If you look only at deaths yes. But radioactive contamination can lead to a lot more damage to health and nature than just deaths. As an example, Fukushima caused 1 death but its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic. Yet usually only deaths are factored in.
And the biggest issue is that one incident can cause so much of it. Add to the fact that we tend to rely on the lowest bidder who will then inevitably cut corners to make as much of a profit for their shareholders, and accidents will happen. Also, there's proliferation risk. No, nuclear material from power plants isn't useable for nuclear bombs but it is for dirty bombs.
If we do it, it should be state managed like the military. We don't let commercial parties play around with nuclear bombs. Why should they be trusted with power plants that contain a hell of a lot more nuclear material?
Edit: oh and uranium mining is also pretty polluting business.
I'm not saying that coal is better. But renewable certainly is. That should be the #1 goal, and the base load met by power storage. Only by nukes if there's no other way.
Anyway that's my opinion as an environmental type.
Being detectable isn’t very interesting. Modern technology can detect vanishingly small concentrations of weird isotopes. No harm came to anybody on the other side of the ocean from that stuff.
Now consider a pollutant like mercury. It goes far beyond being merely detectable. There’s so much mercury in the oceans that it’s unsafe to eat seafood too often. Most of that came from human activity. A huge chunk of it came from burning coal. An entire category of food poisoned planetwide!
"Detecting Fukishima" from North America was no mean feat .. it was akin to hearing the footfall of an ant several miles away.
The radiometric procedure here was (IIRC) replace a large number of air filter mats in a large number of HVAC units and after a week to cycle them back and then reduce the "contaminated" mats down to samples that sat within highly sensitive high crystal volume spectrometers for 72 hours or more.
The 'normal' environmental radiation event count level in 40 litres of doped Sodium Iodide scintillation Crystals (if that's what was used) at some 80m above ground level is between one and two thousand events per second.
The Fukishima signature gamma events came to a few thousand in 72 hours (again, IIRC) whch had to be teased out from a flood of other events many magnitudes greater in count.
Absolutely not enough to be concerned about, but a seriously interesting bit of detection work.
And if nuclear became the default clean energy technology, it would have to be shared worldwide. Every country with the same issues, but varying levels of competence, political alignment, terror risks etc. do we want 100 000 nuclear power stations?
(Edit: although maybe thorium might shift the calculation.)
Focusing on anything except damage/kWh tends to increase damage/kWh.
> its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic
Ostrich Worship -- using detection limits as a proxy for harm -- implicitly promotes damage that is difficult to quantify over damage that is easy to detect in the most minute quantities. It elevates burying your head in the sand into a principle. The fact that nuclear pollution can be detected in mind-bendingly minute quantities is a very dumb reason to be anti-nuclear.
> one incident can cause so much of it
Headline Bias is usually something people aim to avoid rather than celebrate. Hundreds of thousands of slip-and-fall accidents from contractors running around rooftops can't reasonably be rounded to 0 on account of being individually "boring," yet that's what you do when you focus on the biggest incident. Speaking of which, do you oppose hydro-power on the basis of the Banqiao Dam disaster?
> Edit: oh and uranium mining is also pretty polluting business.
Single Ended Comparisons are the root of all evil. PV cells and windmills don't pop into existence without side effects. Their big problem is that you need a lot of them to generate electricity, leading to a lot of side effects.
> I'm not saying that coal is better. But renewable certainly is.
It's not. Or it wasn't. I'm extremely relieved that after 50 years we finally found a low-CO2 power solution that self-styled greens don't fight tooth and nail, and on that count solar and wind are unbeatable. But we had the solution. We could have been done phasing out CO2-emitting sources if we had just kept up the pace on nuclear rollout. Instead, we have just begun. The 50 gigatons excess CO2 emissions (so far, USA only) in order to wait for solar and wind to become economical were an absolute travesty.
And the biggest issue is that one incident can cause so much of it. Add to the fact that we tend to rely on the lowest bidder who will then inevitably cut corners to make as much of a profit for their shareholders, and accidents will happen. Also, there's proliferation risk. No, nuclear material from power plants isn't useable for nuclear bombs but it is for dirty bombs.
If we do it, it should be state managed like the military. We don't let commercial parties play around with nuclear bombs. Why should they be trusted with power plants that contain a hell of a lot more nuclear material?
Edit: oh and uranium mining is also pretty polluting business.
I'm not saying that coal is better. But renewable certainly is. That should be the #1 goal, and the base load met by power storage. Only by nukes if there's no other way.
Anyway that's my opinion as an environmental type.