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Yeah, we should include natural floods and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing into the statistic of normal operation. /s

• yodelshady 6y ago
  Those 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 ago
    62 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Ok, 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?