5 ms·
Solar, surprisingly enough, has a higher death per kilowatt rate than nuclear, primarily because roofing work is so dangerous. Nowhere close to mining coal of
by brownbat 10y ago
Solar, surprisingly enough, has a higher death per kilowatt rate than nuclear, primarily because roofing work is so dangerous.
Nowhere close to mining coal of course.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#41956adf49d2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
- josinalvo 10y agoI've heard these numbers from Forbes come from a very pro-nuclear estimate. Does anyone more knowledgeable care to comment? What other estimates are there? How are they calculated?
- philipkglass 10y agoI would like to see the original inputs that went into the calculation myself. I've searched quite a bit without being able to locate them. As far as I can tell, it's calculated by dividing the (very low) number of acute fatalities from civilian nuclear accidents by the (very high) number of terawatt hours generated by civilian nuclear power plants. If I'm correct that would kind-of be cheating because they're not counting "mundane" fatal accidents (forklift crushing, arc flash, falls from high places, etc.) that also happen on nuclear sites. The spirit of the comparison that fossil combustion is far more dangerous to human health than nuclear power is correct, but the exact number given for nuclear may be a bit too low. Additionally, I'd like to see fatality numbers for solar overall, not just rooftop solar. In the US at least more solar capacity is installed at ground-mount plants than on rooftops. The rooftop number itself could probably use an update; increasing module efficiency, if nothing else, is going to reduce the number of rooftop trips required for a given capacity, hence the number of accidents per terawatt hour.
- cc81 10y agoAnd if you compare to mining for coal should you not compare the manufacturing/mining that is required for nuclear and solar too?
- philipkglass 10y agoYes, though both nuclear and solar require significantly less primary materials extraction than fossil generation. The highest impact from coal is actually air pollution affecting the general population rather than on-the-job deaths of miners.
- ZeroGravitas 10y agoRelevantly, building a solar roof once, rather than adding solar to a standard roof, would eliminate these deaths (assuming building a solar roof is no more dangerous than building a standard roof) and if the roof tiles are genuinely more durable as Musk claims, they could end up with negative fatalities.
- inimino 10y agoGiven that solar installations are tiny and nuclear installations are huge and have generally excellent safety records, this seems quite reasonable.