This report seems to discount the tail risks involved with potential future nuclear accidents. Lets ignore the very complicated question of risk tradeoffs vs other sources for the moment.
Nuclear power has extreme tail risk that is hard to quantify based on the few examples of it happening. For the thee major events we can reference how do we know we didn't simply get lucky?
With fukushima for example, "Japan's prime minister at the time of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami has revealed that the country came within a “paper-thin margin” of a nuclear disaster requiring the evacuation of 50 million people." [1]
Clearly the lack of deaths directly attributable to nuclear accidents does not accurately capture the risks.
So what exactly is the risk of a catastrophic event that has thankfully never happened but could? Its not clear but rather than rolling dice with those risks we can actually make better systems without those unquantifiable risks in the first place. That takes us to the tradeoff calculus.
Just in the realm of nuclear power there are far better approaches we should be investing in as opposed to traditional plants such as LFTR [2] which does not have proliferation, waste or meltdown risk.
Picking on coal is a little unfair at this time because coal is being supplanted by much cleaner natural gas purely on market forces and solar and wind are growing dramatically. Of course there are issues with these as well, scaling issues and their own kind of impacts but they do not harbor the same kind of unquantifiable massive tail risk of traditional nuclear.
Nuclear power has extreme tail risk that is hard to quantify based on the few examples of it happening. For the thee major events we can reference how do we know we didn't simply get lucky?
With fukushima for example, "Japan's prime minister at the time of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami has revealed that the country came within a “paper-thin margin” of a nuclear disaster requiring the evacuation of 50 million people." [1]
Clearly the lack of deaths directly attributable to nuclear accidents does not accurately capture the risks.
So what exactly is the risk of a catastrophic event that has thankfully never happened but could? Its not clear but rather than rolling dice with those risks we can actually make better systems without those unquantifiable risks in the first place. That takes us to the tradeoff calculus.
Just in the realm of nuclear power there are far better approaches we should be investing in as opposed to traditional plants such as LFTR [2] which does not have proliferation, waste or meltdown risk.
Picking on coal is a little unfair at this time because coal is being supplanted by much cleaner natural gas purely on market forces and solar and wind are growing dramatically. Of course there are issues with these as well, scaling issues and their own kind of impacts but they do not harbor the same kind of unquantifiable massive tail risk of traditional nuclear.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1218411...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...