The World’s Safest Source of Energy | Hacker News Reader

The World’s Safest Source of Energy

metals.visualcapitalist.com

32 pointsStreamBright59 comments

Since this is Hacker News, I knew it would be nuclear before opening the article.

And for an article making use of the word 'source' multiple times, it sure doesn't provide any, does it? What a surprise.

Where do the 150 deaths per 1000 TWh from wind energy come from? Skeptical minds would like to know.

I don't know how this article calculates things, but both Solar and Wind require lots of sites, and lots of working at heights.

Every time someone goes up on a roof to instal a panel there is a non zero chance that they will fall off and die. The kind of people installing domestic solar don't tend to perform the same level of health and safety analysis as those installing nuclear reactors!

Plus the radiation from the 3 major nuclear accidents caused a lot of problems the article doesn't acknowledge.

In France the number of cancers increased a lot for the generation living on the east border during Tchernobyl. One of my friends had to have his thyroid removed.

Fukushima is still leaking radiation in the ocean (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/fukushima-nucl...) and we can't (don't ?) measure the consequences.

Then of course you have the burring sites. And the fact it's used to create bombs and we need only to fail one time to prevent a terrorist to getting one, but they can try again and again.

So yes, nuclear energy is an interesting source of technology, but it's not the perfect source HN readers love to depict.

It's also very expensive, and the calculations for the cost of nuclear energy usually completely ignore the cost of destroying the plant on retirement.

I'm glad we have it, it has many benefits, but let's keep trying to find something better. Wind, solar, fusion...

EDITED - Found it. Complete report on wind farm related accidents and deaths world wide. It's pretty extensive, so I've not had a chance to check it in any way. It seems to go up to 2018. It seems to include things like studies on increased suicides from the noise. It's a PDF so not very easy to analyse the figures.

http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/fullaccidents.pdf

This list seems to include some incidents that are only tangentially related to wind power:

"Second of three public fatalities at the same location put down to driver distraction. Accident spot is where turbines become visible to drivers"

"34 year old was killed when his car collided with a truck carrying large wind turbine components"

"47-yr old man killed when the snowmobile he was driving stuck a fence around a wind farm construction site"

I wonder how they extrapolated from a list of accidents into deaths per 1,000TWh? Do you divide the estimated world output by the number of deaths? Do you 'weight' deaths by the year in which they happened and the output at that time? There's lots of ways to mangle those figures...

No idea, but the other issue is are the same criteria being applied for each source of power? I've got no problem accepting that industrial accidents happen with wind turbine manufacture, installation and maintenance. Also that it's reasonable to include all those in the figures, after all if a particular form of power generation involves a lot of industrial accidents, that's a problem. There's just not enough info to see if these figures are truly comparable. Maybe they are, I just can't tell and on a highly charged issue like this you really need to be able to trust the figures you're looking at.

Here's a similar article with lots of sources (which also reports nuclear as extremely safe):

https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

I can't find wind or solar in that article?

Likewise - was keen to understand what deaths are attributable to solar panels as well, especially since they wre more than turbines.

For wind turbines I can kind of imagine a few disaster scenarios (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-16115139/storm-caused-wind-t...) with all the large, heavy, moving parts swinging around at height. But solar? The same solar panels that sit there stationary like widow glass or floor tiles with zero moving parts?

I guess there are deaths from the manufacturing and raw resource extraction? Otherwise I can only assume they include people falling off of the roof installing them?

Yes, it's because people are falling of a roof while installing panels.

Nuclear is safer than solar?

(Couldn't read the article, because the read more button needs JavaScript.)

They specifically said rooftop solar. I imagine it's the rooftop part where the deaths come from.

The materials and quantities of said materials, needed to make solar panels, are dug up from the ground, mines are not very safe.

It's probably totally against the Hacker News comment guidelines for me to say this, but do you think people could perhaps stop globally replacing "the" with "said"? This meme, or whatever it is, is getting rather old and rather irritating. But if for some reason people feel it's necessary, by all means carry on and I'll try not to complain again.

The use totally fits the definition:

adjective: said

1. used in legal language or humorously to refer to someone or something already mentioned or named.

It's not a meme, it's a valid use of that word.

Sure. It's used in patents, for example. But recently it has been massively overused in online discussions and it's no longer funny (if it ever was). It seems to roughly fit this definition of "meme": "an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users".

Clearly this is the wrong place for this discussion. Is there a right place to discuss it, from a linguistic/sociological/stylistic point of view? Not that I really should... I'm just trying to avoid an unpleasant task that I really ought to be doing.

>Is there a right place to discuss it, from a linguistic/sociological/stylistic point of view?

The first place that springs to mind is https://english.stackexchange.com/

I've seen other forums with good quality contributions on topics like this, I think one of them was for people speaking English as a second language looking for advice from native speakers. The name eludes me at the moment but if I come across it again I'll respond here with it.

If you follow the links that are inlined in the article you eventually find referenced articles that they themselves have then referenced. Not optimal.

These are the linked articles that contain the references for this data (haven't checked it out so I am assuming on a cursory glance)

https://forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-death... and https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

Has wind produced 1000TWh of energy yet?

Its interesting how people have weird biases.

Nuclear accidents do happen - and when they do - they poison the area pretty much forever.

If you had the choice of building a power plant - or building a solar / wind factory - it's a no brainer. You're building a power plant factory rather than one single power plant.

Everyone but he US sees the potential.

In the case of Chernobyl, I would argue that the area is not poisoned "pretty much forever". The effects of radiation on local wildlife is up for debate[0], but note the fact that mammal population is increasing(cited in [0]). From this I would think that the local wildlife is not worse off than it would be if humans continued living in that area.

[0]: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl...

EDIT: forgot reference

Of course wildlife is not worse off - anywhere humans leave an inhabited area (ghost towns) you will see it gradually reclaimed by nature. If you want to argue that radiation is healthy for mammals, you would have to compare with a similar unpolluted wildlife area, not with how wildlife fared when the area was a populous industrial city!

Here in Bavaria, over 1500km away, we still today have problems that game and mushrooms are often too much contaminated with radioisotopes to be fit for human consumption.

> Nuclear accidents do happen - and when they do - they poison the area pretty much forever.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is about 1,000 mi^sq and the Fukushima exclusion zone is about 240 mi^sq. This is a lot of land, but it must be dwarfed in comparison to the land destroyed, essentially forever, through mineral exploitation.

Not to mention, the rebound in local wildlife in Chernobyl, due to the simple fact that it's an exclusion zone for humans, show that nuclear accidents are bad for people, but, in the long run, great for wildlife.

The picture isn't all roses, of course, but this article is pretty interesting: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclus...

Well if you wanted to turn an inhabited area into wildlife you could do it by forcibly removing people without having to build and explode a nuclear reactor first. So I don't find this a very convincing argument in favor of the benefit of nuclear accidents.

Hungry people will go anywhere to get food. Always have, since the dawn of man. Hunters would love to go in and bag a deer, some rabids, anything else. Sadly, the only way to keep them out is if they are scared to death.

I won't say "bring on the nuclear accidents", but holy cow, look at what they tell us about ourselves.

What I'm seeing here isn't that radiation is harmless, but that radiation is less harmful than humans, which is no great surprise considering we kill wolves in a few minutes with guns, but radiation can take up to half the lifespan of a wolf to do the same.

Its interesting how people have weird biases!

It's like airplanes vs. cars.

There are several orders of magnitude more deaths in cars than there are in airplanes, but it is immensely spectacular when there are aiplane accidents, leading to a perception of unsafety. On the flip side, there will be at least one person dying in your city, TODAY, due to cars. But that is not spectacular and we gloss over it.

If every airplane crash poisoned the ground for 100 miles surrounding it, there would be a far different measurement of their impact. I don't know anyone who denies the safety record of nuclear if your only metric is human casualties. But that simply isn't the only impact.

The impact on livable land is a good point, though we also should probably consider how many lives we're willing to sacrifice for said land.

If swapping out nuclear for photovoltaics saves 100 km^2 of land but costs one more life on average, are we willing to pay that? Probably. I imagine that most people wouldn't feel comfortable paying 1 million lives though.

Looking a the discussion here,

https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy,

it looks like nuclear saves such a large number of lives that the land cost has probably been worth it.

Flipping the question around, non-nuclear energy sources also have a land cost. It'd be interesting to compare the ecological and land habitability impacts of other energy sources as well.

You are right, there are different metrics that should be considered.

Yes, there is the risk of long-term damage to the environment. But we've also learned a lot from failures and really make sure we can minimize the impact so that failure modes don't condemn an area like at Chernobyl. The stakes are very high, so the precautions aren't half-arsed.

But if we're going to have an honest conversation, we also need to consider the secondary impact of other energy sources. Windfarms kill large birds[1]. Also watch for flying ice [2]. Hydro power disrupts fish migration and affects silt patterns. Most importantly of all, oil continues to cause many wars in addition to health issues.

All means of energy production carry risks and impact both nature and human lives. Some forms spread the risk out, some just shift it to less fortunate populations. Nuclear addresses the risk head-on and contains it. That requires every control system in triplicate; an insane amount of regulation, inspection, safety checks; and of course it requires a level of transparency so that the population can remained informed about the risks and issues.

In the end, there must be a basket of methods used for energy production, to balance the electrical needs of an area.

- Nuclear makes a good baseline for high levels of output. But it doesn't scale up/down very fast to match needs.

- Wind and solar are great if the environment permits it but are vulnerable to weather, and produce several ordrer of magnitude less than nuclear.

- Hydro is free except for the ecological (and sometimes human) disruption it causes when whole areas are lost to the water, and is dependent on weather (at a longer timeline).

- Gas is a great on-demand source to complement the ones above but of course is a net producer of CO₂ and has it's own high ecological & geopolitical impact.

- Coal... well that one needs to be discontinued for the reasons mentioned in the article.

[1] http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/new/us-windfarms-kill-...

[2] https://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/ice-tossing-turbi...

Maybe we do see the potential and it's not yet cost effective for us to implement wind or solar on a large scale. There are lots of smaller scale solar farms around the country, though, and I'm seeing more and more wind turbines, so it's not like we're ignoring it.

If a penny saved is a penny earned, then conservation is the safest of all.

I'm not saying we don't need sources, but most Americans could reduce their energy use by probably 50% - 90%, probably improving their standards of living if they did it thoughtfully.

In terms of deaths caused, conservation is probably be negative, by saving lives from power industries, which tend to be dangerous.

To talk about energy and safety without talking about conservation seems irresponsible.

Yeah, it's funny how these type of articles never report that this isn't an accepted view at all.

We summarize the results of a recent statistical analysis of 216 nuclear energy accidents and incidents (events). The dataset is twice as large as the previous best available. We employ cost in US dollars as a severity measure to facilitate the comparison of different types and sizes of events, a method more complete and consistent that the industry-standard approach. Despite significant reforms following past disasters, we estimate that, with 388 reactors in operation, there is a 50% chance that a Fukushima event (or more costly) occurs every 60–150 years. We also find that the average cost of events per year is around the cost of the construction of a new plant. This dire outlook necessitates post-Fukushima reforms that will truly minimize extreme nuclear power risks. Nuclear power accidents are decreasing in frequency, but increasing in severity.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462961...

This is THE statistic that nuclear proponents love to cite. There have been articles blasting about nuclear’s low fatality number as long as I’ve been on HN. And just as long I’ve been pointing out it’s a bogus, stupid metric.

Solar gets a higher fatality rating because of folks falling off their own roofs. It’s a tragedy sure but does that mean solar is dangerous? Of course not. Climbing up on the roof of your house is dangerous and everybody knows that.

It’s also a number that tries to gloss over the worst parts of nuclear; the extremely long lived impact of nuclear accidents. The areas around Chernobyl and Fukushima are destroyed for generations to come. Finding responsible, safe ways to store spent nuclear fuel continues to be an issue.

Renewables are cheaper and cheaper all the time. More countries are finding they can power a larger portion of their needs with renewables every year. Frankly we just don’t need nuclear and it’s serious risks and downsides.

"It’s a tragedy sure but does that mean solar is dangerous? Of course not. Climbing up on the roof of your house is dangerous and everybody knows that."

That danger is sure a relevant factor when evaluating energy policy. People can know the danger all they want, they'll still do it more often if governments subsidize or otherwise promote rooftop solar.

I think it's fair game to compare those deaths to radiation poisoning deaths from nuclear spills.

> The areas around Chernobyl and Fukushima are destroyed for generations to come.

Along with basically every surface mine in the world. Garzweiler mine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garzweiler_surface_mine), which I'd never even heard of until I spent 30 seconds on wikipedia, is nearly a tenth of the size of the Fukushima Exclusion Zone.

> Frankly we just don’t need nuclear and it’s serious risks and downsides.

I guess you're not from India or China. It is coal that nuclear should displace, not renewables.

Except the solar/wind mix is a better solution than either.

Except baseload from wind and solar does not really work. Some energy storage facility have to be included, and then we would have to factor in human/money cost of that facility as well.

Sure, or throw in a quick response gas fired generator.

It’s a very effective combination, especially pumped hydro.

Frankly we just don’t need nuclear

You lambast the actual statistics cited, but fail to provide anything yourself. How much TW is currently produced globally by Nuclear, and how much Solar or other renewables? What is the timeframe until there is parity?

The biggest risk posed by nuclear power is that we don't build it and carbon levels rise to stratospheric heights.

Eyeballing [1] (from 2016) it looks like renewable will surpass nuclear sometime this year. [2] shows that "other" sources already has, but I think that includes hydro-electricity.

[1] https://www.iea.org/newsroom/energysnapshots/oecd-electricit...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/data/browser/#/?id=2-IEO201...

True, but great majority of the renewables cited into the report is hydro, which is not very portable and cannot be considered as way forward.. not even mentioning all the flooding it causes

Read the first link again. That splits out hydro and shows other renewables are (as I said) about to surpass nuclear.

If we keep turning off nuclear power plants just like Germany.

By my eyeballed guess, it doesn't need any reduction in nuclear power for the renewable sources to surpass it. The nuclear line looks more or less horizontal to me.

Some quick google-fu shows that renewables have already surpassed nuclear worldwide...

I've been curious enough to wonder why very small plants could not be created to serve much smaller areas. I don't know what I'm talking about but would it be possible to make a small nuclear box, say the size of a refrigerator, that could serve a small city alone? A large city would have several of these sprinkled around. In case of a meltdown, or other accident, there would be minimal damage? I don't know what I'm talking about.

Registered to post this - http://www.nuscalepower.com/ This is exactly the idea of smaller, factory-produced walkaway-safe nuclear reactors.

It is weird how people compare safety of 50 year old technology (nuclear incidents) and cutting edge solar/wind

And, there is an asterisk.

* Rooftop solar only

Why?

Why?

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