[fergonco]

How are nimby crowds insane? Accidents may happen. And did happen in the past in that same place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

[alright2565]

Coal plants have killed a minimum of 500k people over the past 20 years[1]. It's not an accident in that case, it's known and planned for (or at least easily predicted enough that it should have been).

But when a few hundred people, or really just 0 people[2] die in one place at one time, people lose their minds.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/23/coal-pow... [2]: An inter-agency analysis concluded that the accident did not raise radioactivity far enough above background levels to cause even one additional cancer death among the people in the area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

[Symmetry]

I tried to do the math once to figure out if Japan would have been better off building a coal power plant instead of Fukushima, the nuclear plant that had the worst disaster in any western country. It was a surprisingly tough question.

https://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-v...

[AdamN]

First off - plenty of people are against coal plants for health reasons in addition to the environmental reasons. There is nobody cheering coal and blocking nuclear (and please don't bring up the Germany decommissioning of nuclear plants and keeping open coal plants because it doesn't speak to what I just said). Secondly, Three Mile Island represents the path to a possible outcome. Just because disaster was averted doesn't mean that the thinking about safety shouldn't be focused on the worst case scenario instead of the one that actually happened.

[Y-bar]

I’m not the person you responded to, but have an honest question here since we are specifically talking about NIMBYism: How much less of NIMBY is there against coal power plants? For example are there examples of people rejecting NPP in their vicinity while accepting CPP?

[elil17]

That's just 500k Americans - far more people have been killed globally.

[fergonco]

Well, not coal plants but emissions. I guess those nymbis would also be against having all that pollution concentrated in their back yard.

My point is that it is not insane. Maybe selfish. Not willing to have risks with potential catastrophic results near your home is the most normal thing.

And with nuclear, the probability is very low, as with planes. Yet it happens. All the time. Our generation went through three once in a lifetime crisis in the last two decades.

[elil17]

It's insane because killing people is the modus operandi of fossil fuel power - and I'm not even talking about climate change. People often die on oil fields and in mines, toxic waste from coal plants leaches into our water supply, and ash enters our air and causes asthma and heart problems. Coal alone has killed about 460,000 Americans in the 21st century: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/23/coal-pow...

Nuclear power plants, in contrast, very rarely have issues: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

[weberer]

Its crazy how this resulted in 0 deaths, yet it pretty much halted nuclear power production for good in the US.

[brookst]

If only safety was a matter of system design and operational practices, not geographic location.

[unglaublich]

Because the alternative, fossil fuel generation, is much, much more polluting and deadly.

[Nullabillity]

Another alternative would be to not build the datacenter...

[himinlomax]

Nobody died at TMI.

Nobody died at Fukushima (from the nuclear incident that is, 10000 died because of the Tsunami)

Hundreds of people died at Chernobyl.

Those are all the major accidents at production nuclear power plant that have ever occured. There are no others.

There is just one that was deadly, and it is about as representative of the safety of nuclear power as flying in a 1920s' plane compared to a state of the art Airbus.

[satiric]

No one died at Fukushima... They did have to evacuate over 150,000 people though. I'm not sure we should be normalizing that.

[1970-01-01]

Accidents will happen daily. Those accidents are extremely well controlled. You are providing an excellent example by jumping to that insane NIMBY conclusion. I think MS can successfully bulldozer these extremely weak arguments about catastrophic accidents better than I could. Stay tuned.

[mpweiher]

What were the effects of the TMI accident, in your opinion?

[hulitu]

> How are nimby crowds insane? Accidents may happen. And did happen in the past in that same place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

That would not be a problem. FAANG controls the OSs and the media. /s