Concorde was the safest form of commercial air-travel, until one day in Paris it wasn't.
Nuclear currently has around 3% share of power generation globally. More share than Concorde had, certainly. But not enough to say definitively that nuclear's comparative safety is not just because of its comparative scarcity. It's been a low-hanging fruit.
Scale up to 30% share and be necessarily exposed to new risks which were not exposed at current levels of deployment.
Many of these additional risks would be from economic factors: we'd probably never achieve 30% share without a less rigorous and much less costly safety regime.
30% is a completely arbitrary level that you’ve picked with no justification. I’d suggest you cite some sources to provide depth to the argument that 30% of world power is materially different.
Arbitrary yes. Pick another number that is substantially larger than current share.
I am not going to be able to give statistics, but to me it's obvious. After all these decades, what's been holding nuclear down to its present market share is its economics of safety. Cost overruns all but bankrupted Toshiba, just to give one recent example.
If you want an order of magnitude more installations, you will have to relax those constraints.
So we cannot use today's safety record as proof of tomorrow's safety if we also expect massive increase in deployment.
Which day in Paris? Single accident did not increase overall air travel safety significantly, regardless of what impression you could get from the press.
Do you want a bit of perspective from someone who's been living under a very thick pall of coal-produced smog for many years? 100-500 µg/m³ of PM2.5 at day time (depends on wind speed mostly, right now it's 550 µg), twice or thrice that at night. I don't think my body can tolerate this much longer. If we were to switch the coal power plants to nuclear energy, I'd jump up and down like a little girl. A small risk of second Chernobyl seems just fine in comparison to this. I'd be fine with a risk of nuclear explosion with no chance to escape, honestly.
Sorry for that, but may I ask where you live? Because if the pollution is coming from a coal power plant, there are filters for that. And I shudder to think what the people (mis)managing that coal power plant could do if it was nuclear instead...
It's not actually true that batteries and solar are a perfect clean solution - and neither is wind. Better than coal to be sure, but it's not what you're making it out to be.
Rare earth metals have to be mined in remote portions of China in dystopian hellscapes. Lithium and other minerals also have to be mined, and leave toxic tailing ponds. Solar panels frequently have cadmium and tellurium, which are also hazardous, and need to be managed. Plastics and composites in wind turbines also cannot be recycled.
There are no perfect solutions, and the future will almost certainly require a mixture of kinds of energy.
Nothing is risk free. The nice thing about nuclear power is that radiation is really easy to detect, with you know, a Geiger counter.
On the other hand, particulate matter emitted by oil and coal plants causes millions of deaths per year, right now. And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe.
What's the systemic risk of solar panels and wind power, for example? A terrorist attack destroying 100 millions solar panels?
> On the other hand
The usual false dichotomy between nuclear and oil/coal/gas.
> And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe.
...not to mention the direct release of heat into the atmosphere due to poorly isolated house heating, industrial production and electric generation plants themselves. None of which is mitigated by nuclear. Rather, it's made even worse by any source of cheap electricity.
Nuclear power plants are designed to withstand attacks from crazies. Terrorist attacks done so far have had minimal impact on infrastructure. It is a very minor and manageable threat.
Release of heat due to chemical and nuclear sources does heat the planet, but the contribution to heating compared to effect of increasing CO2 concentration is negligible in the range of 1%, this is well known.
