The death toll from Fukushima is in the low triple digits at most.
Pollution from coal kills hundreds of thousands of people a year when it's working normally. (This is even if we completely ignore the effects of global warming, whose future death toll is unknown).
Nuclear being seriously dangerous because of a few isolated accidents IS your imagination. It's similar to people who refuse to fly, and drive long distances instead.
The problem is that nuclear "oopses" effectively become forever problems due to the half-life of the materials involved. When the worst-case scenario makes a location a permanent hazard / permanent toxic pollution generator, it's reason enough to say no.
Every other form of pollution can at least be cleaned up in a human timeframe. This kind can't even be approached by machines without them breaking down.
The only way I'd ever support nuclear power is if the nuclear industry were to develop an actually safe reactor (and by safe I mean that it's literally IMPOSSIBLE to cause a nuclear hazard, not "we have safety protocols in place"). But so far that hasn't happened in any meaningful way, so I'm all for dismantling everything and forbidding any new reactors until they can actually prove their safety (this is where I applaud Merkel).
But that's never going to happen, because big projects like this are full of graft, lies, payoffs, and plain fraud (just look at Boeing). So effectively, I don't expect I'll ever be anything but anti-nuclear. And that's a shame, because it has huge potential :/
Coal vs. Nuclear is a false dichotomy. We need to double down on renewables that by some estimates are already cheaper to build let alone to run and to decommission when plants reach their end of life.
And those accidents didn’t cost any money at all, and if they did, all costs were carried by the owners of the plants. And you believe the fantasy that the only deaths caused by Chernobyl was the firefighters and a few people working at the plant. And as usual, you ignore the question of the waste.
And there are other alternatives than coal, which are much more economical than nuclear when each producer carries their own costs, including environmental and insurances.
I don’t have a problem with people disagreeing with me about nuclear, but I do have a problem who are so narrow minded and lazy that they group everyone that have different ideas than themselves together.
LOL, I actually grew up near Chernobyl and my parents STILL work on CHNPP. So I do know a thing or two about the tragedy.
One thing for sure is that it is very speculative to assume pretty much any death toll rather then immediate deaths by liquidators right after the tragedy (<100). I am not sure that cancer rates in Chernobyl are greater than average or, especially, near the vicinity of coal/gas plant.
And if you really have a degree in physics you should know that nuclear waste is a very manageable problem. Finally nobody advocates about building more ChNPP style reactors - there are plenty extremely safe alternatives. France is a good example on this
Just because it’s very hard to estimate the exact excess deaths or cancers doesn’t mean there aren’t any. There are estimates from 4000 up to near a million early deaths, with the lower probably more reliable, but that is far from none or a few. Ukraine are still spending about 6% of its budget on costs related to the accident.
And it is just pure bullshit that nuclear waste is manageable. Or tell me why there’s still no long term storage facility open anywhere in the world. It’s not that they haven’t spent decades trying. The only way waste management isn’t a problem is if you just say it is someone else’s, ie, future generations problem, or if you rely on reprocessing that still won’t reduce all waste, or also seems to be hard to find economy in.
Pollution from coal kills hundreds of thousands of people a year when it's working normally. (This is even if we completely ignore the effects of global warming, whose future death toll is unknown).
Nuclear being seriously dangerous because of a few isolated accidents IS your imagination. It's similar to people who refuse to fly, and drive long distances instead.