this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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Nuclear suffers from the airplane fallacy where when something goes wrong it tends to go really wrong and a lot of people die at once and it makes the news. But fact is, many orders of magnitude more people have died from fossil fuel plants, mining, byproducts, and combustion. They just die slower, in smaller groups, so it doesn't get reported on as easily.
looks doubtful
I mean, I agree with your broader point that it gets a disproportionate amount of coverage and scares people, but I dunno about nuclear accidents killing people quickly and at once.
I mean, Chernobyl was the worst nuclear incident, ya? Like, there were definitely some people who were killed right there, but it was a pretty small group, even so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster
So, immediate deaths were about 30. I mean, that airline crash we had out in those Spanish islands, whatsit called....
googles
Yeah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
I mean, that killed about 20 times the immediate number of deaths in Chernobyl. I guarantee you that that collision didn't get twenty times the media coverage or concern of Chernobyl.
Even if we use the highest estimated total death figure listed above for Chernobyl for the "increased death rate from minor effects around the world" -- 60,000 -- and I suspect that that's being awfully pessimistic -- it kind of gets dwarfed by how many similar deaths around the world we casually ignore from coal power and the like due to particulate emissions.
googles
If one's worried about death rates, nuclear's at about the bottom of the list.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Isn't it even safer than wind energy ?