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EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

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1041 points mpweiher | 1 comments | 12 Sep 25 18:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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binaryturtle ◴[12 Sep 25 18:49 UTC] No.45225297[source]▶
This is clean, until something goes catastrophically wrong.

(Which eventually it will. The more reactors, the more chances for it to happen.)

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yellowapple ◴[12 Sep 25 18:58 UTC] No.45225403[source]▶
Even accounting for the times things have gone “catastrophically wrong”, nuclear is many orders of magnitude safer per unit of energy than every other energy source except solar.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

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ryao ◴[12 Sep 25 19:28 UTC] No.45225725[source]▶
Data reported by Forbes put the death rates for nuclear power in the US below all other sources of energy including solar:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

The death rates are wildly different than the ones at the site you linked. I wonder what the reason is for the discrepancy.

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1. everforward ◴[12 Sep 25 21:35 UTC] No.45227043[source]▶
The death rates might be a difference in units; the Forbes article is using deaths per trillion kWh, the other might be deaths per thousand/million kWh.

The difference in ranking might be down to how they model deaths from nuclear power accidents. One may be using the linear no threshold model, and the other may be using something else. We don't have an agreed upon model for how likely someone is to die as a result of exposure to X amount of radiation, which causes wide gaps in death estimates.

E.g. Chernobyl non-acute radiation death estimates range from 4,000 to 16,000, with some outliers claiming over 60,000. That's a wild swing depending on which model you use.