No, I was able to find stats about fossil fuels. What I question is that it would be less harmful to drop a reactor right into the middle of a city. Remember, my question was about worst case scenario for nuclear, which the very pro-nuclear crowd here has so far been unable to describe on the many occasions that nuclear is hailed here as our saving grace. They instead point to Fukushima and Chernobyl and say "see, there's nothing to worry about."
What, you want an accurate physical simulation of a nuclear reactor falling onto Manhattan, Marvel comics style?
Well, considering that an actual nuclear bomb going off on Hiroshima killed "only" <150,000 people, I find it pretty unlikely a falling reactor will kill half of Manhattan. So, there.
Glib response aside, I want a credible description of worst case scenario for nuclear disaster. The probability of such an event increases greatly if there are many plants, particularly if there are plants in nations which go into decline or plants built in highly corrupt or inept nations. So how many people die from the initial event? How much residual radiation? How far does it spread? How many people are displaced? Are food supplies effected? It sounds like you haven't really thought it through all the way. My personal belief is that people are not to be trusted with technology with such high stakes. Especially with the onset of climate catastrophe within the century ensuring the decline of our society.
Didn't Chernobyl almost make a huge swath of Europe uninhabitable? Wasn't that the takeaway from the miniseries? That a lot of people gave their lives to prevent an unfathomable disaster?
That's a stretch. The Exclusion Zone[1] is about 2600km^2 (1000 sq mi) but it's only declared uninhabitable, there are people living there (though not saying it's a wise move to settle down there).
There are some areas outside that which is also deemed dangerous, but that's the order of magnitude we're talking about.
For reference, Europe covers an area of about 10 million km^2 (almost 4 million sq mi).
Also note that we don't have a good handle on how lower levels of radiation affects us, and there's discussion around if the prevailing method[2] to estimate exposure effects over-estimates the effects at lower exposures.
Sorry, brain seemed to filter away the crucial "almost".
However it goes back to how "intermediate" levels of radiation affects us. Even if the water had caused the remaining cores to blow up as well[1] then it's still not clear just what the impact would be[2].
I might not be remembering correctly, but I thought they had to tunnel under it to stop the core from burning down into the water table which would spread the nuclear disaster far and wide. Not to stop the steam explosion.
