29 ms·

Deaths per unit of energy for various sources

203 points by johndcook 16y ago

billybob 16y ago
So basically, according to this graph, coal, oil and natural gas cause way more deaths per unit of energy produced than other energy sources, and notably, nuclear energy is by far the least dangerous. That's interesting, if it's true.
- jhamburger 16y ago
  Same reason people are much more afraid to fly than drive, despite statistics- We're not scared of dying so much as dying in a catastrophe. Also notice that natural gas is especially low, even though everyone who's ever had gas heat has imagined their house exploding. I'm pro-nuclear myself, but you could argue that these stats are somewhat misleading, since nuclear deaths would tend to come in bunches and the fears are based on what could happen, not what has happened. You could also conclude that nuclear weapons are extremely safe to have around since they haven't killed anyone for 65 years.
  - cubix 16y ago
    You could also conclude that nuclear weapons are extremely safe to have around since they haven't killed anyone for 65 years. Indeed some people have come to this conclusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_assured_destruction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_assured_destruction
    - jhamburger 16y ago
      I don't disagree in principle, I'm just saying that putting up aggregated statistics for something that lends itself to once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic events doesn't tell us a whole lot. I think even the biggest MAD proponents would agree that the risk of nuclear war is greater than zero.
      - pyrhho 16y ago
        I agree with your main point, but I would probably consider being shot with an AK-47 to be a pretty "once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic event".
      - sophacles 16y ago
        Risk of something being greater than 0 is an equally uselss measurement. Otherwise we would have multi-trillion dollar asteroid defense networks, alien invasion detectors in the oort cloud, personal lightning shields, lottery backed retirement funds and so on.
        jhamburger 16y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_III#Greatest_threats http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_III#Greatest_threats
        sophacles 16y ago
        I can play linky too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object#Near-Earth_asteroids http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object#Near-Earth_as... There have been many more asteroids passing really close to earth in recent history than "almost nuclear wars". My point still stands -- nonzero chance is a terrible reason to do anything.
        Retric 16y ago
        I was hit by lighting, and I was vary happy that my personal lighting shield worked. PS: Car
  - holri 16y ago
    If you compare flying vs. car driving upon the live-time spent with this activities, then 2h flying is much more dangerous than 2 hour car driving. Usually this is compared by distinance, but this is wrong. For example last year I spent my holiday nearby driving by car, this year maybe I am going to fly to a distant place utilizing the same transport time. The flying holiday is far more dangerous than the driving one. I do never decide between car and plane for a given goal, therefore the risk relation to the distance is wrong.
    - jhamburger 16y ago
      I don't think I agree with your logic here. It seems like you're saying that traveling to far away places is more dangerous than close places, regardless of how you get there. I don't see how that makes flying more dangerous.
      - holri 16y ago
        An example: A bus driver job is far more secure than a pilot job. When comparing activities we should relate spent livetime not distances to risk.
        jhamburger 16y ago
        Well just about everyone other than Pilots spends a lot more of their life driving than flying, which is still irrelevant to which is the safer mode of transportation. When you boil it down, you're still saying "Going somewhere is more dangerous than not going somewhere."
        holri 16y ago
        no I am saying that "2 hours flying is more dangerous than 2 hours driving." For the estimate of the risks in my live I am asking what is the safer mode of living. Therefore the risk of an activity hast to be related to spent livetime.
        16y ago
  - kprobst 16y ago
    I think in our lizard brains we prefer to have an imaginary measure of control over how we go. So we'd rather have a 20-foot wall of water bearing down on us at 80mph than to be exposed to invisible radiation. We imagine that we have a chance with the tsunami, but culturally we "know" that we're screwed with the fallout. This is cultural detritus from the duck-and-cover times, when we were told that even if we survived the initial blast of a nuclear weapon, the radiation would inevitably kill us (which isn't necessarily true). I read a book years ago called WarDay, about a hypothetical limited nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the US in the mid-80s. In the beginning of the book, after the attack, the authors describe how they took refuge in a school building and constructed a makeshift geiger counter, which told them how safe it was to go outside to scavenge for food and water and help other survivors. The credit that with saving their lives. In other words, they approached the fallout exposure problem from a scientific standpoint, rather than an emotional one. People can't seem to approach the irradiation problem in other than emotional terms, so the end result is sheer panic. If more people were aware of how to measure and limit exposure, that would give them the control they need to function successfully. Sadly, very few do.
- abecedarius 16y ago
  Wasn't natural gas among the safest? Third after nuclear and hydro. (I couldn't see any figure for solar, I guess because it's currently negligible?)
pinko 16y ago
The thousands of children (now adults) near Chernobyl with thyroid cancer don't show up in these stats, since they're not all dead. Doesn't necessarily change the conclusions but worth noting.
- te_platt 16y ago
  I read through the article explaining how the numbers were calculated and the thyroid cancer is noted. The analysis provided could be disputed on methodology but at least there are references you can check if you want to improve upon it.
- ghshephard 16y ago
  From the sources: "But what about Chernobyl ? The World Health Organization study in 2005 indicated that 50 people died to that point as a direct result of Chernobyl. 4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous. He explains that there have been 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children, but that except for nine deaths, all of them have recovered. "Otherwise, the team of international experts found no evidence for any increases in the incidence of leukemia and cancer among affected residents.""
  - pinko 16y ago
    My point is that you or your child getting thyroid cancer, even if you or she recovers, is a pretty horrific outcome, and might deserve to be considered somehow -- not just fatalities.
    - mquander 16y ago
      True, but if you're counting that, there must surely be many other equally bad externalities worth counting; e.g. environmental damage due to oil spills and incidence of lung cancer due to air pollution from coal mining. You have to draw the line somewhere to make the chart, and drawing it at fatalities seems sort of reasonable. It certainly doesn't seem overly gracious to nuclear power.
ghshephard 16y ago
The sources look good [1] In particular, the deaths as a result of hydroelectric power caught some catastrophic failures. Dams are very, very dangerous constructions, and have a failure mode that makes a nuclear plant look safe by comparison. Just one major Hydroelectric Dam [2], Bangiao, was responsible for on the order of 50,000 deaths related directly to the Dam Failure. [1] http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
- mistermann 16y ago
  If 50,000 people were to die from a nuclear incident, a large portion of the public would absolutely lose their minds and insist that a nuclear reactor never again be built on the planet. 50,000 deaths resulting from <choose any other technology> however, is just an unfortunate incident. Hundreds of people will die year after year mining coal with nary a whimper of complaint, but we will hear about people sufferring from thyroid cancer 20 years after Chernobyl until the end of time. (Sorry, a tad snarky....but also very true, no?)
  - borism 16y ago
    but also very true, no? yes. but why do you think that is? people aren't afraid of nuclear for no reason. While it isn't magic, it isn't exactly trivial either, even for experts. Could you explain to me how the hell fuel in Reactor 4 storage pond at Fukushima 1 went critical?
    - ChuckMcM 16y ago
      "Could you explain to me how the hell fuel in Reactor 4 storage pond at Fukushima 1 went critical?" I can. The term 'critical' is used to describe the point at which fission events are being caused by the neutrons emitted by other fission events. Also called a 'chain reaction.' Reactor fuel emits neutrons (actually even 'depleted' fuel emits neutrons see half life). Unused (and spent) fuel is stored in storage ponds filled with water because water is an excellent neutron moderator. Thus any neutrons that are emitted by the natural decay, or by internal fission events of the material are absorbed in the water and converted into a (relatively) small amount of heat. Air is a poor damper of neutrons, and in fact the chance of a neutron hitting an atom in a gas is greatly reduced. When the water in a fuel storage pond is removed, the naturally occurring neutrons can reach other fuel that is stored in that pond. If they are sufficiently energetic they can cause atoms in the fuel they hit to fission. If they do cause fission then heat is generated and another neutron (note: it maybe 2 I admit I've forgotten the exact reaction with U235) is emitted which might cause another fission event. Criticality is controlled by moderating the probability that a neutron will create a fission reaction. If you want to store uranium you can do this by either spreading it far apart or by placing it in an environment that moderates neutron flux. Since the latter is as 'simple' as putting it in water, that is the usual option. The caveat is that your spent fuel will continue to generate heat, if you don't remove that heat eventually the water will boil. If the water boils sufficiently to allow fuel to be exposed to air, the result can be that the fuel passes its criticality threshold. If you can't keep water cool then you can replace it with something that moderates and doesn't boil.
gcampbell 16y ago
The deaths from solar appear to be from falls while installing roof-mounted systems; this would be primarily applicable to residential and small commercial solar systems, whereas most larger systems will tend to be ground-mounted and safer to construct.
- Tuna-Fish 16y ago
  This mostly serves to illustrate just how small the current solar install base is.
pbhjpbhj 16y ago
It's just a visualisation of http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... figures from a couple of days ago, which I found highly dubious. For example where are all the biomass deaths from? Why no figures for non-rooftop solar? What does this "Hydroelectric power was found to to have a fatality rate of 0.10 per TWh (883 fatalities for every TW·yr) in the period 1969–1996" mean? How does spinning a turbine from dammed water cause death? Ah ... further down the page "... Paul Gipe estimated ..." - so someones estimates without proper working or sources for death rates and such ... I would love to see a well worked properly sourced analysis along these lines however.
- Tuna-Fish 16y ago
  Burning biomass causes high levels of particulate emissions, which are a very significant health risk (Burning firewood is the most important source of air pollution in much of the developing world). Hydro is completely safe most of the time, but when a dam fails, it typically kills a lot of people really quickly. It would be really hard to collect figures for non-rooftop solar -- simply because there is so little of it. (They would be very favorable.)
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    Biomass - comprehension error on my part, I thought that it was using dung in fermenters and like apparatus. There seems to be enough solar farms to make the same sort of estimates as have been used in the article though. I think what would be most helpful would actually be a comparison for a large country with similar safety standards across all industries looking at facilities over a fixed period. That would help, IMO, to rule out problems like people continuing with a hydro project even though the dam is cracked from the off ...
- perokreco 16y ago
  Think about what happens when a dam fails. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
jshen 16y ago
I feel like this line of reasoning misses the point a bit. Nuclear waste is dangerous for a very very long time, while deaths from these other sources are front loaded. When can people move back to chernobyl? If we have significant radiation exposure in japan, how long will that land be uninhabitable? Nuclear waste we create today is dangerous for how long?
- DanI-S 16y ago
  How long would the atmosphere take to recover from CO2 emissions if we stopped burning fossil fuels today? How many people will have died as a result of climate change and lung problems before then?
  - afterburner 16y ago
    People keep dismissing renewables. Well, they won't get anywhere if we don't invest in them, and that investment has to come from a decrease in spending on other sources. Like nuclear.
    - lukeschlather 16y ago
      It should come out of coal. If we were willing to nationalize all of our energy, start phasing out coal plants, and go fully nuclear to replace coal, over the next 50 years we could get substantial savings over coal and put those savings into renewables. And in any case, as this graph shows, renewables are not a panacea. Hydro dams cause significant environmental damage, and even wind turbines have their issues.
      - afterburner 16y ago
        Sure, from anywhere it can. But a lot of people are talking about ramping up nuclear spending (and the costs are always understated).
        lukeschlather 16y ago
foresterh 16y ago
What about all of the plants and animals killed from the various resources? Or the land and water that can no longer sustain life because of one disaster or another...
- jerf 16y ago
  I'm not sure what you think this will prove, but if you're going to go this route it's going to make nuclear look even better. Much more confined mining operations, much smaller land use (something almost all "green" technologies are actually terrible with, IIRC nuclear is the most power-per-acre you can get with current tech), waste goes to uninhabited areas anyhow (and if we were less stupid about it there wouldn't hardly be any), and take a quick Google at "pictures of Chernobyl" [1] and note how it isn't a radioactive wasteland in the style of Fallout or anything. Very little land has actually been rendered "unable to sustain life"; I'm not sure it measures in anything more than a handful of acres. Hollywood movies and video games are not a good way to learn how nuclear power works. [1]: http://www.grcade.com/viewtopic.php?t=2217 http://www.grcade.com/viewtopic.php?t=2217 - note the greenery all the way up to the plant itself
  - foresterh 16y ago
    It may make nuclear look better comparably, but it will make all of these (oil, coal, nuclear) look worse. When all you factor into the cost is human life and money, you miss the bigger picture of how we're affecting what doesn't have a voice.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - jerf 16y ago
      "Comparably" is what I meant, certainly. When you add only negatives to an existing assessment, everything will look worse, but relative positions can change.
ecounysis 16y ago
One problem with this visualization is that it does not account for future deaths and less noticeable health effects caused by radioactive waste and accidents related to its storage. On the other hand, it also does not account for the same caused by oil and coal and other pollution.
zwieback 16y ago
Illustrates again that people are afraid of what's scary, not what's likely to actually happen.
- pjscott 16y ago
  Reminds me of the "Stranger Danger" scare a while back. Teaching children to beware of strangers makes them safer from kidnappers, but less safe if they get lost or need help from a random adult for some reason. Guess which of these situations is more common.
kalendae 16y ago
a great part of the fear is that you can not see radioactivity harming you. Water I can see. Mining coal feels like it is within my control whether I engage in that activity or not.
- ChuckMcM 16y ago
  This is the most common reasoning for people who fear nuclear power. They reason that they can't see where the danger (radiation) is so they can't know if they are in danger or not, whereas with an oil spill, a gas pipeline explosion, or an oil refinery event, they have visible boundaries to 'this area is bad' vs 'this area is probably still safe' (note its not of course, you can have odorless and invisible threats like CO but many of the failure modes are visible in a spectrum our unaided senses can detect) I don't have a good answer for re-assuring these folks. (carrying a counter with them seems to be a non-starter, but perhaps a cell phone app would be ok)
baltcode 16y ago
I'd like to see the cost in $ per TWh as another column.
pedalpete 16y ago
I'm missing (or the article is missing) the timeline that the calculations are based on. Is that yearly? last year? last 5 years? We have to take a significant time scale on any of these for it to be considered reliable. Though there may have been 0 deaths from nuclear last year, over a 10 year span, would that number be the same? I believe nuclear can be safer over the long-run, but I'd like to see some more depth in these stats.
- pjscott 16y ago
  The nuclear calculations have a long timeline. They include mining deaths for plant construction and refueling, and one Chernobyl-scale event every 20 years or so. The numbers are explained in much more detail here: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...
  - eliasmacpherson 16y ago
    I read it as allowing for one of that scale every 45 years, the entire duration of data calculation, arriving at 0.037 deaths per TWh. There's no indication that more than one event of that scale is contemplated.
michaelchisari 16y ago
It should be pointed out that there will never be another Chernobyl. It was a perfect intersection of criminally inadequate design, early-adopter naivete, incompetence, and Murphy's Law. In these discussions, bringing up Three Mile Island is fair game, but Chernobyl is not a realistic parallel.
- rabidsnail 16y ago
  Chernobyl: the nuclear disaster to end all nuclear disasters?
joblessjunkie 16y ago
Wait, are you trying persuade us with facts? Airplanes are the safest way to travel by far. That doesn't prevent people from stubbornly refusing to fly (taking very unsafe road trips instead), it doesn't prevent panic attacks in the air, and it doesn't stop governments wasting billions on security checkpoint theater. God speed, my friend, I sincerely hope the facts will make a difference.
- Someone 16y ago
  Airplanes are the safest way to travel by far Yes and no. That depends on how you measure. The typical statistic used (deaths per man-kilometer) favors flying a bit. For example, the space shuttle is safe, according to that metric (guesstimate: 60 shuttle flights for every crash => over a year in space for every crash, 16 times round earth a day => 60000 revolutions * 40k km => 2*10^9 man km per death) According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_safety#Statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_safety#Statistics making one plane ride is riskier than taking a bus once. Moreover, taking of and landing are the high-risk parts of flying. So, I would expect that flying would score worse than that when people starte making shorter flights.
  - gus_massa 16y ago
    I redo the space shuttle risk using the data from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_shuttle_missions#Flight_statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_shuttle_missions#... Total Orbits: ~20K Orbits Length: ~40K Km Crashes: 2 (Assuming same number of crew in each flight.) Risk: 20K * 40K Km / 2 = 4*10^8 man Km per death Or: 2.5 deaths / billon Km So using the Risk/Km criteria the space shuttle is as safe as (water)ships, safer than cars and riskier than trains.
chrismealy 16y ago
Are they counting Iraq War deaths?
- SwellJoe 16y ago
  This was my first thought, as well, and not just Iraq. There have been numerous wars for oil throughout the past century.
- jacoblyles 16y ago
  Didn't the war in Iraq reduce oil production from that country?
lysium 16y ago
Even if reposted with fancy graphs, the data do not get better. Basically, they are from a nuclear lobby site. The referenced data on the lobby site lists 0.04-0.23 deaths per TWh for the coal fuel chain and 0.01-0.65 for nuclear. I don't see that large a difference here between coal and nuclear. The number of 160 deaths/TWh is made up from a very rough estimate of WHO that 1 mio. people die due to coal air pollution (without further reference). That's hardly a good source, IMHO. Further, the effect of storing lethally radioactive material for very long time periods is completely neglected. For me, this is a troll post and I bite.
- grandpa 16y ago
  > Basically, they are from a nuclear lobby site Really? You may well know something I don't, but it doesn't seem that way to me: http://www.reddit.com/domain/nextbigfuture.com/ http://www.reddit.com/domain/nextbigfuture.com/
  - lysium 16y ago
    The info is based on such bogus data, I jumped to that claim. I currently can't check your reddit link, because reddit is down. Maybe it's just the article.
saidulislam 16y ago
flawed observation. true, nuclear accidents don't happen often but when they do you have to deal with immediate and long term effects. as far as I know, coal power plant accidents don't cause deformities for the next 2/3 generations. also I don't see the numbers on solar and wind.
nextparadigms 16y ago
Why are you people advocating for nuclear power so much? Solar and wind power should be the future, and they're renewable. Don't you think that's a much better future? Sure they might not be very effective now, but a couple of decades down the road with some big investments (like in nuclear plants) it should be orders of magnitude more effective than it is now. Of course, a country like USA will never back down from using nuclear plants because they need their byproducts to make nukes.
- relix 16y ago
  At this point, it's the best option for our huge energy needs. Like you said, a few decades down the road, solar power might be somewhat interesting. What do we do until then? Burn coal, which is far more polluting? Next, solar and wind energy yield but peanuts in how much energy we actually need. A recent article suggests that, with impossible 100% efficient solar panels, we'd have to cover 1/6000th of the earth to meet our current energy demands. A few decades down the road this will probably be doubled because of our growing demands.
porkbird 16y ago
I think we should also measure an average number of deaths caused by a single incident and the average number of deaths among strangers caused by a single incident. The incidents at nuclear plants are rare, but the consequences can be much more dangerous than from the other energy sources.
varjag 16y ago
So natural gas is the safest? It is same order of causalities as nuclear, albeit with dramatically less safety effort. One can only imagine how safe would it be if as much was spent for safety measures as with nuclear per TW.
A1kmm 16y ago
The linked sited is an article that links to a blog post that doesn't really say exactly how they came up with their results, but provide some links (e.g. http://manhaz.cyf.gov.pl/manhaz/strona_konferencja_EAE-2001/15%20-%20Polenp~1.pdf http://manhaz.cyf.gov.pl/manhaz/strona_konferencja_EAE-2001/...). It sounds like they take into account deaths where coal air pollution was a contributing factor, but not deaths where radioactive fallout was a contributing factor, and they don't attribute global warming related deaths to fossil fuels. They also don't take into account ongoing risks - some forms of energy present risks long after the energy has been harvested, so the numbers will continue to rise, while others don't). I'd therefore take those results with a grain of salt.
kragen 16y ago
I can't find the crude death numbers in the article. It seems like there's a small chance that the number of deaths due to nuclear power in all of history could increase by a factor of 10 or more due to events in the next week or two, which would push it past rooftop solar energy, although it would still be nowhere near coal.
jvdongen 16y ago
Also good to take into account is that Chernobyl and TMI and Fukushima are installations from the 1970's or early 1980's. And even for those old birds the stats seem fairly favorable. But as long as emotions fueled by scare-mongering have the upper hand, rationality and facts make no chance. So really widespread adoption of nuclear energy (be it fusion or fizzion - I'd be surprised if the public at large makes any distinction between them) is probably not going to happen for the near future. And that's a shame as it could be our ticket out of both a lot of environmental issues and socio-economic issues.

203 points by johndcook 16y ago

So basically, according to this graph, coal, oil and natural gas cause way more deaths per unit of energy produced than other energy sources, and notably, nuclear energy is by far the least dangerous. That's interesting, if it's true.

jhamburger 16y ago
Same reason people are much more afraid to fly than drive, despite statistics- We're not scared of dying so much as dying in a catastrophe. Also notice that natural gas is especially low, even though everyone who's ever had gas heat has imagined their house exploding. I'm pro-nuclear myself, but you could argue that these stats are somewhat misleading, since nuclear deaths would tend to come in bunches and the fears are based on what could happen, not what has happened. You could also conclude that nuclear weapons are extremely safe to have around since they haven't killed anyone for 65 years.
- cubix 16y ago
  You could also conclude that nuclear weapons are extremely safe to have around since they haven't killed anyone for 65 years. Indeed some people have come to this conclusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_assured_destruction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_assured_destruction
  - jhamburger 16y ago
    I don't disagree in principle, I'm just saying that putting up aggregated statistics for something that lends itself to once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic events doesn't tell us a whole lot. I think even the biggest MAD proponents would agree that the risk of nuclear war is greater than zero.
    - pyrhho 16y ago
      I agree with your main point, but I would probably consider being shot with an AK-47 to be a pretty "once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic event".
    - sophacles 16y ago
      Risk of something being greater than 0 is an equally uselss measurement. Otherwise we would have multi-trillion dollar asteroid defense networks, alien invasion detectors in the oort cloud, personal lightning shields, lottery backed retirement funds and so on.
      - jhamburger 16y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_III#Greatest_threats http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_III#Greatest_threats
        sophacles 16y ago
        I can play linky too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object#Near-Earth_asteroids http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object#Near-Earth_as... There have been many more asteroids passing really close to earth in recent history than "almost nuclear wars". My point still stands -- nonzero chance is a terrible reason to do anything.
      - Retric 16y ago
        I was hit by lighting, and I was vary happy that my personal lighting shield worked. PS: Car
- holri 16y ago
  If you compare flying vs. car driving upon the live-time spent with this activities, then 2h flying is much more dangerous than 2 hour car driving. Usually this is compared by distinance, but this is wrong. For example last year I spent my holiday nearby driving by car, this year maybe I am going to fly to a distant place utilizing the same transport time. The flying holiday is far more dangerous than the driving one. I do never decide between car and plane for a given goal, therefore the risk relation to the distance is wrong.
  - jhamburger 16y ago
    I don't think I agree with your logic here. It seems like you're saying that traveling to far away places is more dangerous than close places, regardless of how you get there. I don't see how that makes flying more dangerous.
    - holri 16y ago
      An example: A bus driver job is far more secure than a pilot job. When comparing activities we should relate spent livetime not distances to risk.
      - jhamburger 16y ago
        Well just about everyone other than Pilots spends a lot more of their life driving than flying, which is still irrelevant to which is the safer mode of transportation. When you boil it down, you're still saying "Going somewhere is more dangerous than not going somewhere."
        holri 16y ago
        no I am saying that "2 hours flying is more dangerous than 2 hours driving." For the estimate of the risks in my live I am asking what is the safer mode of living. Therefore the risk of an activity hast to be related to spent livetime.
        16y ago
- kprobst 16y ago
  I think in our lizard brains we prefer to have an imaginary measure of control over how we go. So we'd rather have a 20-foot wall of water bearing down on us at 80mph than to be exposed to invisible radiation. We imagine that we have a chance with the tsunami, but culturally we "know" that we're screwed with the fallout. This is cultural detritus from the duck-and-cover times, when we were told that even if we survived the initial blast of a nuclear weapon, the radiation would inevitably kill us (which isn't necessarily true). I read a book years ago called WarDay, about a hypothetical limited nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the US in the mid-80s. In the beginning of the book, after the attack, the authors describe how they took refuge in a school building and constructed a makeshift geiger counter, which told them how safe it was to go outside to scavenge for food and water and help other survivors. The credit that with saving their lives. In other words, they approached the fallout exposure problem from a scientific standpoint, rather than an emotional one. People can't seem to approach the irradiation problem in other than emotional terms, so the end result is sheer panic. If more people were aware of how to measure and limit exposure, that would give them the control they need to function successfully. Sadly, very few do.
abecedarius 16y ago
Wasn't natural gas among the safest? Third after nuclear and hydro. (I couldn't see any figure for solar, I guess because it's currently negligible?)

pinko 16y ago

The thousands of children (now adults) near Chernobyl with thyroid cancer don't show up in these stats, since they're not all dead. Doesn't necessarily change the conclusions but worth noting.

te_platt 16y ago
I read through the article explaining how the numbers were calculated and the thyroid cancer is noted. The analysis provided could be disputed on methodology but at least there are references you can check if you want to improve upon it.
ghshephard 16y ago
From the sources: "But what about Chernobyl ? The World Health Organization study in 2005 indicated that 50 people died to that point as a direct result of Chernobyl. 4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous. He explains that there have been 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children, but that except for nine deaths, all of them have recovered. "Otherwise, the team of international experts found no evidence for any increases in the incidence of leukemia and cancer among affected residents.""
- pinko 16y ago
  My point is that you or your child getting thyroid cancer, even if you or she recovers, is a pretty horrific outcome, and might deserve to be considered somehow -- not just fatalities.
  - mquander 16y ago
    True, but if you're counting that, there must surely be many other equally bad externalities worth counting; e.g. environmental damage due to oil spills and incidence of lung cancer due to air pollution from coal mining. You have to draw the line somewhere to make the chart, and drawing it at fatalities seems sort of reasonable. It certainly doesn't seem overly gracious to nuclear power.

ghshephard 16y ago

The sources look good [1] In particular, the deaths as a result of hydroelectric power caught some catastrophic failures. Dams are very, very dangerous constructions, and have a failure mode that makes a nuclear plant look safe by comparison. Just one major Hydroelectric Dam [2], Bangiao, was responsible for on the order of 50,000 deaths related directly to the Dam Failure. [1] http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

mistermann 16y ago
If 50,000 people were to die from a nuclear incident, a large portion of the public would absolutely lose their minds and insist that a nuclear reactor never again be built on the planet. 50,000 deaths resulting from <choose any other technology> however, is just an unfortunate incident. Hundreds of people will die year after year mining coal with nary a whimper of complaint, but we will hear about people sufferring from thyroid cancer 20 years after Chernobyl until the end of time. (Sorry, a tad snarky....but also very true, no?)
- borism 16y ago
  but also very true, no? yes. but why do you think that is? people aren't afraid of nuclear for no reason. While it isn't magic, it isn't exactly trivial either, even for experts. Could you explain to me how the hell fuel in Reactor 4 storage pond at Fukushima 1 went critical?
  - ChuckMcM 16y ago
    "Could you explain to me how the hell fuel in Reactor 4 storage pond at Fukushima 1 went critical?" I can. The term 'critical' is used to describe the point at which fission events are being caused by the neutrons emitted by other fission events. Also called a 'chain reaction.' Reactor fuel emits neutrons (actually even 'depleted' fuel emits neutrons see half life). Unused (and spent) fuel is stored in storage ponds filled with water because water is an excellent neutron moderator. Thus any neutrons that are emitted by the natural decay, or by internal fission events of the material are absorbed in the water and converted into a (relatively) small amount of heat. Air is a poor damper of neutrons, and in fact the chance of a neutron hitting an atom in a gas is greatly reduced. When the water in a fuel storage pond is removed, the naturally occurring neutrons can reach other fuel that is stored in that pond. If they are sufficiently energetic they can cause atoms in the fuel they hit to fission. If they do cause fission then heat is generated and another neutron (note: it maybe 2 I admit I've forgotten the exact reaction with U235) is emitted which might cause another fission event. Criticality is controlled by moderating the probability that a neutron will create a fission reaction. If you want to store uranium you can do this by either spreading it far apart or by placing it in an environment that moderates neutron flux. Since the latter is as 'simple' as putting it in water, that is the usual option. The caveat is that your spent fuel will continue to generate heat, if you don't remove that heat eventually the water will boil. If the water boils sufficiently to allow fuel to be exposed to air, the result can be that the fuel passes its criticality threshold. If you can't keep water cool then you can replace it with something that moderates and doesn't boil.

gcampbell 16y ago

The deaths from solar appear to be from falls while installing roof-mounted systems; this would be primarily applicable to residential and small commercial solar systems, whereas most larger systems will tend to be ground-mounted and safer to construct.

Tuna-Fish 16y ago
This mostly serves to illustrate just how small the current solar install base is.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago

It's just a visualisation of http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... figures from a couple of days ago, which I found highly dubious. For example where are all the biomass deaths from? Why no figures for non-rooftop solar? What does this "Hydroelectric power was found to to have a fatality rate of 0.10 per TWh (883 fatalities for every TW·yr) in the period 1969–1996" mean? How does spinning a turbine from dammed water cause death? Ah ... further down the page "... Paul Gipe estimated ..." - so someones estimates without proper working or sources for death rates and such ... I would love to see a well worked properly sourced analysis along these lines however.

Tuna-Fish 16y ago
Burning biomass causes high levels of particulate emissions, which are a very significant health risk (Burning firewood is the most important source of air pollution in much of the developing world). Hydro is completely safe most of the time, but when a dam fails, it typically kills a lot of people really quickly. It would be really hard to collect figures for non-rooftop solar -- simply because there is so little of it. (They would be very favorable.)
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  Biomass - comprehension error on my part, I thought that it was using dung in fermenters and like apparatus. There seems to be enough solar farms to make the same sort of estimates as have been used in the article though. I think what would be most helpful would actually be a comparison for a large country with similar safety standards across all industries looking at facilities over a fixed period. That would help, IMO, to rule out problems like people continuing with a hydro project even though the dam is cracked from the off ...
perokreco 16y ago
Think about what happens when a dam fails. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

jshen 16y ago

I feel like this line of reasoning misses the point a bit. Nuclear waste is dangerous for a very very long time, while deaths from these other sources are front loaded. When can people move back to chernobyl? If we have significant radiation exposure in japan, how long will that land be uninhabitable? Nuclear waste we create today is dangerous for how long?

DanI-S 16y ago
How long would the atmosphere take to recover from CO2 emissions if we stopped burning fossil fuels today? How many people will have died as a result of climate change and lung problems before then?
- afterburner 16y ago
  People keep dismissing renewables. Well, they won't get anywhere if we don't invest in them, and that investment has to come from a decrease in spending on other sources. Like nuclear.
  - lukeschlather 16y ago
    It should come out of coal. If we were willing to nationalize all of our energy, start phasing out coal plants, and go fully nuclear to replace coal, over the next 50 years we could get substantial savings over coal and put those savings into renewables. And in any case, as this graph shows, renewables are not a panacea. Hydro dams cause significant environmental damage, and even wind turbines have their issues.
    - afterburner 16y ago
      Sure, from anywhere it can. But a lot of people are talking about ramping up nuclear spending (and the costs are always understated).
      - lukeschlather 16y ago

foresterh 16y ago

What about all of the plants and animals killed from the various resources? Or the land and water that can no longer sustain life because of one disaster or another...

jerf 16y ago
I'm not sure what you think this will prove, but if you're going to go this route it's going to make nuclear look even better. Much more confined mining operations, much smaller land use (something almost all "green" technologies are actually terrible with, IIRC nuclear is the most power-per-acre you can get with current tech), waste goes to uninhabited areas anyhow (and if we were less stupid about it there wouldn't hardly be any), and take a quick Google at "pictures of Chernobyl" [1] and note how it isn't a radioactive wasteland in the style of Fallout or anything. Very little land has actually been rendered "unable to sustain life"; I'm not sure it measures in anything more than a handful of acres. Hollywood movies and video games are not a good way to learn how nuclear power works. [1]: http://www.grcade.com/viewtopic.php?t=2217 http://www.grcade.com/viewtopic.php?t=2217 - note the greenery all the way up to the plant itself
- foresterh 16y ago
  It may make nuclear look better comparably, but it will make all of these (oil, coal, nuclear) look worse. When all you factor into the cost is human life and money, you miss the bigger picture of how we're affecting what doesn't have a voice.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - jerf 16y ago
    "Comparably" is what I meant, certainly. When you add only negatives to an existing assessment, everything will look worse, but relative positions can change.

ecounysis 16y ago

One problem with this visualization is that it does not account for future deaths and less noticeable health effects caused by radioactive waste and accidents related to its storage. On the other hand, it also does not account for the same caused by oil and coal and other pollution.

zwieback 16y ago

Illustrates again that people are afraid of what's scary, not what's likely to actually happen.

pjscott 16y ago
Reminds me of the "Stranger Danger" scare a while back. Teaching children to beware of strangers makes them safer from kidnappers, but less safe if they get lost or need help from a random adult for some reason. Guess which of these situations is more common.

kalendae 16y ago

a great part of the fear is that you can not see radioactivity harming you. Water I can see. Mining coal feels like it is within my control whether I engage in that activity or not.

ChuckMcM 16y ago
This is the most common reasoning for people who fear nuclear power. They reason that they can't see where the danger (radiation) is so they can't know if they are in danger or not, whereas with an oil spill, a gas pipeline explosion, or an oil refinery event, they have visible boundaries to 'this area is bad' vs 'this area is probably still safe' (note its not of course, you can have odorless and invisible threats like CO but many of the failure modes are visible in a spectrum our unaided senses can detect) I don't have a good answer for re-assuring these folks. (carrying a counter with them seems to be a non-starter, but perhaps a cell phone app would be ok)

baltcode 16y ago

I'd like to see the cost in $ per TWh as another column.

pedalpete 16y ago

I'm missing (or the article is missing) the timeline that the calculations are based on. Is that yearly? last year? last 5 years? We have to take a significant time scale on any of these for it to be considered reliable. Though there may have been 0 deaths from nuclear last year, over a 10 year span, would that number be the same? I believe nuclear can be safer over the long-run, but I'd like to see some more depth in these stats.

pjscott 16y ago
The nuclear calculations have a long timeline. They include mining deaths for plant construction and refueling, and one Chernobyl-scale event every 20 years or so. The numbers are explained in much more detail here: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...
- eliasmacpherson 16y ago
  I read it as allowing for one of that scale every 45 years, the entire duration of data calculation, arriving at 0.037 deaths per TWh. There's no indication that more than one event of that scale is contemplated.

michaelchisari 16y ago

It should be pointed out that there will never be another Chernobyl. It was a perfect intersection of criminally inadequate design, early-adopter naivete, incompetence, and Murphy's Law. In these discussions, bringing up Three Mile Island is fair game, but Chernobyl is not a realistic parallel.

rabidsnail 16y ago
Chernobyl: the nuclear disaster to end all nuclear disasters?

joblessjunkie 16y ago

Wait, are you trying persuade us with facts? Airplanes are the safest way to travel by far. That doesn't prevent people from stubbornly refusing to fly (taking very unsafe road trips instead), it doesn't prevent panic attacks in the air, and it doesn't stop governments wasting billions on security checkpoint theater. God speed, my friend, I sincerely hope the facts will make a difference.

Someone 16y ago
Airplanes are the safest way to travel by far Yes and no. That depends on how you measure. The typical statistic used (deaths per man-kilometer) favors flying a bit. For example, the space shuttle is safe, according to that metric (guesstimate: 60 shuttle flights for every crash => over a year in space for every crash, 16 times round earth a day => 60000 revolutions * 40k km => 2*10^9 man km per death) According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_safety#Statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_safety#Statistics making one plane ride is riskier than taking a bus once. Moreover, taking of and landing are the high-risk parts of flying. So, I would expect that flying would score worse than that when people starte making shorter flights.
- gus_massa 16y ago
  I redo the space shuttle risk using the data from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_shuttle_missions#Flight_statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_shuttle_missions#... Total Orbits: ~20K Orbits Length: ~40K Km Crashes: 2 (Assuming same number of crew in each flight.) Risk: 20K * 40K Km / 2 = 4*10^8 man Km per death Or: 2.5 deaths / billon Km So using the Risk/Km criteria the space shuttle is as safe as (water)ships, safer than cars and riskier than trains.

chrismealy 16y ago

Are they counting Iraq War deaths?

SwellJoe 16y ago
This was my first thought, as well, and not just Iraq. There have been numerous wars for oil throughout the past century.
jacoblyles 16y ago
Didn't the war in Iraq reduce oil production from that country?

lysium 16y ago

Even if reposted with fancy graphs, the data do not get better. Basically, they are from a nuclear lobby site. The referenced data on the lobby site lists 0.04-0.23 deaths per TWh for the coal fuel chain and 0.01-0.65 for nuclear. I don't see that large a difference here between coal and nuclear. The number of 160 deaths/TWh is made up from a very rough estimate of WHO that 1 mio. people die due to coal air pollution (without further reference). That's hardly a good source, IMHO. Further, the effect of storing lethally radioactive material for very long time periods is completely neglected. For me, this is a troll post and I bite.

grandpa 16y ago
> Basically, they are from a nuclear lobby site Really? You may well know something I don't, but it doesn't seem that way to me: http://www.reddit.com/domain/nextbigfuture.com/ http://www.reddit.com/domain/nextbigfuture.com/
- lysium 16y ago
  The info is based on such bogus data, I jumped to that claim. I currently can't check your reddit link, because reddit is down. Maybe it's just the article.

saidulislam 16y ago

flawed observation. true, nuclear accidents don't happen often but when they do you have to deal with immediate and long term effects. as far as I know, coal power plant accidents don't cause deformities for the next 2/3 generations. also I don't see the numbers on solar and wind.

nextparadigms 16y ago

Why are you people advocating for nuclear power so much? Solar and wind power should be the future, and they're renewable. Don't you think that's a much better future? Sure they might not be very effective now, but a couple of decades down the road with some big investments (like in nuclear plants) it should be orders of magnitude more effective than it is now. Of course, a country like USA will never back down from using nuclear plants because they need their byproducts to make nukes.

relix 16y ago
At this point, it's the best option for our huge energy needs. Like you said, a few decades down the road, solar power might be somewhat interesting. What do we do until then? Burn coal, which is far more polluting? Next, solar and wind energy yield but peanuts in how much energy we actually need. A recent article suggests that, with impossible 100% efficient solar panels, we'd have to cover 1/6000th of the earth to meet our current energy demands. A few decades down the road this will probably be doubled because of our growing demands.

porkbird 16y ago

I think we should also measure an average number of deaths caused by a single incident and the average number of deaths among strangers caused by a single incident. The incidents at nuclear plants are rare, but the consequences can be much more dangerous than from the other energy sources.

varjag 16y ago

So natural gas is the safest? It is same order of causalities as nuclear, albeit with dramatically less safety effort. One can only imagine how safe would it be if as much was spent for safety measures as with nuclear per TW.

A1kmm 16y ago

The linked sited is an article that links to a blog post that doesn't really say exactly how they came up with their results, but provide some links (e.g. http://manhaz.cyf.gov.pl/manhaz/strona_konferencja_EAE-2001/15%20-%20Polenp~1.pdf http://manhaz.cyf.gov.pl/manhaz/strona_konferencja_EAE-2001/...). It sounds like they take into account deaths where coal air pollution was a contributing factor, but not deaths where radioactive fallout was a contributing factor, and they don't attribute global warming related deaths to fossil fuels. They also don't take into account ongoing risks - some forms of energy present risks long after the energy has been harvested, so the numbers will continue to rise, while others don't). I'd therefore take those results with a grain of salt.

kragen 16y ago

I can't find the crude death numbers in the article. It seems like there's a small chance that the number of deaths due to nuclear power in all of history could increase by a factor of 10 or more due to events in the next week or two, which would push it past rooftop solar energy, although it would still be nowhere near coal.

jvdongen 16y ago

Also good to take into account is that Chernobyl and TMI and Fukushima are installations from the 1970's or early 1980's. And even for those old birds the stats seem fairly favorable. But as long as emotions fueled by scare-mongering have the upper hand, rationality and facts make no chance. So really widespread adoption of nuclear energy (be it fusion or fizzion - I'd be surprised if the public at large makes any distinction between them) is probably not going to happen for the near future. And that's a shame as it could be our ticket out of both a lot of environmental issues and socio-economic issues.