I beg your pardon? Excessive safety guidelines? Do you have any idea what a large scale nuclear disaster could cause in a densely populated Europe? How close Japan brush with disaster as the Fukushima fallout could have hit the Tokyo region?
> Do you have any idea what a large scale nuclear disaster could cause in a densely populated Europe?
Yes. My idea is that it would be much less harm (to human health and the environment) than is caused by burning brown coal in properly functioning coal-burning power plants.
And much less harm than results from using diesel as a transport fuel. That produces very high levels of carcinogens and other harmful products.
Yet, Europe does both.
Edit: note that these harms are caused every day by equipment working as designed. They are not due to extreme unforeseen circumstances but are accepted as normal.
Have you seen the amount of pointless paperwork that has nothing to do with actual safety/better outcomes that the nuclear industry generates? It’s mind boggling.
Fukushima is a good example of this, because the massive amount of paperwork made it hard to see that they could just spend 1/10th the amount of time, energy, and money and better protect their cooling generators and/or ask for help in time from the navy that was sitting just offshore and willing to help
> Do you have any idea what a large scale nuclear disaster could cause in a densely populated Europe?
Depends, what type of plant?
Plenty of nuclear plant designs that just drop the rods into a water bath and halt all activity.
Do you realize what types of health impacts gas leaks are having on densely populated regions right now?
Or how about fracking destroying drinking water? Higher cancer and birth defect rates for surrounding communities.
> How close Japan brush with disaster as the Fukushima fallout could have hit the Tokyo region?
The amount of fallout from Fukushima was obscenely minuscule. The worst case estimates, by the most pessimistic naysayers, 130 extra deaths will result from the accident. The most commonly agreed upon estimates, 0 additional deaths.
Meanwhile, 13k people dead minimum from coal in America each year. No one even tracks the impact from the literal thousands of natural gas leaks that are ongoing. [1] is a nice visualization of natural gas incidents from 2010 to 2017.
Fukushima was a worst case scenario with massive mismanagement on multiple levels, and the sum environmental impact was less than any of the multiple of oil tanker spills that happen, quite literally, multiple times a year. [2]
I always love the nuclear arguments of "It's SAFE!" immediately followed by, "We just need to remove those pesky safety regulations to make it economical."
I can’t speak for European regulatory bodies, but in the USA the relevant authority is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which was founded in 1974 and approved zero new reactor designs between 1974 and 2020. Conservative doesn’t even begin to describe the stance of regulatory agencies, despite newer designs being much safer from decades of design improvements, nobody wants to be the person responsible for signing off and issuing a safety certification.
