9 ms·

Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest (2017)

78 points by open-source-ux 8y ago

t0mbstone 8y ago
How in the world is nuclear power more safe than friggin solar panels that just sit there in the sun?
- thatswrong0 8y ago
  > includes accidents in the mining of the raw material, the processing and production phases, and pollution-related impacts
  - merb 8y ago
    and of course nuclear material won't be mined, processed and won't have any production phase at all. and building a plant is as harmless as anything else.... yeah, clearly. also their death toll article.... I mean most russion publications think that chernobyl caused the death of a million people, their article was in "the thousand". of course we can always think nicely about anything and be postivie till the end, however humanity can't work with technologies that causes a huge death toll when it comes to desasters, because the market will always bring us to a desaster. also the storage of waste is not a problem we can solve. no human lives over a thousand years, thus no storage will ever be safe.
    - joefourier 8y ago
      According to the WHO, outdoor pollution from burning fossil fuels and biomass causes at least 2 million deaths annually. Even if the 1 million death toll were true, nuclear would still be vastly safer than coal power. You could additionally push for the adoption of nuclear only in well-developed countries if you were adamant about safety, as in the United States the death toll from nuclear is 0.1 per year. But the primary benefit of nuclear would be the reduction in CO2 emissions, with the tremendous safety gains being a bonus. If you only cared about reducing CO2 emissions you could have a Chernobyl every year while still being safer and less polluting than coal power.
- starbeast 8y ago
  'Major' is the key word here. Solar and wind are not included in the analysis.
- joefourier 8y ago
  The article does not address solar (and wind power) as they are not major energy sources, but nuclear power is safer per TWh than solar if you take in account deaths in manufacturing and installing photovoltaic panels (same goes for wind power). You also have to add the energy require to produce the panels, which itself most frequently comes from non-renewable and non-nuclear sources, thereby contributing to pollution and causing more fatalities.
  - starbeast 8y ago
    >nuclear power is safer per TWh than solar if you take in account deaths in manufacturing and installing photovoltaic panels (same goes for wind power). Do you have figures for that?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - CardenB 8y ago
    This is likely true. However, to scale nuclear power development, we would have to lower standards in some ways to meet more aggressive timelines, which would almost certainly increase the mortality rate. Nuclear can be the safest, but it's not the most efficient to build.
    - pitaj 8y ago
      > which would almost certainly increase the mortality rate This is not at all certain. There are ways of loosening regulations while not making them less safe. Even if there weren't, it is not guaranteed that having less safe regulations would result in less safe nuclear plants. Even if the nuclear plants were less safe[1], there is no guarantee that would result in more incidents. Edit [1]: meaning they operate under less stringent safety standards and procedures, not a comment on the outcomes
    - starbeast 8y ago
      One thing to take into account with nuclear is if you aren't happy to share an energy tech with your enemies, due to the risk of them using it to build civilization destroying weaponry, then that tech may not be the safest for global power generation. To pick an example that is constantly in the press, Iran having a nuclear program makes people nervous in a way that them having a wind turbine factory or PV fab does not.
- shawnz 8y ago
  They still require maintenance. And the amount of power they give is very small in proportion to how much hardware is required, unlike nuclear where a very large amount of power is produced from a small amount of hardware.
- leecarraher 8y ago
  they may not want to include intermittent sources of power.
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  Because solar panels production is incredibly toxic. Also coal-burning power power plants emit much more radiation than nuclear ones.
- arduanika 8y ago
  Are you volunteering to go work in some strip mine in South America looking for the necessary heavy metals? Or stick around in that poor village drinking the water?
  - varjag 8y ago
    You'd be surprised to hear where uranium comes from.
vbuwivbiu 8y ago
bollocks is it
- varjag 8y ago
  Exactly. We have two INES 7 incidents 25 years apart. Nuclear is 11% of world electricity generation and is concentrated mostly in technologically developed countries. Spreading that into developing world and to 100% of power generation, we'd have a chernobyl at least every 2.5 years. And given the wars and civil unrest, probably more.
  - shawnz 8y ago
    The figures in the article are already specified per watt-hour. So expanding to 100% of power generation would not change the conclusion. Even if we had a chernobyl every 2.5 years, that could still add up to a better safety rate than other energy sources.
    - varjag 8y ago
      If vast fallout national parks are your thing, sure.
      - vidarh 8y ago
        People still live in the exclusion zone, and most of it has lower background radiation than high altitude cities people don't think twice about. The other reactors kept operating for years. The Chernobyl exclusion zone was and is excessive. Even if it wasn't, the cost in land would still be perfectly fine even if you had one every year and quarantined each area for a century.
        varjag 8y ago
        The problem is not so much background radiation, but polluted produce you consume and poorly mapped hot spots. But sure, if that's your thing. I'll pass.
privateSFacct 8y ago
Given all the deaths from oil including all the war and destruction in middle east, plus enviro damage, plus health impacts, I always wondered why nuclear is always considered the most polluting energy source. One note, they focused on dominant sources of energy (95%) so most renewables are not in the mix. I've got to think for the cost of the US military (or some modest portion of its budget) you could move the part pretty meaningfully towards an improved US energy story (security / health etc).
etrautmann 8y ago
Somehow they didn't include solar, wind, geothermal, or hyrdo in this analysis? It's still a good point though I'd imagine all of those would have similarly low mortality rates.
- pkulak 8y ago
  Are those "major"?
  - starbeast 8y ago
    Depends on the country. If you are looking at making an argument on safety for going forward, you should probably look at them.
  - flashman 8y ago
    In the USA, renewables provide two-thirds as much power as nuclear. If you want to claim nuclear is major, you have to accept renewables are too.
    - merpnderp 8y ago
      That's not the whole truth. That two-thirds is often backed by often stand-by NatGas generators, complicating the issue on if those additional plants should be counted separately.
    - DennisP 8y ago
      But it's not fair to group a bunch of different power sources all under "renewable." Nuclear is at 20%, the biggest renewable is hydro at 7.4%, followed by wind at 6.3%. I might call all of those reasonably major. But solar PV falls way behind at 1.2%, geothermal is 0.4%, and solar thermal only 0.1%. I'd call those minor. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
      - DoctorOetker 8y ago
        what's not fair is not the "grouping", but the consideration of "major"... to assess the merits of each approach to set their fractions you compare their intensive properties not their extensive ones.
skybrian 8y ago
This article is written entirely in terms of death counts. I guess that's a good proxy for safety and makes nuclear power look good, but I don't think it's an appropriate way measuring impact. Denial of use of property is pretty important too. About 150,000 people had to evacuate after the Fukushima disaster due to radiation concerns [1]. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/5-years-after-fukushima-by-the-numbers-1.3480914 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/5-years-after-fukushima-by-the...
- macspoofing 8y ago
  >but I don't think it's an appropriate way measuring impact. Yours isn't a better way to look at it. But here's another way: nuclear power is the only power source that can replace fossil-based power generation (outside of geothermal and hydro)
  - DennisP 8y ago
    Hydro and geothermal can't do it; they're geographically limited. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/12/how-much-dam-energy-can-we-get/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/12/how-much-dam-energy-can-w... https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/warm-and-fuzzy-on-geothermal/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/warm-and-fuzzy-on-geother...
- adrianN 8y ago
  How many people will be displaced because of global warming?
  - elchief 8y ago
    up to 7 billion, depending on how warm you're talking
- varjag 8y ago
  Worse yet, the article takes extrapolated deaths from coal pollution, but only immediate catastrophic deaths from nuclear accidents.
- 8y ago
macspoofing 8y ago
Imagine if developed economies doubled down on nuclear in the 60s and 70s to the same extent as France ... How many trillions of tons of CO2 would not have been emitted to the atmosphere. I suspect the anti-nuke environmental movement is not going to be seen in a friendly light by history.
- arduanika 8y ago
  Too true. Clémenceau might say that the environment is too important to be left to the environmentalists.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
erAck 8y ago
They did not include any numbers on wind, solar, hydro, tide, ... renewable energy; limiting the comparison to "the dominant" energy sources what they call "all major energy sources" shows how narrow the researchers' plate is. World hydro power generation has already a greater percentage than nuclear fission, not in the U.S. though.. Add other renewable resources and all renewable surpass gas. Oil plays almost no role in energy generation. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods_of_generating_electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods...
- mpweiher 8y ago
  Doesn't change the picture. Hydro is surprisingly dangerous, in fact the single largest disaster involving an energy source was a dam that burst in China, killing 171,000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam Overview : Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr) Coal – global average 100,000 (41% global electricity) Coal – China 170,000 (75% China’s electricity) Coal – U.S. 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity) Oil 36,000 (33% of energy, 8% of electricity) Natural Gas 4,000 (22% global electricity) Biofuel/Biomass 24,000 (21% global energy) Solar (rooftop) 440 (< 1% global electricity) Wind 150 (2% global electricity) Hydro – global average 1,400 (16% global electricity) Hydro – U.S. 5 (6% U.S. electricity) Nuclear – global average 90 (11% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush) Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity) Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
  - kartan 8y ago
    "a project to control flooding and provide electrical power generation." Damns are build to control flooding like the Banqiao Dam, to have reserves of water and to generate energy. If you are going to build a dam anyway, why do not use it to produce energy?
ohiovr 8y ago
I don't recall hydroelectric plants leaving entire regions uninhabitable.
- gandhium 8y ago
  Most of them doing just that. Flooding a lot of areas because hydroelectric dam was built on the river is a valid scenario. See: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewable-energy/environmental-impacts-hydroelectric-power.html https://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renew...
  - ohiovr 8y ago
    Can you go fishing in the zone?
- koube 8y ago
  Looks like there was an incident in 1976 that killed anywhere from 1800 to 25000 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
  - bpchaps 8y ago
    That's kinda small compared to Banqiao Dam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, approximately 26,000 people died in the province from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. In addition, about 5,960,000 buildings collapsed, and 11 million residents were affected. Unofficial estimates of the number of people killed by the disaster have run as high as 230,000 people. The death toll of this disaster was declassified in 2005.
    - koube 8y ago
      Wow yeah, don't know how I missed that one.
    - 8y ago
8bitsrule 8y ago
... and far and away the most expensive in the long run. How much offshore windpower could Japan have created with the billions it has already spent cleaning up Fukushima (now estimated to become $200billion)? How much will safe waste storage for tens of centuries cost? We can't know until we figure out how to do that. Right now, we don't have time to waste ... or money. There are clear, clean, much less expensive alternatives. Ask the investors.
beders 8y ago
A 1% failure rate is not safe. Stop reporting this absolute non-sense.
- varjag 8y ago
  ITT: people who'd be first to tell you 99,9% SLA is crap argue that nuclear is safe.
pgreenwood 8y ago
I am strongly in favour of the argument that nuclear power is cleaner, and safer per unit watt-hour. However, what about nuclear weapons proliferation? The popular light water reactor nuclear power stations use enriched uranium fuel, and these processes can be used to make nuclear weapons. Now it's certainly far from the truth all nations who have nuclear power will decide to build nuclear weapons, but I would think that most nations would have the potential of weapons at least partly in mind.
rurban 8y ago
Says the nuclear industry, nobody else. Just look at the independent safety reports on nuclear incidents, how often another Three Mile Island, Tschnernobyl or Fukushima was barely avoided: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph240/bechstein1/docs/kastchiev.pdf http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph240/bechstein1/docs... The nuclear risk is for generations.
dna_polymerase 8y ago
Look kids, that’s how not to do statistical analysis.
oeuviz 8y ago
Hate to point it out but death is not the main hazard of nuclear energy.
MR4D 8y ago
This is the problem with popular statistics - these people don't understand it. As an analogy, let's say they come out with another article about weapons. Perhaps they compare knives, guns, grenades, and nuclear weapons. By their line of thinking, nuclear weapons are the safest because they have killed the fewest number of people (roughly 1/4 million, depending on how you count it). But I think everyone would agree that nuclear weapons are incredibly dangerous. If for no other reason than the fact that they are the only weapon that can create an extinction event. Likewise, nuclear power is "safe" according to this article because it's killed the fewest number of people. It's this type of mentality that gets us into bad situations. Even the 2008 financial crisis was created by this lack of understanding of the potential damage that certain (widely used) financial instruments could do. If the authors want to be really honest, then answering their question (they asked "If we want to produce energy with the lowest negative health impacts, which source of energy should we choose?") would include potential issues as well. A simple example of this is "What would have happened if Fukushima's reactor fell into the sea?" (please ignore the poor wording for simplification of the issue.) The answer is not good. And if it didn't kill many people in a short period of time, it sure as heck would have ruined a good part of the food supply which would have affected many more people. So when you are doing statistics, please consider how you frame the question, because otherwise you're just spouting nonsense.
- byproxy 8y ago
  Just finished reading "Chernobyl Prayer" and I have to say it really did make me rethink my position on nuclear energy. Not that I'm an expert or have any way of impacting the future of nuclear energy, or anything. But, as you say, a nuclear disaster, while rare, would have immense and long-lasting effects. As with any type of accident, it's always a question of "when" not "if".

t0mbstone 8y ago

How in the world is nuclear power more safe than friggin solar panels that just sit there in the sun?

thatswrong0 8y ago
> includes accidents in the mining of the raw material, the processing and production phases, and pollution-related impacts
- merb 8y ago
  and of course nuclear material won't be mined, processed and won't have any production phase at all. and building a plant is as harmless as anything else.... yeah, clearly. also their death toll article.... I mean most russion publications think that chernobyl caused the death of a million people, their article was in "the thousand". of course we can always think nicely about anything and be postivie till the end, however humanity can't work with technologies that causes a huge death toll when it comes to desasters, because the market will always bring us to a desaster. also the storage of waste is not a problem we can solve. no human lives over a thousand years, thus no storage will ever be safe.
  - joefourier 8y ago
    According to the WHO, outdoor pollution from burning fossil fuels and biomass causes at least 2 million deaths annually. Even if the 1 million death toll were true, nuclear would still be vastly safer than coal power. You could additionally push for the adoption of nuclear only in well-developed countries if you were adamant about safety, as in the United States the death toll from nuclear is 0.1 per year. But the primary benefit of nuclear would be the reduction in CO2 emissions, with the tremendous safety gains being a bonus. If you only cared about reducing CO2 emissions you could have a Chernobyl every year while still being safer and less polluting than coal power.
starbeast 8y ago
'Major' is the key word here. Solar and wind are not included in the analysis.
joefourier 8y ago
The article does not address solar (and wind power) as they are not major energy sources, but nuclear power is safer per TWh than solar if you take in account deaths in manufacturing and installing photovoltaic panels (same goes for wind power). You also have to add the energy require to produce the panels, which itself most frequently comes from non-renewable and non-nuclear sources, thereby contributing to pollution and causing more fatalities.
- starbeast 8y ago
  >nuclear power is safer per TWh than solar if you take in account deaths in manufacturing and installing photovoltaic panels (same goes for wind power). Do you have figures for that?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- CardenB 8y ago
  This is likely true. However, to scale nuclear power development, we would have to lower standards in some ways to meet more aggressive timelines, which would almost certainly increase the mortality rate. Nuclear can be the safest, but it's not the most efficient to build.
  - pitaj 8y ago
    > which would almost certainly increase the mortality rate This is not at all certain. There are ways of loosening regulations while not making them less safe. Even if there weren't, it is not guaranteed that having less safe regulations would result in less safe nuclear plants. Even if the nuclear plants were less safe[1], there is no guarantee that would result in more incidents. Edit [1]: meaning they operate under less stringent safety standards and procedures, not a comment on the outcomes
  - starbeast 8y ago
    One thing to take into account with nuclear is if you aren't happy to share an energy tech with your enemies, due to the risk of them using it to build civilization destroying weaponry, then that tech may not be the safest for global power generation. To pick an example that is constantly in the press, Iran having a nuclear program makes people nervous in a way that them having a wind turbine factory or PV fab does not.
shawnz 8y ago
They still require maintenance. And the amount of power they give is very small in proportion to how much hardware is required, unlike nuclear where a very large amount of power is produced from a small amount of hardware.
leecarraher 8y ago
they may not want to include intermittent sources of power.
qwerty456127 8y ago
Because solar panels production is incredibly toxic. Also coal-burning power power plants emit much more radiation than nuclear ones.
arduanika 8y ago
Are you volunteering to go work in some strip mine in South America looking for the necessary heavy metals? Or stick around in that poor village drinking the water?
- varjag 8y ago
  You'd be surprised to hear where uranium comes from.

vbuwivbiu 8y ago

bollocks is it

varjag 8y ago
Exactly. We have two INES 7 incidents 25 years apart. Nuclear is 11% of world electricity generation and is concentrated mostly in technologically developed countries. Spreading that into developing world and to 100% of power generation, we'd have a chernobyl at least every 2.5 years. And given the wars and civil unrest, probably more.
- shawnz 8y ago
  The figures in the article are already specified per watt-hour. So expanding to 100% of power generation would not change the conclusion. Even if we had a chernobyl every 2.5 years, that could still add up to a better safety rate than other energy sources.
  - varjag 8y ago
    If vast fallout national parks are your thing, sure.
    - vidarh 8y ago
      People still live in the exclusion zone, and most of it has lower background radiation than high altitude cities people don't think twice about. The other reactors kept operating for years. The Chernobyl exclusion zone was and is excessive. Even if it wasn't, the cost in land would still be perfectly fine even if you had one every year and quarantined each area for a century.
      - varjag 8y ago
        The problem is not so much background radiation, but polluted produce you consume and poorly mapped hot spots. But sure, if that's your thing. I'll pass.

privateSFacct 8y ago

Given all the deaths from oil including all the war and destruction in middle east, plus enviro damage, plus health impacts, I always wondered why nuclear is always considered the most polluting energy source. One note, they focused on dominant sources of energy (95%) so most renewables are not in the mix. I've got to think for the cost of the US military (or some modest portion of its budget) you could move the part pretty meaningfully towards an improved US energy story (security / health etc).

etrautmann 8y ago

Somehow they didn't include solar, wind, geothermal, or hyrdo in this analysis? It's still a good point though I'd imagine all of those would have similarly low mortality rates.

pkulak 8y ago
Are those "major"?
- starbeast 8y ago
  Depends on the country. If you are looking at making an argument on safety for going forward, you should probably look at them.
- flashman 8y ago
  In the USA, renewables provide two-thirds as much power as nuclear. If you want to claim nuclear is major, you have to accept renewables are too.
  - merpnderp 8y ago
    That's not the whole truth. That two-thirds is often backed by often stand-by NatGas generators, complicating the issue on if those additional plants should be counted separately.
  - DennisP 8y ago
    But it's not fair to group a bunch of different power sources all under "renewable." Nuclear is at 20%, the biggest renewable is hydro at 7.4%, followed by wind at 6.3%. I might call all of those reasonably major. But solar PV falls way behind at 1.2%, geothermal is 0.4%, and solar thermal only 0.1%. I'd call those minor. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
    - DoctorOetker 8y ago
      what's not fair is not the "grouping", but the consideration of "major"... to assess the merits of each approach to set their fractions you compare their intensive properties not their extensive ones.

skybrian 8y ago

This article is written entirely in terms of death counts. I guess that's a good proxy for safety and makes nuclear power look good, but I don't think it's an appropriate way measuring impact. Denial of use of property is pretty important too. About 150,000 people had to evacuate after the Fukushima disaster due to radiation concerns [1]. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/5-years-after-fukushima-by-the-numbers-1.3480914 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/5-years-after-fukushima-by-the...

macspoofing 8y ago
>but I don't think it's an appropriate way measuring impact. Yours isn't a better way to look at it. But here's another way: nuclear power is the only power source that can replace fossil-based power generation (outside of geothermal and hydro)
- DennisP 8y ago
  Hydro and geothermal can't do it; they're geographically limited. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/12/how-much-dam-energy-can-we-get/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/12/how-much-dam-energy-can-w... https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/warm-and-fuzzy-on-geothermal/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/warm-and-fuzzy-on-geother...
adrianN 8y ago
How many people will be displaced because of global warming?
- elchief 8y ago
  up to 7 billion, depending on how warm you're talking
varjag 8y ago
Worse yet, the article takes extrapolated deaths from coal pollution, but only immediate catastrophic deaths from nuclear accidents.
8y ago

macspoofing 8y ago

Imagine if developed economies doubled down on nuclear in the 60s and 70s to the same extent as France ... How many trillions of tons of CO2 would not have been emitted to the atmosphere. I suspect the anti-nuke environmental movement is not going to be seen in a friendly light by history.

arduanika 8y ago
Too true. Clémenceau might say that the environment is too important to be left to the environmentalists.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

erAck 8y ago

They did not include any numbers on wind, solar, hydro, tide, ... renewable energy; limiting the comparison to "the dominant" energy sources what they call "all major energy sources" shows how narrow the researchers' plate is. World hydro power generation has already a greater percentage than nuclear fission, not in the U.S. though.. Add other renewable resources and all renewable surpass gas. Oil plays almost no role in energy generation. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods_of_generating_electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods...

mpweiher 8y ago
Doesn't change the picture. Hydro is surprisingly dangerous, in fact the single largest disaster involving an energy source was a dam that burst in China, killing 171,000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam Overview : Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr) Coal – global average 100,000 (41% global electricity) Coal – China 170,000 (75% China’s electricity) Coal – U.S. 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity) Oil 36,000 (33% of energy, 8% of electricity) Natural Gas 4,000 (22% global electricity) Biofuel/Biomass 24,000 (21% global energy) Solar (rooftop) 440 (< 1% global electricity) Wind 150 (2% global electricity) Hydro – global average 1,400 (16% global electricity) Hydro – U.S. 5 (6% U.S. electricity) Nuclear – global average 90 (11% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush) Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity) Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
- kartan 8y ago
  "a project to control flooding and provide electrical power generation." Damns are build to control flooding like the Banqiao Dam, to have reserves of water and to generate energy. If you are going to build a dam anyway, why do not use it to produce energy?

ohiovr 8y ago

I don't recall hydroelectric plants leaving entire regions uninhabitable.

gandhium 8y ago
Most of them doing just that. Flooding a lot of areas because hydroelectric dam was built on the river is a valid scenario. See: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewable-energy/environmental-impacts-hydroelectric-power.html https://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renew...
- ohiovr 8y ago
  Can you go fishing in the zone?
koube 8y ago
Looks like there was an incident in 1976 that killed anywhere from 1800 to 25000 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
- bpchaps 8y ago
  That's kinda small compared to Banqiao Dam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, approximately 26,000 people died in the province from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. In addition, about 5,960,000 buildings collapsed, and 11 million residents were affected. Unofficial estimates of the number of people killed by the disaster have run as high as 230,000 people. The death toll of this disaster was declassified in 2005.
  - koube 8y ago
    Wow yeah, don't know how I missed that one.
  - 8y ago

8bitsrule 8y ago

... and far and away the most expensive in the long run. How much offshore windpower could Japan have created with the billions it has already spent cleaning up Fukushima (now estimated to become $200billion)? How much will safe waste storage for tens of centuries cost? We can't know until we figure out how to do that. Right now, we don't have time to waste ... or money. There are clear, clean, much less expensive alternatives. Ask the investors.

beders 8y ago

A 1% failure rate is not safe. Stop reporting this absolute non-sense.

varjag 8y ago
ITT: people who'd be first to tell you 99,9% SLA is crap argue that nuclear is safe.

pgreenwood 8y ago

I am strongly in favour of the argument that nuclear power is cleaner, and safer per unit watt-hour. However, what about nuclear weapons proliferation? The popular light water reactor nuclear power stations use enriched uranium fuel, and these processes can be used to make nuclear weapons. Now it's certainly far from the truth all nations who have nuclear power will decide to build nuclear weapons, but I would think that most nations would have the potential of weapons at least partly in mind.

rurban 8y ago

Says the nuclear industry, nobody else. Just look at the independent safety reports on nuclear incidents, how often another Three Mile Island, Tschnernobyl or Fukushima was barely avoided: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph240/bechstein1/docs/kastchiev.pdf http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2013/ph240/bechstein1/docs... The nuclear risk is for generations.

dna_polymerase 8y ago

Look kids, that’s how not to do statistical analysis.

oeuviz 8y ago

Hate to point it out but death is not the main hazard of nuclear energy.

MR4D 8y ago

This is the problem with popular statistics - these people don't understand it. As an analogy, let's say they come out with another article about weapons. Perhaps they compare knives, guns, grenades, and nuclear weapons. By their line of thinking, nuclear weapons are the safest because they have killed the fewest number of people (roughly 1/4 million, depending on how you count it). But I think everyone would agree that nuclear weapons are incredibly dangerous. If for no other reason than the fact that they are the only weapon that can create an extinction event. Likewise, nuclear power is "safe" according to this article because it's killed the fewest number of people. It's this type of mentality that gets us into bad situations. Even the 2008 financial crisis was created by this lack of understanding of the potential damage that certain (widely used) financial instruments could do. If the authors want to be really honest, then answering their question (they asked "If we want to produce energy with the lowest negative health impacts, which source of energy should we choose?") would include potential issues as well. A simple example of this is "What would have happened if Fukushima's reactor fell into the sea?" (please ignore the poor wording for simplification of the issue.) The answer is not good. And if it didn't kill many people in a short period of time, it sure as heck would have ruined a good part of the food supply which would have affected many more people. So when you are doing statistics, please consider how you frame the question, because otherwise you're just spouting nonsense.

byproxy 8y ago
Just finished reading "Chernobyl Prayer" and I have to say it really did make me rethink my position on nuclear energy. Not that I'm an expert or have any way of impacting the future of nuclear energy, or anything. But, as you say, a nuclear disaster, while rare, would have immense and long-lasting effects. As with any type of accident, it's always a question of "when" not "if".