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Comment by craigc | Hacker News Reader

What would be interesting would be to have a poll of which forms of energy people think lead to the most deaths and put it next to this. I have a feeling nuclear would be the top.

The New York Times published an article that touched on this fairly recently too:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-ch...

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Something people run into all the time when talking about toxicology is that generally people tend to believe that either a substance is safe or not safe, irrespective of the dose. The EPA says that 10 ppb of arsenic is perfectly fine in drinking water but I'm pretty sure most people would be horrified to learn that their water has any arsenic in it at all.

People naturally apply the same heuristics to nuclear fallout for the same reasons. Fallout seems equally bad whether it's a 10 S dose or a 10 uS dose. And just as arsenic poisoning is a real thing that happens, deadly fallout was and remains a very real danger from nuclear war. Any nuke will produce some but if you set a big one off near the ground, such as to hit an ICBM silo or a sub pen or a command bunker, and you'll produce a very large amount. At the height of the Cold War a US first strike on the Soviet block was expected to produce up to 100 million casualties in Western Europe from fallout if the wind was blowing the wrong way.

Given that magnitude of danger it's no wonder people hear "fallout" and think that they're all going to die.

Would be more interesting to know what the actual damage from these different sources are, rather than just is one cherry-picked statistic.

And where are wind and solar?

Nuclear industry is notoriously shy about making comparisons to wind and solar.

No we aren't. I compare carbon emissions to wind and solar all the time. Nuclear's on par with wind, 4x lower carbon than solar PV, 40x lower than natural gas, 80x lower than coal.

Wind has a 35% capacity factor in the US, nuclear has 90%. Solar has 25%

Wind and solar capital cost is 4x lower than nuclear right now, thanks to the fact that they're at low generation fractions and have lots of fracked gas and hydro to integrate their variability. As generation fraction goes up, their cost goes up non-linearly. Nuclear cost is terrible right now. Some people are trying to bring it down, but no great progress yet. In 10-20 years when 20 countries have 20% or more variable renewables, nuclear will probably start looking really good again for deeply decarbonizing.

And nuclear roughly as few (and probably a little bit fewer) people than wind and solar per kWh generated, all of which are orders of magnitude safer than fossil. People fall off roofs installing solar panels and wind turbines catch fire and sometimes do ice-throw.

Many people who are interested in nuclear energy see it as a replacement for forms of energy that add carbon to the atmosphere. During normal operations (discarding commissioning and decommissioning) none of the three add significant carbon.

This isn’t a nuclear industry source and they don’t include hydro either (which is also still higher than nuclear on other comparisons).

Wikipedia has a table that still puts both above nuclear with rooftop solar at 440 per PWh and wind at 150 per PWh. (Doesn’t include other solar and I haven’t dug deep to verify those numbers.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities

Roofing is a dangerous profession, so rooftop solar is probably much more dangerous than other solar.

Yep, which to elaborate on your point means we could expect that number to be lower if it covered all solar.

You need more solar panels to get the same amount of energy. So since all the practical risk factors in nuclear apply to solar, and solar requires more activity, we'd expect solar to have more deaths per energy unit.

That said, neither nuclear or solar really kills anyone per TWh, so solar might score better by statistical fluke since the variances are so low.

I personally suspect that we don't count sunburn -> skin cancer deaths from solar. If we did, the radiation risks would ironically be higher for it than for nuclear power. Still basically 0 though.

If you add the solar at the time of building the roof you'd probably reduce this dramatically, as the house would probably be shrouded in scaffolding.

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