this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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To be fair we have seen multiple disasters in the past including Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, which have serious and long lasting effects. I'm not against nuclear power but we can't pretend the downsides are just made up or blown out of proportion.
They are sort of blown out of proportion when you take into account modern safety protocols.
Chernobyl and three mile island were user error, fukushima was force majeure.
Since then they've been piloted widely. France has about 50 reactors and a laundry list of smaller errors that we've since learned from.
Have you ever compared the impact of Fukushima compared to the tsunami that caused it?
Other than that, even if we assume rectors keep being old tech from the 60s, never using newer generations of rectors that can be inherently safe: Who cares about a bit of contaminated area, very localized, every few dozen years, when the alternative is a global climate crisis?
More people died in the evacuation of Fukushima than died fighting the meltdown, which was arguably 1.
The tsunami killed over 15,000 people. Awful disaster.
However, Japanese people are very anti-nuclear so their media made it seem that the impact was horrific when, aside from the exclusion zone, wasn’t all THAT bad. However, losing that land was a big hit to a small country.
I'd agree if our only two options were nuclear or coal/oil plants but we have many options that don't require everything be powered from centralized power plants.
I'm sure all the people and companies that exist in these areas. Land is finite and hospitable land is even more finite. Destroying these areas for decades to come isn't any more preferable that the occasional natural disaster rolling through over a few day period.
As I said I'm not against nuclear power and I would love to see more advancements come to fruition, but it doesn't need to be our main source of energy nor is it accurate to claim that the potential issues that come with it are solely overblown conspiracy theories pushed by oil/coal companies.