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Notes -
Nuclear does have tail risks, but those tail risks are not really that significant. On the whole, you probably get more exposure to radiation through breathing in slightly radioactive particulates from coal burning and mining than you do from nuclear power. The fact is, there is no such thing as perfectly safe power. People die from air pollution, they die from mining rare metals for solar power, they die in steel mills making wind turbines, they die on oil rigs and on dams. And, if the predictions regarding climate change are credible, many people will die from that too.
Because this is what politicians and environmentalists demand as a way to make nuclear power uneconomical. But the fact is that even if we decided to cordon off a few square kilometers of some worthless desert, that would be nothing compared to the huge areas that need to be mined to supply coal, or the areas needed to generate substantial amounts of solar power, or the land flooded when dams are built.
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