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> (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) Wikipedia seems to give 4000 as

> (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) Wikipedia seems to give 4000 as an estimate on those exposed to the highest levels of radiation alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Cancer_projections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Cancer_proj... On the other hand coal, wind and solar never poisoned our food (wild boars in Germany thousands of km away still often are too radioactive to be eaten ). Coal, wind and solar never led to emergency evacuations. Coal, wind and solar cannot be used to make atomic bombs.

wbl 10y ago
Really? Have you already forgotten about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly... If coal plants had the same radiation rules as nuclear plants, they couldn't run.
- kogepathic 10y ago
  > If coal plants had the same radiation rules as nuclear plants, they couldn't run. I think you mean if nuclear plants had the same radiation output as coal plants, they would be required to shut down. Edit: thanks for the downvotes, I realise now that I'm basically stating the same thing as OP. Quite the double standard that coal plants are allowed to spew so much radiation when all other forms of power generation are held to a higher standard.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    What @wbl wrote also makes sense. Nuclear power has a closed fuel cycle: what goes in comes out and is stored. There's no way we could hope to capture all the radioactive particles from a coal plant exhaust, not in the foreseeable future with any reasonable efficiency.
    - kogepathic 10y ago
      > Nuclear power has a closed fuel cycle: what goes in comes out and is stored. Nowadays yes, but this wasn't always the case. The earliest Soviet reactors were open cycle and discharged directly into Lake Kyzyltash. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
      - throwanem 10y ago
        Lesson learned: Don't trust Stalin and Beria with a nuclear plant. Or anything else, of course, but fortunately for everyone both men are safely dead and their danger thus permanently curtailed.
        makomk 10y ago
        Just being closed cycle isn't enough. A couple of the early British reactors apparently exposed the public to low levels of neutron and gamma radiation in normal operation because part of the cooling loop was outside the radiation shield for cost-saving reasons.
        throwanem 10y ago
        A lot of early reactors did a lot of things we now recognize as members of the "pants on head" category of activities. We know better now because back then they didn't, and had to discover what not to do the hard way. We are fortunate to have such examples, and would be foolish to squander such hardly learned knowledge.
foepys 10y ago
Also if a terrorist flys a plane into a coal plant they will not make hundreds of km² uninhabitable.
- pg314 10y ago
  At least some nuclear power plants where designed to withstand a plane crash. E.g. the one in Doel (Belgium) [1] (dutch link). [1] http://fanc.fgov.be/GED/00000000/2900/2954.pdf http://fanc.fgov.be/GED/00000000/2900/2954.pdf
  - acqq 10y ago
    WTC Twin Towers were also "built to withstand a plane crash." But obviously not those planes that have hit them: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1340225/Twin-towers-built-to-withstand-plane-crash.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1340225/Twin-towers-built-to... And the initial design was 30 floors less. The Fukushima plant had a wall to protect it from tsunami and the motors to keep the pumps working when there the electricity fails. The whole design however didn't cover that particular wave: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1388629/Japan-tsunami-destroyed-wall-designed-protect-Fukushima-nuclear-plant.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1388629/Japan-tsunam... The tsunamis like that happened there "only once in a thousand years" so nobody (who made the executive decisions) expected that one. Still there were the stone markers in Japan, many hundreds of years old, with the marking "Do not build your homes below this point!" http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html "As time passes, people inevitably forget."
- rimliu 10y ago
  Neither will it do that flying int nuclear plant.
- vkou 10y ago
  If a terrorist flies a plane into a nuclear plant, the only thing that will be uninhabitable will be the plane.
biehl 10y ago
Coal probably does poison our food with mercury and other heavy metals :(
folli 10y ago
It's good that you don't mention hydroelectric energy, because based on your criteria this is the most dangerous way to produce electric power, killing 170,000 people in a single incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
- makomk 10y ago
  Except that Banqaio Dam was required anyway for flood control purposes, so the choice wasn't between killing 170,000 people and using some other form of power. All that not using hydroelectric power would've achieved is to ensure that nuclear proponents could no longer blame those deaths on hydroelectric power. Not only that, nuclear power didn't exist yet when it was built. Which is probably a good thing - Banqaiao Dam was build significantly under the specs recommended by its engineer for cost reasons, then operated unsafely; can you imagine what would happen if China built a nuclear power plant with the same approach?
  - folli 10y ago
    Couldn't you use the same reasoning for Chernobyl? A requirement to build an electric power plant, sloppy construction, sloppy operation, resulting in a catastrophic accident.
    - mpweiher 10y ago
      Exactly. Chernobyl was an unsafe design, when safe(r) designs were well known. Its operation was not just sloppy, the operation that was performed was a crazy experiment that was well beyond the operating specs of the reactor, clearly illegal and unsafe even in the best of times.
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
This is incredibly myopic. Burning coal for electricity generation has released in to the environment more radiation, heavy metals, and other pollutants than civil nuclear power could ever hope to.
- legulere 10y ago
  Nuclear plants in normal use release less radionuclides into the environment than coal. But is this still the case with malfunction? It is fairly common that huge amounts get released. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascó_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascó_Nuclear_Power_Plant How about Fukushima and Chernobyl. Do you have numbers to back up your claim?
  - rimliu 10y ago
    "Huge amount" which is not even considered a serious incident?
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    As a sibling comment pointed out, you may have selected a poor example there. However, you raise a good point with the Fukushima and Chernobyl examples. It's not hard to imagine that if we had, globally, built nuclear power plants as enthusiastically as we have coal power plants, there would likely have been a lot more serious incidents. It's a sobering thought for my usually rose-tinted view of nuclear. While I could probably have found a more dramatic reference, this one[1] is a bit more calm saying that the risks of adverse health affects from radiation exposure from coal vs nuclear are, in both cases, very slim. It would seem, then, that coal would have other negative health affects before the radiation exposure aspect became a problem. You have to live extraordinarily close to either a coal or nuclear plant to have higher than background radiation exposure from either, under normal operating conditions. 1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
    - ageofwant 10y ago
bootload 10y ago
"Coal," Don't mix coal... with wind and solar. Coal releases proportional amounts of carbon dioxide when used to generate power. On the other hand, wind and solar release fixed amounts of carbon dioxide (during construction and transport) then generate energy C02 free.
- davrosthedalek 10y ago
  ..except for maintenance. Does anybody have up-to-date numbers how long hydro/solar/wind have to run to recoup the energy used in production? For a while, Solar was essentially "let's import energy from Asia in the form of pretty sand", but I think this has changed.
  - bildung 10y ago
    > For a while, Solar was essentially "let's import energy from Asia in the form of pretty sand", but I think this has changed. Considering the fact that efficient pv panels need less than 4% of their lifetime output for production (if in service 25 years (most panels last up to 40 years)), that must have been the late 70s or so. You were probably remembering that 2010 study talking about the rapidly growing solar industry as a whole becoming net producers of energy, e.g. current industry energy input is now lower than current running PV output (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/pv-net-energy-040213.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/pv-net-energy-04021...). But that doesn't say much about net energy production per panel over the panel's lifetime, e.g. if the PV industry would disappear this very moment, existing PV installations would still produce energy for decades.
    - davrosthedalek 10y ago
      The numbers I heard had a 50% replacement/failure rate or so after 10 years. However, that might have been related to the roof installations in Germany.
  - bootload 10y ago
    "..except for maintenance." Good point. Q. Would the amount of energy generated by a solar/wind system outstrip energy used to maintain?
Baeocystin 10y ago
Coal burning has poisoned more food than literally any other industrial activity of humankind. Where do you think the mercury in fish comes from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_in_fish#Origins_of_mercury_pollution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_in_fish#Origins_of_mer...

wbl 10y ago

Really? Have you already forgotten about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly... If coal plants had the same radiation rules as nuclear plants, they couldn't run.

kogepathic 10y ago
> If coal plants had the same radiation rules as nuclear plants, they couldn't run. I think you mean if nuclear plants had the same radiation output as coal plants, they would be required to shut down. Edit: thanks for the downvotes, I realise now that I'm basically stating the same thing as OP. Quite the double standard that coal plants are allowed to spew so much radiation when all other forms of power generation are held to a higher standard.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  What @wbl wrote also makes sense. Nuclear power has a closed fuel cycle: what goes in comes out and is stored. There's no way we could hope to capture all the radioactive particles from a coal plant exhaust, not in the foreseeable future with any reasonable efficiency.
  - kogepathic 10y ago
    > Nuclear power has a closed fuel cycle: what goes in comes out and is stored. Nowadays yes, but this wasn't always the case. The earliest Soviet reactors were open cycle and discharged directly into Lake Kyzyltash. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
    - throwanem 10y ago
      Lesson learned: Don't trust Stalin and Beria with a nuclear plant. Or anything else, of course, but fortunately for everyone both men are safely dead and their danger thus permanently curtailed.
      - makomk 10y ago
        Just being closed cycle isn't enough. A couple of the early British reactors apparently exposed the public to low levels of neutron and gamma radiation in normal operation because part of the cooling loop was outside the radiation shield for cost-saving reasons.
        throwanem 10y ago
        A lot of early reactors did a lot of things we now recognize as members of the "pants on head" category of activities. We know better now because back then they didn't, and had to discover what not to do the hard way. We are fortunate to have such examples, and would be foolish to squander such hardly learned knowledge.

foepys 10y ago

Also if a terrorist flys a plane into a coal plant they will not make hundreds of km² uninhabitable.

pg314 10y ago
At least some nuclear power plants where designed to withstand a plane crash. E.g. the one in Doel (Belgium) [1] (dutch link). [1] http://fanc.fgov.be/GED/00000000/2900/2954.pdf http://fanc.fgov.be/GED/00000000/2900/2954.pdf
- acqq 10y ago
  WTC Twin Towers were also "built to withstand a plane crash." But obviously not those planes that have hit them: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1340225/Twin-towers-built-to-withstand-plane-crash.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1340225/Twin-towers-built-to... And the initial design was 30 floors less. The Fukushima plant had a wall to protect it from tsunami and the motors to keep the pumps working when there the electricity fails. The whole design however didn't cover that particular wave: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1388629/Japan-tsunami-destroyed-wall-designed-protect-Fukushima-nuclear-plant.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1388629/Japan-tsunam... The tsunamis like that happened there "only once in a thousand years" so nobody (who made the executive decisions) expected that one. Still there were the stone markers in Japan, many hundreds of years old, with the marking "Do not build your homes below this point!" http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html "As time passes, people inevitably forget."
rimliu 10y ago
Neither will it do that flying int nuclear plant.
vkou 10y ago
If a terrorist flies a plane into a nuclear plant, the only thing that will be uninhabitable will be the plane.

biehl 10y ago

Coal probably does poison our food with mercury and other heavy metals :(

folli 10y ago

It's good that you don't mention hydroelectric energy, because based on your criteria this is the most dangerous way to produce electric power, killing 170,000 people in a single incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

makomk 10y ago
Except that Banqaio Dam was required anyway for flood control purposes, so the choice wasn't between killing 170,000 people and using some other form of power. All that not using hydroelectric power would've achieved is to ensure that nuclear proponents could no longer blame those deaths on hydroelectric power. Not only that, nuclear power didn't exist yet when it was built. Which is probably a good thing - Banqaiao Dam was build significantly under the specs recommended by its engineer for cost reasons, then operated unsafely; can you imagine what would happen if China built a nuclear power plant with the same approach?
- folli 10y ago
  Couldn't you use the same reasoning for Chernobyl? A requirement to build an electric power plant, sloppy construction, sloppy operation, resulting in a catastrophic accident.
  - mpweiher 10y ago
    Exactly. Chernobyl was an unsafe design, when safe(r) designs were well known. Its operation was not just sloppy, the operation that was performed was a crazy experiment that was well beyond the operating specs of the reactor, clearly illegal and unsafe even in the best of times.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago

This is incredibly myopic. Burning coal for electricity generation has released in to the environment more radiation, heavy metals, and other pollutants than civil nuclear power could ever hope to.

legulere 10y ago
Nuclear plants in normal use release less radionuclides into the environment than coal. But is this still the case with malfunction? It is fairly common that huge amounts get released. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascó_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascó_Nuclear_Power_Plant How about Fukushima and Chernobyl. Do you have numbers to back up your claim?
- rimliu 10y ago
  "Huge amount" which is not even considered a serious incident?
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  As a sibling comment pointed out, you may have selected a poor example there. However, you raise a good point with the Fukushima and Chernobyl examples. It's not hard to imagine that if we had, globally, built nuclear power plants as enthusiastically as we have coal power plants, there would likely have been a lot more serious incidents. It's a sobering thought for my usually rose-tinted view of nuclear. While I could probably have found a more dramatic reference, this one[1] is a bit more calm saying that the risks of adverse health affects from radiation exposure from coal vs nuclear are, in both cases, very slim. It would seem, then, that coal would have other negative health affects before the radiation exposure aspect became a problem. You have to live extraordinarily close to either a coal or nuclear plant to have higher than background radiation exposure from either, under normal operating conditions. 1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
  - ageofwant 10y ago

bootload 10y ago

"Coal," Don't mix coal... with wind and solar. Coal releases proportional amounts of carbon dioxide when used to generate power. On the other hand, wind and solar release fixed amounts of carbon dioxide (during construction and transport) then generate energy C02 free.

davrosthedalek 10y ago
..except for maintenance. Does anybody have up-to-date numbers how long hydro/solar/wind have to run to recoup the energy used in production? For a while, Solar was essentially "let's import energy from Asia in the form of pretty sand", but I think this has changed.
- bildung 10y ago
  > For a while, Solar was essentially "let's import energy from Asia in the form of pretty sand", but I think this has changed. Considering the fact that efficient pv panels need less than 4% of their lifetime output for production (if in service 25 years (most panels last up to 40 years)), that must have been the late 70s or so. You were probably remembering that 2010 study talking about the rapidly growing solar industry as a whole becoming net producers of energy, e.g. current industry energy input is now lower than current running PV output (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/pv-net-energy-040213.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/pv-net-energy-04021...). But that doesn't say much about net energy production per panel over the panel's lifetime, e.g. if the PV industry would disappear this very moment, existing PV installations would still produce energy for decades.
  - davrosthedalek 10y ago
    The numbers I heard had a 50% replacement/failure rate or so after 10 years. However, that might have been related to the roof installations in Germany.
- bootload 10y ago
  "..except for maintenance." Good point. Q. Would the amount of energy generated by a solar/wind system outstrip energy used to maintain?

Baeocystin 10y ago

Coal burning has poisoned more food than literally any other industrial activity of humankind. Where do you think the mercury in fish comes from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_in_fish#Origins_of_mercury_pollution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_in_fish#Origins_of_mer...