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Comment by simlan | Hacker News Reader

> Over 70% of this cost comes from the increased mortality risk associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels.

Sure thing... This disqualified itself really quickly.

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This really is the key point. The German people chose to shut down clear-air nuclear plants and leave their brown coal plants on. The coal plants kills lots of people per year via air pollution. Thus, this choice likely net killed lots of people. They have 45 GWe of coal capacity still, and they use it when the wind isn't blowing.

Of course, the German people were concerned that a nuclear accident would potentially kill more. This is easy to understand emotionally, but not scientifically. Nuclear power plants have killed up to ~4000 total including latent cancers from Chernobyl. Fossil kills 4-8 million people every single year. When you divide by TWh produced, nuclear comes out crazy safe among our energy options. And it's low-carbon to boot (12 gCO2-eq/kWh).

It's the same mental mistake as when people are more afraid of flying than driving.

The shock value of a few high profile accidents overpowers the dull constant killing of a few random people all the time. The total numbers play no part in this equation.

I think the flying vs driving is mostly about control.

"I'm not flying the plane, therefore I have no choice on whether my death could have been prevented"

Coal vs Nuclear has to elicit the same response...

"I didn't make a choice on the coal that will kill my children, but I have a choice on the nuclear plant that could fail in 0.00000000000001% of chances"

Except that it’s not 0.00000000x but more like 2 (really bad accidents so far)/450 (total nuclear power plants in the world).... and probably closer to 1 if you include nuclear waste that we have no idea what to do with.

Not saying coal is better, but fission is kind of real iffy too.

Number of accidents is not what counts here. It's number of deaths caused per terawatt-hour of generation from a particular source. This normalizes things in the context we need to make energy decisions. The numbers are that coal kills 350 people for every 1 that nuclear kills.

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

We also have figured out the solution to commercial nuclear waste disposal. In fact, we've known it for a long time (deep geologic repository), but there's a persistent myth that we don't know what to do with it. Here are photos of the under-construction deep geologic repository in Finland: http://www.posiva.fi/en/media/image_gallery?gfid_2061=94#gal...

But this depends on the person driving. If the person who is worried about this is a much better driver and would be less likely to get in a fatal accident than average then why wouldn't this be a valid concern?

No it isn't a valid concern. For an equivalent distance, commercial flights are still safer than even the safest drivers. At 30000 feet you don't have to worry about some other drunk driver running a red light.

You rarely drive across a whole continent, so I don't think that comparing passenger miles is the best measure. Perhaps deadly accidents per passenger-trip would be better?

Nope.

From https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.com/2017/07/20/are-airp...

For vehicles, “1.13 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled”

and

“Airline accidents per one million miles flown came in at a rate of 0.0035.”

So with an equal denominator, 0.35 vs 1.13. So if you're in the top 20% of safest drivers, which is not hard to reach considering all the idiots out there, you are safer driving.

Nope. Your calculations are totally invalid.

There are other drivers on the road though. Not all traffic deaths are single driver incidents. If someone blows through a red light as you're turning, your reaction time can be shockingly irrelevant.

How does highlighting a way a fatality could occur refute that you might be safer than the average driver?

In Japan a single event wiped out most of their nuclear power for a decade. Plus it added a nuclear site where people under very difficult conditions struggle to control and clean up a few melted-down reactors for several decades...

I can't see that kind of Nuclear as a viable option for Japan.

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