As I pointed out above, the answer depends a lot on which question we are asking:
“Which type of plant has the worst possible worst case outcome?”
vs.
“Which type of plant has historically caused, to date, the least number of direct fatailities?”
It seems that **Whack-a-Mole **wants to answer the second question. And I don’t disagree with his answer. To *that *question.
I suspect the OP wants to talk about the first question. And I stand by my answer as a better answer. To *that *question.
If 3 weeks from now Fukishimi Diaichi is fully breached and spewing long-lived isotopes which are drifting & settling in large quantity across Tokyo & Japan’s industrial heartland we shall see if indeed hydro plants have the worst safety record to date.
Do I think this outcome is highly likely? No. Do I think it is absolutely truly utterly impossible? No. Certain failure modes (e.g. full-on nuclear explosion) *are *absolutely truly utterly impossible. Physics doesn’t let that particular failure happen for the type of fuel used in commercial power reactors. But a wide variety of engineering failures are another matter.
I guess it’s a matter of definition: my Aberfan link shows people killed by coal tailings after heavy rainfall. Mining isn’t a power plant and rainfall isn’t a tsunami, sure, but it is a natural event that caused an accident in the energy industry that killed people.
No, I’m trying to find out the relative risk for each kind of electrical generation under natural disaster scenario.
Let’s say I wanted to produce electricity at or near location X (it has to be somewhat near because electrical energy cannot be cheaply transported over very long distances).
I would want to consider all factors, and come up with the cheapest way to do it. The cost must take into consideration everything – cost per KW, construction cost, deconstruction cost, waste disposal cost, emergency preparedness cost, long-term health cost, cost of insurance for the unforseen…everything. A disaster allowance cost is only one of many; maybe it is less than some, maybe more. Maybe any of these costs can be minimalized (move closer to fuel source to save on fuel transporation, move away from the coast to reduce tsunami risk, move closer to coast to obtain cheaper cooling water).
Maybe some costs cannot be quantized (the range is too great from safe operation to unimaginable disaster). If so, the bean counters won’t be able to come up with a good number but otherwise, we should be able to rank total cost by site and fuel. What’s the bottom line?
You got my drift pretty well. Of course, to be practical, the results of this study will have to be worked in to a larger scenario.
It should be noted (and I’d like to forestall a political argument here), that the “mortality” from a nuke plant failure, (e.g., TMI had one fatality and insignificant radiation release), a resulting popular backlash against building nuke plants will result in a far, far higher mortality and planetary damage as a result of returning to coal and oil sources.
Everything is relative. An event that destroys the Grand Coulee Dam will probably cause the destruction of all dams downriver. The wall of water that reaches Portland, Oregon is estimated to be in excess of 100 feet in height, clearly enough to take out a substantial portion of the metro area’s 2.2 million inhabitants.
So only American lifes count? And Three Mile Island’s cloud of radioactive steam didn’t cause any cancer that lead to deaths?
Where are you getting that number from? The liquidators alone are estimated around 10 000, although official numbers don’t exist - they were trucked in, did their 90 sec., were trucked out and returned home all over the USSR.
Plus the increased thyroid cancer deaths around Chernobyl, plus increased cancer deaths all over Western Europe.
You mean: a lot of the population doesn’t care to educate themselves about the real dangers of radiation, instead believing the lies and propaganda that it’s safe?
Wrong assumption. The alternative is not “nuclear with few real deaths” and “coal with warming”. The alternative is “nuclear with high risks in case of failure plus the waste nobody can currently deal with” vs. “renewable energy” and vs “coal and similar”; and “tackling global warming by reducing all sources of CO2 emission” vs. “not dealing with global warming”. This fake alternative is useful propaganda for the pro-nuclear lobby, but not the full truth. Building new atomic plants will not automatically reduce global warming! It will certainly increase nuclear waste, though, which the US still has no permanent storage solution for.
Probably that bias is what he means that your “problem” is - you’re pro-nuclear, not neutrally informative.
And as for reactors that consume waste from normal reactors - if you start inventing or daydreaming, why not build a fusion reactor? It’s just as plausible.
As physicist Harald Lesch and his guest, a professor of ethics, said yesterday (yet again) in the Abenteuer Forschung (Adventure Research) special on nuclear power: the problem is that as long as nothing unusual happens, nuclear reactors are safer and emit less than other types of power plants.
But when something does go wrong*, it has catastrophic consequences. A cloud of radiation, unlike a burst hydro dam, doesn’t simply kill all the people it lands on; it poisions them and causes them to die slowly over years with cancer (which of course makes it so easy for propaganda to claim “nobody died”: nobody dropped dead the same day; but more people died over the next 20 and 30 years of cancer, only that’s hard to prove). And depending on the types of radioactive material emitted, the ground can be unusuable for not only 30 years, but hundreds and thousands of years.
So while it’s very unlikely for a GAU to happen, when it does happen, it’s worse than normal accidents.
And it’s not only Soviets who cause man-made disasters, no matter how often it’s repeated on the board. It was a commercial power provider in Japan who screwed up and faked reports; it was a commercial power company in Germany who lied and hushed up over a hundred incidents at an old plant in one year; it’s commerical companies in France who hush up incidents all the time; - it pays to use sub-standard stuff, to prolong repairs because everything is redunant, to skip upgrades etc.)
Plus the issue of atomic waste, that nobody can properly deal with (the Swedes are working on a concept that sounds good, but will cost a huge amount of money. I guess the US will skip that in true capitalist fashion when giving the contract to the lowest bidder … probably dumping it in Mexico or similar).
We can do it today. The problem is that those plants produce plutonium as a by product which causes concern regarding non-proliferation. Although some say that that worry may be overblown.
Back to the OP, I assume you are not considering disasters act the material collection stage such as the BP oil spill or burning coal mines such as in
Centralia PA.
If you really are only interested in assessing the risks on a rational basis instead of the usual process so far, then you
don’t built ANY nuclear reactors on a coast likely to experience tsunamis (so no b)
don’t built ANY nuclear reactors in an earth quake zone (so no b)
don’t built ANY hydro dams in an earth quake zone (so no d)
and replace them with PV solar plants, and windwheels in the ocean near the coast.
The problem is that the current process - whether in Japan, the US, France, Germany - is not deciding the best spot for a plant based on risk analysis, but on politicans with pork barrels and bribes/ lobbying from the industry, and the industry taking the cheapest route.
So backup generators to supply energy for cooling for the nuclear reactors (and handle peak loads) further inland cost too much, so the Japanese skipped them. Building a plant with two water cycles is more expensive than the simple design, so the Japanese skipped it, although that leads to problems with the cooling water being radioactive.
Building a nuclear power plant in Diablo canyon, CA and claiming that “it can withstand earthquakes up to 7.5 on the Richter scale” is cheaper than closing that plant and rebuilding a new, safe one, even considering that this year the quakes on the Pacific fire belt were all above 7.5 and another big one is likely to come.
Oh, you meant partial re-use of the rods by enriching. Which doesn’t work for all rods; doesn’t eliminate all of the waste, only parts; and produces plutonium, which attracts terrorists and also is very poisionus. So only a part solution with new dangers.