It's like with cars vs. airplanes. Most people learned to live with the comparatively high risk of driving a car, yet often have a (silent) fear of flying Boeing/Airbus even though they are much safer. Psychological effect of high-profile airplane accidents vs. small scale (but much more numerous) car deaths.
The list of e.g. hydroelectric accidents is very long and deadly, but they are not as "spectacular". How many people are aware of Banqiao Dam failure, which killed 250 000 people and with that single-handedly exceeded the death toll of all nuclear accidents combined?
There's actually several studies of energy sources and their "deaths per TWh" and nuclear usually comes out as the safest.
> It's like with cars vs. airplanes. Most people learned to live with the comparatively high risk of driving a car, yet often have a (silent) fear of flying Boeing/Airbus even though they are much safer.
I don't feel this is a serious comparison, let alone conveys the tradeoffs that need to be considered.
The risk on the table is pretty much the NIMBY rationale: if you're arguing about risks and given that it's unthinkable to presume that there is zero chance of experiencing problems on any type of power plant, do you prefer to deal with a technology whose failure mode does not have any significant impact or do you wish to deal with a technology whose failure modes involve the need to create and manage exclusion zones with a radius of dozens of km which persist for decades on end? This is particularly relevant as we consider that the bulk of energy demands come from densely occupied urban regions.
And regarding safety, this sort of risk assessment stats used to push Nuclear as a safe alternative fails to take into account the strategic importance of a power plant and how they are automatically targets in any national security scenario. Thus extrapolating peace time statistics, which are already quite bad, also fails to adequately classify the full risks of relying on nuclear.
Let me spell it out: more people will die and suffer if we don't support nuclear. There is no way to fix it with renewables. It would just waste the time and amplify the damages.
The list of e.g. hydroelectric accidents is very long and deadly, but they are not as "spectacular". How many people are aware of Banqiao Dam failure, which killed 250 000 people and with that single-handedly exceeded the death toll of all nuclear accidents combined?
There's actually several studies of energy sources and their "deaths per TWh" and nuclear usually comes out as the safest.