The context is a long string of nuclear incidents throughout the Cold War through to the ‘90s.
Not just Chernobyl, not just Fukushima, but the string of disasters at Windscale / Sellafield and many others across the globe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
These disasters were huge, newsworthy and alarmingly regular. People read about those getting sick and dying directly as a result. They felt the cleanup costs as taxpayers. They saw how land became unusable after a large event, and, especially terrifying for those who had lived as adults through Cold War, saw the radioactive fallout blown across international borders by the wind.
It’s not Greenpeace or an anti-nuclear lobby who caused the widespread public reaction to nuclear. It was the public reaction seeing it with their own eyes, and making an understandable decision that they didn’t like the risks.
Chernobyl was one hammer blow to the coffin lid, Fukushima the second, but nuclear power was already half-dead before either of those events, kept alive only by unpopular political necessity.
I’m not even anti-nuclear myself, but let’s be clear: the worldwide nuclear energy industry is itself to blame for the lack of faith in nuclear energy.
Nuke plants are scary when they fail, but the actual threat is way lower than we play it out to be.
Also remember that at each major incident, despite the failures that led to it, people fought tirelessly, in several cases sacrificing themselves, to reduce the scope of the disaster. Each of them could have potentially been worse. We are lucky in that the worst case death figures have not been added to the statistics.
Chernobyl was a poor, badly run reactor that was designed badly decades ago. I don't know why we paint all of nuclear with that brush, other than folks fall victim to availability bias all the time.
The other point is that we sweep aside externalities for all forms of power generation. People don't think of coal as dangerous, but it's killed far more than nuclear.
This is a crazy understatement of just how many human-years of life have been lost due to that incident. How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short. I am amazed this isn't more widely known, and I always find it suspicious when people downplay the real extent of the damage that has been done, to human lives.
Just saying that only 50 people died is pretty messed up in my opinion.
Not only that, but it also produces less radioactive leakage than many other kinds of power sources that depend on resource mining on a large scale (looking at coal plants in particular here)
What is grossly messed up are, or were, the initial projections of thousands, ten-thousand, no hundreds of thousands or even millions of fatalities.
The WHO does a report every decade on the health effects of Chernobyl. Each report had to reduce the projected fatalities by an order of magnitude.
One or two reports ago, the psycho-social effects of the evacuation and loss of income from the plant became greater than the effects of radiation, whether direct or indirect.
And of course all the fatalities and more or less all the negative health effects of Fukushima were due to the unnecessary evacuations.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
Neither case justifies turning off other nuclear reactors. Not even a little.
Radiophobia is more dangerous than radiation.
Every decade, the WHO publishes a report on the health effects of Chernobyl. Every decade, they had to reduce the projections for casualties.
By an order of magnitude.
When it happened, we didn't know better. Now we do.
People are irrationally scared by large incidents and under-represent the regular deaths and costs that occur during operation.
People agree with fatalities per hour of travel because it makes sense. If you're a really frequent flyer, you are more likely to die. In nuclear, I don't give a crap how many watt hour the plant 1000km away from me is generating, I don't want it to affect me. I am however OK with the plant next door affecting me, because I have a say in that. I can choose to live elsewhere.
Someone mentioned rooftop solar causing more deaths. If my rooftop solar falls on my head, only I die.
You can't just reduce everything to aggregate statistics. The relationship and proximity of the affected to the thing that causes the accident also matters.
> Coal
Yes, but the miners die, and only his family face the consequences. Some unrelated guy 50km away doesn't. BIG difference.
Now, modern nuclear plants have way better containment, and e.g I advocate heavily for SMRs [1]. But the fear of nuclear pre-SMR is completely justified and correct as I argued above.
[1] I suppose practically, the ones with 10km radius are also OK. Gen III I think? That is a reasonable region to tell people "if you live here, you might have to evacuate and you might be screwed". Any system with a zone beyond that should always be opposed.
[1] ... and it is on-going. It is happening right now.
Counting deaths does not do the actual damage justice.
But people are ideologically driven against it, in a quasi-religious way (worse than actual soft religion followers actually). There is no way to properly argue with those people, just like flat earthers, so we get the current sentiment on nuclear.
At least it's changing and those people will go the way of the dinosaurs, I hope.
It's entirely irrational just like people who are scared of flying.
And this isn't the first time this happened, had a few debates before and out of nowhere quite a few people insist going as hard as possible, to no end, to dispel "misinformation", like that is what normal people do. I think you should be ashamed of yourselves for denying the pain and suffering of so many people "for a greater purpose".
>Radiophobia
I do not have this issue, I am not scared of a bit higher radiation, I understand the body can deal with quite a lot (compared to normal background).
I am scared of what could happen when humans and their politics get involved. There's more dangers than proper implementation, there can also be sabotage fears, as recent events have shown. I really don't understand why you'd accuse me of such a thing unless you're trying to smear me, which again...makes your rabid responses rather suspicious.
"The RBMK was considered by some in the Soviet Union to be already obsolete shortly after the commissioning of Chernobyl unit 1. Aleksandrov and Dollezhal did not investigate further or even deeply understand the problems in the RBMK, and the void coefficient was not analyzed in the manuals for the reactor. Engineers at Chernobyl unit 1 had to create solutions to many of the RBMK's flaws such as a lack of protection against no feedwater supply. Leningrad and Chernobyl units 1 both had partial meltdowns that were treated, alongside other nuclear accidents at power plants, as state secrets and so were unknown even to other workers at those same plants."
Many dams have been built around the world not for power generation, but to control flooding. The power generation is a secondary concern.
In aggregate dams have saved far more lives, by managing flood waters.
The great thing in 2025 is that we don’t need either the dam or nuclear risk for our electricity needs.
Just build renewables and storage and the risk for the general public is as close to zero as we can get. The only people involved in accidents are those that chose to work in the industry installing and maintaining the gear.
We should of course continue to focus on work place safety but for the general public the risk of a life changing evacuation, radiation exposure or flood from dam failure does not exist.
All the replies other than yours have politely pointed out that you were incorrect.
> >Radiophobia
> I do not have this issue,
The definition says: "...leading to overestimating the health risks of radiation compared to other risks."
That looks exactly like what you are doing.
> I think you should be ashamed of yourselves for denying the pain and suffering of so many people "for a greater purpose".
Nobody here has done that...with possibly one exception.
You are denying the pain and suffering of the people who suffer due to us not adopting more nuclear power. For what "higher purpose" this should be I can't fathom.
The adoption of nuclear power had saved an estimated 1.8 million lives by 2011.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/kh05000e.html
Conversely, the turning off of nuclear power plants or delaying/cancelling of new builds post Chernobyl has cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives.
We estimate that the decline in NPP caused by Chernobyl led to the loss of approximately 141 million expected life years in the U.S., 33 in the U.K. and 318 million globally
https://www.sciencespo.fr/department-economics/sites/science...
A more compact read:
Coal Pollution Likely Kills More People Annually Than Will Ever Die from Chernobyl Radiation
https://reason.com/2016/04/26/more-deaths-from-coal-pollutio...
People fly but it requires a huge amount of trust to put yourself in someone’s hands like that, where if something goes wrong the results are catastrophic. People have faith in the regulations, they trust that the pilots are well-trained and the planes well-maintained, to the point where the chances of catastrophe are so small it overcomes their natural fears.
The same is true of the nuclear industry. The only thing making nuclear a remotely popular option is the extensive regulation which makes the risk to the consumer so small it outweighs their fears.
And the trouble is that it is up against solar and wind, where the cost is much smaller, and the absolute risk - if you discount people who choose to working to install them - really is very close to 0.
How many people's health was impacted from coal and coal burning exhaust, which btw. also includes radioactive particles.