7 ms·

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

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.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - macspoofing 8y ago
    What percentage of that renewable power generation is not backed by traditional fossil or nuclear based generator? I guess 0% This why nuclear power should be THE answer to global warming. But it isn't ... Nuke industry is dead and it is still disparaged by large swaths of environmentalists.
shawnz 8y ago
Some analyses have shown that nuclear beats out all those, too: https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull21-1/21104091117.pdf https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...
- mchannon 8y ago
  That article is from 1979. Wow. Probably best taken with a grain of salt given how much solar in particular has ramped up.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    Some of those numbers are ridiculous even for 1979. Looking at Figure 2, the metric tons of materials numbers for fossil fueled plants exclude the fuel, which is by far the largest material input to fossil fueled power. Example: that figure shows material requirements of about 10 tons per megawatt-year for electricity from coal. A megawatt-year is 1000 * 24 * 365 = 8,760,000 kWh. Kentucky Coal Education says that it takes about 1 pound (0.45 kg) of coal to produce 1 kWh of electricity. The actual material requirements for a megawatt-year of electricity from coal are upwards of 3,900 metric tons. Even with the low-efficiency PV modules of 1979, PV electricity required less mined material than coal electricity. http://www.coaleducation.org/lessons/twe/ctele.htm http://www.coaleducation.org/lessons/twe/ctele.htm This discrepancy is ironic in a document that states in the introduction "If you calculate the risk of only part of a system and compare it with the corresponding part of another, by judiciously choosing the component you could prove that any energy system is riskier (or safer) than any other system. You would obviously be proving precisely nothing." This method of proving precisely nothing is employed by the author in Figure 2, only regarding materials requirements instead of risk.
  - starbeast 8y ago
    Here is a 2012 piece from the same author - 'The Impossible Dream? Why Renewables Won't Reduce CO2 Emissions by Much' - https://www.energycentral.com/c/pip/impossible-dream-why-renewables-wont-reduce-co2-emissions-much https://www.energycentral.com/c/pip/impossible-dream-why-ren... Maybe it is just me, but I suspect he might just have a tiny little bit of bias.
photigragraphy 8y ago
I agree a comparison with those would be interesting however the article does explicitly state which sources are included in the analysis: Here we limit our comparison to the dominant energy sources—brown coal, coal, oil, gas, biomass and nuclear energy; in 2014 these sources accounted for about 96% of global energy production.1
vilhelm_s 8y ago
Perhaps not! There's a famous blogpost that claims that rooftop solar panels are about ten times more deadly than nuclear power stations, because people might fall off the roof when installing them: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...
- erAck 8y ago
  With the difference that one person dropping dead from a roof hurts one family, a nuclear plant going off spoils a huge area for generations.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    Which would make sense if one person fell off a roof for each exploded plant, but the ratio is a tiny bit bigger than that.
    - erAck 8y ago
      So we need 4400 persons falling off a roof to be par with nuclear power plants. I still consider this ratio a much better outcome than a power plant going off anywhere near (radius to be defined in Mm depending on wind direction).
      - StavrosK 8y ago
        How? There has been a handful of nuclear plant accidents ever, but hundreds of thousands of people work on roofs every year worldwide to install solar panels.
        philipkglass 8y ago
        As far as I can tell, the original pro-nuclear "deaths per TWh" calculation, and follow-up work, neglects mundane industrial accidents that occur during the construction and operation of nuclear power plants. Only incidents involving unplanned radiation exposure are counted. But these same kinds of mundane accidents do get counted in the numbers for renewable energy. Further, as I note in another comment, the solar PV numbers neglect that more TWh come from solar farms than from rooftop solar installations, and that constructing solar farms is safer (lower risk of fatal falls). The methodological difference isn't significant if you just want to highlight how dangerous the fossil fuel status quo is compared to non-combustion options. But if you want to compare deaths-from-renewables vs. deaths-from-nuclear, it doesn't make sense to omit the mundane accidents from just one side of the balance sheet. As an example of "mundane" nuclear deaths, 6 workers have been killed at the Surry Nuclear Plant. 2 were fatally scalded by an accidental steam release in 1972. 4 were killed by a steam explosion in 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surry_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surry_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Even... 5 Japanese workers were killed by a 2004 steam accident at Mihama-3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihama_Nuclear_Power_Plant#2004_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihama_Nuclear_Power_Plant#200... Falling equipment killed a worker at Arkansas One in 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Nuclear_One#March_2013_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Nuclear_One#March_201...
mchannon 8y ago
Solar and wind might surprise you. Anytime you're working on a rooftop or on a tower, your risk of falling to your death is not zero. Hydro is in a special case too, because a sudden dam collapse could kill thousands of people in the blink of an eye. Johnstown Flood Disaster comes to mind. Whether you blame the collapse on the hydropower is another question. Call me a crackpot, but I believe geothermal may be worse than the rest put together. By leaching the heat the earth needs to "lubricate" its plate tectonics, I think you might be delaying, amplifying, and shifting the focus of the earthquakes. I think our overdue Hayward earthquake is being influenced by the GWh of heat energy taken out at Salton Trough and the Geysers. Force is building up like in an engine you let the oil out of. I theorize we're about to find out what the Earth-scale equivalent of throwing a rod is.
- autokad 8y ago
  I do agree it seems like a bad idea to leach heat from the inner surface of earth in large quantities. I actually feel the same way about wind as well (a bad idea to take enormous amounts of energy out of the weather system before understanding it).
  - acchow 8y ago
    What about solar? Change an area of land that previously reflected most of the light back into space to absorb it instead.
  - neilwilson 8y ago
    Technically you don’t take it out. You just move the energy somewhere else. It all ends up back as heat eventually. We already move vast quantities of energy around with our food production and distribution systems.
- macspoofing 8y ago
  >Call me a crackpot, but I believe geothermal may be worse than the rest put together. By leaching the heat the earth needs to "lubricate" its plate tectonics, I think you might be delaying, amplifying, and shifting the focus of the earthquakes. I cannot imagine that we are anywhere close to technologically capable of having even a miniscule impact on plate tectonics.
vidarh 8y ago
The Banqiao dam failure alone is enough to drag hydro quite far up the list. Even excluding it, other disasters add up to worse outcomes than nuclear. Hydro plants apart from being an environmental disaster suffers from creating all kinds of hazards downstream if not maintained regularly. When they are, they're mostly ok, until they're not - consider e g.the Mosul dam in Iraq where lack of maintenance has significantly increased the risk to a couple of million people.

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.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- macspoofing 8y ago
  What percentage of that renewable power generation is not backed by traditional fossil or nuclear based generator? I guess 0% This why nuclear power should be THE answer to global warming. But it isn't ... Nuke industry is dead and it is still disparaged by large swaths of environmentalists.

shawnz 8y ago

Some analyses have shown that nuclear beats out all those, too: https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull21-1/21104091117.pdf https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...

mchannon 8y ago
That article is from 1979. Wow. Probably best taken with a grain of salt given how much solar in particular has ramped up.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- philipkglass 8y ago
  Some of those numbers are ridiculous even for 1979. Looking at Figure 2, the metric tons of materials numbers for fossil fueled plants exclude the fuel, which is by far the largest material input to fossil fueled power. Example: that figure shows material requirements of about 10 tons per megawatt-year for electricity from coal. A megawatt-year is 1000 * 24 * 365 = 8,760,000 kWh. Kentucky Coal Education says that it takes about 1 pound (0.45 kg) of coal to produce 1 kWh of electricity. The actual material requirements for a megawatt-year of electricity from coal are upwards of 3,900 metric tons. Even with the low-efficiency PV modules of 1979, PV electricity required less mined material than coal electricity. http://www.coaleducation.org/lessons/twe/ctele.htm http://www.coaleducation.org/lessons/twe/ctele.htm This discrepancy is ironic in a document that states in the introduction "If you calculate the risk of only part of a system and compare it with the corresponding part of another, by judiciously choosing the component you could prove that any energy system is riskier (or safer) than any other system. You would obviously be proving precisely nothing." This method of proving precisely nothing is employed by the author in Figure 2, only regarding materials requirements instead of risk.
- starbeast 8y ago
  Here is a 2012 piece from the same author - 'The Impossible Dream? Why Renewables Won't Reduce CO2 Emissions by Much' - https://www.energycentral.com/c/pip/impossible-dream-why-renewables-wont-reduce-co2-emissions-much https://www.energycentral.com/c/pip/impossible-dream-why-ren... Maybe it is just me, but I suspect he might just have a tiny little bit of bias.

photigragraphy 8y ago

I agree a comparison with those would be interesting however the article does explicitly state which sources are included in the analysis: Here we limit our comparison to the dominant energy sources—brown coal, coal, oil, gas, biomass and nuclear energy; in 2014 these sources accounted for about 96% of global energy production.1

vilhelm_s 8y ago

Perhaps not! There's a famous blogpost that claims that rooftop solar panels are about ten times more deadly than nuclear power stations, because people might fall off the roof when installing them: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...

erAck 8y ago
With the difference that one person dropping dead from a roof hurts one family, a nuclear plant going off spoils a huge area for generations.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  Which would make sense if one person fell off a roof for each exploded plant, but the ratio is a tiny bit bigger than that.
  - erAck 8y ago
    So we need 4400 persons falling off a roof to be par with nuclear power plants. I still consider this ratio a much better outcome than a power plant going off anywhere near (radius to be defined in Mm depending on wind direction).
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      How? There has been a handful of nuclear plant accidents ever, but hundreds of thousands of people work on roofs every year worldwide to install solar panels.
      - philipkglass 8y ago
        As far as I can tell, the original pro-nuclear "deaths per TWh" calculation, and follow-up work, neglects mundane industrial accidents that occur during the construction and operation of nuclear power plants. Only incidents involving unplanned radiation exposure are counted. But these same kinds of mundane accidents do get counted in the numbers for renewable energy. Further, as I note in another comment, the solar PV numbers neglect that more TWh come from solar farms than from rooftop solar installations, and that constructing solar farms is safer (lower risk of fatal falls). The methodological difference isn't significant if you just want to highlight how dangerous the fossil fuel status quo is compared to non-combustion options. But if you want to compare deaths-from-renewables vs. deaths-from-nuclear, it doesn't make sense to omit the mundane accidents from just one side of the balance sheet. As an example of "mundane" nuclear deaths, 6 workers have been killed at the Surry Nuclear Plant. 2 were fatally scalded by an accidental steam release in 1972. 4 were killed by a steam explosion in 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surry_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surry_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Even... 5 Japanese workers were killed by a 2004 steam accident at Mihama-3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihama_Nuclear_Power_Plant#2004_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihama_Nuclear_Power_Plant#200... Falling equipment killed a worker at Arkansas One in 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Nuclear_One#March_2013_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Nuclear_One#March_201...

mchannon 8y ago

Solar and wind might surprise you. Anytime you're working on a rooftop or on a tower, your risk of falling to your death is not zero. Hydro is in a special case too, because a sudden dam collapse could kill thousands of people in the blink of an eye. Johnstown Flood Disaster comes to mind. Whether you blame the collapse on the hydropower is another question. Call me a crackpot, but I believe geothermal may be worse than the rest put together. By leaching the heat the earth needs to "lubricate" its plate tectonics, I think you might be delaying, amplifying, and shifting the focus of the earthquakes. I think our overdue Hayward earthquake is being influenced by the GWh of heat energy taken out at Salton Trough and the Geysers. Force is building up like in an engine you let the oil out of. I theorize we're about to find out what the Earth-scale equivalent of throwing a rod is.

autokad 8y ago
I do agree it seems like a bad idea to leach heat from the inner surface of earth in large quantities. I actually feel the same way about wind as well (a bad idea to take enormous amounts of energy out of the weather system before understanding it).
- acchow 8y ago
  What about solar? Change an area of land that previously reflected most of the light back into space to absorb it instead.
- neilwilson 8y ago
  Technically you don’t take it out. You just move the energy somewhere else. It all ends up back as heat eventually. We already move vast quantities of energy around with our food production and distribution systems.
macspoofing 8y ago
>Call me a crackpot, but I believe geothermal may be worse than the rest put together. By leaching the heat the earth needs to "lubricate" its plate tectonics, I think you might be delaying, amplifying, and shifting the focus of the earthquakes. I cannot imagine that we are anywhere close to technologically capable of having even a miniscule impact on plate tectonics.

vidarh 8y ago

The Banqiao dam failure alone is enough to drag hydro quite far up the list. Even excluding it, other disasters add up to worse outcomes than nuclear. Hydro plants apart from being an environmental disaster suffers from creating all kinds of hazards downstream if not maintained regularly. When they are, they're mostly ok, until they're not - consider e g.the Mosul dam in Iraq where lack of maintenance has significantly increased the risk to a couple of million people.