LogFAQs > #979574881

Grand_Kirby posted...

If you have something that's going to be running for years and years eventually something is going to go wrong, and if that something is a thing that is going to be so absurdly damaging, that's when you need to start having the conversation about if it's worth doing at all.

You always have that conversation, whether it's a $10 thing that's gonna last 5 minutes or a $10 billion thing that's gonna last 5 decades, and it's about expected value (% chance times cost). That's what engineering is all about.

We know how much cost, death, pollution, radiation Fukushima/Three Mile/Chernobyl caused, and it's far less than what fossil fuel plants cause (per unit of energy). That makes it easily worth it, even if modern plants didn't reduce the risks by orders of magnitude, which they have.

It's way more dangerous to say that 1 big catastrophe is too scary, therefore we can't do it, and instead have to stick with the thing that's 10x worse overall but it's distributed daily so we don't notice (frog in boiling water). Whether it's 1 big event or 10000 little ones, the planet and people and economy still die just the same. The only thing that's saved by the 10000 option is human sanity. There is value to that but it doesn't outweigh the cost.