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Comment by testing22321 | Hacker News Reader

> And nuclear still is the safest energy sort available.

Surely solar is orders of magnitude safer.

Solar and nuclear are comparable: 0.02 vs 0.03 deaths/TWh (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...)

Depending on what kind of solar, it can have quite a high death/TWh ratio because people fall off roofs while installing them. As a ratio is far better now that so much new solar is ground level solar farms and not installed by amateurs or professionals who have a van, a ladder and watched a YouTube video that one time. Some older estimates based, I think, on generic roofing accident rates, were up to 0.44 deaths/TWh.

Wind is more dangerous than nuclear (0.04), I guess also from falls and accidents during construction and maintenance.

Edit: All are incredibly safe compared to the next worst, hydro (1.3, or 30 times worse than wind).

The differences in deaths from (non-accident) nuclear and wind/solar are very small compared to the amount of energy produced. The effect of the statistical value of lives lost is tiny compared to direct differences in energy cost, and so shouldn't have any effect on which is chosen.

This is not the case for coal, where the cost of lives can be substantial.

Yes, indeed all are far below the next one (hydro, 1.3, dam failures, I imagine).

And brown coal is sitting pretty at 36+, i.e. ONE THOUSAND times worse than nuclear.

The cost for coal depends a lot on how the emissions are treated, and how deaths from CO2 are calculated. A general problem with the latter is these are global deaths, and foreign lives are valued far below domestic lives. Kind of horrible, but choices on spending illustrate this.

The scam here is presenting average occupational accident rates as a measure of "safety" when the obvious risk of nuclear power is the rare large-scale events which render large areas of land uninhabitable for generations while producing few directly-attributable deaths.

Are those large-scale events in the room with us? Or are you saying over the last, however many decades of all sorts of countries running nuclear plants, we've just been oh so lucky to have a negligible number of serious accidents? Luck is an interesting argument.

Also, you may want to fact-check your "large areas of land" because you're just making that up, if talking about accidents that have already happened, or going of by feels I guess if talking about hypothetical accidents that have by luck not happened all this time?

The real scam is bikeshedding about the safety of nuclear vs solar while happily burning coal. Take a deep breath, let your lungs taste the byproducts of burning coal. And now, I dare you, say something about the nuclear waste "problem". barf

what about other risks such as the risk of large scale contamination of habitable areas?

Coal is particularly bad about large scale contamination. Nuclear has historically involved substantial contamination in processing plants (Hanford, Paducah, Oak Ridge, Rocky Flats and so on).

Solar, wind, and battery do not have comparable large scale contamination risks.

The potential for widespread radiation leakage from nuclear doesn't exist with wind or solar. I would think a terrorist would hit a nuclear power plant over any wind or solar farms.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone will remain uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years.

> uninhabitable

Inhabitable: there are people living there off their own gardens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samosely

However Undesirable to you or I.

If refugees were allowed to live there, I wonder how many people would choose radiation over their current worse situations?

The article mentions people moving from Donbas (perhaps less inhabitable): "Following the outbreak of the war in Donbas in 2014, refugees from that conflict settled in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or nearby".

Now calculate what % of habitable land on Earth that exclusion zone takes up.

Yeah, that's a lot of zeroes.

When you can sell NYC on building a nuclear power plant on Manhattan, then I will agree with you.

Only if you remember to reapply sunscreen every few hours.

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