4 ms·

My first thought is that once a solar panel is installed on the roof, that death rate has to drop nearly to 0. That is, the risk is foremost in hoisting and ins

My first thought is that once a solar panel is installed on the roof, that death rate has to drop nearly to 0. That is, the risk is foremost in hoisting and installing these heavy fragile panels on your pitched roof. With nuclear, though, I'd think that very little comparative risk is associated with construction. The bulk of the risk is in ongoing operation. So the die is not yet cast on nuclear deaths. I'm reminded of a case a few years ago at a nuke plant in Ohio where an acid leak above the reactor head had slowly eaten away... The 6-inch thick reactor head was, in this spot, corroded down to just 1/8 (!!!!) inch thick. Now, politically, I do favor nuclear power. I think it's a national security issue to wean off fossil fuels. But i think this "study" is a little overheated and needed a healthy dousing of sea-water.

Andys 16y ago
Side note: you are supposed to regularly clean your solar panel glass to keep it at peak efficiency.
- Tichy 16y ago
  How well would privately operated nuclear power sources work out?
  - eru 16y ago
    Does it matter? Nobody's proposing nuclear power plants in your backyard. If central installation and professional operation are better, than we should go for it.
    - Tichy 16y ago
      Just trying to say that this comparison might be comparing apples to oranges. It doesn't even say what goes into those numbers, or where they come from. For example, in Germany nuclear garbage is stored in old salt mines. Did they include the people who died creating the salt mines in the statistics?
      - chc 16y ago
        If one is suggested as a substitute for another (as it is in this case), it's never an apples-to-oranges comparison. Maybe it should be apples-to-oranges, but that just means that one option is so out-of-left-field that it should never even have been suggested.
jerf 16y ago
How many decades do nuclear plants need to run before you're willing to make a call? It's stupidly irrational how people require hundreds and hundreds of time more proof for a power source that has OMGRadiation!!1! but require no evidence of the safety of other much much more dangerous sources of power.
- billswift 16y ago
  Megan McArdle has a decent post discussing the problem of Japanese debt and reconstruction costs (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/03/how-will-japan-finance-its-reconstruction/72457/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/03/how-will...). Naturally the nuclear power plants came up and eventually I agreed with another commenter about the overblown claims about radiation dangers with: "From decades of reading, I have come to the conclusion that Greens think you can get cancer from the word nuclear, actual exposure isn't required."
- notahacker 16y ago
  After three decades of nuclear power went by without incident you'd have presumably have felt confident making the call that there was no threat whatsoever from nuclear power accidents. But the number of deaths attributable to nuclear power in the its fourth decade were more than the first three decades put together. Would it be fair to say that the first three decades weren't a sufficient sample size? Evaluating the safety record of something which due to extreme safety measures fails only very occasionally, but renders cities unsafe for human habitation and livestock on the other side of Europe unfit for human consumption decades later, clearly requires a different approach to evaluating risk than something which kills people only in regular small industrial accidents during manufacturing and on-site erections. The known safety record of nuclear power thus far is pretty good, which is mainly because of huge investment in safety driven by paranoia. But even looking purely at the catastrophic failure scenario as the only nuclear-related cause of death, if you design nuclear power stations to be able to withstand natural disasters that only occur once every hundred years then you might have to wait sixty years for the first breach and another sixty for the first bad unavoidable breach. Making a call about the long term safety of something which can potentially cut short the life of millions of people just because it hasn't happened yet[1] could be a little premature, although with any luck we'll have something sufficiently better and safer than U235 fission to render most of today's power generation technology obsolete in a couple of decades time anyway. [1]If you take the most extravagant claimed death figures published by scientists ["Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment" - Yablokov; V & A Nesterenko], Chernobyl could have been responsible for the premature deaths of as many as a million.

Andys 16y ago

Side note: you are supposed to regularly clean your solar panel glass to keep it at peak efficiency.

Tichy 16y ago
How well would privately operated nuclear power sources work out?
- eru 16y ago
  Does it matter? Nobody's proposing nuclear power plants in your backyard. If central installation and professional operation are better, than we should go for it.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    Just trying to say that this comparison might be comparing apples to oranges. It doesn't even say what goes into those numbers, or where they come from. For example, in Germany nuclear garbage is stored in old salt mines. Did they include the people who died creating the salt mines in the statistics?
    - chc 16y ago
      If one is suggested as a substitute for another (as it is in this case), it's never an apples-to-oranges comparison. Maybe it should be apples-to-oranges, but that just means that one option is so out-of-left-field that it should never even have been suggested.

jerf 16y ago

How many decades do nuclear plants need to run before you're willing to make a call? It's stupidly irrational how people require hundreds and hundreds of time more proof for a power source that has OMGRadiation!!1! but require no evidence of the safety of other much much more dangerous sources of power.

billswift 16y ago
Megan McArdle has a decent post discussing the problem of Japanese debt and reconstruction costs (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/03/how-will-japan-finance-its-reconstruction/72457/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/03/how-will...). Naturally the nuclear power plants came up and eventually I agreed with another commenter about the overblown claims about radiation dangers with: "From decades of reading, I have come to the conclusion that Greens think you can get cancer from the word nuclear, actual exposure isn't required."
notahacker 16y ago
After three decades of nuclear power went by without incident you'd have presumably have felt confident making the call that there was no threat whatsoever from nuclear power accidents. But the number of deaths attributable to nuclear power in the its fourth decade were more than the first three decades put together. Would it be fair to say that the first three decades weren't a sufficient sample size? Evaluating the safety record of something which due to extreme safety measures fails only very occasionally, but renders cities unsafe for human habitation and livestock on the other side of Europe unfit for human consumption decades later, clearly requires a different approach to evaluating risk than something which kills people only in regular small industrial accidents during manufacturing and on-site erections. The known safety record of nuclear power thus far is pretty good, which is mainly because of huge investment in safety driven by paranoia. But even looking purely at the catastrophic failure scenario as the only nuclear-related cause of death, if you design nuclear power stations to be able to withstand natural disasters that only occur once every hundred years then you might have to wait sixty years for the first breach and another sixty for the first bad unavoidable breach. Making a call about the long term safety of something which can potentially cut short the life of millions of people just because it hasn't happened yet[1] could be a little premature, although with any luck we'll have something sufficiently better and safer than U235 fission to render most of today's power generation technology obsolete in a couple of decades time anyway. [1]If you take the most extravagant claimed death figures published by scientists ["Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment" - Yablokov; V & A Nesterenko], Chernobyl could have been responsible for the premature deaths of as many as a million.