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The usual numbers for deaths per 10TWh for different sources of electrical power look something like this Nuclear — 0.2 to 1.2 deaths per 10 TWh
by sampo 6y ago
The usual numbers for deaths per 10TWh for different sources of electrical power look something like this
Nuclear — 0.2 to 1.2 deaths per 10 TWh
Natural gas — 0.3-1.6 deaths per 10 TWh
Hydroelectric — 1.0-1.6 deaths per 10 TWh
Coal — 2.8 to 32.7 deaths per 10 TWh
But for hydro, the largest dam failure in history is always excluded from the statistics. If we were to include it, the number for hydro would become 30—50 timer larger.
https://www.businessinsider.com/dam-safety-statistics-risk-of-death-2017-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/dam-safety-statistics-risk-o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
- edf13 6y agoWhy is the range so large for coal?
- cowsandmilk 6y agoMost likely huge variation in estimates of deaths from climate change and estimates of coal’s contribution to climate change.
- sampo 6y ago> Why is the range so large for coal? Coal plants release sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides and fine particles, which cause air pollution. It's difficult to estimate precisely the number of deaths caused by polluted and lower quality air.
- yodelshady 6y ago"excluding the biggest failure" - that's beyond cherry picking into just outright lying isn't it? (Not aimed at you: you've obviously been very fair in capturing the issues with the data as presented). Nuclear advocates will often complain that the deaths from Chernobyl get disproportionate press compared to the perpetual toll that is daily operations for coal. But just ignoring the deaths - I can't see how that's justified in good faith.
- drran 6y agoYeah, we should include natural floods and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing into the statistic of normal operation. /s
- yodelshady 6y agoThose things were, blindingly obviously, never intended to produce electrical power. The Banqiao dam was, and failed under similar environmental stresses to Fukushima, killing - by any even vaguely sane analysis - an order of magnitude more people. If you count disaster deaths for some methods of producing a resource (power) and ignore them for others, I'm calling you a bad-faith actor.
- drran 6y ago62 upstream dams were broken before Banqiao dam failed. No dam in the world is capable to stop 15 700 000 000 000 tonnes of water. The flood was catastrophic anyway. The primary responsibility of Banqiao dam is to control flood. Power generation was secondary.
- pwagland 6y agoI know that you are claiming to be sarcastic, but one should point out that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were not used to generate power, so I don't suspect that anyone would suggest to include them in the power generation deaths. And in this case, the flooding was almost certainly made worse by the dam, since there was a calamitous failure mode. That is _not_ to say that people would not have died otherwise from the flooding.
- drran 6y agoOk, let replace Hiroshima bombing with Fukushima disaster. Imagine that instead of 62 dams broken bi Nina typhoon, about 10 nuclear reactors were flooded instead. (We don't need a flood control when we use nuclear energy. Right?) How many deaths you will expect in addition to drown and ill in this imaginary case?
- 6y ago
- asiachick 6y agoIf you'd like it in animated form the latest Kurzgesagt video covers this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM
- natmaka 6y agoNuclear toll (and costs) will be adequately accounted for when the very last reactor AND the very last hot waste will be cold. In at least a million years. In the meantime the thingie is ticking... Banqiao? Not really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301436
- 908B64B197 6y agoI'll further cherry-pick here, but I wonder what the data would look like only for western infrastructures.
- hristov 6y agoAnd for nuclear all large problems are excluded from the statistics. The Chernobyl disaster probably killed about million people according to reputable western european studies. But the official Soviet statistic is one person dead, and that is what is used in most official statistics for nuclear. And Chernobyl is one of the more transparent cases. There were studies done on the damage because the disaster was caused by the weak Soviet empire which everyone on the west wanted to bring down. Other disasters, like three mile island and fukushima have certainly killed hundreds of thousands but everyone is very careful not to do a study on that. So what I am saying is these statistics are not to be trusted. They are mostly an indication of the political power the owners of certain power plants have.
- wiredfool 6y agoThose statistics are not generally accepted.
- lainga 6y agoWould you mind linking me those reputable Western European studies?
- deepspace 6y agoWhere are these alleged 'reputable western european studies'? The worst estimate I could find was 93,000-200,000 by Greenpeace, not exactly a neutral party. The worst-case 'reputable' estimate is 27,000 by the Union of Concerned Scientists. A million is way, way out there.