How are you going to make the barrel? The primer? Flintlock or matchlock I could see.
There's two stages: 1) Immediately after you use consumables while you try to establish some stable situation. 2) Later you'ld better be making or trading for everything you need.
Basic carpentry is pretty easy. And that's all that one needs when there's no new lumber.
Farming is good...but what's your water source? The area that I live in is a natural desert, which is watered with water from the mountains. The pre-tech people who lived around here subsisted largely on hunting and acorns (ugh!). You need to check out the area you live in to see whether or not it will support farms. (There are very good reasons why the Nile and Euphrates valleys were places where cities got their start.)
Generally, if the disaster is catastrophic, people who live in the cities aren't going to have a chance of surviving. There's too many, and they're too far above the carrying capacity of the area. If that's where you live, guns are probably your only hope, but you'd better not advertize that you have them. (And you only hope is a pretty poor one.) Most people in rural areas will also die. Most of our rural population is in areas that can't survive without things like externally supplied water. And in areas where waters available (say rivers and lakes) people are going to be jammed in too close for the carrying capacity of the land. After, say, five years the survivors will start to have a reasonable chance of continuing to survive. During those five years every animal that can't escape will have been eaten, so hunting will be extremely poor. At this point farming will start to emerge as a necessary choice. But the farmers will need protection, either self supplied, or supplied by others. One way leads to village based democracy, the other to feudal totalitarianism. I suspect that what will usually happen is a "strong man" based democracy. This means that the village chief has nominally absolute authority, but when he angers too many people, he's cast out. Possibly alive. And then the next chief is chosen by consensus.
You'll notice that here I didn't talk much about possessions. There won't be any transport, so what you have is basically what you can carry for 50 miles/day. Without a decent pack. And with no pack animal. If you invest your weight allowance in guns and ammo, you'd better hope you run across someone you can steal safe water from. (Note that guns and ammo also means all the other equipment you need, like gun oil. Which will be irreplaceable.) There are reasons that when I was talking about projectile weapons I mentioned bows. Being skilled with a spear-thrower might be nearly as good. (Different ratio of strengths and weaknesses, but not much inferior overall.)
To my mind, anything which catastrophically destroys civilization on one continent will make recovery on that continent a VERY long term affair, if it's possible at all without outside help.
Saltpeter's easy. Sulfur's the hard part. And getting the mix right. (You need more than just the right proportions. Grain size needs to be right. Meal powder means that all the components need to be ground VERY finely, and then you only have meal powder. To turn that into gun powder you need to moisten it, work it into cakes dry it and grind it back to powder of even grain sizes...without setting it off.)
(You don't need all that if all you want is firecrackers. And cannon are slightly more forgiving. But muskets foul even with very good black powder...but bad black powder causes them to foul much more quickly.)
P.S.: Perhaps modern gunpowder stores well, but I've heard tell of powder forming crystals that caused it to either hang fire or to burn quite irregularly. It's true this was from around the time of WWII, and the stories may have been old then. I've never wanted to experiment in this direction.
Mead requires honey. Honey requires bees. Bees are currently in trouble. Also, beekeeping in a time when there aren't suppliers for the equipment is going to be much more difficult.
OTOH, if you DO successfully keep bees, they not only allow you to make mead, they provide the highly salable honey. (I don't know that much about beekeeping in low tech environments...just that it was a late development in northern Europe.)
Beer's good though. It's one of the earliest ways of providing safe water used in Europe. And safe water is going to be a desperate need. (That's one of whiskey's strong uses in a primitive environment. It's also a good disinfectant and a reasonable pain killer.)
N.B.: Whiskey will be a necessity for any primitive surgeon. As both a disinfectant and as a painkiller. (Well, ok. Brandy would work as well. Or Vodka. Anything 60 proof or over.)
Whiskey is another good investment if you have such expectations. Good whiskey is difficult to make, in high demand, keeps well, and takes a very long time to make if you have only primitive equipment. (Consider the problem of seals in the still, and making pipes that don't leak lead.)
You'd probably want to make sure that it was securely packaged, and that the caps of the bottles were upright and not exposed to moisture. Doing such in the current environment is easy. After a collapse, much more difficult. And you can buy an extra liter of whiskey a week without anyone raising an eyebrow. (Try doing that with guns and ammo. And ammo doesn't store as well.)
Another good investment would be a medical degree. That one's more time consuming, but after a collapse doctors, those who know more than what drugs to prescribe anyway, will be extremely valuable. Nurses too.
Or you could apprentice yourself to a blacksmith. That would be a really valuable skill. But you'd better learn how to handle and recognize scrap metal.
Horse handling probably won't be worth bothering with in most areas for a few generations. Most of the horses will be eaten. Archery would be worthwhile, but learn to fletch your arrows at the same time. I doubt that you could learn to handle a longbow well, but it would be a good idea to learn how to teach the use of it. (Supposedly one needs to grow up with a longbow to learn it's proper use.) Having a few compound bows would be a good substitute, but you won't be able to replace them. So also get a few regular bows, and learn how to make them from wood. And which wood. (Yew is likely not to be available, so learn what's available in your area.)
Guns are a strictly short term answer. (So is whiskey.) Both only buy you time to establish yourself in a community...and you'll NEED a community. Self defense by an individual is a recipe for dying out within one generation.
But remember that the amount of gold is finite, and the number of people who desire it has increased. And the number of people who both desire it and can afford it has increased even more. Also, lots of it is "used up" in things like plating chip connections to prevent oxidation. (Not much per each, but there's LOTS of chip connections.)
So one should EXPECT the price of gold to be high by historical standards. Don't know if it's overvalued. (I expect that it is.) Just that this isn't a good argument.
I'd be reluctant to accept one for free. I don't like either Kindle, or any other DRM supporting reader. I'm quite dubious about the very concept, but not really opposed, to electronic readers. I'm oppose to DRM enabling readers. Including the Kindle.
Five years from now, when you need a new machine, you'll understand why. EVERYTHING you've bought will need to be replaced, and part of it won't be available any longer. (Replaced doesn't necessarily mean repurchased...but it can. That depends on vendor choice, not yours.)
What's the best alternative distro to Debian? Fedora isn't really aimed at desktop users, Ubuntu is also going to be including mono by default. Etc.
I think that I'd be able to hash things around to avoid mono anyway, but I'd rather not have to hassle with that, so what's the best alternative? Space isn't my problem, but I'd really rather avoid mono, and I need an end-user distribution.
Sorry, but by the time our sun has passed through it's red giant phase it will be considerably LESS than one solar mass.
(I've always wondered at what point in a stars life they count it's weight for that phrase. Possibly they're uncertain enough about the exact value that it doesn't matter, but I think the sun is expected to shed something approximating 1/4 of it's mass during the red giant phase, so that's a lot of uncertainty.
OTOH, I'm definitely NOT a astrophysicist, and I might be off in how much mass the sun is expected to shed by quite a large amount. All I really know is that it's not an insignificant amount.)
You might ask Einstein or Hawking about that. They sort of disagree with you. They seem to always be offended by any part of a theory that appears inelegant to them.
Now I'll grant that this *ISN'T* proof, it's just something that seems to be an unreasonably effective way of looking for where the truth should lie, and what evidence should support it.
I might accept it if everything that's come to light that they've been doing hadn't been security theater rather than real security work.
I'll grant that it's possible that some stuff has been going on that's both serious and effective, but I REALLY doubt that "Homeland Security" had anything to do with it. The FBI I might accept. Several other agencies also don't seem to be staffed entirely by clowns. That isn't true of Homeland Security.
"By default" is the correct term. Unfortunately, the default case isn't guaranteed, and how many people know all the paperwork they signed while enrolling at the university? My understanding is that a general waiver of some sort (ownership, derivative work, SOMETHING) has become quite common.
It's less than totally clear to me that such a university education is worth the cost. Without it you'd need to acquire the skills some other way, and you'd need to get an employment history that would compensate for the lack of a degree. But it might well be worth it to escape a life of indebtedness.
I don't know. Others have reported colleges that require the signing of an agreement that everything you do as a student belongs to the college. Since the decision was "That wasn't unethical" (and I didn't read the original article) the matter of whether the college owned the code didn't come up. (I'm sure it should have. But I think that requiring such an agreement is itself unethical, so...)
I doubt it. I expect the drop would stop shortly after the population density achieved an optimum level...if things remained stable that long. I can't define optimum, but I *can* say that Japan is overcrowded, as are US cities. The optimal density of an area appears to depend partially on transportation. I'm sure it also depends on other factors. Just as the optimal birth rate depends on the actual death rate.
I'm not certain, but I suspect that an optimal population density would allow most families to live on 4 or 5 acre lots. Youths, of course, would need to congregate more densely before pairing off to form families. Some functions would probably need to be denser. Etc. (Note that this is below the density of US suburbs, but far above it's rural density.)
You seem to be considering that cost is the *only* criteria for judging the desirability of a power source. You've made an argument that nuclear power is probably going to be slightly cheaper. (Not grossly cheaper.) To me it's close enough that other considerations are quite able to decide the issue.
OTOH, I'm not certain that this will be as expensive as you claim. And yet again, it comes with the problem of how to have a power storage facility for when the wind isn't blowing. How much do you need? How much would it cost? Etc. And what happens to the transmission costs? Nuclear plants are located a long way from most of the potential users of the power. That means long transmission lines, and extensive line losses. How about off-shore wind turbines? They can be located relatively close to most of their users, but the transmission is via cables that run through or over sea water. What losses does that cause? ("Purchasing the site", however, should be almost cost free, once the government straightens out the handling of the paperwork.)
Actually, nuclear waste isn't all that bad. It's just concentrated. There's less radiation remaining in the waste than there was in it when it was fuel, and the fuel is just concentrated rock. (Special kind of rock, but people lived around it for mega-years without problems. And their ancestors before them.)
So if you dispersed the waste evenly over the planet there'd be less radiation now than there was before the nuclear plants were build. Breeder reactors are different, but there are designs that will essentially burn all the fuel to inactive materials. But there are political problems with building them. Intractable ones. (The core is Plutonium.)
Renewables should be preferred, but there's a place for nuclear reactors. Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that our current approach is a good on. To me it seems that breeder reactors are the only reasonable long term approach, and the current designs for such are very crude. More unfortunately, all the breeder reactors that I consider plausible require a stable political environment to be safe. Whoops!
And why does every company refuse to build a nuclear plant without the government indemnifying them against any problems that can be caused by an accident or act or war?
If they trust it so much, they should be able to get normal insurance. Or would that make it too expensive? And if it would, then that cost is just being hidden and spread out over people who otherwise wouldn't accept it.
(This may be US only, but I wouldn't bet on it. I think in France the plants are officially owned by the government, which is pretty much the same thing.)
You seem to be confusing the worst that has happened with the worst that could happen. The worst that could happen hasn't even been approached. It needs to be analyzed separately for each plant, but in many cases it's a lot worse than a mere breaching of containment and dispersion of radioactive materials. (That is, indeed, comparable to a dam bursting.)
It's hard to do comparisons, though. How does one compare drowning on the day of the accident vs. getting cancer 5 years later and dying after another 7 years of increasingly intrusive and expensive treatment? Any comparison you make is going to be based on non-objective biases. OTOH, both would cause the cities/towns/villages affected to be deserted. Both would allow some salvage...usually more after the nuclear event (at least technically...governments might have other ideas).
But there are often potential disasters for nuclear plants that are much worse. We haven't seen any of them, so I presume that the people who said they were extremely unlikely were correct. But if you model "worst case scenario" you don't just model the worst that has happened. You model the worst that could happen. This is almost never done honestly by anyone, so don't feel I'm singling out the nuclear industry. It's just that Dams have a long history, so not many of the "worst case scenario"s are still hidden. (I haven't seen record of "an earthquake splits the dam right down the center and it all comes loose at once just as the town is trying to recover from the earthquake", but it's probably happened.)
P.S.: That "worst case scenario" for a dam was inspired by the Diablo Canyon reactor which was decommissioned before start up when the public raised an uproar because the reactor was built right on top of one of the major active faults in the area. I don't know what would have happened, but it certainly gives me pause when I think about trusting the people who build the nuclear plants. We're still paying for that idiocy, when the bill should have been sent to the site engineers who selected the site.
The problem is that while most of the problems of nuclear power are quite soluble, the solutions appear to be unattractive to those in power. So they don't happen. It's not really a technical problem.
E.g., the waste problem could be solved by fast breeders. Unfortunately one of the results is plutonium. This isn't a technical problem, it's a political one...and I don't see any solution.
Security, again, isn't a technical problem. And nobody's ever come up with a perfect solution when you consider it as a political problem. As a technical problem, pieces of it can be solved. But when major corporations don't change the default passwords....that's NOT a technical problem.
Therefore, the only safe nuclear plant will be one that's totally robotized. Even then there'll be accidents, but accidents are technical problems, and can be limited. OTOH, it's likely to be well over a decade before I'd be willing to trust a robotized nuclear plant. Actually, I'd want to have it running at a test site for over a decade. Say at the Nevada nuclear testing site. And I'd want it to be under heavy variable load. So build a new Super Collider near it for it to power (or something similar). Or build transmission lines from there to feed power to the grid. And in that case, build several of the plants there. Some distance and around a decade apart. That would minimize several of the problems...but you need a design that doesn't demand lots of water for cooling.
And until that's ready, off-shore windmills sound like a good, safe, transition step.
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How are you going to make the barrel? The primer? Flintlock or matchlock I could see.
There's two stages:
1) Immediately after you use consumables while you try to establish some stable situation.
2) Later you'ld better be making or trading for everything you need.
Basic carpentry is pretty easy. And that's all that one needs when there's no new lumber.
Farming is good...but what's your water source? The area that I live in is a natural desert, which is watered with water from the mountains. The pre-tech people who lived around here subsisted largely on hunting and acorns (ugh!). You need to check out the area you live in to see whether or not it will support farms. (There are very good reasons why the Nile and Euphrates valleys were places where cities got their start.)
Generally, if the disaster is catastrophic, people who live in the cities aren't going to have a chance of surviving. There's too many, and they're too far above the carrying capacity of the area. If that's where you live, guns are probably your only hope, but you'd better not advertize that you have them. (And you only hope is a pretty poor one.) Most people in rural areas will also die. Most of our rural population is in areas that can't survive without things like externally supplied water. And in areas where waters available (say rivers and lakes) people are going to be jammed in too close for the carrying capacity of the land. After, say, five years the survivors will start to have a reasonable chance of continuing to survive. During those five years every animal that can't escape will have been eaten, so hunting will be extremely poor. At this point farming will start to emerge as a necessary choice. But the farmers will need protection, either self supplied, or supplied by others. One way leads to village based democracy, the other to feudal totalitarianism. I suspect that what will usually happen is a "strong man" based democracy. This means that the village chief has nominally absolute authority, but when he angers too many people, he's cast out. Possibly alive. And then the next chief is chosen by consensus.
You'll notice that here I didn't talk much about possessions. There won't be any transport, so what you have is basically what you can carry for 50 miles/day. Without a decent pack. And with no pack animal. If you invest your weight allowance in guns and ammo, you'd better hope you run across someone you can steal safe water from. (Note that guns and ammo also means all the other equipment you need, like gun oil. Which will be irreplaceable.) There are reasons that when I was talking about projectile weapons I mentioned bows. Being skilled with a spear-thrower might be nearly as good. (Different ratio of strengths and weaknesses, but not much inferior overall.)
To my mind, anything which catastrophically destroys civilization on one continent will make recovery on that continent a VERY long term affair, if it's possible at all without outside help.
Saltpeter's easy. Sulfur's the hard part. And getting the mix right. (You need more than just the right proportions. Grain size needs to be right. Meal powder means that all the components need to be ground VERY finely, and then you only have meal powder. To turn that into gun powder you need to moisten it, work it into cakes dry it and grind it back to powder of even grain sizes...without setting it off.)
(You don't need all that if all you want is firecrackers. And cannon are slightly more forgiving. But muskets foul even with very good black powder...but bad black powder causes them to foul much more quickly.)
P.S.: Perhaps modern gunpowder stores well, but I've heard tell of powder forming crystals that caused it to either hang fire or to burn quite irregularly. It's true this was from around the time of WWII, and the stories may have been old then. I've never wanted to experiment in this direction.
Mead requires honey. Honey requires bees. Bees are currently in trouble. Also, beekeeping in a time when there aren't suppliers for the equipment is going to be much more difficult.
OTOH, if you DO successfully keep bees, they not only allow you to make mead, they provide the highly salable honey. (I don't know that much about beekeeping in low tech environments...just that it was a late development in northern Europe.)
Beer's good though. It's one of the earliest ways of providing safe water used in Europe. And safe water is going to be a desperate need. (That's one of whiskey's strong uses in a primitive environment. It's also a good disinfectant and a reasonable pain killer.)
N.B.: Whiskey will be a necessity for any primitive surgeon. As both a disinfectant and as a painkiller. (Well, ok. Brandy would work as well. Or Vodka. Anything 60 proof or over.)
Whiskey is another good investment if you have such expectations. Good whiskey is difficult to make, in high demand, keeps well, and takes a very long time to make if you have only primitive equipment. (Consider the problem of seals in the still, and making pipes that don't leak lead.)
You'd probably want to make sure that it was securely packaged, and that the caps of the bottles were upright and not exposed to moisture. Doing such in the current environment is easy. After a collapse, much more difficult. And you can buy an extra liter of whiskey a week without anyone raising an eyebrow. (Try doing that with guns and ammo. And ammo doesn't store as well.)
Another good investment would be a medical degree. That one's more time consuming, but after a collapse doctors, those who know more than what drugs to prescribe anyway, will be extremely valuable. Nurses too.
Or you could apprentice yourself to a blacksmith. That would be a really valuable skill. But you'd better learn how to handle and recognize scrap metal.
Horse handling probably won't be worth bothering with in most areas for a few generations. Most of the horses will be eaten. Archery would be worthwhile, but learn to fletch your arrows at the same time. I doubt that you could learn to handle a longbow well, but it would be a good idea to learn how to teach the use of it. (Supposedly one needs to grow up with a longbow to learn it's proper use.) Having a few compound bows would be a good substitute, but you won't be able to replace them. So also get a few regular bows, and learn how to make them from wood. And which wood. (Yew is likely not to be available, so learn what's available in your area.)
Guns are a strictly short term answer. (So is whiskey.) Both only buy you time to establish yourself in a community...and you'll NEED a community. Self defense by an individual is a recipe for dying out within one generation.
But remember that the amount of gold is finite, and the number of people who desire it has increased. And the number of people who both desire it and can afford it has increased even more. Also, lots of it is "used up" in things like plating chip connections to prevent oxidation. (Not much per each, but there's LOTS of chip connections.)
So one should EXPECT the price of gold to be high by historical standards. Don't know if it's overvalued. (I expect that it is.) Just that this isn't a good argument.
I'd be reluctant to accept one for free. I don't like either Kindle, or any other DRM supporting reader. I'm quite dubious about the very concept, but not really opposed, to electronic readers. I'm oppose to DRM enabling readers. Including the Kindle.
Five years from now, when you need a new machine, you'll understand why. EVERYTHING you've bought will need to be replaced, and part of it won't be available any longer. (Replaced doesn't necessarily mean repurchased...but it can. That depends on vendor choice, not yours.)
What's the best alternative distro to Debian? Fedora isn't really aimed at desktop users, Ubuntu is also going to be including mono by default. Etc.
I think that I'd be able to hash things around to avoid mono anyway, but I'd rather not have to hassle with that, so what's the best alternative? Space isn't my problem, but I'd really rather avoid mono, and I need an end-user distribution.
For some reason that I don't understand it's not supposed to be baryonic matter. I.e., no protons. This rules out the Dyson spheres.
Sorry. I'd really like that explanation to work.
Sorry, but by the time our sun has passed through it's red giant phase it will be considerably LESS than one solar mass.
(I've always wondered at what point in a stars life they count it's weight for that phrase. Possibly they're uncertain enough about the exact value that it doesn't matter, but I think the sun is expected to shed something approximating 1/4 of it's mass during the red giant phase, so that's a lot of uncertainty.
OTOH, I'm definitely NOT a astrophysicist, and I might be off in how much mass the sun is expected to shed by quite a large amount. All I really know is that it's not an insignificant amount.)
You might ask Einstein or Hawking about that. They sort of disagree with you. They seem to always be offended by any part of a theory that appears inelegant to them.
Now I'll grant that this *ISN'T* proof, it's just something that seems to be an unreasonably effective way of looking for where the truth should lie, and what evidence should support it.
I might accept it if everything that's come to light that they've been doing hadn't been security theater rather than real security work.
I'll grant that it's possible that some stuff has been going on that's both serious and effective, but I REALLY doubt that "Homeland Security" had anything to do with it. The FBI I might accept. Several other agencies also don't seem to be staffed entirely by clowns. That isn't true of Homeland Security.
"By default" is the correct term. Unfortunately, the default case isn't guaranteed, and how many people know all the paperwork they signed while enrolling at the university? My understanding is that a general waiver of some sort (ownership, derivative work, SOMETHING) has become quite common.
It's less than totally clear to me that such a university education is worth the cost. Without it you'd need to acquire the skills some other way, and you'd need to get an employment history that would compensate for the lack of a degree. But it might well be worth it to escape a life of indebtedness.
The university counts grades as compensation, and they have the lawyers to prove it.
I believe that due to various overheads a bubble sort is the most efficient sort for arrays of fewer than 20 elements. Perhaps it's 12.
Remember a bubble sort's efficiency is O(n^2), which means that for small n it's reasonably good.
I don't know. Others have reported colleges that require the signing of an agreement that everything you do as a student belongs to the college. Since the decision was "That wasn't unethical" (and I didn't read the original article) the matter of whether the college owned the code didn't come up. (I'm sure it should have. But I think that requiring such an agreement is itself unethical, so...)
I wonder about the power transmission line. It would be a lot less visible than the turbine.
I doubt it. I expect the drop would stop shortly after the population density achieved an optimum level...if things remained stable that long. I can't define optimum, but I *can* say that Japan is overcrowded, as are US cities. The optimal density of an area appears to depend partially on transportation. I'm sure it also depends on other factors. Just as the optimal birth rate depends on the actual death rate.
I'm not certain, but I suspect that an optimal population density would allow most families to live on 4 or 5 acre lots. Youths, of course, would need to congregate more densely before pairing off to form families. Some functions would probably need to be denser. Etc. (Note that this is below the density of US suburbs, but far above it's rural density.)
You seem to be considering that cost is the *only* criteria for judging the desirability of a power source. You've made an argument that nuclear power is probably going to be slightly cheaper. (Not grossly cheaper.) To me it's close enough that other considerations are quite able to decide the issue.
OTOH, I'm not certain that this will be as expensive as you claim. And yet again, it comes with the problem of how to have a power storage facility for when the wind isn't blowing. How much do you need? How much would it cost? Etc. And what happens to the transmission costs? Nuclear plants are located a long way from most of the potential users of the power. That means long transmission lines, and extensive line losses. How about off-shore wind turbines? They can be located relatively close to most of their users, but the transmission is via cables that run through or over sea water. What losses does that cause? ("Purchasing the site", however, should be almost cost free, once the government straightens out the handling of the paperwork.)
How does it weather major storms?
That's the primary problem for off-shore platforms. The secondary one is how efficient is the power transmission to shore? (Including reliability.)
Once those two are solved, then it's just a wind turbine.
They use long distance electrical transmission lines.
Actually, nuclear waste isn't all that bad. It's just concentrated. There's less radiation remaining in the waste than there was in it when it was fuel, and the fuel is just concentrated rock. (Special kind of rock, but people lived around it for mega-years without problems. And their ancestors before them.)
So if you dispersed the waste evenly over the planet there'd be less radiation now than there was before the nuclear plants were build. Breeder reactors are different, but there are designs that will essentially burn all the fuel to inactive materials. But there are political problems with building them. Intractable ones. (The core is Plutonium.)
Renewables should be preferred, but there's a place for nuclear reactors. Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that our current approach is a good on. To me it seems that breeder reactors are the only reasonable long term approach, and the current designs for such are very crude. More unfortunately, all the breeder reactors that I consider plausible require a stable political environment to be safe. Whoops!
And why does every company refuse to build a nuclear plant without the government indemnifying them against any problems that can be caused by an accident or act or war?
If they trust it so much, they should be able to get normal insurance. Or would that make it too expensive? And if it would, then that cost is just being hidden and spread out over people who otherwise wouldn't accept it.
(This may be US only, but I wouldn't bet on it. I think in France the plants are officially owned by the government, which is pretty much the same thing.)
You seem to be confusing the worst that has happened with the worst that could happen. The worst that could happen hasn't even been approached. It needs to be analyzed separately for each plant, but in many cases it's a lot worse than a mere breaching of containment and dispersion of radioactive materials. (That is, indeed, comparable to a dam bursting.)
It's hard to do comparisons, though. How does one compare drowning on the day of the accident vs. getting cancer 5 years later and dying after another 7 years of increasingly intrusive and expensive treatment? Any comparison you make is going to be based on non-objective biases. OTOH, both would cause the cities/towns/villages affected to be deserted. Both would allow some salvage...usually more after the nuclear event (at least technically...governments might have other ideas).
But there are often potential disasters for nuclear plants that are much worse. We haven't seen any of them, so I presume that the people who said they were extremely unlikely were correct. But if you model "worst case scenario" you don't just model the worst that has happened. You model the worst that could happen. This is almost never done honestly by anyone, so don't feel I'm singling out the nuclear industry. It's just that Dams have a long history, so not many of the "worst case scenario"s are still hidden. (I haven't seen record of "an earthquake splits the dam right down the center and it all comes loose at once just as the town is trying to recover from the earthquake", but it's probably happened.)
P.S.: That "worst case scenario" for a dam was inspired by the Diablo Canyon reactor which was decommissioned before start up when the public raised an uproar because the reactor was built right on top of one of the major active faults in the area. I don't know what would have happened, but it certainly gives me pause when I think about trusting the people who build the nuclear plants. We're still paying for that idiocy, when the bill should have been sent to the site engineers who selected the site.
The problem is that while most of the problems of nuclear power are quite soluble, the solutions appear to be unattractive to those in power. So they don't happen. It's not really a technical problem.
E.g., the waste problem could be solved by fast breeders. Unfortunately one of the results is plutonium. This isn't a technical problem, it's a political one...and I don't see any solution.
Security, again, isn't a technical problem. And nobody's ever come up with a perfect solution when you consider it as a political problem. As a technical problem, pieces of it can be solved. But when major corporations don't change the default passwords....that's NOT a technical problem.
Therefore, the only safe nuclear plant will be one that's totally robotized. Even then there'll be accidents, but accidents are technical problems, and can be limited. OTOH, it's likely to be well over a decade before I'd be willing to trust a robotized nuclear plant. Actually, I'd want to have it running at a test site for over a decade. Say at the Nevada nuclear testing site. And I'd want it to be under heavy variable load. So build a new Super Collider near it for it to power (or something similar). Or build transmission lines from there to feed power to the grid. And in that case, build several of the plants there. Some distance and around a decade apart. That would minimize several of the problems...but you need a design that doesn't demand lots of water for cooling.
And until that's ready, off-shore windmills sound like a good, safe, transition step.