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Originally Posted by Frank MetaMusil
Not sure that's such a good idea given the Earth's decision to shift plates and cause a tsunami, which basically hosed Japan's health anyway. I might be one of the few that finds that ironic though.....
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Again this is the nirvana fallacy, comparing nuclear to some magic energy source with zero impact on the environment and population rather than comparing it to the alternatives and their impacts.. compare it to the morbidity and deaths due to coal generation, or due to people having to use dung or wood to cook (tens of thousands of children in India die each year from this), etc.
So the extra 20 to 1000 deaths over the next 100 years due to the accident has to be compared to the deaths if all that electricity had been generated with coal.. that'd be 2000 to 1 million instead. Plus the future impact of global warming on food, land, war, etc (which are difficult to quantify of course).
And that's assuming that risks can't be further mitigated, which they can, in Japan if the generators hadn't been sitting out in the open to be drown it wouldn't have been as big an issue. And the reactors were well beyond their design life, with human decisions to extend rather than retire being a problem.
Plus there are reactor designs that could be far safer, including new ones like LFTR that may be able to be designed to be inherently safe (i.e. they shut down all by themselves if power is lost, through basic physics rather than a shutdown system). Other countries are starting to move on these kinds thankfully.
We'll never have an energy source that has zero impact, but we could have one that has less overall impact.