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Nuclear energy has the lowest death rate (deaths per TWh of any type of energy generation technique/source [1][2][3]. It is the obvious answer to the climate cr

• appleflaxen 7y ago
  I'm confused because I don't even see wind and solar on the first citation you provided, but you seem to be using it to say it's better than renewables.
  • pengstrom 7y ago
    A cursory Google search puts the solar number between 0.4 and 0.8 deaths per TWh.
    • bryanlarsen 7y ago
      Which is mostly people falling off roofs doing residential solar. It'd be nice to split out residential and industrial solar.
  • acidburnNSA 7y ago
    I usually say that nuclear is on par with wind and solar in terms of deaths/TWh. The numbers at these low levels have large relative error bars, and there's not much value in comparing them to each other when 80% of the world is fueled by fossil fuel, which is very clearly killing at least 4.2 million people/year from air pollution alone, (nevermind future effects of climate change). Whenever someone says or implies that nuclear is safer than wind or solar it turns into this low-value debate that totally misses the point that nuclear, wind, and solar are vastly safer than our normal way of making power. The surprising bit is nuclear because most people think it's really dangerous. https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/ https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/
    • socialdemocrat 7y ago
      It is an apple to orange comparison though. Somebody falls down and break their neck from installing a wind turbine is pretty obvious. Nuclear accidents in contrast are very hard to assess the deaths from because a lot of people don't die straight away. You don't know how long these people would have lived otherwise. Not to mention many get sever health problems over many years. You don't get that kind of effects from wind and solar. It is far more clear cut if somebody died from it or not. From the articles I've read it seems pretty clear that assessing the actual damage from Chernobyl is an utter mess. You cannot really put that much faith in any of the numbers. The errors bar will be very large for nuclear power because you have a few massive accidents which are very hard to determine the full outcome of. When a few people die from say solar power installation authorities have no interest in covering it up. When huge number of people die from a nuclear accident there is a VERY strong incentive to downplay the accident and its effects, because it reflects very badly on the government.
      • acidburnNSA 7y ago
        I agree that the perception of risk is because of the indirect effects you mention. There's a strong similarity between climate science and low-dose radiation science. Both have huge well-coordinated UN and WHO-organized teams of experts who have reached consensus (IPCC for climate, UNSCEAR for radiation). Both have passionate counter-advocates saying that the UN experts are in cahoots and lying (Breitbart for climate, Greenpeace for radiation). You appear to be referring to the Greenpeace side of the story (which is also who the recent Chernobyl HBO series listened to, unfortunately). Let me direct you to the UNSCEAR side of the story: https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html Today, we understand that low-dose radiation causes very little negative health effects over the long term. It's not the boogeyman we're lead to believe by the opponents of nuclear power. Including all the long-term deaths caused by Chernobyl, nuclear has still saved over 2 million lives simply by displacing air pollution deaths. Nuclear is definitively a life-saver. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen
  • s5ma6n 7y ago
    You can check out the second citation for this value. Also here is a relatively newer link which also explains the calculations: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/deaths-by-energy-source-in-forbes.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/deaths-by-energy-sourc...
• sago 7y ago
  I don't disagree. But death numbers I think gloss over the antinuclear point. Nuclear problems have been catastrophic black swans. A nuclear plant is mostly great. Unless it's not. In a way nobody expected, (that is probably obvious in hindsight). Whereupon the cleanup is huge, requires state intervention, and possibly decades. When someone dies because of an accident in wind power the implications are far more local. It is not entirely unreasonable to prefer more highly-constrained danger to a smaller risk of catastrophe.
  • Symmetry 7y ago
    On the other hand these black swan events usually aren't that bad. For instance the Fukushima disaster, without an evacuation, wouldn't have killed any more people than a equivalently sized coal plant operating in the same place for as long as Fukushima had operated. The difference is just that with Fukushima the deaths are relatively concentrated in time. Now, Chernobyl was a disaster you're not going to see with the normal operation of any class of power plant. But hydroelectric dams also have the potential and sometimes do fail in ways that kill thousands of people but I don't usually hear people oppose those power plants on these grounds. I think that the real reason people have such a fear of nuclear power plants is that we use the same terms, "radiation" and "fallout," for the dangers from a nuclear reactor failure and a nuclear war when the magnitudes are as different as a pebble and a boulder. I grew up mostly after the Cold War and always associated those terms with nuclear power and never realized that if you're a hundred kilometers downwind of a megaton scale groundburst you can die puking your guts out from fallout a couple of hours later.
    • socialdemocrat 7y ago
      That is like comparing getting killed by pollution by getting shortened your life expectancy to getting killed by getting stabbed in the heart with a knife. It is the absurd statistician's view of life. That is not what it actually feels like to people. People would rather have a shorter life span due to say unhealthy eating than having a higher expectancy of getting stabbed to death by a maniac. Nuclear power is more like that latter. When it happens it is terrifying and scares the shit out of people. It is easy to be a smart ass in hindsight when you know all the facts But when a nuclear accident happens you will not have all the facts. You will not know the severity. You will have to evacuate lots of people. And it is going to have a severe mental toll on these people. These are factors entirely lost in your statistical approach to looking at this. Not to mention the Fukushima disaster cost a FORTUNE!! 182 BILLION dollars! That is not pocket change. Who pays that? Not the nuclear power generators. It is tax payers. In other words Nuclear power is getting a huge subsidy because they don't pay for their own clean. They don't pay for any insurance. Had they paid for insurance, they selling nuclear power would have been impossible. It would simply have cost WAY too much.
• socialdemocrat 7y ago
  The death rates of nuclear power makes no sense to talk about. It is very hard to measure the reduced life expectancy due to radiation. Not to mention a lot of the horrors of Chernobyl was covered up. It also does not take into account the large number of people will severe health problems the rest of their lives. A nuclear accident is more like a terrorist attack, while deaths from other power sources are more like car accidents. Sure more people die in car accidents, but it does not have the profound psychological effect of a terrorist attack. Nuclear accidents is like a terrorist attack. They cause massive panics and scare. Uncertainty roams. It is an invisible danger. I don't suddenly get sick from pollution from coal power. Radio activity can make me seriously sick in short time without realizing it. It is an invisible danger. And even if nuclear accident caused as little health problems and death as the most rose tinted stories suggest, you still cannot run away from the fact that these accidents carry MASSIVE price tags. Chernobyl involved hundreds of thousands of people doing cleanup. It cost 235 billion dollars to do. Fukushima cost 182 billion dollars. For my native Norway that is roughly a whole state budget. It would bankrupt the country having an accident like that. Or at least if we did not have a big fat oil fund. Most countries don't have a big fat oil fund to finance huge nuclear disasters. Unless you nuclear advocates start talking serious about the cost issue, you are just glossing over the most serious issues with nuclear power.
  • mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Do most countries have big fat oil funds to finance the cost of the incoming environmental disasters? > I don't suddenly get sick from pollution from coal power Coal power is actually worse for health than nuclear power and releases more radioactive material into the environment.
  • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    > It is very hard to measure the reduced life expectancy due to radiation. No it is not. The ability to fairly precisely calculate cancer risk over time based on radiation exposure is exactly how we get the death numbers for nuclear. It's basically no different than calculating deaths from other airborne pollution except that radiation gives you cancer whereas coal soot (for example) gives you lung problems.
• relativitypro 7y ago
  You had me at nuclear, and lost me at technology that won’t ever be licensed by the nrc in the next 20yrs. How will you save the climate?
  • 08-15 7y ago
    Honestly, the NRC doesn't matter anymore. Because with respect to carbon emissions, the US doesn't matter all that much. (Harhar, not even you emissions are worls class anymore. An empire in decline. SCNR.) China does, and India will matter soon. Therefore, technology built in China will matter, and they don't give a rat's ass about the NRC.
• tstrimple 7y ago
  I don't think you're giving enough credit to the real cause behind nuclear power's unpopularity. It's too expensive. Even France who went all in with nuclear power is moving away from it due to expense. Look at how many people protested the Dakota Access Pipeline, and how little difference it made to the companies building it. Investors don't care about hippies keeping nuclear power plants away, and if they saw enough profit in nuclear power they would find a way to get it done. Even with the subsidies and grants offered by the Obama administration, there wasn't much commercial interest in nuclear power. If nuclear power is really the solution to climate change, then it needs to be even more subsidized if not nationalized in government run facilities by people who are motivated by something other than investor profit margins.
  • lucb1e 7y ago
    > Investors don't care about hippies keeping nuclear power plants away, and if they saw enough profit in nuclear power they would find a way to get it done. Surely, if this is true, investors wouldn't sink a few billion into a project only to find that the politicians don't like it and shut it down? In Germany, a new reactor was completely built and ready, only to find that the government prevents them from ever taking it online. Investors saw money but the public perception in Germany (which is about as far from reality as anti-vaxxers are) changed it after all.
    • tstrimple 7y ago
      Maybe that's true in Germany. I don't think corporations are as powerful there as in the US. That being said, it's my understanding that, like France, Germany is undertaking a massive shutdown of existing nuclear infrastructure. Do you have more details on the plant which was built but not turned on?
      • lucb1e 7y ago
        I'm on mobile and on the move, but it shouldn't be hard to find if you look at Wikipedia's list of nuclear plants around the world or in Germany or so.
      • 7y ago
• Retric 7y ago
  That's factually incorrect, rooftop solar is ~5x as dangerous as nuclear based on reasonable estimates. However, grid connected photovoltaic solar is incredibly safe. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... Talking about rooftop solar in a safety context is very much a straw man argument. Putting stuff on roofs is dangerous, but you don't need to put solar on a roof. PS: Concentrating solar is also very different from a cost and risk perspective than photovoltaic solar.
  • boomboomsubban 7y ago
    Your source is behind a paywall, but the small part available says >In comparison, nuclear energy was considered the safest energy source At the same time, their second source addresses that non-rooftop solar likely has a far lower mortality rate, and either way has 100x less of a mortality rate than coal.
  • lucb1e 7y ago
    Isn't that exactly what they said, that nuclear is the lowest, so it makes sense that rooftop solar is worse (in terms of death only, of course)?
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  • audunw 7y ago
    The problem with these comparisons, is that a death from installing rooftop solar is arguably something that the person doing the work actually have at least some ability to prevent. A death in a nuclear accident, or premature death from pollution, is not something the person doing the dying has much if any control over.
• kbr2000 7y ago
  > Nuclear energy has the lowest death rate [...] Unfortunately, facts do not change our minds. arguably, it's not the right technology to solve these human problems then. for that you'll need one with the highest death rate possible.
• brodouevencode 7y ago
  > Unfortunately, facts do not change our minds. Ben Shapiro frequently throws out the adage "Facts don't care about your feelings." Unfortunately for a lot of people "their feelings also don't care about the facts".
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  • MyHypatia 7y ago
    Ben Shapiro makes awful statements like,"I am getting really sick of people who whine about 'civilian casualties'... when I see in the newspapers that civilians in Afghanistan or the West Bank were killed by American or Israeli troops, I don't really care". And "We're above 800 million Muslims who are radicalized – more than half the Muslims on earth." and then he throws out the adage "Facts don't care about your feelings" as if the statements he makes are objective truth, and any disagreement is by people who only care about feelings and not facts. Ben Shapiro's M.O. is making emotionally charged statements that disparage groups of people. When people react, he labels that reaction emotionally driven in contrast to his "logic" and "facts". This type of disingenuous dialogue happens all the time, always to the detriment of the actual problem or issue that would be beneficial for society to solve.
    • 0-_-0 7y ago
      Here is what he said about it later in an article called "So, Here’s A Giant List Of All The Dumb Stuff I’ve Ever Done (Don’t Worry, I’ll Keep Updating It)": The “Enemy Civilian Casualties” Column. In this column, written when I was 18, I suggested that civilian casualties in war were of no concern. While the larger point of the piece — that we must calculate the risk to American service members when we design rules of engagement — is partially correct, the piece is expressed in the worst possible way, and simplifies the issue beyond the bounds of morality (particularly by doubting the civilian status of some civilians). It’s just a bad piece, plain and simple, and something I wish I’d never written. It’s also good evidence that a lot of the stuff you think is smart at 18 is just you being an idiot at 18.
• WhompingWindows 7y ago
  Cost, cost, cost. Point to a cost-effective, new-build nuclear in the USA and SHOW me that it's more cost-effective than renewables or LNG. Until we have a carbon tax or a massive policy shift in favor of extremely capital-intensive new-build nuclear, we will continue on our current path of renewables, batteries, and LNG dominating the grid. I'm all for nuclear, by the way, but let's not pretend that cultural attitudes (which haven't dented GOP denialism) and misinformed lefty greens (which haven't ended fracking or coal) are to blame here. Nuclear is just way too expensive and hard to do in the USA, it's as simple as dollars and cents.
  • CydeWeys 7y ago
    And cost matters. More than anything else. Everyone pointing to nuclear power as the solution conveniently ignores how insanely expensive it is. New reactors cost many billions of dollars, and aren't cheap to operate either. We're at an inflection point where new solar and wind plus batteries is cheaper than new nuclear, so that's what's going to be built. It's a simple economic reality having nothing to do with whether fears of nuclear power are overblown or whatever.
    • readams 7y ago
      Battery storage is not an option for large scale. Battery technology is good for bridging gaps measured in minutes while larger power plants spin up and react to demand. That's a real benefit, and helps to eliminate some expensive peaker power plants, but the technology is simply not even close to being able to fill in the gaps needed for a grid where large percentages of the energy is wind or solar. Nuclear is currently the only technology that exists that can do this.
      • cygx 7y ago
        Power-to-gas technology can possibly fill that niche.
        • readams 7y ago
• pacala 7y ago
  Nuclear energy is deeply irresponsible. It requires maintenance of reactors to prevent significant environmental contamination. On a long enough timescale, it is impossible to guarantee continuous maintenance. At some point in the next millennium there will be a technological downturn, leading to thousands of unmaintained reactors dotting the landscape, leaking highly radioactive materials. Hard to imagine human civilization recovering in such an environment.
  • EricE 7y ago
    Actually it doesn't. There is no reason we could be burning todays "waste" in Thorium or other reactors. Reactor designs that also coast to a stop if their systems are interrupted vs. melting down like many of the current high pressure designs in use. There are many ways to produce nuclear power and there are plenty of designs that are far more efficient and safe than the currently widely used designs. Indeed China doesn't have to deal as much with irrational hype and is set to pass the rest of the western world: https://neutronbytes.com/2018/01/07/recent-developments-in-advanced-reactors-in-china-russia/ https://neutronbytes.com/2018/01/07/recent-developments-in-a... It's a combination of politics and hysteria that has painted nuclear into a corner, not science or reason. The Japanese have been researching micro-reactors for a long time - hopefully they can make it work. I'd love to have a refrigerator sized thing in my basement that makes my power and removes my dependency on the grid.
    • pacala 7y ago
      Nuclear reactors contain highly toxic materials. No matter how smart designs they use, they'll decay and leak if left unattended for a long enough period. We have huge spent radioactive material storage problems right now. Just imagine if every Dick and Mary had a reactor in their basement. If only 1% of these reactors go under maintained, we have a serious problem on our hands. That before considering a major civilization blip like a communist revolution or a world war. As of China, they are the dirtiest civilization in human history. Not an example to emulate if we are to leave our children and grand-children a livable Earth.
• balabaster 7y ago
  I think it was Churchill that the quote is ascribed to - "Many more men die from whisky each year than bullets. Men would still rather be full of whisky than bullets." Unfortunately the same holds true when it comes to many people's opinions of nuclear power.
• ZeroGravitas 7y ago
  If I said I'd invented a new technology that would have less deaths per Terawatt than Nuclear, what would your first question be? I'm going to guess it was "how much does it cost"? Because we all instinctively know that human life is precious but not priceless. even if we're not familiar with the economic scoring that's done on new projects that might save or cost lives. If nuclear costs so much that we could save more lives by spending that money on something else, then it's not a good deal. Different people might die, but overall less people will die. I know nuclear fans are a bit emotional and don't like dealing with hard facts and figures. The thought of a single person dying is too much for them to cope with and they can't make logical decisions as a result, but think about it for a while and you'll see that expensive but safe power isn't particularly helpful if there's much cheaper alternatives with only slightly higher death rates. Plus I think solar and wind are actually safer than nuclear now, but even if they weren't, their cost would probably still edge it.
  • weberc2 7y ago
    > I know nuclear fans are a bit emotional and don't like dealing with hard facts and figures. The thought of a single person dying is too much for them to cope with and they can't make logical decisions as a result, but think about it for a while and you'll see that expensive but safe power isn't particularly helpful if there's much cheaper alternatives with only slightly higher death rates. I don't have a dog in this fight, but comments like this hardly seem helpful and are very likely against HN rules.
    • beat 7y ago
      It's not helpful, but it's spot-on. I always think of this whenever nuclear arguments pop up here. The pro-nuclear side tends to be extremely emotional, but think of themselves as the "logical" ones. It's kind of annoying, actually.
    • ZeroGravitas 7y ago
      It was actually an ironic take on the common "more-logical-than-you" stance that nuclear proponents often take, pre-emptively writing off anyone not gung-ho about nuclear as people who can't make objective evaluations either because they're either so irrationally scared of nuclear or are so hippy-dippy that they just want unworkable solutions that sound good but can never work. But yes, it is annoying isn't it?
• beat 7y ago
  "Nuclear is safer because people smash their thumbs with hammers installing solar panels" is THE stupidest argument made by nuclear proponents. Please, stop doing that. It makes you sound like a jerk.
  • lisper 7y ago
    It may well be the stupidest argument, but it is not the argument that the person you are responding to actually made. If you're going to admonish someone to stop advancing stupid arguments the least you can do is speak to what they actually said rather than raising a straw man.
    • beat 7y ago
      No, they just said what I said, with flowery science words. Morally and emotionally, it's exactly the same thing I said. And just to be clear here... arguing "nuclear power is much safer than commonly believed" is perfectly reasonable. Arguing that "nuclear power is safer than solar and wind" strains credulity. Doing it with carefully groomed and overtly partisan "facts" is just a way of saying "Everyone who disagrees with me is stupid, hahaha!" It's not stupid because it's wrong. It's stupid because it doesn't convince anyone on the fence about anything except that you're being a jerk.