this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Is that a bad reason really? When nuclear goes bad it goes really bad and it can go bad due to human error which is something that will always be present. When a solar panel catastrophically fails it doesn't render the surrounding environment uninhabitable for decades.
The thing is, nuclear problems are big and scary events, but they're rare.
Think like plane crash vs other transportation accidents: they make bigger news, but they're actually safer than most other solutions.
Here's the data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
It does seem that your solar example is the one thing that's safer than nuclear sccording to this chart though, so maybe you knew!
I'm not just talking about deaths though. If a bad nuclear accident happens it makes a large part of the surrounding area uninhabitable and the fallout in the air can cause long term very nasty health problems for a lot of people. If that happened near a big city the results would be devastating. Considering that the other clean energy options are comparable in terms of danger per output during general operation it just doesn't seem worth it. Obviously I'm not a nuclear engineer and maybe I need to read up on it more but that's my current thoughts on the matter.
As for the rarity, they may be but we are operating on an indefinite time scale. Sooner or later something is going to happen again with how complex those things are. Especially with corporations involved that are more concerned with making their stocks go up than keeping people safe. Here's a better explanation of what I'm talking about - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_accident
Those are very good points.
This specific source doesn't highlight it and I don't have the opportunity to find something else at the moment, but when I first heard about it ( in a ted talk that I can't remember the name of... ) they had highlighted that health complications followed similar curves. The worsts of course being burning stuff due to dumping it in the air, but that most renewables had their lot of injuries too, that their just less publicized.
Here's my full take of nuclear/renewables
My understanding is that most power grid depending on renewables need an alternate energy source for when power demands ramp up: they need some energy sources that they can tune depending of needs, at the drop of a hat.
Hydro does that, you can let more or less water through. (I happen to live aomewhere where most of our energy is Hydro) Things like wind or solar are more complicated.
As an energy appoint source, I think nuclear is a good fit for some use cases.
You took the words right out of my mouth.