The critical difference is the absence of choice… It’s not as if the residents of Fukushima chose to put a solar farm there… they had a nuclear plant that fell in on itself. The nature preserve in Ukraine is great… but it simply wouldn’t be that if there was any choice about it. It may be that the total long-term risks of coal are greater than the short-term, catastrophic risks of nuclear, but they aren’t really the same kinds of risks. They carry very different consequences, and our society isn’t set up to compensate you when your house value goes to nothing because it would give you thyroid cancer to live in it.
I don’t believe that a moral argument based on the incidence of harm will really hold up in the cold light of day.
Firstly, it’s important to make clear, the actual risks associated with nuclear energy are very much lower than those associated with almost any other industry. Fission supplies about 5% of global primary energy. Chernobyl has resulted in, probably (according to things like tracking of over 100 000 “liquidators”, who have not shown the expected increased leukemia rates), fewer than 100 radiation-related deaths. For the world overall, the production & use of energy is thought to result in more than six million deaths annually, about half in small children, the preponderance of which are deaths from air pollution. (Indoor air pollution, from cooking or heating with open fires of wood, straw, dung, or sometimes coal or peat, is a major culprit.) On any reasonable computation, falls among solar-panel installers & wind-turbine maintenance men cause more deaths each year than all atomic-energy-related activities put together!
If we take the absurd claims of the antinuclearites as true, and assume that Chernobyl resulted in a hundred thousand fatalities, we would have to have such an event every week to reach a comparable level of harm ; and with 20 or even 50 times the installed nuclear capacity of today, that’s just plain not going to happen, even if (again an absurd idea) we were to build Chernobyl-style reactors to generate all that energy.
Secondly, I rather think that having your village primary school obliterated by a collapsing heap of coal waste, with all the children inside, as happened at Aberfan, is rather worse than having to leave your home temporarily owing to radioactivity from a damaged atomic plant. Iodine-131, which can put small children at a slightly increased risk of thyroid cancer, especially if they are poorly nourished, has a half life of less than ten days, and is quite chemically active, so after a few weeks only, it is essentially gone. Caesium & strontium are also removed pretty rapidly by the combination of decay & chemical action (which sequesters them into insoluble forms, or washes them into the oceans, where they are diluted into irrelevance). And, again, the best evaluations of the Fukushima accident — an event triggered by a Magnitude 9 earthquake with associated 13-meter tsunami, which actually killed something like twenty thousand people — show that almost everyone who was evacuated would have been safer to shelter in place. The response was disproportionate to the actual risk, and actually caused more harm than it prevented.
Thirdly, what of the risks associated with, say, chemical contamination, or indeed explosions & fires, from a battery factory? (No evacuations in the area around the fire, despite a huge cloud of choking, toxic smoke…) What of the huge quantities of toxic chemicals released by solar panel manufacture? (Silicon Valley has a big share of the nation’s Superfund sites…) What of the very real risk of wind turbines exploding in flames, starting wildfires, & sending their blades flying about like forty-metre, multi-tonne spears, to plunge into houses or vehicles? What of fires & explosions at solar-thermal power plants? These are all very real things. What makes them more acceptable than the remote risks associated with atomic energy? Or, in other words, where exactly do you get off telling me that I have the right to accept those risks, but not to accept the risk which comes with living near a nuclear power plant? Completely passing over the question of consent-based siting, when a facility has a lifespan of 60 years or more, on what grounds can you say that people have no opportunity to choose whether they want to live near it? Comanche Peak has been a damn sight better to the people of Glen Rose than the RSR lead smelter ever was to the people of West Dallas, and that would still be true if both reactors melted down tomorrow.
The empirical evidence bears out exactly what would be expected from the purely theoretical consideration : fission provides enormous benefits, and imposes tiny harms.
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If you want a definition of “large-scale energy”, try this : you have to supply 1000 watts, continuous, per person, to a city of 1 000 000 people.
We know that solar & wind can’t do that. They have to be “backed up” with something, so the obvious question becomes, why don’t you just use the thing that does the backing up, & forget about the solar & wind?
Large amounts of power delivered to concentrated loads are a hallmark of industrial civilization.
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A couple more thoughts.
Firstly, on any sane computation*, you’re more likely to die because a car drives into your house, than from any cause related to nuclear energy.
Second, many antinuclear arguments look a lot like this : “our protester was killed when he threw himself in front of a train, so it must be unsafe to move nuclear fuel by rail”. It’s a stupid argument to make against anything.
The exact same thing would have happened if he’d thrown himself in front of a coal train, except, oops, they don’t have coal trains in France! Wonder why that could be? I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that a single carload of nuclear fuel has the energy content of hundreds of trainloads of coal… One carload of nuclear fuel a year, versus a hundred carloads of coal a day, couldn’t possibly result in safer rail service. That’s silly.
*For a non-sane computation : Helen Caldicott claims that all cancers are caused by radiation, two thirds of them by man-made radiation, & the remaining third by natural radiation. Because the roughly one-third of radiation exposure that folks in the developed world typically receive from manmade sources is almost all from medical X-rays (less than 1% of your typical total exposure has anything to do with civilian atomic power), this means she’s against life-saving diagnostic radiography. Needless to say, nobody with a background in oncology agrees…
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I don’t know who Helen Caldicott is, so if you’re arguing with me you’ve got the wrong guy