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Comment by _mulder_ | Hacker News Reader

Never mind that coal mining kills almost 6000 people a year, or that populations of coal-mining areas have death rates about 10 per cent higher than non-mining areas, or that coal emissions drive global warming.

I'm fully in favour of nuclear power but using partial evidence and misleading comparisons to back up arguments does not help the cause.

You can't compare the death toll of mining coal to the death toll of a nuclear accident and prove one is more dangerous than the other. They are completely different things having no common factors. How many people died mining Uranium? How many people die per MW produced for both fuels? How many people die in disasters at Coal Power plants?

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> They are completely different things having no common factors.

No common factors? Really? They are both used to make energy.

Coal is 1,888 times more deadly than nuclear power when measured in deaths per MW. According to http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...

And that includes Chernobyl, and uses the worst case scenario for the effects of radiation!

If you removed Chernobyl and used http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis instead (which is more likely to be accurate) the deaths attributed to nuclear power would go even lower.

Nuclear power is by far the safest form of energy on earth - it even beats solar power. It is so very very very stupid we don't get 80% of our energy from it.

Yes there are no common factors between mining a product and an industrial accident occurring when using a product.

Agreed, they are all part of the mix when comparing the overall life-cycle dangers of different fuels, but the Author of the article is not comparing like-with-like. If you're comparing Coal vs Nuclear, you can only compare the death toll of mining coal with the death toll of mining uranium. Or the health effects from coal burning vs uranium fission.

An article claiming BMW's are safer than Volvos because nobody ever dies during their manufacture whereas Volvo's are dangerous because 1000 people crash and die in them per year would hold no wieght.

No, not really.

That article would indeed be a problem, but only if it ignored either Volvo manufacturing deaths or BMW driving deaths. An article comparing total Vovlo and BMW related deaths as a measure of the make's cost to society would present a valid argument. Granted, generally when someone calls and automobile make "safe," they mean safe to drive, and that's what matters to car buyers, but part of the point of this article is that's not what matters when discussing power plants, which are payed for by 'society' rather than individual buyers.

Total deaths from Coal power generation vs Nuclear Power generation is indeed a meaningful comparison.

That article would indeed be a problem, but only if it ignored either Volvo manufacturing deaths or BMW driving deaths

Which is exactly what that article does. I see no reference to the deaths from uranium mining, or the deaths from industrial accidents at coal power plants.

I'm not saying these figures don't exist and certainly not suggesting they suggest nuclear isn't quite so squeaky clean. Other HN commenters have supplied links suggesting uranium mining is much safer. My original point was that misleading comparisons, like the one mentioned, don't help pro nuclear arguments because they are frankly desperate, sensational and don't hold up to scrutiny.

> And that includes Chernobyl, and uses the worst case scenario for the effects of radiation!

I know he writes that, but the numbers used aren't mentioned and not easily to research, as far as i saw. I heavily doubt that statement.

An article talking about "two failures" of nuclear plants isn't believable, there were quite a few more.

All the benefits of solar/wind are not easy to research, as far as I saw. I heavily doubt that statement.

Can you see what I did there?

The problem is that people will start falling off those windmills. Edit: Can someone provide me with the windmill related death statistics in the US?

Not really. I think you try to shift who has to give sources for what, evading to try to disprove my articulated doubt of your citation with another source, like by citing which numbers were used.

Isn't it interesting that you are commenting on a comment __with__ sources, while providing none yourself.

After I make a tongue in cheek comment to your comment. You flail more rethoric at me, demanding sources from me (?).

You also accuse me of trying to invert the burden of proof, while like I said you haven't really offered a source.

Here is a source for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

That is not what I wanted to do. Thing is: The article cited is spotty in that regard, I pointed that out (you don't need sources for that) and I didn't and still don't understand your answer to that comment of mine. I don't want to discuss meta nor personal, so that's it for me.

See It is hard to take any of your statements seriously as your reading comprehension is so bad, that you don't even notice that you are arguing with the wrong guy.

You don't know what reading comprehension means. Hint: Remembering a small username not even visible when replying to a comment deeper down in a thread has nothing to do with it.

Indeed if all you care about is hearing your own voice it doesn't really matter what you are saying or to whom you are saying it.

Here's your figures on deaths per TWh:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...

Every year 1MM lives are shortened from the exhaust of coal power plants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_coa...

3 people died in uranium mines in the last 10 years

So that is 3 vs. 60,000 deaths for mining

That should be normalized for TWh, but the point stands, of course.

The argument is wrong because coal is as bad as nuclear power. Both are limited, both are centralized systems and both have huge environmental impacts. Mining, transport, energy production, and also exhaust and waste.

It should also be noted that coal mining is done the worst conditions you can think of. I'm very glad that by 2018, Germany will stop its coal production completely and not only because it is very expensive to get the coal in Germany.

This is btw something you have with all fossil and nuclear sources. With time it will get more expensive to get to the fuel needed. And according to the German government, nuclear fuel comes only partially from mining. So mining is currently not delivering the fuel for all nuclear power plants running. The rest comes from old nuclear weapons and other sources, according to the German government.

Also it should be noted that nuclear power was never really profitable. It might be with old plants now but with newer plants I think it is unlikely to earn a dime with nuclear power unless you get some kind of subsidy. The new EPR currently being build in Finland already costs 100% more than expected. With that money you could have installed enough windmills to cover those 1600 MW the EPR might provide.

Nuclear power was used for about 50 years, it will leave us with waste for the next 100,000 to 1,000,000 years.

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