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Comment by wcerfgba | Hacker News Reader

> But radiation hasn’t harmed anywhere near as many people as fossil fuels.

The implication with both this statement and the map is that we should be comparing the total number of people who died from radiation, and the total from fossil fuels, and see which is bigger, but there are other ways of evaluating (potential) harms.

Nuclear power and other radtech is not equally common around the world, and neither are fossil fuels. In the context of promoting transition from one to the other, the important question is the relative harm of these two choices as a function of their deployment over time. There have been events from minor leaks to world-changing disasters, all of which are contingent on human factors which vary widely across time and space. So it's not clear that increasing global rollout of nuclear power will be as consistently safe in the future as it has been in the recent past.

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In deaths per KWh nuclear is king, with a thousandth of the deaths of gas and ten thousandth of coal. Until recently even solar was worse due to installers sometimes falling off roofs!

E.g. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

I really do not understand why almost no one bothers to spend a couple of minutes looking up the actual numbers and analysis that people have been doing for decades... its universal in all subjects, not just nuclear.

Because the 'actual numbers' were protested against even by the scientists on whose work they are based and represent (or rather misrepresent) what an industry that is constantly trying to cut corners does when there is enough attention and scepticism to go around to stop them before they do anything critically stupid.

In spite of various plant operators' attempts, no serious accident has ever occured because there are mass protests and an industry regulator which hasn't been captured (yet). There is no precedent for this ever continuing if a toxic industry is accepted by the public and every precedent of it turning into a relationship like chevron has with the amazon.

Solar is also front loaded, whereas nuclear stays an existential threat to an entire region for decades after decomissioning at the very least. The risk from plants that shut down in the 60s has not yet passed.

Of course they cut corners! They're so overburdened with endless overly cautious regulations that see spending a billion man hours as better than letting a single curie of material get loose into the wider environment (which is incredibly stupid given how much more good a billion man hours can do in, say, healthcare). If they didn't cut corners nothing would get done.

And once corner cutting starts it doesn't distinguish well between the actually important rules and the ineffectual or overly cautious ones. Overregulation is an actual safety threat.

"Of course they're going to be willfully negligent! Just change the rules so they're allowed to kill you and they won't have to break them." While being novel isn't particularly compelling. It also has no explanatory power over all of the corruption and willful negligence pre-1979 or the spiralling costs elsewhere.

We allow people to drive. We allow burning of fossil fuels and use of tires.

These things kill people. Life is not infinitely valuable, a higher quality of life for years can be worth a few life hour reduction in life expectancy.

In the domain of public policy, money is lives. Spending more money on nuclear safety means less money on cancer detection or rare disease research, which costs lives. Spending money inefficiently costs lives.

> It also has no explanatory power over all of the corruption and willful negligence pre-1979 or the spiralling costs elsewhere.

By the latter, are you referring to Cost Disease?

There is a fractal of terrible assumptions here.

However rooftop solar reduces the need for a grid and grid maintenance. Are the deaths due to grid building and maintenance accounted for in these figures? It looks to be based on just production, not production plus distribution.

And solar increases the need for storage. There are certainly all kinds of indirect effects that might skew those numbers, and so it's very much possible solar does better. That isn't really the point - the point is that nuclear is a whole lot safer than many widespread alternatives.

While some would like nuclear to replace solar as well, I think most of those of us who see nuclear as unnecessarily maligned are more frustrated by how e.g. coal and fossil fuels remain in the mix despite the massive number of deaths they cause. E.g. the German decision to shut down nuclear plants and as a consequence needing to run coal plants longer will likely cause more deaths than all nuclear plants combined through the history of nuclear power.

Sure. I too am annoyed by the shut down of nuclear power plants. Any marginal ultra-long-term safety gain of not generating new waste is more than offset by the already sunk costs of the nuclear power plant. And the bad effects of coal burning.

Also, spent nuclear fuel is very easy to safely dispose of, we just don't want to because:

A. It's useful and can be reprocessed into useful fuel once that's allowed and we can do it cheaply.

B. The media and public would throw a fit if people started dumping (glassed) nuclear waste on the ocean floor. Because the media and public are completely innumerate and cannot do things like multiplication required to calculate the less than 0.1% radioactivity increase the ocean would experience.

> German decision to shut down nuclear plants and as a consequence needing to run coal plants longer will likely cause more deaths than all nuclear plants combined through the history of nuclear power

That's a funny way of spelling cancelling tens to hundreds of gigawatts of renewable investment which was to replace those nuclear reactors and the fossil fuels and replacing them with gas.

If they'd come through on that, before shutting down the nuclear plants, you'd have a point. Without shutting down the nuclear power plants a lot of that money wouldn't have been needed in the first place. But it didn't happen, and so it's perfectly reasonable to blame them for either or both of those decisions. Fact remains that in retaining the coal power they've caused a huge number of unnecessary deaths.

The people that made the decision to cancel the planmed renewables are not pro renewables.

Your bad propaganda is completely incoherent.

My "bad propaganda" does not rely on the intent of any of the people who did this cancellations. All it relies on is the fact that the shut down of nuclear ensured a reliance on coal that has killed and will kill a huge number of people.

If you're trying to make a point, you're failing.

Still incoherently blaming the cancellation of wind and solar on the installatin of wind and solar. It's like having your junkie housemate steal the money you were going to spend on a LEV after you sold your car and spend it on drugs, then blaming the LEV.

I've done no such thing. If you're unable to understand my comments maybe don't comment on them.

There are a few ways of comparing these numbers. I think you're suggesting that something like deaths/kWh is a better metric, which I agree with; if we just go with total deaths than something like pedal-driven generators are the safest way to generate power, which is obviously an unhelpful statement.

However, the greater point is that although nuclear power is dangerous by default because of the waste and risks of meltdowns it can be made very safe with engineering and still be a cheap generation method. By all accounts I'm familiar with fossil fuels cannot be made safe for either the environment or people while still being cost-effective.

A major issue in the nuclear vs fossil fuels argument is perceived vs actual risk. I don't have the numbers, but even though Fukushima was a huge disaster, the death toll is officially 1. But the cleanup has been very expensive and very visible. Meanwhile, coal/gas/oil plants deflect the equivalent costs of their cleanup onto workers and people in the communities in increased mortality and healthcare costs.

More succinctly, nuclear can be safe with effort, but fossil fuels seemingly can't be safe, no matter how much effort.

I agree deaths/kWh is a better metrics, and I was probing into your point about how nuclear can be safer due to better engineering. Is the engineering alone enough? Can we engineer out the risky human parts? Perhaps today that looks like increasing automation of reactors, perhaps in future it means a computer could run an entire station without human inputs or oversight.

Also great points about perceived vs actual risk, and observability of effects, as other things affecting the political landscape of nuclear!

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