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And yeah, I’m being a little glib here about asteroids. I don’t intend to debate the specifics of asteroid deaths, so much as to argue that events that haven’t happened yet can still be statistically dangerous, and that it’s not anti-data to worry about them.
We’re trying to compare the safety of solar power with nuclear power. If we’re including construction and installation accidents among deaths caused by solar power, we should include them for nuclear, too. If the truck driver hauling a load of concrete to the nuclear plant collides with a minivan, do those count as nuclear power deaths?
If that’s where you’re drawing the box, absolutely. IIRC if you include everything back to mining, generating electricity with grid mix to manufacture parts, etc., in a full lifecycle analysis, solar still comes out with more deaths per power generated, but it’s like 5x. But I encourage looking this up or waiting for me to do so.
It’s not REALLY a comparison of nuclear to solar, it’s an attempt to highlight that our history of nuclear power is one of very few deaths. Here’s a list of accidents and I count 13 deaths, mostly due to people being electrocuted or injured by mechanical failures. The fear of nuclear is outsized compared to how dangerous it has historically been.
The one page I found listed deaths per TWh. One TWh would take, best-case, three or four nuclear power plants, vs about a US full blanketed with solar panels (in the practical sense, not the literal). Given that getting to equity requires much, much more construction/installation, it is no surprise that more deaths could be attributed to solar and/or wind.
And, of course, PV solar panels are not immortal. Twenty-five or thirty years and you will probably need replacements. Which, realistically, is about how long a nuclear reactor is reliable for – Bill Gates’ TerraPower tries to sell us on century-life reactors, but I am quite skeptical about the stability/reliability of the hardware at even half that age. And, spent fuel notwithstanding, reactor parts are entirely non-recyclable garbage. Some of the materials from solar panels may be recoverable.
Ordinary deaths are already folded into construction costs, and shouldn’t be counted separately. Truck drivers buy insurance, construction companies have to pay lawsuit settlements, etc. When you order a load of concrete, whatever (fractional) deaths that went into making it already show up in the costs.
What should be counted are external deaths. Which, for solar, is zero, and for nuclear is close to zero. For coal it’s millions.
Again, though, a cataclysmic failure of solar panels, and a cataclysmic failure of a 1970s nuclear power plant, are different animals entirely. Deaths from nuclear accidents will be clustered, and if (making up numbers here) you have a 1% annual global chance of an accident that kills one million people, you can go a long time with zero deaths and still have a very high average death toll. References to historical deaths without examining the likelihood of a cataclysmic event is not an appropriate data analysis; it’s similar to the drunk who insists that because he’s never gotten in a crash while inebriated it’s perfectly safe.
I would say that, yes, if there were a 1% chance of killing a million people each year, that would be unacceptable.
But, as you said, you just made that number up, and I would say that, given the historical safety record, it is much, much, much lower than that.
In the US, we’ve had around a hundred reactors going for the last few decades. One of them had a problem that killed no one.
Chernobyl was an old design and idiots at the controls. It is hard to say what the death toll from that accident was, but it’s at most in the tens of thousands, if you include all the statistical increases in cancer. (Coal kills a few multiples of that every year.)
Fukushima was caused by one of the worst earthquakes and tsunamis on record, and had one direct death, as a worker fell off a crane during the event, and is indirectly responsible for a few hundred deaths that resulted from the (unnecessary, IMHO) evacuation. Over fifteen thousand people died from the earthquake and tsunami.
I’d say it’s less like sharks vs asteroids, and a better analogy is cars vs commercial jets. Forty thousandish people died from car accidents, and another four and a half million were badly injured. A few hundred people died in plane crashes. But, those plane crashes did mean that a bunch of people died all at once, so that made the news, while the one person every 15 minutes that dies in a car accident goes unnoticed. Yet people feel perfectly safe driving to the airport, and then are terrified to get on the plane.
And that is all based on the 1950’s technology that is the light water reactor. We have much better designs now, that are much safer, as well as more efficient, producing less waste both in the highly radioactive spent fuel stream, as well as contaminated building and containment materials.
In order to examine the likelihood of a cataclysmic event, unless you are just going to guess and make up numbers, you have to look at the historical record, and the historical record is pretty damn good.
I’d say that it’s far less like a drunk getting into a car, and much more like a sober and trained pilot getting into a cockpit.
Well, sure, some of it is. But we’re talking about a sliver of the left, a tiny number of people. It’s not “the left” in the sense of “the majority of people who define themselves as being on the left side of the political spectrum or who largely support political parties that occupy that side.” For that group, in most of the Western world, nuclear power generation isn’t even an issue under discussion. Other issues are important right now.
Saying “the left” is anti-nuclear-power is akin to saying “the left” is opposed to people owning cats because PETA doesn’t think humans should own pets.
I live in the same country as Sam, in an area that is very liberal, and I honestly cannot in my entire life - I am 48 years old - remember meeting a left wing person who expressed a negative opinion about nuclear power. I cannot remember the last time I even read, or heard on the news, of opposition to it. It is NOT an issue here.
Reminds me of my physics teacher in CEGEP who liked to tell us about is experience working at the Chalk River Nuclear Research Labs. Which are apparently undergoing a modernization effort.
Okay, again, I’m talking about older reactor models, and the historical (read: 1970s, 1980s) anti-nuclear politics. And again, Chernobyl was as mild as it was because of a lack of rain and because of wind direction; it easily could have been much, much worse, like, hundreds of times worse.
Examining the historical record, we got real lucky, and if reactors hadn’t improved in the way they actually did (in part due to pressures from anti-nuclear politics), there’s a very good chance we wouldn’t have stayed lucky.
Nuclear is bad, and the noise from windmills causes cancer.
- paraphrasing our despised ‘leader’.
Donald J. Trump, yet another anti-nuke leftist to add to the list.
I’ve only skimmed the thread, but my takeaway is that Sam Stone is a 1970’s era nuclear reactor. Is that right?
At least he’ll never go critical (thinking).
I strongly disagree with this and it’s why I included the example of Yucca Mountain. Obama campaigned on the promise to close it down. That means there was enough anti sentiment for Obama to make it a promise.
Throw in the fact that Democrats are just now adding a pro plank to their platform and I don’t think your analysis holds up.
Again, it looks like liberals are coming around but that has not been the case in recent history. The best we can say is that at least the dem presidents didn’t actively shut plants down the way Sanders wanted to do.
In response to @Robot_Arm
From 1979, but with discussion of different methodology: Is Solar Power More Dangerous Than Nuclear? | IAEA
Site won’t show me their source unless I make an account, but including for completeness: Global deaths per energy source | Statista
Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power is actually more dangerous than Chernobyl | NextBigFuture.com
You’ll notice none of the numbers are exactly the same. And that’s because there isn’t necessarily one “right” way to do this, and also technology is changing.
Most death or labor loss analyses don’t account for GHG emissions; it’s hard to assign injury numbers to those. But you can (and people have) perform similar well-to-wheels lifecycle analyses on GHG emissions. This is sometimes where you’ll encounter the jokers who think it’s some big gotcha reveal that solar and wind have associated GHG emissions, when (nearly) everyone already understands this.
There isn’t really a “should” here; it depends on what you’re trying to figure out. If we’re planning 1TW of new capacity, nuke vs PV, there are different materials mined and processed for each, with different direct and indirect (e.g. emissions) safety concerns. If we’re taking capacity offline, any upstream costs are already sunk.
Here we are supposed to be complaining about someone (I forgot why) and instead we’re talking about science and engineering. Have we no shame?
Trying to count deaths this way is a fool’s errand, IMHO. It is so dependent on exactly how you draw your box, you can come up with any answer you want depending on what you include/exclude.
Insurance adjusters, safety organizations like the NTSB, etc. already know how to take deaths into account: somewhere in the ballpark of $10M each. It’s a bad move to add a safety feature or adopt some technology if each life saved costs $100M. And a smart move if it costs $1M each.
All that pricing information is already lumped into the capital costs of your power plant. If one technology is half the cost of another, well it’s possible that it still causes more deaths, but it must be so much cheaper in other ways that it more than makes up for the difference. We can then spend those savings on other things (like healthcare) that will make up for the difference.
Of course, I’m speaking here of internalized deaths; ones that will show up on an insurance claim or the like. Which is why I emphasize that it’s external deaths that we should focus on.