Countries which have had nuclear leaks or meltdowns: 15.
Number of nuclear leaks and meltdowns since 1952 (only those which resulted in loss of human life or >US$50K property damage): ~100.
About 60% of those have been in the USA, allegedly the most advanced country in the world.
Note that the USA requirements for nuclear reactor waste (yes, they produce toxic waste; they are not clean), last time I checked, required the canisters to be able to survive for 300 years. The waste lasts longer than 300 years.
Two years ago the USA had a leak which spilled ~400,000 gallons of radioactive water into a major river system, and it was covered up for two years.
Finally: If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.
Statistics like these are largely useless for comparison for several reason. One of these is the small sample size of nuclear accidents while the probability distribution of their impact exhibits an extremely high kurtosis risk, what Nassim Taleb calls a "Black Swan". All it takes is one Chernobyl-level accident in a densely populated area, and these statistics would look significantly worse for nuclear energy.
But even if you could avoid an extremely large number of immediate and long-term deaths from the accident, suddenly having to evacuate and relocate tens of millions of people overnight would take most countries to the brink of collapse.
And none of that even takes into account how completely uncompetitive nuclear energy is in economic terms, how long it would take to build new plans, and that long-term storage of radioactive waste still lacks a proper solution despite decades of work. It's a dead technology, and the time has come to stop wasting resources on trying to make it work when those could be used much more productively to accelerate the move towards renewables.
>And none of that even takes into account how completely uncompetitive nuclear energy is in economic terms
Nuclear is extremely price competitive if you actually force carbon producing power generation methods to pay to clean up the pollution they emit. Which is something we require of nuclear but for some reason not any other.
> long-term storage of radioactive waste still lacks a proper solution despite decades of work.
This is both a solved problem and also a non-problem. Advanced nuclear reactor designs have effectively zero waste.
> It's a dead technology, and the time has come to stop wasting resources on trying to make it work when those could be used much more productively to accelerate the move towards renewables
> Nuclear is extremely price competitive if you actually force carbon producing power generation methods to pay to clean up the pollution they emit. Which is something we require of nuclear but for some reason not any other.
Price competitive with fossil fuels. Still 10x the cost of renewables. Please do implement a carbon price though.
Also they don't clean up. There are unremediated uranium mines, nuke plants, mills, and plutonium separation facilities all over the world that are just left for the public to deal with while any money set aside is embezzeled or is only a fraction of what is needed for cleanup.
> This is both a solved problem and also a non-problem. Advanced nuclear reactor designs have effectively zero waste.
Closed fuel cycles are not a thing.
It's never happened. It's not on the drawing board. No series program is trying. The one reactor that allegedly could have a breeding ratio over one is used in a plutonium shell game and achieves nothing other than a small boost in fuel economy for some other reactors and to keep some weapons grade plutonium ready.
Reprocessing does nothing other than spew fission products everywhere.
And yet, in nuclear's first half-century of existence no such accident has happened. And the next half-century has technology to be far, far safer than the first.
And if you would like to dispute my claim of negligible deaths or injuries, please tell me what percentage of a whole is considered negligible for you? 1%? 0.1%? I'd like to use that information to tailor my reply to your response.
Are you suggesting that Mayak was densely populated in 1957? Or that it even is today? Neither of us would have ever heard of the place, or any place within a thousand kilometers ten times its size, if not for the 1957 incident.
You're still trying to distract from your claims that no nuclear incident that could wipe out a city has ever happened. Remoteness of the destruction isn't a counter argument.
This is only valid reasoning if the danger from those TWh is passed and is a statistically significant sample.
It also intentionally ignores the hundreds of thousands of mining and mill workers and indiginous people living near unremediated mines in India, Uzbekistan, Niger, Usa, Kazakhstan, Mayak, and so on.
Lots of people have been killed by dam failures. 240,000 people just from the failure of the Banqiao and Shimantan Dams in 1975, according to wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure
But I don't see anyone calling for an end to hydroelectric power. Fission power certainly has it's issues, but I think a lot of the opposition to it is more emotional than rational.
But, to be fair, you almost never hear about the direct risks to humans, only their affect on the ecosystem.
I think if you asked most people whether the dam upstream from their home could burst and kill them, they'd say "that can't happen anymore", whereas if you asked about the nuclear plant upwind from their house, they'd say "yes, nuclear plants are fundamentally unsafe". That's the opposite of what you'd say if you just looked at the number of historical deaths, which is why I suspect it does not come from a cold-blooded look at those statistics, but from somewhere else.
There's quite a big difference between objecting to specific instances of hydroelectric power and opposition to the entire concept (as exists for nuclear fission)
Not when the reactor is melting down or exploding, it doesn't. :) People don't really have much of a problem with properly-functioning nuclear reactors.
But if we both want to consume electricity - than we do have to make a choice about that source of electricity. And the data constituently says nuclear is far safer than coal, even though coal is far more common.
So it really is 'apples vs. oranges' when comparing nuclear v. coal.
Unfortunately it only addresses the spent fuel rods themselves, not the large amounts of medium and low-level waste from operation and (especially) decommissioning of reactors.
How radioactive? Bananas are "radioactive" and so are you. As far as I can tell the amount didn't actually pose a health risk to anyone.
> If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.
I would live near a nuclear reactor. I wouldn't prefer it, as the cooling towers are unsightly. But I wouldn't be worried about safety. Definitely preferable to living next to a coal plant!
I'd much rather live next to a nuclear plant than a wind/solar farm of the same output. The size difference is enormous. Not even counting that the renewables would also need a spare gas plant on standby.
> Finally: If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.
Did anyone even make this point? What's more I don't think any one wants any kind of power plant next to their house. That's why they're zoned.
> Finally: If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.
Are you willing to have a smoking a coal plant right beside your house? You are aware that they release orders of magnitude more radiation than a nuclear power plant, and are orders of magnitude more likely to have a disaster happen to them, right?
> If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.
If you are not willing to have a pig farm right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a hypocrite and should not really be eating meat.
Don't forget everyone who lives downriver from that dam all the way to the ocean. Living next to it but out of the path of the water, or above it, would be fine.
I used to live in a small city on the coast that was a 20 minute drive from a nuclear plant and also downstream from a hydroelectric dam.
There are no more supporters of nuclear than people who live and work in this industry. So if you are trying to say that people who live next to NPP are “against” it, you say a wrong statement.
Countries which have had nuclear leaks or meltdowns: 15.
Number of nuclear leaks and meltdowns since 1952 (only those which resulted in loss of human life or >US$50K property damage): ~100.
About 60% of those have been in the USA, allegedly the most advanced country in the world.
Note that the USA requirements for nuclear reactor waste (yes, they produce toxic waste; they are not clean), last time I checked, required the canisters to be able to survive for 300 years. The waste lasts longer than 300 years.
Two years ago the USA had a leak which spilled ~400,000 gallons of radioactive water into a major river system, and it was covered up for two years.
Finally: If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.