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Footballguy
We've also had two military-related nuclear incidents with Hanford (radioactive waste released into groundwater) and SL-1 (reactor exploded).This is wrong, by the way. Nuclear power has been around since the 1970s. In that time, there have been three significant nuclear accidents. One was Chernobyl, which was caused by gross incompetence and horrible design. Nobody takes that particular episode seriously in terms of informing current policy. One was Three Mile Island, which resulted in no deaths. And one was Fukushima, which was the result of a one-off natural disaster. As others have noted, European countries have been using nuclear power pretty extensively for decades without issue. There's no reason to think that our experience would be any different given modern technology and design principles.
By way of contrast, people die all the time in coal-mining accidents, and coal pollutes the air in a manner that causes illness and death. But those deaths don't seem to count because they're insufficiently scary. I'm 100% positive that much of the fear about nuclear energy is driven by the same availability heuristic that causes people to freak out over airline safety and drive instead, even though the latter is way more dangerous.
The thing is, we know their will be more earthquakes. It's going to happen. We are actively beginning a storage plan at San Onofre that relies on containing nuclear waste in thin canisters in a salt-water environment less than 100 feet from the ocean, and 10 inches above the water table. Guess what happened to the waste stored in a similar fashion at Hanford? But it's safe, right? Except for the fact that just last year, they accidentally dropped a 5500 lb canister of waste 18 feet.
European countries have been using nuclear power without issue--if you don't count Russia (twice), I guess. And Germany (fire), Switzerland (partial core meltdown), and the Czech Republic (twice--the second resulting in permanent decommissioning). Each could have ended up catastrophic.
Oh, and there's this:
As of 2014, there have been more than 100 serious nuclear accidents and incidents from the use of nuclear power. Fifty-seven accidents have occurred since the Chernobyl disaster, and about 60% of all nuclear-related accidents have occurred in the USA
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