11 ms·

I often wonder if nuclear testing or fossil fuels is having a worse impact on humans and society. Maybe both are partly to blame for the madness

godelski 5y ago
Fossil fuels. No question. We know the dangers of both very well. Only a handful of people have died from nuclear. More people die each day from climate.
- kube-system 5y ago
  Not to mention that the use of fossil fuels also releases small amounts of radioactive contamination directly into the atmosphere as a matter of normal use.
- ThinkBeat 5y ago
  Um he said "nuclear testing", not "nuclear power".
  - trenchgun 5y ago
    How many people have died from nuclear testing?
    - godelski 5y ago
      Hard to say tbh, but I'd wager less than a million. For comparison, that's about the yearly death rate (or rather early deaths, which is similar to how we attribute radiation deaths) from coal. Not fossil fuels, coal. The __magnitudes__ are vastly disproportional here. There's nothing to debate here except what we fear more. But our lack of fear over climate change is how we got here. Because the killer is slow moving and (mostly) invisible.
      - drran 5y ago
        It's a good argument to replace coal energy with clean energy, but why we should replace dirty coal with dirty nuclear?
        godelski 5y ago
        > dirty nuclear That's a bold assertion. Would you care to back it up? Nuclear does not produce carbon. It's one of the safest forms of energy we have. There's a reason France has one of the lowest emission rates in the world. Killing nuclear in the 80's and 90's is clearly one of the worst mistakes we've ever made. The mistake we're making now is pitting nuclear against renewables. There's a large scientific consensus that we should _complement_ renewables with nuclear. Use renewables where we can but it is a far better option than gas. That's the choice we are currently making. Let's not make the same mistake twice, there's a lot more on the line this time.
        drran 5y ago
        Nuclear does produce radioactive waste. It's why Chornobyl, Fukushima, Kyshtym, and few other places are inhabitable. We should clean these dirty places before we call nuclear energy «clean».
    - freeflight 5y ago
      Estimates for that actually exist, they put the number at around 340,000 to 460,000 people [0], and that's only in the US. [0] https://cms.qz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/6043f-meyers-fallout-mortality-website.pdf https://cms.qz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/6043f-meyers-f...
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - ThinkBeat 5y ago
      A 1991 study by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) predicted that some 2.4 million people would eventually die from cancer as a result of atmospheric testing globally. https://www.gcsp.ch/global-insights/75-years-later-nuclear-weapons-still-kill https://www.gcsp.ch/global-insights/75-years-later-nuclear-w... https://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/1991/06/RadioactiveHeavenEarth1991.pdf https://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/1991/06/RadioactiveHe...
- laurent92 5y ago
  > More people die each day from climate. And from solar panels! There are a dozen deaths a year, worldwide, from installing them on roofs, which mean solar is more deadly than nuclear ;)
- 8bitsrule 5y ago
  >Only a handful of people have died from nuclear. I accept that statement only when it's followed by ' so far as you know.' [https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/atomic-veterans-1946-1962 https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/atomic-veterans-1946-...] [https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/25/us/us-nuclear-accident-in-1965-was-staged-documents-show.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/25/us/us-nuclear-accident-in...]
  - godelski 5y ago
    I accept that statement but also the people we do know that have died are several orders of magnitude. While I'm sure there are plenty of people that have died from radiation that we don't know of I'm sure this number isn't in the millions but rather in the dozens or hundreds. It'd be pretty difficult to hide so many deaths.
    - drran 5y ago
      * Strict rules and prohibitions reduced the number of deaths from radiation poisoning to a very low number. * Yeah, the number of deaths from radiation poisoning is very low, so we can be reckless.
      - godelski 5y ago
        I didn't say reckless. But we also can't get the death number to zero without spending an infinite amount of resources. But doing so would result in more deaths due to not spending resources elsewhere. The problem is we can't look at everything individually. We can to a certain point but after that there are coupled effects and also noise. This is very different than saying that we can be reckless (which is a gray term, not a binary).
        drran 5y ago
        Yep, it's the classical runaway tram problem: people will die anyway, but we should kill as fewer people as possible. So, let look at nuclear risks: * potential damage area is extremely high. If a state sponsored actor will take control over a nuclear station or nuclear waste store, he can blast it and disperse over half of a continent. Unlike nuclear weapon, it will be very dirty, so it's better not to do at same continent, but an Asian or African country can do that in the USA. * potential loses are very high, up to billions of people, if major part of the continent will be contaminated. Nobody can provide insurance for such event. If we increase the number of nuclear stations by 10x, risks will increase by 10x or more, because it's easier to guard a few stations than a dozen or a hundred stations. To keep risks low, safety of stations must be improved by the same number, otherwise, by increasing the number of stations by 10x we will have a Chornobyl/Fukushima level event every 3-5 years. Do you see a way to improve safety of nuclear stations and waste storage by 10x, while keeping construction cost and construction time in acceptable range?
- drran 5y ago
  How much we can «safely» kill by nuclear power? Can you give us a number?
  - godelski 5y ago
    Zero? How much can we «safely» kill by {solar panel roof installations, wind turbines, driving, drinking water, eating, taking showers, insert literally any }. You're creating an unreasonable position that I need to defend and you are not acting in good faith.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    Sure. At least 1 million per year, because that is the amount of people that die due to the various illnesses caused by coal mining and coal power plants (lung cancer etc.) in the US alone. Assuming the liberal estimate of 60,000 deaths caused by Chernobyl in total (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...), the nuclear industry would have to give us about 17 Chernobyls per year to match the fossil fuel industry.
    - drran 5y ago
      OK, good starting number. Few thoughts: When we phase out coal, say in 20 years, the next acceptable number will be much lower. We need about 20 years to build nuclear stations, so we should orient at this new number, isn't? When a next nuclear disaster happen, public will reverse it opinion again, so nuclear projects will be frozen and nuclear stations will be decommissioned, like it happened before. Do you have a Plan B for this case? If a next nuclear disaster will cover a much larger area (due to evil intent), say half of a continent, how much cancer percentage will rise when people will not be able to escape to clean land, clean food, clean water?
      - nexuist 5y ago
        > We need about 20 years to build nuclear stations, so we should orient at this new number, isn't? Yes, I was being facetious, obviously 1 million / year is not a good goal. But considering that the total amount of radiation related deaths has not even reached 1 million total since the first bomb in 1945, it is unlikely any such number will be approached soon. > When a next nuclear disaster happen, public will reverse it opinion again, so nuclear projects will be frozen and nuclear stations will be decommissioned This has never happened for oil rig disasters that have released millions of gallons of toxic crude oil into the ocean causing untold damage to the global ecosystem. If we go all in on nuclear we're not turning around. > Do you have a Plan B for this case? Mars? The Plan B is just to not use as much electricity or convert a sizable portion of land to solar and wind farms. The public will not tolerate either option. See my other comment comparing the size of nuclear plants to solar farms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29765656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29765656 TL;DR the world's largest solar park can hold 459 Fukushima plants, which would generate over 13.5% of the world's energy supply as opposed to the 2.7GW the solar panels are currently generating which is 0.016% of the world's energy supply. > If a next nuclear disaster will cover a much larger area (due to evil intent), say half of a continent A terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant could not cause an explosion like Chernobyl because the emergency shutdown procedure would safely end the fission reaction as opposed to Chernobyl's mechanism which accidentally accelerated it. The worst that could happen is something like Fukushima where the core melts down due to a LOCA (loss of coolant accident). Three cores melted down that day and 12 years later there has only been a single recorded radiation death. > how much cancer percentage will rise 20 years from now we will also have more advanced and successful methods of treating cancer - keep in mind that modern chemo vs. 1980's chemo is worlds apart and certainly contributed to the public fear as cancer was still mostly a death sentence. Now many types of cancer have been cured and the likelihood of survival has risen across the board. This is not an excuse to say that cancer is acceptable, just that it won't be a death sentence for the majority of people even if a nuclear accident did somehow cover an entire continent. Also, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was kept active until 2000! Operators were bused in every day following the accident. You can even go on tours in the city of Pripyat now and the resulting dose is just slightly higher than background radiation. In other words, the situation was resolved within a few years, and that was using 1980's technology. Today with technology such as robots, quadcopter drones, and advanced construction techniques (ie. the New Safe Confinement) it is unlikely that another Chernobyl would last even a few weeks before the core was covered up. It doesn't matter where it happens either; the UN and the developed world would not let an accident like that go unnoticed and unsolved in our connected society.
- freeflight 5y ago
  > Only a handful of people have died from nuclear. At least if one ignores the hundreds of thousands of people who were directly killed by nuclear weapons.
  - mlyle 5y ago
    Are we going to count everyone who's died from skin cancer against solar, and everyone who's died in a hurricane against the wind?
    - freeflight 5y ago
      The context was nuclear weapon tests, nuclear weapons are designed and built for a purpose, they are man-made we have influence over their existence. While the sun and hurricanes are natural phenomena that we don't really have much influence over nor were they designed for the specific purpose of giving skin cancer or killing people.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - godelski 5y ago
        Modify mlyle's argument to deaths due to power outages or the danger of state sponsored attacks on power grids. Either way these comparisons are very weird. No one questions how a knife can be used for cooking and is found in most homes yet knives are very dangerous weapons. But also people aren't killing one another with kitchen knives. They're both knives but have different purposes and different designs.
palijer 5y ago
What do you mean by "the madness"?
acidburnNSA 5y ago
Fossil and biofuel combustion kills 8 million people per year and has for decades [1]. Nuclear testing exposed some hundreds of people to high levels of radiation, some of which died or had shortened lives. Wide populations that got fallout doses many times less than natural background were very likely not affected by testing fallout. Thus, fossil and biofuel combustion have been many orders of magnitude worse than nuclear weapons testing for overall human health. [1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1 https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1

godelski 5y ago

Fossil fuels. No question. We know the dangers of both very well. Only a handful of people have died from nuclear. More people die each day from climate.

kube-system 5y ago
Not to mention that the use of fossil fuels also releases small amounts of radioactive contamination directly into the atmosphere as a matter of normal use.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
Um he said "nuclear testing", not "nuclear power".
- trenchgun 5y ago
  How many people have died from nuclear testing?
  - godelski 5y ago
    Hard to say tbh, but I'd wager less than a million. For comparison, that's about the yearly death rate (or rather early deaths, which is similar to how we attribute radiation deaths) from coal. Not fossil fuels, coal. The __magnitudes__ are vastly disproportional here. There's nothing to debate here except what we fear more. But our lack of fear over climate change is how we got here. Because the killer is slow moving and (mostly) invisible.
    - drran 5y ago
      It's a good argument to replace coal energy with clean energy, but why we should replace dirty coal with dirty nuclear?
      - godelski 5y ago
        > dirty nuclear That's a bold assertion. Would you care to back it up? Nuclear does not produce carbon. It's one of the safest forms of energy we have. There's a reason France has one of the lowest emission rates in the world. Killing nuclear in the 80's and 90's is clearly one of the worst mistakes we've ever made. The mistake we're making now is pitting nuclear against renewables. There's a large scientific consensus that we should _complement_ renewables with nuclear. Use renewables where we can but it is a far better option than gas. That's the choice we are currently making. Let's not make the same mistake twice, there's a lot more on the line this time.
        drran 5y ago
        Nuclear does produce radioactive waste. It's why Chornobyl, Fukushima, Kyshtym, and few other places are inhabitable. We should clean these dirty places before we call nuclear energy «clean».
  - freeflight 5y ago
    Estimates for that actually exist, they put the number at around 340,000 to 460,000 people [0], and that's only in the US. [0] https://cms.qz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/6043f-meyers-fallout-mortality-website.pdf https://cms.qz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/6043f-meyers-f...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - ThinkBeat 5y ago
    A 1991 study by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) predicted that some 2.4 million people would eventually die from cancer as a result of atmospheric testing globally. https://www.gcsp.ch/global-insights/75-years-later-nuclear-weapons-still-kill https://www.gcsp.ch/global-insights/75-years-later-nuclear-w... https://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/1991/06/RadioactiveHeavenEarth1991.pdf https://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/1991/06/RadioactiveHe...
laurent92 5y ago
> More people die each day from climate. And from solar panels! There are a dozen deaths a year, worldwide, from installing them on roofs, which mean solar is more deadly than nuclear ;)
8bitsrule 5y ago
>Only a handful of people have died from nuclear. I accept that statement only when it's followed by ' so far as you know.' [https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/atomic-veterans-1946-1962 https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/atomic-veterans-1946-...] [https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/25/us/us-nuclear-accident-in-1965-was-staged-documents-show.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/25/us/us-nuclear-accident-in...]
- godelski 5y ago
  I accept that statement but also the people we do know that have died are several orders of magnitude. While I'm sure there are plenty of people that have died from radiation that we don't know of I'm sure this number isn't in the millions but rather in the dozens or hundreds. It'd be pretty difficult to hide so many deaths.
  - drran 5y ago
    * Strict rules and prohibitions reduced the number of deaths from radiation poisoning to a very low number. * Yeah, the number of deaths from radiation poisoning is very low, so we can be reckless.
    - godelski 5y ago
      I didn't say reckless. But we also can't get the death number to zero without spending an infinite amount of resources. But doing so would result in more deaths due to not spending resources elsewhere. The problem is we can't look at everything individually. We can to a certain point but after that there are coupled effects and also noise. This is very different than saying that we can be reckless (which is a gray term, not a binary).
      - drran 5y ago
        Yep, it's the classical runaway tram problem: people will die anyway, but we should kill as fewer people as possible. So, let look at nuclear risks: * potential damage area is extremely high. If a state sponsored actor will take control over a nuclear station or nuclear waste store, he can blast it and disperse over half of a continent. Unlike nuclear weapon, it will be very dirty, so it's better not to do at same continent, but an Asian or African country can do that in the USA. * potential loses are very high, up to billions of people, if major part of the continent will be contaminated. Nobody can provide insurance for such event. If we increase the number of nuclear stations by 10x, risks will increase by 10x or more, because it's easier to guard a few stations than a dozen or a hundred stations. To keep risks low, safety of stations must be improved by the same number, otherwise, by increasing the number of stations by 10x we will have a Chornobyl/Fukushima level event every 3-5 years. Do you see a way to improve safety of nuclear stations and waste storage by 10x, while keeping construction cost and construction time in acceptable range?
drran 5y ago
How much we can «safely» kill by nuclear power? Can you give us a number?
- godelski 5y ago
  Zero? How much can we «safely» kill by {solar panel roof installations, wind turbines, driving, drinking water, eating, taking showers, insert literally any }. You're creating an unreasonable position that I need to defend and you are not acting in good faith.
- nexuist 5y ago
  Sure. At least 1 million per year, because that is the amount of people that die due to the various illnesses caused by coal mining and coal power plants (lung cancer etc.) in the US alone. Assuming the liberal estimate of 60,000 deaths caused by Chernobyl in total (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...), the nuclear industry would have to give us about 17 Chernobyls per year to match the fossil fuel industry.
  - drran 5y ago
    OK, good starting number. Few thoughts: When we phase out coal, say in 20 years, the next acceptable number will be much lower. We need about 20 years to build nuclear stations, so we should orient at this new number, isn't? When a next nuclear disaster happen, public will reverse it opinion again, so nuclear projects will be frozen and nuclear stations will be decommissioned, like it happened before. Do you have a Plan B for this case? If a next nuclear disaster will cover a much larger area (due to evil intent), say half of a continent, how much cancer percentage will rise when people will not be able to escape to clean land, clean food, clean water?
    - nexuist 5y ago
      > We need about 20 years to build nuclear stations, so we should orient at this new number, isn't? Yes, I was being facetious, obviously 1 million / year is not a good goal. But considering that the total amount of radiation related deaths has not even reached 1 million total since the first bomb in 1945, it is unlikely any such number will be approached soon. > When a next nuclear disaster happen, public will reverse it opinion again, so nuclear projects will be frozen and nuclear stations will be decommissioned This has never happened for oil rig disasters that have released millions of gallons of toxic crude oil into the ocean causing untold damage to the global ecosystem. If we go all in on nuclear we're not turning around. > Do you have a Plan B for this case? Mars? The Plan B is just to not use as much electricity or convert a sizable portion of land to solar and wind farms. The public will not tolerate either option. See my other comment comparing the size of nuclear plants to solar farms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29765656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29765656 TL;DR the world's largest solar park can hold 459 Fukushima plants, which would generate over 13.5% of the world's energy supply as opposed to the 2.7GW the solar panels are currently generating which is 0.016% of the world's energy supply. > If a next nuclear disaster will cover a much larger area (due to evil intent), say half of a continent A terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant could not cause an explosion like Chernobyl because the emergency shutdown procedure would safely end the fission reaction as opposed to Chernobyl's mechanism which accidentally accelerated it. The worst that could happen is something like Fukushima where the core melts down due to a LOCA (loss of coolant accident). Three cores melted down that day and 12 years later there has only been a single recorded radiation death. > how much cancer percentage will rise 20 years from now we will also have more advanced and successful methods of treating cancer - keep in mind that modern chemo vs. 1980's chemo is worlds apart and certainly contributed to the public fear as cancer was still mostly a death sentence. Now many types of cancer have been cured and the likelihood of survival has risen across the board. This is not an excuse to say that cancer is acceptable, just that it won't be a death sentence for the majority of people even if a nuclear accident did somehow cover an entire continent. Also, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was kept active until 2000! Operators were bused in every day following the accident. You can even go on tours in the city of Pripyat now and the resulting dose is just slightly higher than background radiation. In other words, the situation was resolved within a few years, and that was using 1980's technology. Today with technology such as robots, quadcopter drones, and advanced construction techniques (ie. the New Safe Confinement) it is unlikely that another Chernobyl would last even a few weeks before the core was covered up. It doesn't matter where it happens either; the UN and the developed world would not let an accident like that go unnoticed and unsolved in our connected society.
freeflight 5y ago
> Only a handful of people have died from nuclear. At least if one ignores the hundreds of thousands of people who were directly killed by nuclear weapons.
- mlyle 5y ago
  Are we going to count everyone who's died from skin cancer against solar, and everyone who's died in a hurricane against the wind?
  - freeflight 5y ago
    The context was nuclear weapon tests, nuclear weapons are designed and built for a purpose, they are man-made we have influence over their existence. While the sun and hurricanes are natural phenomena that we don't really have much influence over nor were they designed for the specific purpose of giving skin cancer or killing people.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - godelski 5y ago
      Modify mlyle's argument to deaths due to power outages or the danger of state sponsored attacks on power grids. Either way these comparisons are very weird. No one questions how a knife can be used for cooking and is found in most homes yet knives are very dangerous weapons. But also people aren't killing one another with kitchen knives. They're both knives but have different purposes and different designs.

palijer 5y ago

What do you mean by "the madness"?

acidburnNSA 5y ago

Fossil and biofuel combustion kills 8 million people per year and has for decades [1]. Nuclear testing exposed some hundreds of people to high levels of radiation, some of which died or had shortened lives. Wide populations that got fallout doses many times less than natural background were very likely not affected by testing fallout. Thus, fossil and biofuel combustion have been many orders of magnitude worse than nuclear weapons testing for overall human health. [1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1 https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1