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Safety is not about deaths alone. You can’t ignore the massive costs and negative personal effects of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

AstralStorm 6y ago
I cannot ignore negative personal effect of loud wind turbines and healthcare cost of the PM10 and finer particulates either. No, renewables cannot provide all the power we need even if humanity scales down the energy use, which is not going to happen. (Batteries, even sodium-sulfur, at these scales are impossibly expensive, same with pumped storage.)
- legulere 6y ago
  Which renewables are producing PM10 emissions? The problem of renewables is not the power they can produce, but how to handle intermittency. Better electricity networks are one part of the solution, batteries can be as well. Even with 50% renewables Germany has one of the most stable electricity networks in the world. Also in the traditional base-peaked system you still need peeking power plants and you have problems with weather effects (in summer water in rivers can get too warm to use it or dry up, in winter it can freeze)
lucb1e 6y ago
> Safety is not about deaths alone. You can’t ignore the massive costs and [...] Actually, if we're talking about safety, we can. There are some good total cost analyses, since governments also want to know how power can be produced most cheaply. The US and UK both published reports about this with somewhat varying (but ballpark similar) numbers. But anyway, we were talking about safety. > [...] and negative personal effects Okay, please bring on the stats then. I agree that this is relevant to the safety discussion and, thus, the discussion whether we should use nuclear fission going forward, but I never see anyone cite comparative stats on displacement, illnesses, etc. All I ever see is that nuclear kills very, very few people per TWh compared to current energy sources, making it seem very attractive to build as a replacement when looking at this metric. You'd have to have a huge number of people falling ill or being displaced (but not dying) due to nuclear disasters or uranium mining to make it better than our current energy sources.

AstralStorm 6y ago

I cannot ignore negative personal effect of loud wind turbines and healthcare cost of the PM10 and finer particulates either. No, renewables cannot provide all the power we need even if humanity scales down the energy use, which is not going to happen. (Batteries, even sodium-sulfur, at these scales are impossibly expensive, same with pumped storage.)

legulere 6y ago
Which renewables are producing PM10 emissions? The problem of renewables is not the power they can produce, but how to handle intermittency. Better electricity networks are one part of the solution, batteries can be as well. Even with 50% renewables Germany has one of the most stable electricity networks in the world. Also in the traditional base-peaked system you still need peeking power plants and you have problems with weather effects (in summer water in rivers can get too warm to use it or dry up, in winter it can freeze)

lucb1e 6y ago

> Safety is not about deaths alone. You can’t ignore the massive costs and [...] Actually, if we're talking about safety, we can. There are some good total cost analyses, since governments also want to know how power can be produced most cheaply. The US and UK both published reports about this with somewhat varying (but ballpark similar) numbers. But anyway, we were talking about safety. > [...] and negative personal effects Okay, please bring on the stats then. I agree that this is relevant to the safety discussion and, thus, the discussion whether we should use nuclear fission going forward, but I never see anyone cite comparative stats on displacement, illnesses, etc. All I ever see is that nuclear kills very, very few people per TWh compared to current energy sources, making it seem very attractive to build as a replacement when looking at this metric. You'd have to have a huge number of people falling ill or being displaced (but not dying) due to nuclear disasters or uranium mining to make it better than our current energy sources.