Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest (2017)

ourworldindata.org

78 pointsopen-source-ux120 comments

Somehow they didn't include solar, wind, geothermal, or hyrdo in this analysis? It's still a good point though I'd imagine all of those would have similarly low mortality rates.

Solar and wind might surprise you. Anytime you're working on a rooftop or on a tower, your risk of falling to your death is not zero.

Hydro is in a special case too, because a sudden dam collapse could kill thousands of people in the blink of an eye. Johnstown Flood Disaster comes to mind. Whether you blame the collapse on the hydropower is another question.

Call me a crackpot, but I believe geothermal may be worse than the rest put together. By leaching the heat the earth needs to "lubricate" its plate tectonics, I think you might be delaying, amplifying, and shifting the focus of the earthquakes. I think our overdue Hayward earthquake is being influenced by the GWh of heat energy taken out at Salton Trough and the Geysers. Force is building up like in an engine you let the oil out of. I theorize we're about to find out what the Earth-scale equivalent of throwing a rod is.

This is outside of my normal area of expertise, but from what I gather, the total geothermal power output was around 14 GWH in 2017 [1], with an estimated maximum of 2TW possible worldwide if we develop every spot available [2].

It looks like the current estimates of baseline power lost through plate tectonics from the mantle are 35-47 TW, "from secular cooling, internal radioactivity, and core heatflow across its base" [3,4]. To bring these numbers into scale, there is approximately 173,000 TW of heat energy bombarding the earth [5]. I am not able to find estimates for the total thermal energy stored in all of the earth, as there is decent debate about what the inner 'layers' are made of; however, it seems doubtful that we are making a large impact even on localized regions with a max current output of 14 GW when compared to the 35 TW per year lost naturally.

[1] https://www.iea.org/topics/renewables/geothermal/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power

[3] http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016AGUFMDI52A..02D

[4] https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-is-stored-in-the-earth...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget

Did you switch units from wh to w?

And in 1975, Banqiao Dam in China killed 26,000 people immediately from flooding, and another 145,000 in the aftermath, according to China's official estimate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

>Anytime you're working on a rooftop or on a tower, your risk of falling to your death is not zero.

Okay, but I'd still be interested in:

a) A measure of death risk to the general public, i.e. people not directly involved in the production of the energy. It's important to distinguish internalized vs externalized risk.

b) A measure that accounts for the potential cost of preventing these deaths. That is, one that could capture insights like "source X and source Y currently have the same death count per kWh, but it would cost half has much to achieve a 10% reduction in deaths from X compared to Y".

The ratio of internal/external deaths would hugely effect the measure in b) -- it's much easier to stack on measures that can prevent deaths if they're employees of the provider than if it's the general public.

And so, on a), I would guess that measure for wind power is really hard to distinguish from zero.

> A measure of death risk to the general public, i.e. people not directly involved in the production of the energy. It's important to distinguish internalized vs externalized risk.

That's kinda creepy. Like we should be ok with Appalachian coal mining's horrible safety record because the general public never dies in mining collapses or gets black lung. Who cares about some faraway people just so long as I can run my crypto farm at under 5¢/kWh?

Very "Hunger Games".

certainly shouldn’t be okay with it, but if arbitrary people in a 100km radius were effected rather than just miners, yes that would be worse, because their “decision” to remain in the area is further removed from the problem than the decision to remain a miner

So what are you thoughts on coastal cities? Should the government do something about them?

My memory is every so often a major hurricane comes along and kills a bunch of people. The people who die probably didn't choose to put the city where it is. The risks are much higher than the nuclear industry.

And some follow up questions, because I always vent on Nuclear (sorry, don't mean to take it out on you, the lack of evidence based policy on environmental issues just gets me every time):

Is dying in a hurricane better than the health impacts of nuclear, which are many years delayed?

Do you think that the evacuation from the region around Fukashima (deaths: 10s of people), which killed more people than the radiation (deaths: 0) is evidence that the standard of "were effected" is too high?

Have you ever exposed yourself to so much solar radiation that you felt heat on your skin? Do you feel that this level of risk is remotely acceptable, given the number of deaths caused by skin cancer each year?

_PS_ I've worked on a coal mine. Deaths mining coal is already a crazy low figure, Australian coal mines are probably safer than supermarkets by the statistics. I'd be shocked if erecting and maintaining solar panels and wind turbines is safer than nuclear. Roofs and spinning blades will kill people.

>Call me a crackpot, but I believe geothermal may be worse than the rest put together. By leaching the heat the earth needs to "lubricate" its plate tectonics, I think you might be delaying, amplifying, and shifting the focus of the earthquakes.

I cannot imagine that we are anywhere close to technologically capable of having even a miniscule impact on plate tectonics.

Interesting. Trade “the planet’s climate” for “plate tectonics” and you’ll find a lot of like-minded Americans, particularly in Congress.

The Earth's crust has something like a million times the mass of its atmosphere.

Actually, TIL (a google search revealed) it's only 5 times more massive.

That is not correct either.

Earth's crust: 2.77 * 10^22 kg

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFM.V33A1161P

Earth's atmosphere: 5.15 * 10^18 kg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Density_an...

The crust is about five thousand times more massive.

The factor of 1000 difference is what you get when you accidentally forget to convert between kg and tonnes.

5000 it is.

The mass of the atmosphere is same as mass of 10m layer of water (because they both create 1 atm hydrostatic pressure). Obviously, the crust is much thicker than 10m, also much denser than 1000kg/m^3.

That's similar to what the fracking advocates said before they started causing earthquakes.

Causing earthquakes is easy (I lived close to a mine, and earthquakes happened). Affecting plate tectonics ... I feel like that is something entirely different.

I do agree it seems like a bad idea to leach heat from the inner surface of earth in large quantities. I actually feel the same way about wind as well (a bad idea to take enormous amounts of energy out of the weather system before understanding it).

Technically you don’t take it out. You just move the energy somewhere else. It all ends up back as heat eventually. We already move vast quantities of energy around with our food production and distribution systems.

What about solar? Change an area of land that previously reflected most of the light back into space to absorb it instead.

Lubricating these faults often has the reverse effect; it allows the plates to constantly slip and having more frequent, smaller earthquakes. That being said, the geysers quake a few years back hit the theoretical maximum for that portion of the fault so who really knows. See below for info on the topic as well as the Parkfield Experiment.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/parkfield/fluids.php

Perhaps not!

There's a famous blogpost that claims that rooftop solar panels are about ten times more deadly than nuclear power stations, because people might fall off the roof when installing them: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...

The majority of American PV generation is from ground mounted solar farms, not rooftop systems. I have looked many times for statistics about worker mortality in solar farm construction, sadly to no avail. I believe that deaths-per-TWh is significantly lower for solar farms. Dangerous falls are much less common during the construction of large farms and panels in farms tend to be more productive than those mounted on rooftops.

In California, for example, distributed rooftop solar installations generated 10.7 TWh in 2017 while solar farms generated 23.1 TWh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_California#Gene...

I wonder how the figures change if you require solar in the first place?

Presumably, if solar was required by planning regulations (where sane), for new-build or major roof repairs, the installation risk could then be nearly eliminated as an extra factor, given you are going to have the problem of putting a new roof on anyway.

It would still take extra time or extra people to install solar alongside other work on the roof, and thus create extra risk.

Depends on how you are doing it. If the solar is also your roof surface it isn't an extra job, it is just a materials choice.

edit - also, given how much risk there is in the prep and teardown for scaffolding, combining roof jobs will generally reduce the overall risk a lot, even if you can't combine tasks any further than that.

With the difference that one person dropping dead from a roof hurts one family, a nuclear plant going off spoils a huge area for generations.

Which would make sense if one person fell off a roof for each exploded plant, but the ratio is a tiny bit bigger than that.

People don't risk falling off scaffoldings when building and maintaining nuclear power plants?

OSHA is much more vigilant in power plants than on random roofs.

So we need 4400 persons falling off a roof to be par with nuclear power plants. I still consider this ratio a much better outcome than a power plant going off anywhere near (radius to be defined in Mm depending on wind direction).

How? There has been a handful of nuclear plant accidents ever, but hundreds of thousands of people work on roofs every year worldwide to install solar panels.

As far as I can tell, the original pro-nuclear "deaths per TWh" calculation, and follow-up work, neglects mundane industrial accidents that occur during the construction and operation of nuclear power plants. Only incidents involving unplanned radiation exposure are counted. But these same kinds of mundane accidents do get counted in the numbers for renewable energy. Further, as I note in another comment, the solar PV numbers neglect that more TWh come from solar farms than from rooftop solar installations, and that constructing solar farms is safer (lower risk of fatal falls). The methodological difference isn't significant if you just want to highlight how dangerous the fossil fuel status quo is compared to non-combustion options. But if you want to compare deaths-from-renewables vs. deaths-from-nuclear, it doesn't make sense to omit the mundane accidents from just one side of the balance sheet.

As an example of "mundane" nuclear deaths, 6 workers have been killed at the Surry Nuclear Plant. 2 were fatally scalded by an accidental steam release in 1972. 4 were killed by a steam explosion in 1986.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surry_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Even...

5 Japanese workers were killed by a 2004 steam accident at Mihama-3.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihama_Nuclear_Power_Plant#200...

Falling equipment killed a worker at Arkansas One in 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Nuclear_One#March_201...

solar power produces more waste than nuclear.

https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/are-we-headed-solar-waste...

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2017-08-...

I agree a comparison with those would be interesting however the article does explicitly state which sources are included in the analysis:

  Here we limit our comparison to the dominant energy sources—brown coal, coal, oil, gas, biomass and nuclear energy; in 2014 these sources accounted for about 96% of global energy production.1

The Banqiao dam failure alone is enough to drag hydro quite far up the list. Even excluding it, other disasters add up to worse outcomes than nuclear. Hydro plants apart from being an environmental disaster suffers from creating all kinds of hazards downstream if not maintained regularly. When they are, they're mostly ok, until they're not - consider e g.the Mosul dam in Iraq where lack of maintenance has significantly increased the risk to a couple of million people.

Some analyses have shown that nuclear beats out all those, too: https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...

That article is from 1979. Wow.

Probably best taken with a grain of salt given how much solar in particular has ramped up.

Some of those numbers are ridiculous even for 1979. Looking at Figure 2, the metric tons of materials numbers for fossil fueled plants exclude the fuel, which is by far the largest material input to fossil fueled power.

Example: that figure shows material requirements of about 10 tons per megawatt-year for electricity from coal. A megawatt-year is 1000 * 24 * 365 = 8,760,000 kWh.

Kentucky Coal Education says that it takes about 1 pound (0.45 kg) of coal to produce 1 kWh of electricity. The actual material requirements for a megawatt-year of electricity from coal are upwards of 3,900 metric tons. Even with the low-efficiency PV modules of 1979, PV electricity required less mined material than coal electricity.

http://www.coaleducation.org/lessons/twe/ctele.htm

This discrepancy is ironic in a document that states in the introduction "If you calculate the risk of only part of a system and compare it with the corresponding part of another, by judiciously choosing the component you could prove that any energy system is riskier (or safer) than any other system. You would obviously be proving precisely nothing."

This method of proving precisely nothing is employed by the author in Figure 2, only regarding materials requirements instead of risk.

Here is a 2012 piece from the same author - 'The Impossible Dream? Why Renewables Won't Reduce CO2 Emissions by Much' - https://www.energycentral.com/c/pip/impossible-dream-why-ren...

Maybe it is just me, but I suspect he might just have a tiny little bit of bias.

Are those "major"?

In the USA, renewables provide two-thirds as much power as nuclear. If you want to claim nuclear is major, you have to accept renewables are too.

But it's not fair to group a bunch of different power sources all under "renewable." Nuclear is at 20%, the biggest renewable is hydro at 7.4%, followed by wind at 6.3%. I might call all of those reasonably major.

But solar PV falls way behind at 1.2%, geothermal is 0.4%, and solar thermal only 0.1%. I'd call those minor.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

what's not fair is not the "grouping", but the consideration of "major"... to assess the merits of each approach to set their fractions you compare their intensive properties not their extensive ones.

What percentage of that renewable power generation is not backed by traditional fossil or nuclear based generator? I guess 0%

This why nuclear power should be THE answer to global warming. But it isn't ... Nuke industry is dead and it is still disparaged by large swaths of environmentalists.

That's not the whole truth. That two-thirds is often backed by often stand-by NatGas generators, complicating the issue on if those additional plants should be counted separately.

Depends on the country.

If you are looking at making an argument on safety for going forward, you should probably look at them.

They did not include any numbers on wind, solar, hydro, tide, ... renewable energy; limiting the comparison to "the dominant" energy sources what they call "all major energy sources" shows how narrow the researchers' plate is.

World hydro power generation has already a greater percentage than nuclear fission, not in the U.S. though.. Add other renewable resources and all renewable surpass gas. Oil plays almost no role in energy generation. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods...

Doesn't change the picture. Hydro is surprisingly dangerous, in fact the single largest disaster involving an energy source was a dam that burst in China, killing 171,000 people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Overview :

   Energy Source               Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr)

   Coal – global average         100,000    (41% global electricity)

   Coal – China                  170,000   (75% China’s electricity)

   Coal – U.S.                    10,000    (32% U.S. electricity)

   Oil                            36,000    (33% of energy, 8% of electricity)

   Natural Gas                     4,000    (22% global electricity)

   Biofuel/Biomass                24,000    (21% global energy)

   Solar (rooftop)                   440    (< 1% global electricity)

   Wind                              150    (2% global electricity)

   Hydro – global average          1,400    (16% global electricity)

   Hydro – U.S.                        5    (6% U.S. electricity)

   Nuclear – global average           90    (11%  global electricity w/Chern&Fukush)

   Nuclear – U.S.                      0.1    (19% U.S. electricity)

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

"a project to control flooding and provide electrical power generation."

Damns are build to control flooding like the Banqiao Dam, to have reserves of water and to generate energy.

If you are going to build a dam anyway, why do not use it to produce energy?

This article is written entirely in terms of death counts. I guess that's a good proxy for safety and makes nuclear power look good, but I don't think it's an appropriate way measuring impact. Denial of use of property is pretty important too. About 150,000 people had to evacuate after the Fukushima disaster due to radiation concerns [1].

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/5-years-after-fukushima-by-the...

How many island and coastal dwellers are going to be denied their property because of our stubborn refusal to build nuclear plants?

Worse yet, the article takes extrapolated deaths from coal pollution, but only immediate catastrophic deaths from nuclear accidents.

Actually more people died during evacuation than from the radiation itself (which afaik resulted in 0 fatalities). It could be argued that the evacuation was unnecessarily broad, and resettlement was unnecessarily delayed.

How many people will be displaced because of global warming?

up to 7 billion, depending on how warm you're talking

>but I don't think it's an appropriate way measuring impact.

Yours isn't a better way to look at it. But here's another way: nuclear power is the only power source that can replace fossil-based power generation (outside of geothermal and hydro)

Hydro and geothermal can't do it; they're geographically limited.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/12/how-much-dam-energy-can-w...

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/warm-and-fuzzy-on-geother...

Says the nuclear industry, nobody else.

Just look at the independent safety reports on nuclear incidents, how often another Three Mile Island, Tschnernobyl or Fukushima was barely avoided: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph240/bechstein1/docs...

The nuclear risk is for generations.

... and far and away the most expensive in the long run.

How much offshore windpower could Japan have created with the billions it has already spent cleaning up Fukushima (now estimated to become $200billion)?

How much will safe waste storage for tens of centuries cost? We can't know until we figure out how to do that.

Right now, we don't have time to waste ... or money. There are clear, clean, much less expensive alternatives. Ask the investors.

How in the world is nuclear power more safe than friggin solar panels that just sit there in the sun?

The article does not address solar (and wind power) as they are not major energy sources, but nuclear power is safer per TWh than solar if you take in account deaths in manufacturing and installing photovoltaic panels (same goes for wind power). You also have to add the energy require to produce the panels, which itself most frequently comes from non-renewable and non-nuclear sources, thereby contributing to pollution and causing more fatalities.

This is likely true. However, to scale nuclear power development, we would have to lower standards in some ways to meet more aggressive timelines, which would almost certainly increase the mortality rate.

Nuclear can be the safest, but it's not the most efficient to build.

> which would almost certainly increase the mortality rate

This is not at all certain. There are ways of loosening regulations while not making them less safe. Even if there weren't, it is not guaranteed that having less safe regulations would result in less safe nuclear plants. Even if the nuclear plants were less safe[1], there is no guarantee that would result in more incidents.

Edit [1]: meaning they operate under less stringent safety standards and procedures, not a comment on the outcomes

One thing to take into account with nuclear is if you aren't happy to share an energy tech with your enemies, due to the risk of them using it to build civilization destroying weaponry, then that tech may not be the safest for global power generation.

To pick an example that is constantly in the press, Iran having a nuclear program makes people nervous in a way that them having a wind turbine factory or PV fab does not.

Whether solar and wind power are major energy sources depends on where in what region you live.

>nuclear power is safer per TWh than solar if you take in account deaths in manufacturing and installing photovoltaic panels (same goes for wind power).

Do you have figures for that?

> includes accidents in the mining of the raw material, the processing and production phases, and pollution-related impacts

and of course nuclear material won't be mined, processed and won't have any production phase at all. and building a plant is as harmless as anything else.... yeah, clearly.

also their death toll article.... I mean most russion publications think that chernobyl caused the death of a million people, their article was in "the thousand". of course we can always think nicely about anything and be postivie till the end, however humanity can't work with technologies that causes a huge death toll when it comes to desasters, because the market will always bring us to a desaster.

also the storage of waste is not a problem we can solve. no human lives over a thousand years, thus no storage will ever be safe.

According to the WHO, outdoor pollution from burning fossil fuels and biomass causes at least 2 million deaths annually. Even if the 1 million death toll were true, nuclear would still be vastly safer than coal power.

You could additionally push for the adoption of nuclear only in well-developed countries if you were adamant about safety, as in the United States the death toll from nuclear is 0.1 per year.

But the primary benefit of nuclear would be the reduction in CO2 emissions, with the tremendous safety gains being a bonus. If you only cared about reducing CO2 emissions you could have a Chernobyl every year while still being safer and less polluting than coal power.

They still require maintenance. And the amount of power they give is very small in proportion to how much hardware is required, unlike nuclear where a very large amount of power is produced from a small amount of hardware.

'Major' is the key word here. Solar and wind are not included in the analysis.

Are you volunteering to go work in some strip mine in South America looking for the necessary heavy metals? Or stick around in that poor village drinking the water?

You'd be surprised to hear where uranium comes from.

they may not want to include intermittent sources of power.

Because solar panels production is incredibly toxic. Also coal-burning power power plants emit much more radiation than nuclear ones.

Imagine if developed economies doubled down on nuclear in the 60s and 70s to the same extent as France ... How many trillions of tons of CO2 would not have been emitted to the atmosphere. I suspect the anti-nuke environmental movement is not going to be seen in a friendly light by history.

Too true. Clémenceau might say that the environment is too important to be left to the environmentalists.

This is the problem with popular statistics - these people don't understand it.

As an analogy, let's say they come out with another article about weapons. Perhaps they compare knives, guns, grenades, and nuclear weapons. By their line of thinking, nuclear weapons are the safest because they have killed the fewest number of people (roughly 1/4 million, depending on how you count it).

But I think everyone would agree that nuclear weapons are incredibly dangerous. If for no other reason than the fact that they are the only weapon that can create an extinction event.

Likewise, nuclear power is "safe" according to this article because it's killed the fewest number of people.

It's this type of mentality that gets us into bad situations. Even the 2008 financial crisis was created by this lack of understanding of the potential damage that certain (widely used) financial instruments could do.

If the authors want to be really honest, then answering their question (they asked "If we want to produce energy with the lowest negative health impacts, which source of energy should we choose?") would include potential issues as well.

A simple example of this is "What would have happened if Fukushima's reactor fell into the sea?" (please ignore the poor wording for simplification of the issue.) The answer is not good. And if it didn't kill many people in a short period of time, it sure as heck would have ruined a good part of the food supply which would have affected many more people.

So when you are doing statistics, please consider how you frame the question, because otherwise you're just spouting nonsense.

Just finished reading "Chernobyl Prayer" and I have to say it really did make me rethink my position on nuclear energy. Not that I'm an expert or have any way of impacting the future of nuclear energy, or anything. But, as you say, a nuclear disaster, while rare, would have immense and long-lasting effects. As with any type of accident, it's always a question of "when" not "if".

I am strongly in favour of the argument that nuclear power is cleaner, and safer per unit watt-hour. However, what about nuclear weapons proliferation?

The popular light water reactor nuclear power stations use enriched uranium fuel, and these processes can be used to make nuclear weapons. Now it's certainly far from the truth all nations who have nuclear power will decide to build nuclear weapons, but I would think that most nations would have the potential of weapons at least partly in mind.

Given all the deaths from oil including all the war and destruction in middle east, plus enviro damage, plus health impacts, I always wondered why nuclear is always considered the most polluting energy source.

One note, they focused on dominant sources of energy (95%) so most renewables are not in the mix.

I've got to think for the cost of the US military (or some modest portion of its budget) you could move the part pretty meaningfully towards an improved US energy story (security / health etc).

Hate to point it out but death is not the main hazard of nuclear energy.

A 1% failure rate is not safe. Stop reporting this absolute non-sense.

ITT: people who'd be first to tell you 99,9% SLA is crap argue that nuclear is safe.

Look kids, that’s how not to do statistical analysis.

I don't recall hydroelectric plants leaving entire regions uninhabitable.

Looks like there was an incident in 1976 that killed anywhere from 1800 to 25000 people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...

That's kinda small compared to Banqiao Dam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, approximately 26,000 people died in the province from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. In addition, about 5,960,000 buildings collapsed, and 11 million residents were affected. Unofficial estimates of the number of people killed by the disaster have run as high as 230,000 people. The death toll of this disaster was declassified in 2005.

At least there will be some normalcy within 10,000 years

Wow yeah, don't know how I missed that one.

But the region is still habitable is it not?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Relocation_of...

At least it isn’t killing people in other countries.

Most of them doing just that. Flooding a lot of areas because hydroelectric dam was built on the river is a valid scenario.

See: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renew...

Can you go fishing in the zone?

Three Gorges Dam in China uprooted 1.3 million people from their homes.

No the government uprooted them. No one plans on having a meltdown.

bollocks is it

Exactly.

We have two INES 7 incidents 25 years apart. Nuclear is 11% of world electricity generation and is concentrated mostly in technologically developed countries. Spreading that into developing world and to 100% of power generation, we'd have a chernobyl at least every 2.5 years. And given the wars and civil unrest, probably more.

The figures in the article are already specified per watt-hour. So expanding to 100% of power generation would not change the conclusion. Even if we had a chernobyl every 2.5 years, that could still add up to a better safety rate than other energy sources.

If vast fallout national parks are your thing, sure.

I don't think you understand the point I'm trying to make. All energy sources have dangers, but nuclear has the least danger in proportion to the amount of energy it gives. A few large disasters are not inherently worse than many small disasters. Just because nuclear disasters create a more dramatic scene than other types of disasters, doesn't mean that the overall harm is greater.

"The least danger" is poorly qualified here. The article certainly does no justice with straightforward, apples to apples comparison.

People still live in the exclusion zone, and most of it has lower background radiation than high altitude cities people don't think twice about. The other reactors kept operating for years. The Chernobyl exclusion zone was and is excessive. Even if it wasn't, the cost in land would still be perfectly fine even if you had one every year and quarantined each area for a century.

The problem is not so much background radiation, but polluted produce you consume and poorly mapped hot spots. But sure, if that's your thing. I'll pass.

We could have a Chernobyl every year and still kill fewer people than coal plants alone do today.

We'd likely release less radioactive materials into the air too - a lot of current coal plants pump huge quantities of uranium dust into the atmosphere.

Relatively few people die annually as a direct consequence of coal plant catastrophes. The pollution risks are extrapolated and gradual, just like the much less studied long term risks of non-lethal fallout exposure.

We're not talking about direct consequences of catastrophes. We're talking about life cycles, and about an existential risk to our species. There are some deep, deep pockets interested in diverting attention, narrowing the timeline of analysis, and changing the problem scope. As open source enthusiasts we should recognize this for what it is: good old-fashioned FUD.

(Edit for clarity: I'm not accusing you personally. I'm simply skeptical about where our received wisdom about the dangers of nuclear comes from.)

Despite your disclaimer, it does sound personal: can't really be read in any other way.

But talking about FUD, the article compares immediate deaths of nuclear accidents versus long term effects of coal pollution.

And relatively few people die annually as a direct consequence of nuclear catastrophes too.

The directly attributable number of deaths from nuclear plant catastrophes is <100 worldwide over the history of nuclear power plants.

The vast majority of projected reduced number of life-years from Chernobyl (a number that's keeps regularly being adjusted down) is down to increased risks of cancer that have turned out to be overblown, but will certainly end up having contributed the majority of deaths.

What I think happens is techies love neat, advanced, elegant (even if on paper) solutions to complex problems. Nuclear certainly ticks all the right boxes, so there is a great appeal to it. Huge incentive to gloss over messy real world outcomes.

Only not. We don't build plants like the one in Chernobyl anymore.

I remember a lengthy and much upvoted post in r/worldnews explaining how Westinghouse designs are much safer than Chernobyl. The day before Fukushima blew up.

That's not especially ironic. The Fukushima reactors that failed were designed by General Electric, Toshiba, and Hitachi in the early 1960s. Westinghouse was not involved.

Nuclear power continues to demonstrate a very low risk to human life per TWh of electricity generated, including Chernobyl and Fukushima. That said, it's probably best for nuclear advocates to acknowledge that sufficiently incompetent/malicious humans and/or exceptional natural disasters can lead to large unplanned releases of fission products from any reactor. And then to re-emphasize that the actual risks to human health are still lower for nuclear power than for any fossil-based power system.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-...

And most of the harm from Fukushima was the evacuation.

The wind blew into the sea. With Chernobyl it blew over my hometown: I have two family members with thyroid issues.

I feel for them. But with coal many more would have died from pollution. With more dams the contribution to climate change (gas released from rotting vegetation) would damage the planet, millions would be driven from their homes, and the risks of dam failures would keep being driven up and over time likely cause more deaths (as it has in the past). With more rooftop solar, more people would kill themselves in installation accidents.

It's not a situation where shutting down nuclear just magically prevents deaths, because the demand for power is still there. It is a matter of shifting the risks elsewhere. And the numbers are clear that nuclear is far safer than most of the alternatives (most - it's not clear for example if that'd be the case for larger solar installations; it's rooftop installations that seems to be the biggest problem with solar).

This doesn't mean we should uncritically build a ton of nuclear plants, but e.g. delaying the decommissioning of coal plants to take nuclear plants offline, the way Germany did, is tantamount to mass murder given what we know of the relative risks.

I'm sad for their misfortune but arguing against nuclear won't do any good for them, on contrary as this article states nuclear is safer than the other major energy sources. A family is a small sample size too. Of course we should also look into other studies of the energy sources total effect on humanity, to be sure. I think we have to see the big picture and not focus on our bubble.

I see an analogy to car and plane safety when comparing coal and nuclear safety. Car accidents are more frequent and damage can vary, while plane accidents are seldom but often severe. It is difficult to foresee the future, but we have the past that give us a good indicator of what will save most lives.

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