this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Oh, I have two good ones:
Nuclear power causes less deaths per energy unit produced than wind. (source
You have slightly less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than living on an average place.
To explain the second: A major misconception is, that nuclear power plants are dangerous due to their radiation. No they aren't. The effect of radiation from the rocks in the ground and the surroundings is on average 50x more than what you get from the nuclear power plant and it's fuel cells. (source). Our body is very well capable of dealing with the constant background radiation all the time (e.g. DNA repairs). Near a power plant, the massive amounts of isolation and concrete will inhibit any background radiation coming from rocks from that direction to you. This means, that you'll actually get slightly less radiation, because the nuclear plant is there.
Nuclear power is actually the cleanest way to produce energy. The waste from replacing solar panels and windmills (which have a service life only three to five years) is actually more of a problem than the waste from spent fuel rods. Plus environmental impacts from fuel rod production are less than solar panel and windmill production. The problem with nuclear energy happens when things go wrong. It would have to be absolutely accident free. It never has been and never will be.
Though they're on the right track with nuclear power. Fusion would be ideal, runs on seawater (fuses deuterium/tritium) and if there's a problem you simply shut off the fuel. Problem is insurmountable engineering issues, we just don't have tech for it yet (need anti-gravity). They've been working on it for many decades and progress has been painfully slow.
Even when things go wrong, it's not as bad as with the other classic fossile energy sources. Exactly this calculation is included in the world in data source on deaths per kWh which I linked.
When we have car accidents normalised, massive climate change, air pollution from fossile fuels, then even the occasional nuclear accident isn't really a problem.
The problem is, that these accidents get much more attention than they deserve given how many deaths are caused by fossile fuels. When calibrating for deaths, fossile fuels should get around 100x the attention