this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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To be fair, it does have the most potential to cause harm if you exclude every kind of fossil fuel. And hydroelectric. That said, there isn't a chance in hell I'm going to protest fission if the only alternative is more coal/gas.
And yet by KWH produced it's the safest by a large margin (safer than solar and wind), and that includes Chernobyl happening, arguably pretty close to "worst case".
Potential is meaningless. Real-world experience has demonstrated it.
Nuclear's problem is that, when an issue happens, it is so very visible.
The millions of people dying every year to air pollution are far more spread out, so who cares?
You're more likely to crash in a car, yet people are (generally) far more scared of planes.
Visibility is a very real problem in environmental measures that I rarely see discussed.
The example that comes to mind is Madrid. Over the past few years there have been many measures to divert the traffic from the city centre. At a "visible" level this is great, which results in less pollution in the city centre, less traffic, less noise. All amazing. If you delve a bit deeper though, this hasn't been backed up properly by additional public transport, or encouraging working from home, or anything like that. So people who work in the area are having to drive more kilometres, so that they can go around the city centre, resulting in more emissions and pollution overall. The catch? It's in the impoverished areas of the outskirts. Therefore invisible.
The governments look amazing at improving the pollution in the city centres not by addressing it, but by moving it somewhere else. Most times they opt for what is "visibly" good rather than what will actually result in a measurably better outcome. The negative effects of nuclear are very visible, so that weighs a lot in the decisions unfortunately.
And this is exactly why mass shootings get all the news cycles, but the much more common gang violence doesn't.
Which is incredibly dumb and why we can't have nice things. The solutions to the more impactful, everyday issues like car crashes and gang violence are very different from the solutions to more rare, but more "newsworthy" issues like airplane failure and mass shootings.
Its invisible like tuberculosis deaths. 4000 a day yet nobody cares cos its poor people that are not politicaly usefull dying.