoroughly washing the living area and possibly not growing any food on contaminated soil.)
Nuclear energy is not a free but it kills a lot less the coal, so closing nuclear plants and using coal plants like Germany did is stupid(the decision was pure political and forced by the Green party, ironic)
Acutally, On 26 January 2019, a group of federal and state leaders as well as industry representatives, environmentalists, and scientists made an agreement to close all 84 coal plants in the country by 2038.
It is especially Solar and Wind that are on the rise in Germany
The damage will be done by 2038. We need to stop pretending we have time to slowly wean off of fossil fuels. We're already facing feedback loops that are going to drastically change the climate. Just look at the graph on that page. Renewables have largely replaced nuclear... Which is largely a clean energy source while coal has barely changed and the use of gas has slightly increased. Except now we have nothing to cover baseload except for coal and we're still building new coal power plants.
They could have replaced coal with all the new renewable energy sources and thus reduce the CO2 output. But instead they somehow decided it was a good idea to shut down nuclear power plants before they shut down the last coal plant.
Per TWh produced, coal kills more than the power produced by Chernobyl.
Generation 4 reactors will very likely begin operation in the next 6-10 years. Just look at the integral molten salt reactor as an example.
Germany has always had a good environmental track record, which is why their bad decisions are interesting. It tells us about communication problems between researchers who study the impacts of energy generation and voters who are concerned about protecting the environment.
And politicians who were happy to simply outsource CO₂ emissions by closing their nuclear plants and buying electricity from other countries, which generate it from coal.
Yep - it's not in their electoral backyard. Another angle is that it seems Germany is becoming a giant in renewable tech. I mean, it looks like their big bet on that is paying off in pure economical terms. So the voters are unlikely to punish politicians for a move that seems to spell a lot of export money for Germany.
This is the problem, you can't build a nuclear weapon with the fuel in a power plant, misconceptions like this cause a lot of damage to the entire planet.
Nuclear energy is used a lot less than coal and kills a lot less than coal. Let's see how it goes when reactors replace power generation in third world with poor safety record and in upcoming warzones.
We nerds love technology and this is really the main reason for strong pro-nuclear sentiment in places like HN. Health effects or emissions footprint have little to do with it.
I think you imagine that a nuclear power plant would explode like a nuclear bomb, that is not the case. The fuel used is not the same as in the one in bombs either so you can't put some masks on and rob the nuclear plant.
> you are assuming that all reactors have failure modes of an RBMK reactor
All reactors have failure modes, no? Any reactor that depends on people for the continued safe operation should include the assumption that incompetent and malicious people will eventually take control.
That's not unique to nuclear power, but a lot less can go wrong if an evil person gets control of a wind turbine.
That said, I'd still vote for a politician that proposed building new nuclear power plants.
>All reactors have failure modes, no? Any reactor that depends on people for the continued safe operation should include the assumption that incompetent and malicious people will eventually take control.
There are designs to build reactors that can handle the case where no humans,electricity, water are present anymore, so we could build new safe reactors.
The bad people argument, the fuel in power reactors is not the same as the one in bombs, for bombs you need more "rich" Uranium, so the terrorists that would enter inside a safe reactor would have to have some super expertise to extract teh fuel and somehow make it a mass distruction weapon. You can have similar issues with chemical plants, those are not as protected and an explosion in such a chemical plant could do a lot of damage as we seen when accidents happen, or exploding a water dam, or putting poison in water... there are many bad scenarios you can imagine some evil terrorists could do
Anything with a serious gradient of energy can catastrophically fail. That's the thermodynamic nature of the things.
You can't have a completely safe power plant, period. You certainly can have one where you don't know a certain failure mode exists. For example RBMK prior to 1986, or a pebble bed reactor prior to THTR-300 incident.
And my war zone remark wasn't about fuel theft, but more likely things. Like dropping a buster bomb onto a live reactor.
I will need to research this, so if you can point me to the resource that made you have this opinion please share it with me, Thanks
I would imagine you can design a system that would have a fail safe, like when temperature gets to high it would melt a specific component and kickstarting a physical process that you could not stop.
>buster bombs
Those can also be dropped on chemical plants, water dams, fuel depos , it is not like the nuclear power plant would explode from a conventional bomb, I am not a physicist but I think it needs tons of neutrons to get critical so you would need maybe to drop a nuclear bomb on a nuclear plant so it is silly IMO, but if I am wrong link me reliable material.
I think the point is that operating power reactors have high inventories of dangerously radioactive fission products in the core. Under normal circumstances that is safe because containment is designed for normal operation and foreseeable natural disasters, so the fission products don't get into the biosphere. But nuclear reactor containments are not designed to survive attack with heavy weapons. Deliberate attack could cause catastrophic release of dangerously radioactive materials.
It's true that large hydroelectric dams have the same problem. If some party decides to commit a war crime and destroy the dam you live downriver of, it could be catastrophic. The same consideration doesn't apply with large fossil fueled or wind/solar facilities because they have a much smaller danger radius if destroyed by heavy weapons.
People fighting against the Syrian government blew up a large natural gas facility during the civil war. If Syria generated power from nuclear reactors instead of gas, would the rebels have declined to destroy a reactor? It would certainly have been a war crime. But the Syrian civil war already saw many war crimes.
I don't think that any organized military would deliberately destroy live reactors. There's always a chance for accidents. "Pilot visually confirmed the target, mistaking the nuclear cooling towers for the designated coal plant's cooling towers."
I don't mean that people should eschew nuclear power because of what might happen in extraordinary wartime circumstances. But it is possible to release large quantities of dangerous fission products from a reactor facility just by attacking it with conventional high explosive weapons.
>I don't think that any organized military would deliberately destroy live reactors.
I am not sure about that, US dropped actual nuclear bombs and even today there are many that excuse this so I think that in a war US would bomb not only bridges,factories,coal plants but they would also bomb nuclear plants and there will be no significant criticism.
I agree that there are risks and waste from nuclear, my main issue is that for some reasons coal plants have larger damage to the environment and population. My opinion is that we should not rush on building new nuclear plants but finish the ones that are already built, use them to full capacity , invest into research for the safer nuclear versions.
I would not like to have a nuclear plant near my house, but if you have to chose between a coal plant that is polluting and radiating all the time is running and a new nuclear plant design that it would fail only in super rare events (there are designs that would be safe even if the cooling system fails) then I definitely don't want the coal plant.
Btw nuclear is used in medicine, there are labs that use radioactive materials, I think the number of this would grow and it may end up in countries you don't trust but you can't stop progress,
Natural gas burns quite cleanly. There's a number of European nations that don't have a single active coal power plant and they get by somehow.
The reason nuclear crowd loves to focus on coal is it's the worst case conventional technology and hence the easiest to argue against. The arguments against hydro, wind or NG are a lot less convincing.
Burning gas still creates CO2, it may be cleaner then coal.
Ideally we would not have to chose and we can close all coal,gas and nuclear plants and replace them with renewable, if this is not possible then we should maybe use rationality and not emotions to dictate priorities. This means closing or reducing coal usage, keeping and using nuclear at full capacity .
so if they're at worst, both equal, at best, one that releases a small-size (compared to earth) contamination zone every 3 decades while the other incrementally worsens the climate and atmosphere everywhere, why are you arguing in favor of the worse option?
You failed to understand the point the person made above, there are equal only in the rare case that nuclear fails.
So you have nuclear plant that produces no CO2 and could produce radiation in a rare event , and you have a coal plant that produces CO2, other pollution in the smoke and radiation 100% of the time, similar with gas and other fossil fuels.
Honestly if you have 2 choices , live near the coal plant and it's smoke and radiation or live near a nuclear plant that will fail only of a super rare earthquake what do you chose ? Do you chose 100% harm vs 0.1(number I invented) harm ?
