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Nuclear fusion reaction releases almost twice the energy put in
(www.newscientist.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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Comparing (some) other forms of energy's deaths to nuclear is like comparing mosquito bites to shark bites. A sharks kill a lot less people than mosquitoes, but a mosquito bite won't make the news.
Well, we all die at some point, be it from malaria, nuclear fallout, cancer, car accidents, heart failure, stupidity, etc.
There are more mosquitoes on the planet than they are nuclear reactors, So I'm not sure what you think you're trying to show with that graph.
The point is a nuclear reactor failing catastrophically, yeah it's a more rare event than dying from malaria, but we seem to treat malaria treatment better than we do reactor designs and operations, especially when profits are involved.
And a person dying for malaria, doesn't put a pox of the lands around them for centuries making it unusable to anyone else. The risk versus reward calculation is much different, it's not strictly just a quantity of deaths issue.
And even if you want to talk just about the odds of failure/death, I'm sure all the dinosaurs scoffed at the idea of being killed by an asteroid, until one fateful day (how's that for a non-sequitur example!). Or flying by plane is the safest form of travel, unless you're in a 737 Max, then safety be damned.
Does climate change caused by the coal industry not fall under the "pox of the lands" category?
Eventually, yes, but a lot slower. And you can definitely put one as an S tier threat and the other one as an A tier threat.
And as I stated, if we have fusion and solar/battery then we don't have to worry about that from either of them anymore.
The graph is per terra-watt hour. My point is that watt for watt nuclear is actually one of the safest forms of energy.
Many deaths over a period of time aren't necessarily better than less deaths in an instant.
And flying is the safest form of travel, which makes the Boeing 737 Max the Chernobyl of planes I guess.
The point is the chance of failure, even if they haven't happened in a higher quantity so far, is very high, higher in nuclear power plants as they are currently designed or have been designed in the past, than other forms as you have described or supposedly newer ones that are on the designing boards as we speak. And when they fail, they fail too catastrophically, too horrendous for Humanity to have too many of those.
Just one more time, because I don't want to keep the conversation up, but I'm not anti-nuclear, just anti-old and current nuclear. Get those new smaller salt based low risk of catastrophic failure easier to operate by humans and handles human errors more gracefully reactors out there and I'll be just fine with those.