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Comment by ConsiderCrying | Hacker News Reader

I love looking at that "Radiation Dose Chart", which has been posted quite frequently ever since "Chernobyl" the tv series aired. Shows just how much radiation humans are dealing with on an everyday basis.

Regarding the essay, I wouldn't mind seeing what the risk is like for the nearby regions. I've seen reports that the rains might smooth some of the danger but it's still a chilling prospect. Wouldn't contamination of land in the Kiev region and parts of Belarus mean a disruption of some supply chains? I've read that Ukraine delivers vast amounts of salt to the EU, that would likely be hit. (Not to mention the impact on people but that's a different matter altogether.)

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Here is another chart: https://www.hilfe-tschernobyl.de/s/cc_images/cache_243604066...

It shows the raise of thyroid cancer in Belarus.

Radiation accidents are quite convenient as those who suffer from them spread over a very long time while you read always that only one person died from Fukushima for example.

There was also much less radiation that got out in the Fukushima accident.

Levels are so low, that you can't make predictions that are bases on real data. You can only extrapolate the cancer risk from higher doses.

Every coal and gas plant does around the same harm as a Fukushima accident every year if you look at the deaths they cause.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Just as an FYI, in terms of deaths per terawatt-hour, nuclear is about an order of magnitude safer than the next safest contender, solar, and two orders of magnitude safer than coal. [1, 2]

Also consider that the worst ever accident in the history of nuclear power, Chernobyl of course, is expected to in the full course of time, kill 4,000 people (including those who killed themselves because they thought they were "contaminated"). On the other hand, the worst hydro accident, the Bangqiao dam failure, killed 171,000 people in the span of likely about 10 whole minutes. [3, 4]

It bears calling out separately for emphasis since you mentioned it, if you're going to get any cancer, just pray it's thyroid cancer -- it has a 98% survival rate [5]. The thyroid is removed and you take thyroxin for the rest of your life, but otherwise, you're good to go. If you're in an affected area adding it to your routine screening should be more than sufficient.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

[2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

[5] https://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/thyroid-cancer/statistic...

In this instance, order of magnitude would mean in a team of 10 people killed producing solar energy 9 of them get to live if we use nuclear.

The data you sourced doesn't consistently support that in link [1]; it suggests more like 1 in 2 so isn't really fair to call that an order of magnitude. It is just much better.

But don't mind me, I remain as confused as ever about why people don't feel these statistics end the argument over nuclear.

I usually use [2] as my source (where the order of magnitude is fully supported -- 0.04 vs 0.44 deaths per terawatt hour for rooftop solar). I believe [1] is referencing the totality of the solar market, including both rooftop and industrial solar. Rooftop solar is more dangerous due to the risks associated with installing and servicing panels on an incline a couple of stories off the ground.

[1] notably excludes the Bangqiao dam as that would raise the hydro number probably an order of magnitude by itself. Their biomass number also likely excludes air pollution.

Either way, to your point, the results are pretty darn clear no matter how you slice and dice the numbers.

[2] is pretty cranky, to put it mildly. Guy is quite insistent that thyroid cancer deaths even the nuclear industry acknowledged were down to Chernobyl shouldn't count, but on the other hand he's quite happy to attribute an arbitrarily large proportion of roofing accidents to solar power and scale that up by the TWH requirements of a nuclear plant because obviously there's nowhere other than pitched roofs to install solar panels.

If we're looking at the peer reviewed stuff, nuclear isn't an order of magnitude safer than renewables, it's broadly similar to modern renewables after taking into account the evacuation of entire cities to mitigate the nuclear casualty figures...

If Sun will blow and destroy whole Earth, it still will be the safest form of energy generation per TWh, so solar energy wins again.

I mean, it isn't, because the data says it isn't but that's okay too :) nothing's risk free, many solar panels have/had cadmium and rare earth metals which are mined in horrifyingly toxic pits across China, and generate piles of e-waste that need to be disposed of. The panels themselves are large and heavy and need to be cleaned, serviced and replaced over time.

That doesn't mean it's at all bad, just it's not perfect either.

It killed 4000 people because they basically shut down cities and villages to allow it to do so.

If they hadn’t obliterated those places the death toll would be a lot higher.

I haven’t heard of entire cities being shutdown due to solar accidents despite the far greater prevalence of solar farms than nuclear facilities in existence.

Edit: Also, heroic efforts by ordinary Russians, who almost certainly compromised their own lives so that people much further away wouldn’t be affected.

Yes, because even despite the mismanagement of the disaster, the timescales involved allowed them to implement the protections needed. You’re arguing for the GP.

Personally I think may require evacuation of entire cities for decades to mitigate casualties is a risk factor worth taking into account, except perhaps when building nuclear reactors in deserted areas.

Similarly, the fact that we've largely contained it by shutting entire countries down is not an argument for COVID-19 actually being one of the least harmful pathogens humanity has encountered.

Definitely worth taking into account! But when you do, it's still a lot less damaging overall than things like coal.

So, what I'm hearing in this thread is that we should evacuate entire areas around coal burning power plants for decades, but we choose not to.

I'd probably shut them down altogether where possible. But disingenuous in the extreme to pretend that the radiation exposure from living in Pripyat is comparable to that of living somewhere near coal plants.

> But disingenuous in the extreme to pretend that the radiation exposure from living in Pripyat is comparable to that of living somewhere near coal plants.

Yes and no, in a way it's worse because Pripyat was evacuated, so people were moved to low radiation areas. Coal plants, people don't realize just how much radiation is generated by them. Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. [1]

"Fly ash uranium sometimes leaches into the soil and water surrounding a coal plant, affecting cropland and, in turn, food. People living within a "stack shadow"—the area within a half- to one-mile (0.8- to 1.6-kilometer) radius of a coal plant's smokestacks—might then ingest small amounts of radiation. Fly ash is also disposed of in landfills and abandoned mines and quarries, posing a potential risk to people living around those areas."

Honestly it sounds much risker to live anywhere near a coal plant than anywhere near a nuclear plant (which for the record have had 30 years of safety upgrades since Chernobyl). Not to mention, the last RBMK reactor at the Chernobyl power plant was left operating until the year 2000.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

You mean, ordinary Ukrainians, 260 thousands of them.

I don't think anyone claims that nuclear is safer than solar, but of course solar can't really power everything because half the time it's dark. Also you'd need a solar farm about the size of Spain just to satisfy demand, to say nothing of transmission losses getting energy to high latitudes or mountainous/cloudy regions where the sun doesn't shine all day long.

Imagine trying to power Seattle or Vancouver with solar. It might work until 3 or 4 pm in the summer, but at all other times you'd need to bring power across the Rockies, taking massive transmission losses all the way due to resistivity of wire, and then of course when it's the rainy season in the Pacific North West, it's snowing in the Prairies so now you need to have a means of scraping snow and ice from your Spain-sized solar farm.

Then scale that difficulty up by an order of magnitude, adding in the cost of maintaining multi-terawatt transoceanic power cables to import energy from another continent if you want to run your electrical applicances after the sun goes down.

It's just not feasible.

> of course solar can't really power everything because half the time it's dark

And this new thing called internet could never work because half the time people is sleeping so trying to access a webpage in Australia would work only 12 hours a da... oh, wait...

We have batteries.

> you'd need a solar farm about the size of Spain

https://mapfight.appspot.com/sahara-vs-es/sahara-desert-spai...

Your snarky analogy doesn't really make sense because the power infrastructure in Australia runs all night long with no need for batteries. Or did you think that Australia's coal and NG plants shut down in the evening?

But sure, you could put that Spain-sized solar farm in the Sahara. Then it's just a simple matter of pacifying the Islamic militants and whoever else while building a global-scale power distribution network, and convincing opposing powers such as NATO, Russia, and China, to give up their domestic power infrastructure and put national security at risk by relying on one giant point of failure all while coordinating construction projects (with their increased electrical demands) on a global scale.

I won't even get into the size of the battery farm required to store a continent's energy needs. The United States used 1.068E20 joules of electricity in 2018: Divide by the number of seconds in a year and there's your wattage, I'll leave it to you to figure out the rest.

edit: and we're still ignoring transmission losses at transcontinental scale

Nuclear energy density is surprisingly low when you consider security around the powerplant.

Waterford Nuclear Generating Station for example occupies 3,000 acre of land to produce 8402 GWh (2017). That’s 8402 GWh / 12 million square meters / 365.24d / 24h = 0.08kW per meter or 80w/meter compared to ~67w/meter over 24 hours for a 23% efficient solar panel in a Arizona. You are spacing those panels, so in practice solar needs about twice the land for the same average power.

That’s just one example there are better and worse examples. Notably you can get higher nuclear power density when multiple GW reactors are on the same peace of land, but that’s got it’s own issues.

> I don't think anyone claims that nuclear is safer than solar

This branch of the comment thread started because arcticbull claimed, with two separate sources, that nuclear is safer than solar.

The major examples of nuclear being less safe than solar involve invoking nuclear plants designed in 1967 (Fukushima) and 1972 (Chernobyl). At the dawn of the nuclear industry [0].

People are claiming that nuclear is safer than solar and they are accompanied by statistical evidence that nuclear is absurdly safe. The evidence is also considerable that by 1975 they'd figured out how to design a safe reactor.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_power_history.svg

I believe the claim was that it's safer per terawatt-hour, not that it's absolutely safer.

Those are different metrics.

While technically correct that isn't a useful interpretation of "nuclear power is safer than solar", because it implies that nuclear is infinitely safer than using solar energy in a country that doesn't have any nuclear plants but has some solar panels.

I don't think anyone would care about that fact in practice. Deaths per unit power is much more important unless you have a thesis that it changes with the amount of power produced.

Rooftop solar is #6. Grid solar built on the ground is #1 and nuclear is arguably #2 based on specific models of the dangers associated with widespread fallout. Though windmill deaths during construction are front loaded, so it’s likely to drop as current windmills age.

PS: Hydro power is actually negative deaths per kWh if you include the lives saved from reduced flooding. But that gets into tricky definitions.

> PS: Hydro power is actually negative deaths per kWh if you include the lives saved from reduced flooding. But that gets into tricky definitions.

It's very positive if you count the Bangqiao Dam ;)

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