10 ms·
Death rates from energy production per TWh
- 317070 7y agoIs uranium mining included in these numbers? Edit: it seems to be what mainly contributed to the nuclear numbers: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673607612537?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067360... > The sources of the effects and indeed the effects themselves for the nuclear fuel cycle are very different from those for the fossil fuel cycles. They can arise from occupational effects (especially from mining), routine radiation during generation, decommissioning, reprocessing, low-level waste disposal, high-level waste disposal, and accidents.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoRecall that because it's getting energy from the nucleus rather than from electron shells, there is 2,000,000x more energy in the mined raw material when you're using nuclear. That's why a train car of nuclear fuel per year can power a city, where a coal plant needs a mile-long train car per day. Nuclear energy density is crazy high. So you don't have to mine a lot, you don't have a lot of waste, you don't need lots of land, and you don't emit any carbon dioxide. See: https://www.xkcd.com/1162/ https://www.xkcd.com/1162/
- mimixco 7y agoThe uranium cycle requires heavy equipment (dozers, loaders, trains, trucks, etc), all of which run on fossil fuels, so it's not "carbon free."
- theamk 7y agoIt is not fully carbon free, yes; but compared to fossil fuels, it practically is.
- roenxi 7y agoBreathing produces carbon dioxide; so you aren't going to get very far with that sort of argument. Nothing is carbon free. The heavy equipment is not going to produce enough carbon to be worth measuring on a per kW basis. The energy density of nuclear fuel is just too high.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoThat's included in the number of 11 gCO2-eq/kWh. Please refer to this comment where you were lightly reprimanded for saying that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19905223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19905223 I say carbon-free for anything that's under 40 gCO2-eq/kWh (so I can include solar), which is 10x less than natural gas, 20x less than coal. Nuclear is 40x less natural gas! It's the lowest carbon energy source we know, tied with wind.
- mimixco 7y agoThanks but you've said elsewhere that you work in the nuclear industry. HN is not a place where we need to "reprimand" each other.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoWe do need to provide meaningful feedback to things that are incorrect, such as the suggestion that nuclear is not tied with wind as the lowest-carbon full-lifecycle energy source we know. I chose to work in the nuclear industry specifically to help avert climate change. I was like: "I want to help reduce climate change. Aha, nuclear is interesting because it's low-carbon and also not perfected. That's a good challenging problem to work on!" This doesn't invalidate anything I've said. In fact, it bolsters things I say because it means I know what I'm talking about.
- mimixco 7y agoThat's fine and you're free to do that, but it doesn't make what I said "incorrect." The uranium cycle uses carbon and, what's worse, produces vast amount of tailings (radioactive waste) which contaminate land and water. This is in addition to the spent fuel rods which most people think of as "nuclear waste." I hope that you could agree that those are true statements.
- DuskStar 7y agoBy that standard, there are no carbon-free energy sources.
- kozak 7y agoWhere would solar and wind be in this chart? It's definitely not zero (falls from height, etc).
- jartelt 7y agoDeaths from solar and wind are almost entirely due to falls during installation and service. I looked into this a few years ago while writing my thesis and death rate per TWhr for different energy sources was: coal (29), oil (18), natural gas (2.8), biofuel/biomass (4.6), hydro (1.4), solar (0.11), wind (0.06), and nuclear (0.052).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mikece 7y agoMy guess it would be related to gas. It's my understanding that new utility-grade wind and solar installs have to have generating capacity equal to or greater than the nominal generation capacity of wind/solar to maintain a stable base load when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining and that natural gas powered two-stage plants tend to be the "insurance" layer (they are relatively clean, start fast, can throttle up/down far more flexibly than other modes of generation...)
- malcolmwhy 7y ago> Note: Figures include deaths resulting from accidents in energy production and deaths related to air pollution impacts. Deaths related to air pollution are dominant, typically accounting for greater than 99% of the total. Based on that note it sounds like it might be pretty close to 0.
- calebegg 7y agoThis older article has estimates for more production types including those: 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...
- classic959 7y agoExactly what I was thinking. I'd expect it to be quite high (deaths per TWh) while the technology is new or advancing fast, both because the energy production will be low, and because there must be more risk in newer industrial-scale technologies. Deaths per TWh in Offshore wind vs Onshore wind production would be interesting to see too.
- resters 7y agoDoes this include deaths from oil wars?
- dotancohen 7y agoThough initially I was inclined to treat this as a troll, this is actually a good point. Major power consumers can acquire solar and wind energy without causing widespread destruction to other countries. Not so for oil, and to a much lesser extent that I think has not been realized since the 1940's, uranium.
- resters 7y agoIt certainly wasn't intended as a troll, fwiw.
- calebegg 7y agoThe associated article has more discussion and context: https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy
- Tepix 7y agoI really dislike their headline "It goes completely against what most believe, but out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest" because it ignores solar, water and wind energy which is likely to be the safest and far from insignificant today and in the future.
- trothamel 7y agoSolar, wind, and water are all far more deadly than nuclear. A more valid criticism might be to point out that radiation tends to kill slowly, while renewable deaths are fast (falls, drowning, construction accidents). The result is that nuclear accidents can be very disruptive without being directly deadly. (See the 160,000 people evacuated after Fukushima.)
- KirinDave 7y agoIt is odd; isn't it? It's a rather substantial component of the world's energy and wind and water have safety implications, but it isn't even considered here.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- toong 7y ago1. I think hydro doesn't score so good after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam 2. Wind is not without issues either: http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/AccidentStatistics.htm http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/AccidentStatistics.htm 3. And even more moralities with people falling down their rooftop installing solar panels.
- 7y ago
- craigc 7y agoWhat would be interesting would be to have a poll of which forms of energy people think lead to the most deaths and put it next to this. I have a feeling nuclear would be the top. The New York Times published an article that touched on this fairly recently too: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-change-nuclear-power.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-ch...
- kuro68k 7y agoWould be more interesting to know what the actual damage from these different sources are, rather than just is one cherry-picked statistic. And where are wind and solar?
- crdoconnor 7y agoNuclear industry is notoriously shy about making comparisons to wind and solar.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoNo we aren't. I compare carbon emissions to wind and solar all the time. Nuclear's on par with wind, 4x lower carbon than solar PV, 40x lower than natural gas, 80x lower than coal. Wind has a 35% capacity factor in the US, nuclear has 90%. Solar has 25% Wind and solar capital cost is 4x lower than nuclear right now, thanks to the fact that they're at low generation fractions and have lots of fracked gas and hydro to integrate their variability. As generation fraction goes up, their cost goes up non-linearly. Nuclear cost is terrible right now. Some people are trying to bring it down, but no great progress yet. In 10-20 years when 20 countries have 20% or more variable renewables, nuclear will probably start looking really good again for deeply decarbonizing. And nuclear roughly as few (and probably a little bit fewer) people than wind and solar per kWh generated, all of which are orders of magnitude safer than fossil. People fall off roofs installing solar panels and wind turbines catch fire and sometimes do ice-throw.
- dotancohen 7y agoMany people who are interested in nuclear energy see it as a replacement for forms of energy that add carbon to the atmosphere. During normal operations (discarding commissioning and decommissioning) none of the three add significant carbon.
- Tepix 7y agoI don't believe in the numbers the nuclear industry publishes. As long as you don't drop dead inside one of their reactors, they don't count nuclear energy as the reason (not surprising, if i were in their shoes I'd probably do the same). By the way, why are solar panels and wind turbines missing in the list? It's awfully misleading. -- Edit due to downvotes: As an example, here's a study that came to the conclusion that leucemia is twice as common as normal among small children growing up near nuclear plants in Germany: http://doris.bfs.de/jspui/handle/urn:nbn:de:0221-20100317939 http://doris.bfs.de/jspui/handle/urn:nbn:de:0221-20100317939 Why is noone counting the resulting deaths in these statistics for nuclear energy?
- DiseasedBadger 7y agoDo you have any verification for that suspicion? Even coal counts protected deaths from increased cancer rates.
- Tepix 7y agoSee my other comment. Fukushima has one official dead person from radiation. But what about the 1% increased cancer risk? Has noone dead from this cancer? Is noone going to die from it in the future? The normal rate of Thyroid cancer among children in Japan is 0.35 per 100,000. In Fukushima the rate is now 13.4 children per 100,000. [1] -- [1] http://www.ippnw.de/atomenergie/gesundheit/artikel/de/schilddruesenkrebs-in-fukushima-7-ja.html http://www.ippnw.de/atomenergie/gesundheit/artikel/de/schild...
- acidburnNSA 7y agoNuclear accidents without iodine pills do indeed increase Thyroid cancers. This is a tragedy. Fortunately, Thyroid cancer these days is almost never fatal, it's totally treatable. However, this still affects the victims lives seriously. The number of kids who get thyroid cancer from nuclear, however, is almost insignificant compared to the number of children who currently die from air pollution, not to mention the ones who will die from CO2 emissions causing global warming. Everything has risks. The risks from nuclear are exceedingly low.
- VikingCoder 7y agoI'd love to see "Clean Coal" on here. And solar, wind, hydro-electric, thermo-electric, etc.
- maxxxxx 7y agoWhat is “clean coal” other than nice sounding words?
- KirinDave 7y agoSince "Clean Coal" is more about marketing and some token gestures at carbon capture, it is already represented on this list. But it is very surprising that hydro, wind and solar aren't on this list. It is a non-trivial component of the total power production of both the US and Europe.
- hannob 7y ago"Clean Coal" is a meaningless marketing term. Unless you specify what that means. (It used to mean CCS - which doesn't exist at scale - or more efficient coal plants - which probably only makes a very minor difference, because they're still terribly inefficient.)
- VikingCoder 7y agoI know. I want it called out on the graph.
- Symmetry 7y agoThat is for the "Clean Coal" with scrubbers and such that is used in the US and Europe. The coal numbers would look much worse if we were talking about plants in China.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- base698 7y ago.
- ljf 7y agoMy personal concern is the waste that we have no way of properly handling and no real plans for. Give me a proper plan and I'd be fully behind nuclear (well - if it was self funding - currently hugely subsidised and still one of the most expensive ways to make power). That said - my alternative isn't 'more coal' - it is a combination of renewables and trying to reduce our energy usage. But I know that both of these won't be the breakthrough that we need without cheap storage.
- Dumblydorr 7y agoThere are plans for it, use a next generation reactor that uses waste as fuel. That may take a few decades but it seems the most capitalistic way, and thus the most likely way.
- ljf 7y agoAnd if solar and wind and storage become cheap enough that the next generation reactors are never needed? Then what? A plan based on tech which either isn't created or not yet deployable is a little too handwavy for me.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoThen we'll be worried about the environmental and economic implications of mining for, manufacturing, maintaining, replacing, and recycling that scale of steel, fiberglass, glass, concrete, rare earths, and 10000 skyscrapers of lithium per USA-sized-country. Recall that in winter there is 4x less sun, and sometimes the wind doesn't blow for 10 days in a row across massive multi-state regions. The storage implications of that are ludicrous. It's far cheaper to decarbonize with a good mix of variable renewables and nuclear, even with nuclear at its current high price.
- pjc50 7y ago
- codingdave 7y agoI've worked in oil & gas, and the deaths come primarily from human error, which increases as operations scale up, as you end up hiring people who are not already experienced at running plants, and have to train them up -- mistakes happen. So what we need to ask to be sure nuclear is really as safe as the number makes it appear is... what happens when we scale up and introduce more new employees, and more errors? What is the worst thing that can happen if a new worker makes a bone-headed move and causes an incident? I honestly don't know the answer, and would be interested in hearing more. But I'm not going to be sold on nuclear safety by a chart, not when I've seen how crazy hard it is to keep a large operations staff in energy plants safety-conscious enough to prevent accidents, injury, and deaths. These are human issues that need to be addressed to be sure safety levels stay on track.
- Ettvatre 7y ago> I've worked in oil & gas, and the deaths come primarily from human error The article says: > Deaths related to air pollution are dominant, typically accounting for greater than 99% of the total. I understand that you are talking about a subset of the data the article are talking about. But if 99% is due to pollution then it sounds like your subset is not so relevant.
- codingdave 7y agoThank you, I had missed that. While that does strengthen the point of the chart, it doesn't invalidate my concerns. It was almost 10 years ago now, but I recall an incident that made national news, when a gas hub in Texas exploded, and there were impressive, but sobering, photos of flames shooting 500 feet into the air from the resulting fire. That is one worst-cases for oil & gas. Some of the spills we've had from tankers are other worst-cases. And they do happen. So again, I need to know what the worst-case for nuclear is before I'm going to be sold on it. Because if it scales to the capacity of our gas industry... something will happen. And we need to know what it will be and be ready to handle it.
- solveit 7y ago
- CzechTech 7y agoBut muh ctivity...
- gtirloni 7y ago"Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont...
- KirinDave 7y agoSo, it's fairly obvious this was written with a pro-Nucelar bent, which is disappointing for something branded with YC. Even if we ignore that when nuclear power plants DO fail, they're cataclysmic in consequences. Simply put, there are only so many 500-year-no-go-zones we can create in our environment before the problems presented by them start to scale upwards into places we don't understand. What I think is most interesting is that very few entrepreneurs are talking about the exciting world of a more distributed grid. Distributed Grids running on renewables with backup from a larger centralized grid is a really interesting idea, and it's one where long term servicing costs will be pretty big. It'd be a good time for folks in SV to think about swinging at the big formerly-state-subsidized behemoth power company. Because the alternative is that they make their case that they need state subsidization while still maintaining autonomy. I don't really understand why so many folks like to think it's a clever take to say, "Actually Nuclear is quite safe." Even if that's the case, it is dependent on having a centralized power grid (which is very hard to maintain and occasionally causes wildfires), it depends on fuel mining and manufacture (also not a very safe proposition for those involved, uranium mining has similar risks to coal mining), and the proliferation of these fuels also proliferates an important component of the means by which weapons that turn a city to ash in mere moments are manufactured. Compare this to the plunging cost of solar and wind. It just... doesn't seem very smart except for the most densely stacked industrial regions.
- scrumper 7y agoIt isn’t written from a pro-nuclear perspective: it’s just data, with attributed sources. And the majority of those nuclear deaths are from uranium mining.
- seren 7y agoI think when talking about nuclear accidents, there is too much a focus on the actual death rate, but not on the impact of the evacuation area. For example, if you look at Cattenom Nuclear Power Plant location on a map and create a 80 km radius exclusion zone, Luxembourg, as a country probably ceases to exist. This is not something that could happen with a catastrophic failure of wind turbines or solar panel. By definition, nuclear plants are near coastal areas or a river, so prone to ocean rising water (or tsunamis), floods or droughts. This is something that is harder to evaluate than simply a death count. I believe this is less relevant for the US, where I assume there is enough space left in sparsely populated areas, but in denser areas like in Europe or South East Asia, it seems to be a bigger factor.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoIt's hard to make a call about when to evacuate in the midst of an accident. I tend to think short-term evacuation in things like Fukushima makes lots of sense. But then let people move back based on science of low-dose radiation. There's a lot of misinformation about radiation and public information. If you say something like: "The dose rate you will get if you stay is thought to take about 10 days off your life, vs. 4000 days if you drink too much booze" people may not evacuate as much. You could even say: "Fear of radiation is more dangerous than radiation itself" https://aeon.co/ideas/fear-of-radiation-is-more-dangerous-than-radiation-itself https://aeon.co/ideas/fear-of-radiation-is-more-dangerous-th...
- petre 7y agoAn 80 km exclusion zone is a gross exageration. There hasn't been such a huge exclusion zone, not even in the cases of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
- seren 7y agoFair enough, 80 km is some kind of absurd extreme value, but Luxembourg city centre is about 25 km from Cattenom, so you can at least expect some real estate upheaval at the very least.
- 7y ago
- strainer 7y agoThis kind of chart should have its workings and data readily available. It appears the only deaths included for nuclear are from some cancer estimate which is not readily accessible. It is not clear what the others death count includes. Here is the entire data download that is actually included for this chart: Entity,Code,Year, (deaths per TWh) Biomass,,2014,4.63 Brown coal,,2014,32.72 Coal,,2014,24.62 Gas,,2014,2.821 Nuclear,,2014,0.074 Oil,,2014,18.43 With it lacking any discussion of what these quite mysterious counts mean - this is often taken as proof of safety. Yet Nuclears exceptional score could be transformed by the kind of catastrophic accident which nuclear is capable of and which by great expense and some luck has avoided to date. For example if weather during Fukushimas accident had blown fallout over Tokyo, or if a reactor anywhere releases similar or greater amounts of fallout anywhere in the world where a large population center is downwind, many thousands of cancers are possible, with children disproportionately affected by radiation exposure. Large areas of land can be made uninhabitable to civilization for decades or more, and depending on future civilizations standards.
- petre 7y agoIt blew the fallout northwest. An aproximate 50x20 km eliptic strip was contaminated. Tokyo is too far away. Uninhabited by people, yes, mainly due to fear if radiation. For other animals and plants that aren't aware of radiation, not really.
- _ph_ 7y agoThe problem with radiation for humans is, that humans live far longer than most species - at least common to the two regions with a reactor blowup. An e.g. 10 year loss of projected lifespan would be considered unacceptable for a human population, but most animals don't live long enough to get significantly impacted.
- petre 7y agoEver heard the word samosely? That the name given to the people that live in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/moving_to_Chernobyl https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/moving_to_Cherno...
- westurner 7y agoApparently the deaths are justified because energy. Are the subsidies and taxes (incentives and penalties) rational in light of the relative harms of each form of energy? "Study: U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending" https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fossil-fuel-subsidies-pentagon-spending-imf-report-833035/amp/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fossil-f... > The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was $599 billion. > The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices and how much consumers would pay if prices fully reflected supply costs plus the taxes needed to reflect environmental costs” and other damage, including premature deaths from air pollution. IDK whether they've included the costs of responding to requests for help with natural disasters that are more probable due to climate change caused by these "externalties" / "external costs" of fossil fuels.
- leereeves 7y agoEnergy saves lives so some risk probably is justified.
- westurner 7y agoWhy isn't the market choosing the least harmful, least lethal energy sources? Energy is for the most part entirely substitutable: switching costs for consumers like hospitals are basically zero. (Everyone is free to invest in clean energy at any time)
- leereeves 7y agoSwitching costs for the entire society are far from zero.
- westurner 7y ago100% Renewable Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy > The main barriers to the widespread implementation of large-scale renewable energy and low-carbon energy strategies are political rather than technological. According to the 2013 Post Carbon Pathways report, which reviewed many international studies, the key roadblocks are: climate change denial, the fossil fuels lobby, political inaction, unsustainable energy consumption, outdated energy infrastructure, and financial constraints. We need to make the external costs of energy production internal in order to create incentives to prevent these fossil fuel deaths and other costs.
- batisteo 7y agoI'm pretty sure uranium extraction in Africa is killing. Doen't seems to be taken in account in this 12yo study.
- angersock 7y agoAny of you notice this seems to have been spiked from frontpage?