Belarus had markedly increased general cancer rate post-1986. At the time most of that was fatal. None of that naturally is included in site personnel and firefighter fatalities that IAEA recognises as the only casualties.
When I was a student I met a Chernobyl liquidator in his 30s on a local train. He said he was dying of leukaemia and looked like it. As a thought experiment, how would you argue to him that his death is unrelated?
Western part of USSR had also an explosion of thyroid cancers and tumors among children. Fortunately it was very treatabe. Because it was screened as a known consequence of the fallout my brother in law had an intervention early.
Those numbers are still in the single digit thousands. Meanwhile how many deaths have been caused by fossil fuel emissions (both carbon, and local, and radiation). Very very hard to predict, but you see estimates going up to the many millions.
Would you argue that Bhopal was a nothingburger because it is dwarfed by residual emissions worldwide over decades?
These are consequences from single incident, for a power source that has minuscule share of generation worldwide. The second similar event had also led to exclusion of substantial territory and only avoided massive health effects due to wind pattern towards the ocean.
And if nuclear proliferated more to geography prone to low safety culture and warfare the toll could up considerably.
Either way nobody argues for replacement of nuclear with coal in this day of age. Renewables are the fastest growing energy sector.
Bhopal helps my argument. The consequences of that were far worse than Chernobyl and yet I’d bet for every 1,000 people who have heard of Chernobyl only one or two would know about Bhopal.
> If nuclear became #1 power source and instead of 25 year cadence we had IAEA scale 7 events every 1.5 years, would you still argue it's a net win?
Events like Fukushima would be worthwhile tradeoffs. Events like Chernobyl would not, but that would require nigh non-existent safety regulations.
To put it in layman's terms - I'd much much much rather live right next to a US operated nuclear power plant than a US operated coal plant. In fact I do live rather close to several nuclear power plants.
Im also not against solar or wind, but energy diversity is important for national and energy security purposes
I can't just take generic hardware products hyped up as "AI" with software seriously. It's the new Windows button.
reply