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Coal powerplants kill orders of magnitude more people and nobody cares. What makes safety of thousands of people threathened by nuclear powerplants worth so muc
by ajuc 7y ago
Coal powerplants kill orders of magnitude more people and nobody cares. What makes safety of thousands of people threathened by nuclear powerplants worth so much more than the safety of millions of people threathened by the coal powerplants?
Because that's what we're doing in practice - assigning vastly different value for lives of people depending whether they live near a nuclear or a coal powerplants. And then complaining that nuclear power cannot compete on cost :)
Oh, BTW, renewables kill more people per MWh generated than nuclear, too :)
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 (2012): https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#4d114152709b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
It's so frustrating how irrational people can be with good intentions... If you demanded same safety factors from other power sources as from nuclear - they couldn't compete with nuclear on cost. But people killed by radiation are much more important than people killed by falling from their roof while installing a solar panel :)
- digianarchist 7y agoHuman cost factors as well as CO^2 are not priced in. If they were then nuclear might make more sense economically.
- The_rationalist 7y agoHumanity would be saved if political parties had your understanding. In other words, humanity would be saved if politics became a science.
- hanniabu 7y agoOkay, so your argument for not making nuclear safe is that coal kills a lot of people? Nice one, that's about as sound of an argument as killing somebody and then saying the military kills more people so what's the big deal.
- ajuc 7y agoMisleading analogy. You don't need to murder people, so the alternative to murdering someone is not murdering anyone. You need baseload power anyway, so you have to choose some way to generate power. Nuclear kills the least number of people per MWh. So not choosing nuclear kills people and choosing nuclear saves people. Even if you decided to return to the pre-industrial era and not generate power at all - that would kill even more people, so going nuclear is still better. You need to look at alternative costs when comparing your options, you cannot just look at bad sides of one option and good sides of the other.