Nuclear power plants aren't the same thing as portable nuclear batteries, which is what these are.

No, but risk is all relative.

The video says the replacements were sometimes things like wind turbines. These tend to kill birds.

These RTGs seem quite impressive actually. Simple and easy to construct, if you have a nuclear industry. They survived for decades of being completely abandoned in a society falling apart. The biggest risk was only to people who literally broke in and stole them. There were no construction accidents creating and maintaining endless thousands of kilometers of transmission cables, no dead birds or dead maintenance engineers trying to repair a huge non-solid-state device in the middle of a Russian storm, the lighthouses presumably saved many lives and were cheap enough to build that the embattled USSR could afford to do so.

I wouldn't be surprised if a full lifecycle cost/benefit analysis that took into account the alternatives ended up being strongly positive in favour of this technology.

> You can see Japan as the latest example disaster where one week before, no one imagined this could happen

I don't accept this characterisation. I see Fukushima as an example of being curiously diligent in one area, and negligent in another, perhaps because rather than have a "culture" of safety it was simply legislation driven, such that standards dropped as soon as there was a gap/oversight in the legislation. To clarify - as safe as the plant was, it was not in a safe chosen location. Concerns were raised, and ignored. legislation covered the building and operation of the plant, not diligence in planning its location.

security is somewhat weakest-link - it doesn't matter if your doors are metal with strong locks if there are large windows without bars. Fukushima was always unsafe, just conditional on a relatively rare event - by the same measure the unstable warehouse cargo that exploded in Beirut was always unsafe, even if it existed for nearly 7 years.

This statement could definitely use a source.

For coal power stations:

«According to estimates by the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the world’s coal-fired power stations currently generate waste containing around 5,000 tonnes of uranium and 15,000 tonnes of thorium. Collectively, that’s over 100 times more radiation dumped into the environment than that released by nuclear power stations.»

About 1% of it is leaked into air, so about 500 tonnes of uranium and 1500 tonnes of thorium are leaked into air every year.

However, uranium and thorium are much less dangerous than radioactive iodine, strontium, and cesium.

For Chornobyl, I found estimate at Wikipedia: «An early estimate for total nuclear fuel material released to the environment was 3±1.5%; this was later revised to 3.5±0.5%. This corresponds to the atmospheric emission of 6 tonnes (5.9 long tons; 6.6 short tons) of fragmented fuel.[127]»

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Relative_is...

But is this an apt comparison. The soviet union was pretty independent from the rest of the west. I's sooner qualify that western/European nuclear is safe, so the average isn't dragged down by despotic/unstable nations.

Nuclear proliferation is a worldwide concern, but a new power plant in your backyard is as safe as relative to the national record.

The thing is, a coal plant is a guaranteed continuous catastrophic incident.

Don't discount nuclear waste as well. I'm not trying to promote coal here, but nuclear energy has problems too and shouldn't be touted as something it's not: a safe and clean solution.

Don't overblow nuclear waste. Normal responsible operation produces very little waste per electric MWh produced. And we know how to handle it. No energy production solution is perfect but compared to coal/gas pollution it can eliminate it is a nonbrainer.

Every analysis is based on some assumptions and all predictions hold true only for limited timescales. Yes natural disasters happen and we can't prevent all of them. Yes we will have "nuclear disasters". The world is under constant threat of semiglobal nuclear war.

But Chernobyl and Fukushima (and others, let's not kid ourselves) are disasters with minuscule cost in lives and environment harm. Every year 60 million people die and out of that 12 million die due to unhealthy environment. Risks of (non-weapon) nuclear energy to life, while they exist, are a complete non-issue. Apart from political changes, we need cheap reliable energy to fix the atmosphere and to fix that unhealthy environment.

Here in Canada we use the CANDU system which is far safer than the systems like what you found in Three Mile Island - and no-one is as foolish as to do the Russian tests again.