11 ms·

The linked tweet doesn't provide a citation or context for the "helped prevent ~2M deaths" claim. But there is work in this area which suggests that "~2M lives

The linked tweet doesn't provide a citation or context for the "helped prevent ~2M deaths" claim. But there is work in this area which suggests that "~2M lives saved" in the last 50 years underestimates the benefits of nuclear power by a lot. One commenter here writes > What is the actual claim here? Nuclear power didn't prevent any deaths, after all everyone will eventually die for one reason or another. So it must be something like two million people would have died earlier without nuclear power, but by how much? That's a better way to think about the problem: not "lives saved," but life-years saved. Calculations of life-years saved are necessarily sketchy, but there is at least one promising preliminary effort [1]. See especially page 22. [1] https://storage.googleapis.com/production-sitebuilder-v1-0-1/741/319741/PkwWoHa4/d3b0f38f46d248d3ae8f35e9a4e70994?fileName=Chernobyl_20211201.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/production-sitebuilder-v1-0-1...

johnnyb9 5y ago
The study is from NASA: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen& https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen&
ouid 5y ago
The idea that people are simultaneously intelligent enough to understand the somewhat nuanced argument that nuclear power is safe, but also so stupid that "2 million lives saved" makes more sense to them than just a number of QALYs is, I think, an abject failure of science journalism. If you explain everything like everyone is 5, you reap what you sow.
- danbruc 5y ago
  For those unfamiliar with the unit, QALY is quality-adjusted life year. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
anonporridge 5y ago
Life-years saved is a step in the right direction, but still the wrong metric to focus on in my opinion. Healthy life-years is a much better metric to optimize. If we get people living to 200, but 120 of those years are in a miserable and extremely debilitated state, I consider that a failure compared to average life span of 100, where only 5 years are in an extremely debilitated state. i.e. getting 95 good healthy years + 5 bad ones >>> 80 healthy years and 120 bad ones. I suppose you can make an argument that extending your miserable years can help a person survive long enough to eventually take advantage of body and mind rejuvenation tech, so there is some point where absolute maximization of life-years might make sense.
- pydry 5y ago
  This is QALYS. It's how the UK allocates health care spending. The UK allocates healthcare in a pretty humane, efficient and, ultimately, (whisper it!) communist manner.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    That doesn't sound very communist to me. Moreover, while the British certainly prefer their healthcare system to the American system (and I probably agree), I've never heard them describe their system as efficient (on the contrary, they seem to talk about it as a money pit).
    - jfk13 5y ago
      The amazing thing is that despite being a money pit, it still manages to deliver better overall value than the US "system".
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        It's not really amazing, it's just that not everything is in reference to the US system. When Brits comment about their system being a money pit, they aren't always thinking about the US system as their frame of reference. This seems to be a stumbling block for us Americans, or at least for Americans who are passionate about healthcare reform.
runarberg 5y ago
This is a strange shift in responsibility. Wouldn’t it be better to say: “Coal shortened the life of so and so many people”? After all If there were neither coal power (or other air polluting power) nor nuclear those lives wouldn’t have been shortened either.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Yes. This is an attempt to boost nukes, but however much better it makes nukes look, it makes renewables several times moreso.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    If it is retrospective, it doesn't really say anything about renewables because for most of the last 50 years they haven't been [meaningfully] feasible. The debate going forward is still entirely valid because nuclear has upsides that contrast with renewable. It should be part of the discussion.
    - runarberg 5y ago
      It is still a rather strange shift in perspective. We don’t count the people saved by taking public transit, we count the people killed by cars. Speculating what was and wasn’t feasible for the past 50 years is even stranger. Usually these comparisons have an implicit all else being equal because you can get into some real funky speculations with alternative history without it. For example, if we had neither coal nor nuclear how different would the energy market be today? Would there have been more innovations in renewables and the current technology would have been reached in the 80s? Or would we have implemented our infrastructure to maximize energy efficiency? How many lives would that have saved? You get the point. This practice gets unnecessarily complicated really fast. I agree with parent that the only reason to say that “nuclear saves lives“ over “coal destroys lives” is that you have an agenda to promote nuclear over alternatives without mentioning those alternatives.
      - belorn 5y ago
KennyBlanken 5y ago
Nuclear power is clean at the plant but the fuel has a very dirty production pipeline. Further, plants are estimated to have a carbon impact around the same or worse than natural gas because their supply chain is so expensive. Instead of the carbon coming from burning the fuel, it comes from the enormous amount of work that goes into keeping a nuclear power plant running. HNers love to shout about the environmental impact of semiconductor production for solar panels and mining for batteries and even permanent magnets used in electric motors. But apparently reactor fuel comes out of the ground and is refined based on ...wishful thinking? It's all moot. Nuclear power is not being deployed by utilities because it is one of the most expensive forms of energy generation. With almost a century of enormous subsidization and research, it has only increased in cost. Wind and solar have plummeted in cost. Wind is currently the cheapest, with solar hot on its tail. Solar continues to fall at around 10% a year. Last year in the US alone, and only accounting for grid-scale projects, wind and solar have replaced nuclear at a 6:1 ratio. When you account for commercial and residential solar and wind, it's an even higher ratio. Solar cells cost $76 per watt in the seventies and now it costs thirty cents per watt. That's a 250 fold reduction. Wind has gone from 55 cents per kwhr in the eighties, to 5 cents today. Nuclear? More expensive than it was in the eighties. With HVDC transmission technology seeing wider and wider use, and well as battery technology plunging in cost: everyone in the industry and government sector considers "what energy source do we go forward with" as solved. It's not just cheaper: it doesn't have any of the numerous concerns nuclear does. Solar panels can be recycled (or simply resold for applications where the 10-20% reduced capacity doesn't matter, ie where there's plenty of roof/land available relative to energy needs), and the biggest problem with wind turbines has been figuring out how to recycle the turbine blades when they're EOL, something that is now solved. GE is turning blades into concrete, and Vestas has figured out how to recycle blades into like-new fiberglass. Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward except the nuclear industry.
- hedora 5y ago
  It's unclear that battery scaling will happen in time to reach sharply negative carbon emissions, or that solar and wind will meet future energy demands. Our kids need to put all the carbon back in the ground, which means we need to put the first 10-20% back ourselves. That would double global energy consumption for decades, assuming we started today. Your supply chain carbon arguments have a fundamental flaw: Transportation and the grid need to decarbonize regardless of which technology the power plant uses. Solar panel production is being bootstrapped with coal based power plants. That doesn't imply coal plants will be needed moving forward, or that industrial (bursty, scheduled consumption) electicity will be scarce. The fact that US nuclear plants are riduculously economically inefficient doesn't imply plants in the rest of the world are similarly bad, or that the technology is infeasible. The US environmental movement intentionally sabotaged the industry through the second half of the 20th century. Also, efficient, safe nuclear plants have been operated for decades in other countries. Anyway, we're clearly headed to a situation where we have effectively infinite clean electricity during the day, thanks to solar. The real questions are whether energy storage devices are cheaper than nuclear, and how economical it is to time shift energy-intensive industrial processes (basically building 2-3x more factory, but idling it at night). I'm hoping there is some bursty carbon capture technology on the horizon, where buying more equipment for a higher burst capture rate is cheap, so the electricity produced for the quarter of the day where there's a massive surplus isn't wasted. We need to do that anyway, and it would greatly reduce nuclear, hydro and energy storage demand.
DrBazza 5y ago
Nuclear power should be exactly comparable to other types of power. Deaths during construction. Carbon produced in construction. Deaths caused by mining and transporting fuel. Carbon produced by that. Deaths caused by consuming fuels. Carbon for that as well. Deaths caused by accidents during the lifetime of the power source. Deaths caused to wildlife and pollution. Deaths caused by decommissioning and deconstruction. Carbon for that too. Then lifetime for nuclear power station, vs oil, coal, gas, wind turbine, solar. Finally you can do an unbiased comparison of each. Nuclear power has saved many lives by not requiring dangerous coal mining, particulate emissions, and climate change effects.
- jrootabega 5y ago
  That's the real trolley problem: they have to be powered by SOMETHING.
- hedora 5y ago
  The nature of the carbon production is important. Carbon from wired electricy is different from embodied carbon from battery electric vehicles, and both are different from CO2 equivalent emissions from the chemistry of the industrial process itself. After all, end game is you use a carbon neutral technology to power itself, emissions from energy usage go to zero. Similarly, solving carbon emissions for batteries cleans up energy storage. Also, deaths due to climate change dwarf all the other sources combined (except, maybe, for deaths from coal emissions), so direct deaths are a second order effect that can be ignored in practice.
- yosito 5y ago
  OurWorldInData has a lot of data for these types of comparisons: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
  - rob_c 5y ago
    but feels says nuclear bad...
- geph2021 5y ago
throwaway894345 5y ago
Yeah, if people can throw around "deaths due to air pollution" it seems pretty legitimate to throw around "lives saved due to nuclear".
- runarberg 5y ago
  It might seem legitimate but I disagree that it is. It needlessly promotes one alternative over unmentioned others, giving people the sense that the only mentioned alternative is the only sensible one. Take a version of the trolley problem for example. A trolley is heading towards group of people tied to the tracks. You have the option to pull a lever and divert the trolley to another pair of tracks, but it will hit an engineer working on those tracks. You state that pulling the lever saves all these lives, but unmentioned is the alternative to derail the trolley to a runaway zone which saves everybody. In this version of the trolley problem you can count the deaths due to inaction. Is it right however to shift the rhetoric and talk about how many lives saved due to one particular action without mentioning there was an alternative?
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    It's an understandable impulse to assume that every article is framed in reference to the thing you're passionate about, but considering renewables weren't generally feasible (i.e., hydro and geothermal are older but not generally available for obvious reasons) until relatively recently (and even still, its feasibility for reliable base load generation is dubious), it's a certainty that this article is positioning nuclear relative to fossil fuels, not renewable energy. Even if renewables were available the whole time, it's perfectly reasonable to talk about the lives saved by nuclear even if renewables would save a few more (and to be very explicit, the renewables-only crowd reliably exaggerates the lives saved--some renewable energy sources kill more people than nuclear, even when accounting for disasters like Chernobyl).
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      By the same logic, Hydropower has saved 3 Million lives in the last 50 years. Efficiency and insulation probably saved even more.
godelski 5y ago
The 2M number is referenced here[0] [0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/nuclear-power-may-have-saved-1-8-million-lives-otherwise-lost-to-fossil-fuels-may-save-up-to-7-million-more/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...

johnnyb9 5y ago

The study is from NASA: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen& https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen&

ouid 5y ago

The idea that people are simultaneously intelligent enough to understand the somewhat nuanced argument that nuclear power is safe, but also so stupid that "2 million lives saved" makes more sense to them than just a number of QALYs is, I think, an abject failure of science journalism. If you explain everything like everyone is 5, you reap what you sow.

danbruc 5y ago
For those unfamiliar with the unit, QALY is quality-adjusted life year. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

anonporridge 5y ago

Life-years saved is a step in the right direction, but still the wrong metric to focus on in my opinion. Healthy life-years is a much better metric to optimize. If we get people living to 200, but 120 of those years are in a miserable and extremely debilitated state, I consider that a failure compared to average life span of 100, where only 5 years are in an extremely debilitated state. i.e. getting 95 good healthy years + 5 bad ones >>> 80 healthy years and 120 bad ones. I suppose you can make an argument that extending your miserable years can help a person survive long enough to eventually take advantage of body and mind rejuvenation tech, so there is some point where absolute maximization of life-years might make sense.

pydry 5y ago
This is QALYS. It's how the UK allocates health care spending. The UK allocates healthcare in a pretty humane, efficient and, ultimately, (whisper it!) communist manner.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  That doesn't sound very communist to me. Moreover, while the British certainly prefer their healthcare system to the American system (and I probably agree), I've never heard them describe their system as efficient (on the contrary, they seem to talk about it as a money pit).
  - jfk13 5y ago
    The amazing thing is that despite being a money pit, it still manages to deliver better overall value than the US "system".
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      It's not really amazing, it's just that not everything is in reference to the US system. When Brits comment about their system being a money pit, they aren't always thinking about the US system as their frame of reference. This seems to be a stumbling block for us Americans, or at least for Americans who are passionate about healthcare reform.

runarberg 5y ago

This is a strange shift in responsibility. Wouldn’t it be better to say: “Coal shortened the life of so and so many people”? After all If there were neither coal power (or other air polluting power) nor nuclear those lives wouldn’t have been shortened either.

ncmncm 5y ago
Yes. This is an attempt to boost nukes, but however much better it makes nukes look, it makes renewables several times moreso.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  If it is retrospective, it doesn't really say anything about renewables because for most of the last 50 years they haven't been [meaningfully] feasible. The debate going forward is still entirely valid because nuclear has upsides that contrast with renewable. It should be part of the discussion.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    It is still a rather strange shift in perspective. We don’t count the people saved by taking public transit, we count the people killed by cars. Speculating what was and wasn’t feasible for the past 50 years is even stranger. Usually these comparisons have an implicit all else being equal because you can get into some real funky speculations with alternative history without it. For example, if we had neither coal nor nuclear how different would the energy market be today? Would there have been more innovations in renewables and the current technology would have been reached in the 80s? Or would we have implemented our infrastructure to maximize energy efficiency? How many lives would that have saved? You get the point. This practice gets unnecessarily complicated really fast. I agree with parent that the only reason to say that “nuclear saves lives“ over “coal destroys lives” is that you have an agenda to promote nuclear over alternatives without mentioning those alternatives.
    - belorn 5y ago

KennyBlanken 5y ago

Nuclear power is clean at the plant but the fuel has a very dirty production pipeline. Further, plants are estimated to have a carbon impact around the same or worse than natural gas because their supply chain is so expensive. Instead of the carbon coming from burning the fuel, it comes from the enormous amount of work that goes into keeping a nuclear power plant running. HNers love to shout about the environmental impact of semiconductor production for solar panels and mining for batteries and even permanent magnets used in electric motors. But apparently reactor fuel comes out of the ground and is refined based on ...wishful thinking? It's all moot. Nuclear power is not being deployed by utilities because it is one of the most expensive forms of energy generation. With almost a century of enormous subsidization and research, it has only increased in cost. Wind and solar have plummeted in cost. Wind is currently the cheapest, with solar hot on its tail. Solar continues to fall at around 10% a year. Last year in the US alone, and only accounting for grid-scale projects, wind and solar have replaced nuclear at a 6:1 ratio. When you account for commercial and residential solar and wind, it's an even higher ratio. Solar cells cost $76 per watt in the seventies and now it costs thirty cents per watt. That's a 250 fold reduction. Wind has gone from 55 cents per kwhr in the eighties, to 5 cents today. Nuclear? More expensive than it was in the eighties. With HVDC transmission technology seeing wider and wider use, and well as battery technology plunging in cost: everyone in the industry and government sector considers "what energy source do we go forward with" as solved. It's not just cheaper: it doesn't have any of the numerous concerns nuclear does. Solar panels can be recycled (or simply resold for applications where the 10-20% reduced capacity doesn't matter, ie where there's plenty of roof/land available relative to energy needs), and the biggest problem with wind turbines has been figuring out how to recycle the turbine blades when they're EOL, something that is now solved. GE is turning blades into concrete, and Vestas has figured out how to recycle blades into like-new fiberglass. Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward except the nuclear industry.

hedora 5y ago
It's unclear that battery scaling will happen in time to reach sharply negative carbon emissions, or that solar and wind will meet future energy demands. Our kids need to put all the carbon back in the ground, which means we need to put the first 10-20% back ourselves. That would double global energy consumption for decades, assuming we started today. Your supply chain carbon arguments have a fundamental flaw: Transportation and the grid need to decarbonize regardless of which technology the power plant uses. Solar panel production is being bootstrapped with coal based power plants. That doesn't imply coal plants will be needed moving forward, or that industrial (bursty, scheduled consumption) electicity will be scarce. The fact that US nuclear plants are riduculously economically inefficient doesn't imply plants in the rest of the world are similarly bad, or that the technology is infeasible. The US environmental movement intentionally sabotaged the industry through the second half of the 20th century. Also, efficient, safe nuclear plants have been operated for decades in other countries. Anyway, we're clearly headed to a situation where we have effectively infinite clean electricity during the day, thanks to solar. The real questions are whether energy storage devices are cheaper than nuclear, and how economical it is to time shift energy-intensive industrial processes (basically building 2-3x more factory, but idling it at night). I'm hoping there is some bursty carbon capture technology on the horizon, where buying more equipment for a higher burst capture rate is cheap, so the electricity produced for the quarter of the day where there's a massive surplus isn't wasted. We need to do that anyway, and it would greatly reduce nuclear, hydro and energy storage demand.

DrBazza 5y ago

Nuclear power should be exactly comparable to other types of power. Deaths during construction. Carbon produced in construction. Deaths caused by mining and transporting fuel. Carbon produced by that. Deaths caused by consuming fuels. Carbon for that as well. Deaths caused by accidents during the lifetime of the power source. Deaths caused to wildlife and pollution. Deaths caused by decommissioning and deconstruction. Carbon for that too. Then lifetime for nuclear power station, vs oil, coal, gas, wind turbine, solar. Finally you can do an unbiased comparison of each. Nuclear power has saved many lives by not requiring dangerous coal mining, particulate emissions, and climate change effects.

jrootabega 5y ago
That's the real trolley problem: they have to be powered by SOMETHING.
hedora 5y ago
The nature of the carbon production is important. Carbon from wired electricy is different from embodied carbon from battery electric vehicles, and both are different from CO2 equivalent emissions from the chemistry of the industrial process itself. After all, end game is you use a carbon neutral technology to power itself, emissions from energy usage go to zero. Similarly, solving carbon emissions for batteries cleans up energy storage. Also, deaths due to climate change dwarf all the other sources combined (except, maybe, for deaths from coal emissions), so direct deaths are a second order effect that can be ignored in practice.
yosito 5y ago
OurWorldInData has a lot of data for these types of comparisons: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- rob_c 5y ago
  but feels says nuclear bad...
geph2021 5y ago

throwaway894345 5y ago

Yeah, if people can throw around "deaths due to air pollution" it seems pretty legitimate to throw around "lives saved due to nuclear".

runarberg 5y ago
It might seem legitimate but I disagree that it is. It needlessly promotes one alternative over unmentioned others, giving people the sense that the only mentioned alternative is the only sensible one. Take a version of the trolley problem for example. A trolley is heading towards group of people tied to the tracks. You have the option to pull a lever and divert the trolley to another pair of tracks, but it will hit an engineer working on those tracks. You state that pulling the lever saves all these lives, but unmentioned is the alternative to derail the trolley to a runaway zone which saves everybody. In this version of the trolley problem you can count the deaths due to inaction. Is it right however to shift the rhetoric and talk about how many lives saved due to one particular action without mentioning there was an alternative?
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  It's an understandable impulse to assume that every article is framed in reference to the thing you're passionate about, but considering renewables weren't generally feasible (i.e., hydro and geothermal are older but not generally available for obvious reasons) until relatively recently (and even still, its feasibility for reliable base load generation is dubious), it's a certainty that this article is positioning nuclear relative to fossil fuels, not renewable energy. Even if renewables were available the whole time, it's perfectly reasonable to talk about the lives saved by nuclear even if renewables would save a few more (and to be very explicit, the renewables-only crowd reliably exaggerates the lives saved--some renewable energy sources kill more people than nuclear, even when accounting for disasters like Chernobyl).
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    By the same logic, Hydropower has saved 3 Million lives in the last 50 years. Efficiency and insulation probably saved even more.

godelski 5y ago

The 2M number is referenced here[0] [0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/nuclear-power-may-have-saved-1-8-million-lives-otherwise-lost-to-fossil-fuels-may-save-up-to-7-million-more/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...