Or… we can just do nuclear, which is SAFER than solar/wind energy, and not have any issues with needing to build giant batteries.
- every country runs it's own homegrown nuclear power plants
- a few first world companies run power plants in every country, making them dependent and complaint
- nuclear plants are in "safe" countries (which hopefully remain safe) and their electricity gets distributed to dependent "unsafe" countries via a global power grid
Which of those solutions do you prefer?
It's roughly as safe as renewables, and they're both much safer than fossil fuels, particularly coal, but you have to use obviously out of date stats to suggest anything else regarding renewables vs nuclear and the trend is clearly in renewables favor, even if it wasn't continuing to get cheaper, which it is, which gives you more safety-per-buck too.
For people still retro-fitting solar (which will grow in absolute terms), the increased efficiency means they get more power per trip to the roof than the past installs, further lowering the deaths per TWH generated (this also impacts mining related deaths as PV efficiency of manufacture has been increasing, getting more TWH per unit of material).
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/09/chinas-nuclear-energy-...
What do the men who planned the solar and wind rollouts think?
https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
It pretty much totally discounts the insanely large number of thyroid cancer cases in children. Then comes up with a very optimistic scenario of survival rates based on western medical interventions. So maybe they didn’t die per say but had significantly reduced quality of life and mutations.
This is a classic example of taking one vanity metric and making absolute conclusions from it rather than taking a range of data points to paint a more accurate story.
I find Wikipedia shows a range of numbers that are far more likely to give a realistic picture
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_dis...
I'm not claiming it as a 100% accurate source, as it was just what I found with a quick google - I agree using a range of data points for each energy source would be more rigorous. Do you have a better source that uses ranges for the different energy options?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
I don't think that Mayak is relevant, as it is a secretive, poorly regulated nuclear weapons production facility. Similarly, the impacts of Therac-25 [1] patients or the Goiania Incident[2] don't get counted against nuclear energy.
If this is surprising then you need to diversify your media news consumption.
Rooftop solar is more deadly than nuclear when you count people falling off of roofs during solar installation as “solar deaths”, otherwise it’s safer.
source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
> People often focus on the marginal differences at the bottom of the chart – between nuclear, solar, and wind. This comparison is misguided: the uncertainties around these values mean they are likely to overlap.
> The key insight is that they are all much, much safer than fossil fuels.
> Nuclear energy, for example, results in 99.9% fewer deaths than brown coal; 99.8% fewer than coal; 99.7% fewer than oil; and 97.6% fewer than gas. Wind and solar are just as safe.