Deaths per TWH by energy source | Hacker News Reader

Deaths per TWH by energy source

nextbigfuture.com

53 pointsiand19 comments

Unless the point is to say "Wow, Coal is a very dangerous energy source on a global basis." or "Wow, China is really bad at operating coal power plants", this isn't very informative.

Obviously, the coal figures are reflecting the health issues created or exacerbated by using the product. So miner deaths, cancers, respiratory illnesses, etc are probably all factored in there.

Just as Chinese coal sticks out as outlier, nuclear sticks out as well.

How can you make an argument based on deaths without accounting for future risks? Some waste products of many nuclear energy generation are dangerous for 10,000 years -- longer than recorded history. And as the article states, one of the issues with nuclear accidents is the difficulty of attributing deaths:

"4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous."

It just seems bizarre to me that someone would discuss at length the hazards of working on a roof, while the US has hundreds of nuclear power plants with adjacent waste ponds that will require active cooling for an indefinite period of time.

Even if you count ever "possible shortened life" as a result of Chernobyl as a death right now, it has minimal impact on the relative dangers of nuclear vs. coal or oil.

"4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous."

This figure is far less than the number who will die just this year from mining coal (mostly in China and Africa), let alone from the direct health effects of secondary causes of coal pollution which will number in the hundreds of thousands to low millions.

There is very little nuclear waste (currently less than three Olympic sized swimming pools for all of Canada's nuclear waste) compared to the primary and secondary industrial waste from coal, oil and other forms of energy production, including solar and wind manufacturing.

Solar and wind are only "environmentally friendly" after the units are installed and working. If you add in the production, installation and land requirements, as well as maintenance, solar and wind are not as helpful as claimed.

I live between two of the largest nuclear generating stations in the world, within 20km, and I have few concerns. Having visited the sites and educated myself independently on the nuclear issue, I am far happier with this solution than the alternatives, including industrial wind and solar, though solar roof panels can have a place in helping reduce electrical heating of hot water.

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True, but kind of trivial when the topic at hand involves the preventable early deaths of millions of people.

I have to admit these statistics are beautiful. Arguing that Nuclear is more save than Solar because of more people dieing from falling down their roof instead of dying by Nuclear catastrophes is just supreme quantitative logic. It demonstrates so beautifully how numbers are excellent for focusing on a narrow feature (i.e. "correlatable" action-death relations) while totally blending out aspects such as long-term effects of nuclear waste and so on.

The long-term effects of nuclear waste tend to get blown out of all proportion. The total amount of nuclear waste produced so far is so tiny that even if you were to spread it in the atmosphere you're unlikely to cause worse damage than what coal or oil does. Not least given the amount of radioactive material that gets spread by coal power plants. When you take into account the number of reactor designs that would allow using current nuclear waste again as input to other types of reactors, and the problem diminishes further.

This post and your comment remind me of Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth'. As a politician, he went straight to fear-mongering rather than actually being a leader and moving us forward.

If we spent the same $/TWh on coal/oil safety as we do on nuclear, maybe this would look different. Obviously, coal and oil are simply used, abundant, and cheap.

Most of the deaths from coal are related to air quality, so simply improving plant safety isn't going to do a lot to reduce the death rate.

There are plant upgrades, like various types of scrubbers, that can remove some of the worst particulates from coal plant emissions. I don't know what the marginal decrease in deaths per TWh per dollar would be, though, or how low it can go.

There are also a considerable number of deaths from mining accidents, which of course are drastically smaller for nuclear than for coal. Considering the relative amounts of mining required, this should not be a surprise.

"sorry page does not exist"

That's weird - works for me. Here's a cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jvGUABA...

Let's not have this discussion. I predict lots of heat and very little light.

It should get amusing when the crowd of folks who claimed that Fukushima was no big deal show up. Oh wait, they're here already.

Somewhat OT, but maybe worth mentioning:

I was one of those who went around and said "Meh, no big deal, just another earthquake in Japan". When I first heard about the quake [1], it was basically just the automatic report and some twitter noise. I tried to find more Information during the rest of the day, but while a lot of reports came in, none mentioned much damage.

So, my reaction was "Hey guys, there was a big earthquake in Japan. 9.0! That's a lot. But I don't think it caused huge damage, after all, Japan is prepared for such things." I think this is a nice example how the media shapes our thinking: Just because I didn't saw any "Deadliest earthquake ever!"-headlines, I tought that it couldn't be a big deal. I mean, we have Airplanes, Satellites and the Internet, surely everybody would know the extent of damage by now...

[1] about three hours after it happenend, thanks HN!

It was a big deal. The point is that statistically such incidents kill and injure far fewer than coal, natural gas, or even hydroelectricity.

it's not about deaths. it's about lives.

I'm unclear as to what you're trying to say there. Are you contending that nuclear power disrupts and ruins more lives than coal power does?

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