Last edited Sat Dec 27, 2025, 08:45 PM - Edit history (1)
There are not enough "guardrails" for fossil fuel plants.
Fossil fuel plants kill people whenever they operate normally; nuclear plants generally don't kill people and when they do, it is only under extreme conditions of failure.
It is fear of radiation that kills people, specifically because people think in a rote fashion that nuclear power is "dangerous," and fossil fuel plants aren't.
The real data states otherwise.
Hence people are overly concerned - out of irrational fear - about nuclear plants and just don't give a rat's ass about fossil fuel plants.
Nuclear plants save lives:
Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 48894895)
If follows that delaying nuclear plants under the conditions that they must prove that no one will ever be injured at any time ever by nuclear operations, a criteria not attached to fossil fuel plants, kills people. It also follows that shutting nuclear plants kills people.
In a comment in another thread, celebrating the "work" of the functional whining of the unqualified idiot Ed Lyman of the inaptly named "Union of Concerned Scientists," I wrote this:
It will be a good day when the fossil fuel industry is required to show that its waste products will never kill anyone anywhere in any century here and beyond.
One would need to understand something about what nuclear engineering is...