5 ms·

All of those accidents combined killed less than 10% of the people that are killed by fossil fuel pollution every single year. Most nuclear accidents are entire

All of those accidents combined killed less than 10% of the people that are killed by fossil fuel pollution every single year. Most nuclear accidents are entirely hypothetical.

mah4k4l 4y ago
Has affected millions of peoples health already and whole ecosystems. And the consequences will cumulate from this thousands of years. Count that in your equation and get more informative numbers.
- yawaramin 4y ago
  Whose health? Any actual data?
  - orwin 4y ago
    I think GP was talking about CO2 (affect millions already, will still be present in a thousand years)
  - kuhewa 4y ago
    This is in dollars, but 10% of healthcare spending in the US equates to a good amount of health I reckon https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412012000542 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...
    - yawaramin 4y ago
      I was asking about the GP's assertion about health impact of nuclear.
  - mah4k4l 4y ago
    The dispersed fallout? Hard to quantify because of it's dispersedness and long term slowness. But it is for example plutonium and we know it's effects on life on Earth, so one could proceed from there with some math and futurological trend extrapolation. And simply by using the knowledge we have about plutonium mixed with common sense.
toofy 4y ago
i’m not at all anti-nuclear but i’m not sure what you mean by > most nuclear accidents are entirely hypothetical. i also agree that fossil fuels kill a lot of people as well, only in slow-motion and we have some form of weird disconnect when something happens in slow-motion vs quick. but again, nuclear accidents are not hyperbole nor are they hypothetical. again, i’m not anti-nuclear, i suspect we need a mix of strong decentralized renewables such as solar/wind and a filler of nuclear. i’m no expert on nuclear accidents but my cynical take is that the building companies/orgs probably cut corners on safety in order to save money. and maybe that could be a area to improve safety—significantly overbuild on safety features. like i said tho, absolutely not an expert.
- kuhewa 4y ago
  Just the nature of a plant requiring active management (and power) to prevent meltdown is a weak point. The reasonable answer to this concern imo is explaining how passive safety systems have advanced and are implemented in new reactor designs, and how plants are built so when intentionally attacked or incidentally damaged a meltdown or release of highly radioactive material does not ensue, especially for folks advocating for the widespread adoption of nuclear energy worldwide. Strikes me as odd that the typical response is instead 'but this old energy generation tech which we all agree needs to go has downsides'.
donny2018 4y ago
If we remove Chernobyl from this list, we'll find that probably just 1 person died from radiation after power plant accidents. Fossil plants are killing millions of people every year. During heatwave this year, when we had temperatures around 43C for almost 2 weeks, hundreds of people died in my country because our energy grids were overloaded and ACs turned off. And many people can't even afford to pay for AC energy bills anyway so they don't use it. Our energy needs are growing every year and energy production can't keep up. We NEED cheap energy that nuclear can give. This is the matter of survival at this point.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  SL-1 killed three people. However, it was a military reactor, not civilian.
pfdietz 4y ago
If you have to resort to "it's better than fossil fuels" you have damned nuclear with faint praise. And you have also wasted our time, because nuclear is competing with renewables now, not with fossil fuels.
- endominus 4y ago
  Okay, how about; it's safer than literally every other method of energy production? Less deaths per thousand terawatt-hours produced (90) than wind (150), solar (440), or hydroelectric (1400). https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    I already addressed that argument. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295591 If a statistical human life is worth $9 M, then 440 deaths per thousand TWh adds $0.004/kWh to the cost of solar. This cannot overcome the large cost advantage solar and wind have over nuclear in most places (even with storage costs included). Also, the 440 figure is, I believe, assuming rooftop solar. At scale to power the world solar will be mostly ground mounted. If you don't agree with that statistical value, and think it should be higher, why you've just argued we're not imposing enough safety systems on nuclear plants -- because $9 M is the value the NRC uses when determining if additional safety systems are warranted.
    - endominus 4y ago
      And I happen to think the NRC is wrong and the vast number of safety regulations imposed on nuclear power is harmful to the ultimate goal of getting off coal as quickly as possible. We should be building more nuclear reactors, even if we lower safety standards to do so, to reduce dependency on fossil fuels and the ongoing ecological disaster they entail. But that won't happen because both fossil fuel lobbyists and environmentalists loathe nuclear power. Decades of accumulated safety regulations have added massively to the capital costs to nuclear reactors and offer covering fire for fossil fuel lobbies to continue to distract people with renewables, which are always just around the corner and about to overtake everything (between 2009 and 2019, the global share of energy produced by renewable sources has risen from 7% to 10% - a real green revolution!). But here's the real kicker - when nuclear reactors get taken offline, as happened in California and Germany recently, they are replaced by fossil fuels. Not solar. Not wind.

All of those accidents combined killed less than 10% of the people that are killed by fossil fuel pollution every single year. Most nuclear accidents are entirely hypothetical.

mah4k4l 4y ago

Has affected millions of peoples health already and whole ecosystems. And the consequences will cumulate from this thousands of years. Count that in your equation and get more informative numbers.

yawaramin 4y ago
Whose health? Any actual data?
- orwin 4y ago
  I think GP was talking about CO2 (affect millions already, will still be present in a thousand years)
- kuhewa 4y ago
  This is in dollars, but 10% of healthcare spending in the US equates to a good amount of health I reckon https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412012000542 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...
  - yawaramin 4y ago
    I was asking about the GP's assertion about health impact of nuclear.
- mah4k4l 4y ago
  The dispersed fallout? Hard to quantify because of it's dispersedness and long term slowness. But it is for example plutonium and we know it's effects on life on Earth, so one could proceed from there with some math and futurological trend extrapolation. And simply by using the knowledge we have about plutonium mixed with common sense.

toofy 4y ago

i’m not at all anti-nuclear but i’m not sure what you mean by > most nuclear accidents are entirely hypothetical. i also agree that fossil fuels kill a lot of people as well, only in slow-motion and we have some form of weird disconnect when something happens in slow-motion vs quick. but again, nuclear accidents are not hyperbole nor are they hypothetical. again, i’m not anti-nuclear, i suspect we need a mix of strong decentralized renewables such as solar/wind and a filler of nuclear. i’m no expert on nuclear accidents but my cynical take is that the building companies/orgs probably cut corners on safety in order to save money. and maybe that could be a area to improve safety—significantly overbuild on safety features. like i said tho, absolutely not an expert.

kuhewa 4y ago
Just the nature of a plant requiring active management (and power) to prevent meltdown is a weak point. The reasonable answer to this concern imo is explaining how passive safety systems have advanced and are implemented in new reactor designs, and how plants are built so when intentionally attacked or incidentally damaged a meltdown or release of highly radioactive material does not ensue, especially for folks advocating for the widespread adoption of nuclear energy worldwide. Strikes me as odd that the typical response is instead 'but this old energy generation tech which we all agree needs to go has downsides'.

donny2018 4y ago

If we remove Chernobyl from this list, we'll find that probably just 1 person died from radiation after power plant accidents. Fossil plants are killing millions of people every year. During heatwave this year, when we had temperatures around 43C for almost 2 weeks, hundreds of people died in my country because our energy grids were overloaded and ACs turned off. And many people can't even afford to pay for AC energy bills anyway so they don't use it. Our energy needs are growing every year and energy production can't keep up. We NEED cheap energy that nuclear can give. This is the matter of survival at this point.

LorenPechtel 4y ago
SL-1 killed three people. However, it was a military reactor, not civilian.

pfdietz 4y ago

If you have to resort to "it's better than fossil fuels" you have damned nuclear with faint praise. And you have also wasted our time, because nuclear is competing with renewables now, not with fossil fuels.

endominus 4y ago
Okay, how about; it's safer than literally every other method of energy production? Less deaths per thousand terawatt-hours produced (90) than wind (150), solar (440), or hydroelectric (1400). https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
- pfdietz 4y ago
  I already addressed that argument. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295591 If a statistical human life is worth $9 M, then 440 deaths per thousand TWh adds $0.004/kWh to the cost of solar. This cannot overcome the large cost advantage solar and wind have over nuclear in most places (even with storage costs included). Also, the 440 figure is, I believe, assuming rooftop solar. At scale to power the world solar will be mostly ground mounted. If you don't agree with that statistical value, and think it should be higher, why you've just argued we're not imposing enough safety systems on nuclear plants -- because $9 M is the value the NRC uses when determining if additional safety systems are warranted.
  - endominus 4y ago
    And I happen to think the NRC is wrong and the vast number of safety regulations imposed on nuclear power is harmful to the ultimate goal of getting off coal as quickly as possible. We should be building more nuclear reactors, even if we lower safety standards to do so, to reduce dependency on fossil fuels and the ongoing ecological disaster they entail. But that won't happen because both fossil fuel lobbyists and environmentalists loathe nuclear power. Decades of accumulated safety regulations have added massively to the capital costs to nuclear reactors and offer covering fire for fossil fuel lobbies to continue to distract people with renewables, which are always just around the corner and about to overtake everything (between 2009 and 2019, the global share of energy produced by renewable sources has risen from 7% to 10% - a real green revolution!). But here's the real kicker - when nuclear reactors get taken offline, as happened in California and Germany recently, they are replaced by fossil fuels. Not solar. Not wind.