I'm trying to reconcile your numbers with the Wikipedia "Aviation safety” article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety

which for 2019 describes "0.5 accidents per million departures" and "40 fatalities per trillion revenue passenger kilometers". Considering that many or most passengers fly close to 800-1000 km/h, we're still quite a bit above above 1 fatality per 100 million passenger hours.

Would a factor of 10 be enough? Suppose we go from one major accident per fortnight to one per five months (10 fortnights). Is that higher than what we have seen in the past thirty years?

And yet we could regulate even more to make flying even safer, but likely negatively impacting the cost of flying.

This is a balance/tradeoff. We agree for some deaths, for a given price. It is the same for food safety, workplace safety.

With the latest designs and regulations there has been no major issue across all the nuclear facilities, except for Fukushima which sustained a 9 earthquake + a tsunami... and yet hardly any death (in the 10 years after, one death by cancer got compensated but still not clear if it was directly linked... the evacuation itself might be responsible for up to 50 deaths though, showing how the perception of nuclear can be overhyped).

It is possible that the nuclear industry is over-regulated (done mostly after Chernobyl) and could benefit to be reviewed based on the current knowledge.

Without doing or seeing the actual math, my intuition leans on the side of it's probably much more efficient to put people together under certain constraints and fly them in one big container, than lots of unconstrained individual containers. See public transport vs cars for a similar tradeoff.

Two points:

Chernobyl was a poor, badly run reactor that was designed badly decades ago. I don't know why we paint all of nuclear with that brush, other than folks fall victim to availability bias all the time.

The other point is that we sweep aside externalities for all forms of power generation. People don't think of coal as dangerous, but it's killed far more than nuclear.

Ok plenty of responses to the Chernobyl thing, but without a definition of "safe" it's a moot argument. The injury per watt hour speaks for itself, unless you had something else in mind.

It turns you are right that there was a ton of BS around the Chernobyl accident...but going in the other direction.

Every decade, the WHO publishes a report on the health effects of Chernobyl. Every decade, they had to reduce the projections for casualties.

By an order of magnitude.

When it happened, we didn't know better. Now we do.

How many towns were closed in order to strip mine coal? And no, that's not just a thing of the past but still happening today.

How many people's health was impacted from coal and coal burning exhaust, which btw. also includes radioactive particles.

A whole town got pulled out of their flats and was never allowed back

How does that measure against a whole planet being pulled out of thermal equilibrium, and the projected displacement of 1 billion people?

What sort of nonsense statistic is fatalities per watt hour?

People agree with fatalities per hour of travel because it makes sense. If you're a really frequent flyer, you are more likely to die. In nuclear, I don't give a crap how many watt hour the plant 1000km away from me is generating, I don't want it to affect me. I am however OK with the plant next door affecting me, because I have a say in that. I can choose to live elsewhere.

Someone mentioned rooftop solar causing more deaths. If my rooftop solar falls on my head, only I die.

You can't just reduce everything to aggregate statistics. The relationship and proximity of the affected to the thing that causes the accident also matters.

> Coal

Yes, but the miners die, and only his family face the consequences. Some unrelated guy 50km away doesn't. BIG difference.

Now, modern nuclear plants have way better containment, and e.g I advocate heavily for SMRs [1]. But the fear of nuclear pre-SMR is completely justified and correct as I argued above.

[1] I suppose practically, the ones with 10km radius are also OK. Gen III I think? That is a reasonable region to tell people "if you live here, you might have to evacuate and you might be screwed". Any system with a zone beyond that should always be opposed.

Yes that's the point. Dam failure is much worse and actually the largest event of fatalities related to power generation was a dam breaking. Yet people are not against dams at all, even though they are not much better in terms of risks.

It's entirely irrational just like people who are scared of flying.

It's actually not, as it correctly states 50 direct fatalities.

What is grossly messed up are, or were, the initial projections of thousands, ten-thousand, no hundreds of thousands or even millions of fatalities.

The WHO does a report every decade on the health effects of Chernobyl. Each report had to reduce the projected fatalities by an order of magnitude.

One or two reports ago, the psycho-social effects of the evacuation and loss of income from the plant became greater than the effects of radiation, whether direct or indirect.

And of course all the fatalities and more or less all the negative health effects of Fukushima were due to the unnecessary evacuations.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...

Neither case justifies turning off other nuclear reactors. Not even a little.

Radiophobia is more dangerous than radiation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia

> How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short.

Not that many, according to long term studies.

Not many unlike what you want to believe. And there is no mechanism to directly link them to the nuclear meltdown. Since they are suspiciously clustered in specific places, it is more likely that there are other environmental and genetic problems that have more influence than the result of secondary radiation.

In addition to what other comments have said below, it's also important to state that the indirect impacts of the alternatives aren't widely studied, so it's practically impossible to compare. How do we figure out how many people have a significant impact on their life because of the fossil fuel we burn and put all sorts of crap into the atmosphere?

Slovenia has been running a reactor for a good long while without any problems and it's extremely safe. So from our POV, it's much more likely that Austria would prefer everyone around them to import Austrian energy instead of producing their own.

Also, Austria makes no sense. It opposes a new reactor in Slo being built but that means that the current one will just keep getting its life extended. Clearly it's not about safety.

It's the other way around.

Nuclear works now. We just have to build it.

Intermittent renewables supplying an industrial society does not. And there is no way to get from here to there except a lot of handwaving and "magic happens here".

https://image.slidesharecdn.com/20100608webcontentchicagosli...

It’s important to understand the qualifier per unit of energy.

The correct parable for you would have been the number of bear deaths vs interactions with bears weighed against number of car deaths vs interactions with cars.

Not apples to apples.

Just being near a potentially aggressive bear is a bad situation.

Being near a car or a nuclear power plant is not a bad siuation.

Of course you should run in the other direction if you're close to a potentially aggressive bear.

Same thing if you're in the path of an out of control car, or near a nuclear power plant accident.

But you've got to separate the "probability of bad situation occurring" from the "severity of the bad situation when it does occur".

You generally can't really pet a wild brown bear, since they are not interested in humans and would avoid you. You can't run away from it either, since it can outrun you easily

By your logic, it's wrong to spend many billions per year on traffic safety. It should go into bear safety instead.

"Average deaths per TWh produced" is a good yardstick to me.

This analogy is probably wrong.

Still, though, if nuclear continued growing at the same pace it was until the 80s we'd be in a massively better spot climate change wise.

Sure, these days its too expensive in relative terms but switching back to fossil fuels due to all the Chornobyl/Three Mile panic (but mainly likely because of the cost) might end up being one of the bigger mistakes in human history.

We can make nuclear safe (enough) but after one big incident nobody wanted the political career suicide to push for this. So we are stuck with criticizing stone-age level nuclear power because we never took it further. The West never stopped doing something just because the USSR didn’t do it properly.

If we did the same with commercial air travel after the first disasters we’d still cross the oceans in boats. Car accidents kill 10-15 times more people every year worldwide than Chernobyl did but we don’t give up on cars either. Heck, smoking kills 7-8 times more people than cars every year (that’s 80-100 Chernobyls worth every year) and we still allow it.

The reasons are political not technically or financially insurmountable obstacles. We didn’t shut down nuclear in Europe for “green” reasons or because we can’t improve it, or because it kills too many people, but because enough Russian money went into politicians’ pockets to do this.

What kind assumptions is this based on?

> can wipe a continent

Sorry, but no.

Chernobyl exclusion zone is less than a single area of the Agent Orange usage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chernobyl_radiation_map_1...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aerial-herbicide-spray-mi...

No, the exceptions are builds like HPC.

The average build time is currently 6.5 years. The median is lower at 5.8. The variations across both time and space of those average are neither large nor particularly systematic.

There have always been outliers, so if you focus on those you can "prove" anything you like.

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...

In France, the last construction is Flamanville EPR. It is at least 5 times over budget and 15 years late

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Pl...

It won’t be competitive with anything.

But that’s OK, Theresa May signed a guarantee that they’d get paid an uncompetitive price by the taxpayer, regardless.

South Korean company build a NPP in 7 years in Saudi Arabia.

I'm talking about wind turbine wings. A lot of stuff is fiberglass and have to be buried.

I have no idea how this information relates to the parent post;

Ergo FBR, no 10000y+ nuclear waste, problem solved

(there is still very low amount of waste that have a long half-life, really not a big deal)

That’s not how economic viability works. EDF posted €11.4bn net profit in 2024[0] and France is the world’s largest net exporter of electricity precisely because nuclear is economically viable.

Government involvement doesn’t negate viability, it enables it, just like with roads, ports, or any other infrastructure requiring long-term capital deployment.

0: https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/fran...

Nuclear can be turned up and down relatively easily. It's on/off that takes a long time. And you can supplement nuclear with pumped storage hydro to steepen its turn up/down curve in extremis.

They are trying to switch the conversation from electricity where renewables are making unmistakably swift progress, to all energy (e.g. gas for heat in homes and factories and oil for cars and trucks).

They think the horrific inefficiency of fossil fuels in these uses makes progress look slow and futile as it massively inflates the total energy usage.

In reality, once we get the easy bits of renewable electricity done and are at 80% carbon free electricity, these other markets let us avoid the hard part of getting to 100% clean energy but still make rapid progress on decarbonisation.

An EV or heat pump running on mostly clean energy is a 5 or 6x improvement in carbon even before you account for the grid benefits of having such a large amount of battery and heat storage attached to the grid.

I think you're looking at electricity here, not energy. Energy is much more than electricity.

Not everybody live in house and have enough rooftop area. In Europe majority people live in apartments. If you want to have wind warm and solar farm there is also energy wasted with power lines transmission. Energy powerbanks also have energy waste.

I'm all in to have energy mix and more people to have solar panels if they can but it's not a holly grail

> Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations.

Compared to who? In shared link you can see most countries are relying on non renewable energy. The better one is France (nuclear powered) and Norway (hydropowered).

Or rebuild the cooling technology to fit the new and future climate instead of the old one.

I would have thought the solution to drought and water shortages would be to desalinate and reduce water wasted in order to fix the problem. Using a “mix of technologies” is ignoring the problem and trying to work around it instead of fixing it. And given that clearly having extra capacity that you don’t need at any given point in time just in case things go wrong is likely extremely expensive, I don’t really see the incentive. Frankly, even a really simple stupid question: what do you do with solar and/or wind power when it is dark and/or not windy? In other words, those solutions would still not be sufficient to replace nuclear during heat and drought, instead, you would need storage, which could store power from any source, but fixing the root causes of issues with nuclear power would seem more rational to me

Nuclear at $6,000-12,000/kW installed capacity becomes cheaper than solar+battery somewhere between 1-3 days of required backup.

Have you done the math of how insufficient battery tech is, if we are to go 100% renewable? I'm so tired of renewable proponents just use the thought terminating cliche "BATTERIES!" when intermittency is brought up.

There are several factors, but the single biggest reason for nuclear's ever increasing cost is due to construction productivity.

All other forms of productivity have gone up drastically. However construction productivity remains stuck at a constant. And as other areas are more productive, we need to still pay those in construction competitive wages or else they would switch to more productive jobs with higher wages. (Let's just elide the disconnect between wages rising fully with productivity increases, but they do rise some!)

Despite being far more wealthy today than centuries ago, we don't build cathedrals with super intricate stonework, because labor is so much more expensive.

I fear that nuclear is like the gothic cathedral: something that was far easier to do when labor costs were low, but at wealth increases it becomes far more difficult to make economic sense.

Which again does not capture the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.

And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.

Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.

Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants.

Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...

You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market.

Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Analogy doesn’t work, it’s deaths per TWhour that matter.

Solar, wind, and nuclear are all within error of each other in that counting. Three points on that:

1. Almost ALL of that is due to Chernobyl, which has to be recognized as an outlier for multiple reasons. Both in that it should never have happened, and that had they a containment shield it wouldn’t have been any worse than 3MI or Fukushima.

2. Both wind and solar have a lot of industrial and resource extraction costs & pollution that are not being counted here.

3. Land use and environmental impact are a far worse story for wind and solar.

Yes. And in Fukushima, they apparently actually lowered an existing natural barrier.

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Tepco-Rem...

In addition, they didn't have hydrogen recombinators, which for example are/were standard in all German plants. Those plants also had special requirements for bunkers for the Diesel backup generators so they couldn't be knocked out by water.

The point is not about "someone may not err" but about "someone may err", or more precisely "someone WILL err", coupled with the effects of such mistakes.

Failing to correctly design, build, exploit or maintain a wind turbine or solar panel isn't a big deal. Failing to do so on a nuclear reactor can become a huge and lasting disaster for many.

Current Ukraine would beg to differ.

> and on the other side you have that new "nuclear grassroots movement" which tells me that nuclear power is akshually completely safe, and even if an incident happens it's not doing any harm and btw those Chornobyl death numbers are completely overblown

You're making it sound like anyone who's not against nuclear, thinks Chernobyl is overblown

I've never heard that sentiment anywhere. (I'm sure you can find examples when looking for it; after all, there's also people who believe vaccines cause bill gates mind control.) Why the strawman argument?

Great overview! :)