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Nuclear energy contributes ~17% of the world's electricity, and has only killed 90 people. Solar (rooftop) contributes <1% of the worlds electricity and has kil

• emsy 12y ago
  If you don't count the thousands of victims that died of contamination from Tchernobyl. Oh and don't forget the deformed babies.
  • TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Even if, when you tally everything up, nuclear still ends up as the least deadly solution per kWh. And it's not even about one-upping one another on safety statistics. Is that mainstream has it completely backwards. They think that nuclear is the most deadly and fossils are safe, whereas it's exactly the other way around. Nuclear is the safest, while fossils are probably the most lethal.
    • waps 12y ago
      Rooftop solar is pretty fucking bad as well [1]. It is only just shy of fossil fuels, and only if you count several kinds of deaths as fossil fuel deaths that are debatable whether they're part of fossil fuel energy generation. Car-related deaths being the obvious one. Most deaths for most energy generation methods come from disasters (all except solar, where most deaths happen during installations), for example, the tidal wave that caused fukushima raised the death tolls for nuclear, solar, wind and fossil. For nuclear, because 2 employees were having a smoke outside of the power plant, got picked up by the wave and smacked against the wall of the power plant. Nuclear death, right ? Solar, why ? Two reasons, first a number of installations were rudely interrupted by the wave, and for a few larger buildings solar panels came crashing down, a few of them right into people (that second part happens more often during earthquakes). Solar deaths ? Well, yes. Wind, well, if you were doing maintenance on a wind turbine while the wave washed it away ... And for fossil fuel the same : a number of employees of refineries and transporters (one oil train, for example), were killed. One particularly bad example : in one of the refineries a number of engineers were doing a quality inspection with management of the inside of several new gas tanks, and the wave filled it with water after knocking it over. My point here is that in many cases it's a bit of a stretch saying that the energy generation method is what killed people. Although it must be said that coal mine safety in China, yes, deaths come from disasters, but ... it takes a special kind of dishonesty to call these disasters accidental. I don't get people that defend rooftop's solar track record. Installing slippery, heavy pieces of glass on inclined surfaces a dozen meter up from the ground, that may have become slippery due to rain and frequently suffer structural failure (meaning a small piece cracks when you walk on it) ... Believe it or not this is NOT a particularly safe thing to do. (and of course, the US has many seismically active zones, and well, you may want to avoid being a roof worker in those zones) Wind power, incidentally, is also famous for killing or maiming maintenance technicians. [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de... (note that if you take China out of the statistics, coal becomes as safe as oil was, and oil becomes half as safe as solar)
  • abelsson 12y ago
    The number of non-acute deaths from Chernobyl is highly uncertain and difficult to estimate, even 30 years later. The range of estimate seem to more reflect the author's opinion on nuclear power than scientific fact. WHO estimated 4000 additional cancer deaths from Chernobyl (out of a population of hundreds of millions), based on the LNT-model, which seems very conservative given that there doesn't seem to be much glaring extra cancers in areas with higher natural background radiation.
  • hueving 12y ago
    Well nobody counts them because there is no direct link.
• power_rated 12y ago
  Being forced to have a technology that destroys your neighbourhood for nearly eternity if it blows in your backyard is a social problem.