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Notes -
Did you happen to see the Safe Enough guest book review on ACX? I thought it was a neat look into the genesis of this regulatory regime.
I did read that. But I think it's silly to go to huge such huge efforts to reduce risk in nuclear energy while we pump out enormous amounts of air pollution with coal. Tens of thousands die every year in the US alone, millions worldwide... and people are worried about potential risks from freak events? We should worry about large, real, experienced dangers rather than small, unreal, conjecture-based dangers.
I see Fukushima and raise dam failures - those actually kill people in huge numbers. One dam failure in China made Fukushima look like a joke - 11 million homeless, 171,000 dead. Yet nobody scrambles to prevent dams being built, blanket-bans them by law.
As for the worst case scenarios... there's excessive hysteria about radiation. The methodology is dubious at best, linear no-limit threshold models are just a guessing game of extrapolating from real danger to effects that can't even be observed. It's unscientific and defies reason - should we build giant shades to blot out the sun (a major source of radiation)? If there's no safe threshold for nuclear-derived radiation, why should there be a safe threshold for UV (which again kills orders of magnitude more than nuclear energy ever has every single year). The cost of a major nuclear disaster is a social construct, people feeling like they ought to evacuate, be stressed or expensively clean up despite the effects being small. There's zero existential risk as well.
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