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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: 0s | 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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LinXitoW ◴[13 Sep 25 09:22 UTC] No.45230649[source]▶
These are death rates with the current saturation of plants. If we wanted to cover all of Europe, a much more densely populated area, with nuclear, the deaths (and other negative consequences) would be far greater, no?
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1. yellowapple ◴[14 Sep 25 20:00 UTC] No.45242763[source]▶
The thing about nuclear is that the land area consumed per unit of energy is, like the deaths per unit of energy, extremely low. You can “cover all of Europe” without needing to put very many people (if any) in the potential exclusion zone.

Even with that being said, those safety numbers have held even with China building large numbers of reactors in relatively dense areas. I'd be surprised if European reactors turned out to pose much of a higher risk.