Bags of debris from Fukushima disaster swept away in typhoon (opens in new tab)

There's so many problems with this statement I barely know where to begin.

1. Are we talking total or per kWH of generated power?

2. "Deaths" is a questionable measure. One should look at the environmental impact of digging up, processing (enriching in the case of nuclear), transporting and the storage of byproducts from processing (eg UrF6) as well as spent fuel.

3. Here's the important one: you need to look at failure modes. Coal plants pollute but they also do it very slowly and no coal plant has ever blown up to the point where it's made 1000 square miles of land uninhabitable for decades (to compare, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is 1000 square miles).

4. Coal vs nuclear is a straw man argument. Coal is terrible. Everyone knows this. Coal is becoming the power source for the developing world as it is naturally dying in the developed world, being replaced by renewables and fossil fuels that while not great, are at least better than coal (eg natural gas).

5. How many of the externalities of nuclear power aren't factored into the price? Like the cost of storage and clean ups. These seem to be borne by governments not the companies profiting from the power (of course, some nuclear power in some countries is state-owned and run; depending on the country I'm not sure if this is better or worse).

Personally I find the apologism on HN about nuclear to be disingenuous, exhausting and naive.

But it's not clear you can argue this from historical data.

For comparison, you could argue nuclear weapons are safer than conventional ones, as they have killed fewer people, and that bioweapons are the least dangerous.

The issue is whether there is a tail to the distribution of nuclear event impacts (costs or fatalities), which we may not have seen much of empirically yet.

It seems hard to address that empirically with nuclear (although you could argue that perhaps the same is true for climate change for coal?)

To do a simple calculation, you need to know the real costs of things, and right now those are unbounded.

“Think tank puts cost to address nuke disaster up to 81 trillion yen”

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201903100044.html

To be clear, I was not defending coal. But I do have to ask over what time period radioactive coal wastes "kills a lot more people than nuclear," because being alive is fatal. I think the variance matters even if the mean is lower.

That is a good argument against coal. Why not trying to develop better solutions? That is, including nuclear. The nuclear solution as it stands is obsolete, by the industry's standards, expensive and doesn't make much sense. The next-generation is not ready—more effort needed there. Alternative solutions exist that are both safer and economically sound.

That's neither here nor there, if it kills them in more accumulated ways, and with less or no chance of mass killing accidents.

Cars also hit millions, but we are ok with it, because of the cost/benefit, and the mode that it does so (isolated in different car accidents, etc).

If cars were able to kill 20,000 people in a single bad accident, then we'd have found something else instead...

That would be considered a bug, not a feature. I can’t imagine a more NIMBY proposal than building a nuclear reactor.

Also, I think the benefit of small reactors is ease of manufacture. You could probably just put several on a single site next to a HV substation. You get economy of scale that way.

Countries like Germany are all in on renewables, but then you have days where it's cloudy and the wind isn't blowing, and what do they do? Buy from France, who are invested in nuclear.