General Discussion

It established, for all time, the worst case for a failure of a nuclear power plant.

Everyday, about 19,000 people die from fossil fuel waste, aka air pollution, around the world according to a paper I frequently post here from one of the world's most prominent medical journals, Lancet. That works out 7 million per year

Chornobyl took place almost exactly 40 years ago. This means that around 280 million people died from air pollution since the reactor, with its poor design and positive void coefficient failed. The population of the United States is 340 million. That means if you're in a room of 10 people, it is the equivalent of having 7 of them so die. This ignores deaths from extreme weather driven by the continuing destruction of the planetary atmosphere.

The city of Kiev is less than 100 km from Chornobyl. During and after it's dangerous and deadly nuclear phase out, Germany purchased huge amounts of coal, oil and especially gas from Putin. The revenue from these sales went into building fossil fuel powered weapons of mass destruction now raining down on Kiev. Before Putin's attack Kiev remained a thriving city.

Which killed more people in Kiev, radiation from Chornobyl - the area now existing as something of a nature preserve, teeming with animals rare elsewhere in Europe - or German funded weapons of mass destruction launched by Putin, who by the way, has a former Chancellor Germany, Gerard Schroeder as a paid employee?

No one will ever again build a reactor with a design like the RBMK, one with a positive void coefficient, that failed at Chornobyl, but people do build coal plants that kill people whenever they operate normally.

Nuclear energy, the most reliable and cleanest form of energy on the planet, need not be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.

Have a nice day.