DEBATENATE

Topics / Climate and energy

The challenge

“Nuclear power is too dangerous”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. Measured by deaths per unit of electricity, nuclear is one of the safest ways human beings have ever made power. A study in The Lancet compared energy sources and found coal and oil kill far more people for the same electricity. Nuclear came in at the bottom. Three Mile Island, the worst nuclear plant accident in American history, had no detectable health effects, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And all the spent fuel this country has produced since the fifties would fit on one football field, less than ten yards deep. You'll say Chernobyl. That was a flawed Soviet reactor design, run by operators breaking their own procedures during a test. Let me ask you this. Do you judge flying by the one crash on the news or by the millions of landings? Fear is loud. Data is quiet. Listen to the data.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. Per unit of electricity, nuclear kills far fewer people than coal, oil or gas. Their everyday pollution does more damage than nuclear's rare accidents.

    Markandya and Wilkinson in The Lancet in 2007 estimated deaths per terawatt-hour across energy sources and found nuclear the lowest of those compared, with lignite, coal and oil the highest.

  2. The waste is small, solid and contained. Fossil fuel waste goes straight into the air you breathe.

    The Department of Energy states that all the spent nuclear fuel the United States has produced since the 1950s could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than ten yards.

  3. The worst disaster in history came from a design and a safety culture Western reactors never used.

    The International Atomic Energy Agency's safety advisory group found the Chernobyl accident resulted from flaws in the Soviet RBMK reactor design combined with operators violating procedures during a test.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: America still has no permanent place to put nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain stalled, so the waste just sits at plants around the country.

Nate: That's Washington dodging a decision for decades. It's a political failure, not an engineering one. The waste is a small, solid, tracked volume sitting in steel and concrete casks. Try recalling what already left a smokestack.

What he grants the other side

America still has no permanent repository for its spent nuclear fuel.

The lines

Sources

  1. Markandya, A. and Wilkinson, P., The Lancet, Electricity generation and health (2007)
  2. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Backgrounder on the Three Mile Island Accident (2022)
  3. U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy, 5 Fast Facts about Spent Nuclear Fuel (2020)
  4. International Atomic Energy Agency, International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, INSAG-7: The Chernobyl Accident: Updating of INSAG-1 (1992)

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