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>Existing nuclear reactors are already extremely safe

The perceived safety is the result of being operated by highly trained and vetted personnel 24/7/365 for decades on end.

In actual fact nuclear reactors are extremely dangerous.



On thing I never see in these discussions is the toll on workers via radiation exposure. I worked at a nuclear plant in the 1990s and the exposure allowed to outage workers who worked six months a year was something like 5 REM, or 50yrs off radiation in 6 months. Are these deaths included in the statistics? It appears not - part of the issue undoubtedly is causal attribution to a cancer that occurs many years later. A cursory search of the literature suggests that not a lot of work has been done on this.


You went from dose to questioning whether their deaths are included. Did you have knowledge that there were there an abnormal number of deaths among the outage workers?

5 Rem is 50 mSv; the Wikipedia Sievert page lists this as "U.S. 10 C.F.R. § 20.1201(a)(1)(i) occupational dose limit, total effective dose equivalent, and the global average background radiation dose is 2.4 mSv/a, so ~20 years worth of background radiation.


Are you calculating under LNT (Linear No Threshold)? Otherwise unless the rate is spiky it might be fine.


And those personnel are really expensive.




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