Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy
Some back-of-the-grubby-napkin maths.<p>Nuclear is currently about 10% of global electricity production. We could go all-nuclear, therefore, by going 10x on nuclear reactors (less in fact because there are renewables too but nvm).<p>There have been two major, critical nuclear energy incidents - Chernobyl and Fukushima. I&#x27;ll count them both, though see caveat [1]. That&#x27;s 2 incidents in 50 years. If we went all-nuclear and extrapolated, that&#x27;d be 20 incidents per 50 years, or 40 per century. UN estimates 4,000 deaths from Chernobyl (contentious but I&#x27;ll stick with it). Wikipedia quotes Fukushima as 2,000 deaths - well, 2,002 deaths caused by evacuations and 1 in the incident. Let&#x27;s not mince around and make it 4,000 per pop.<p>40 incidents per century at 4,000 deaths per event, that&#x27;s a total of 160,000 deaths per _century_. In return, we&#x27;re basically carbon-neutral and don&#x27;t need storage. How many people die if we&#x27;re not carbon-neutral? Millions for a start. It seems like a no-brainer to me. Also subtract all the deaths from not-generating power using these now-replaced means, improvements to air quality from not burning stuff, and I think humanity is in a much, much happier place.<p>I&#x27;m not saying nuclear is without downsides, I&#x27;m saying if you take all the downsides on the chin, nuclearise through the nose, you&#x27;re better off than the alternative of burning stuff. Solar and wind are great but plenty of regions would require months worth of storage, which we&#x27;re nowhere near to technologically.<p>So, now some nuance:<p>[1] Chernobyl, as I understand it, was basically man-made. Fukushima happened in one of the most extreme environments - east coast of Japan, one of the world&#x27;s most seismically active regions. Also nuclear safety went ahead since then - these were both designs from 70s (!), we&#x27;re 50 years away from the 70s.<p>[2] There are proliferation risks (though I still question whether they are as bad as global warming), but most of carbon emissions are from rich countries anyway (and we kinda equate rich with non-terrorist).<p>[3] Nuclear is expensive, but it is because it got much safer. We could, presumably, just take the old, less safe designs and build using those - and recreate all the above back-of-the-napkin maths. We could instead assume nuclear is indeed very expensive, but then we&#x27;d need to reduce the expected death toll numbers.<p>[4] Many regions can perhaps, indeed, do without nuclear and rely on solar, wind and hydro - great, good for you. Can you really do it without gas peaker plants or other &quot;top ups&quot;? Well if you can even nicer, but plenty of places cannot. But that&#x27;s all good, that means we need less nuclear to achieve the same zero-carbon goal.