Comment by teamonkey
5 months ago
> I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place.
The context is a long string of nuclear incidents throughout the Cold War through to the ‘90s.
Not just Chernobyl, not just Fukushima, but the string of disasters at Windscale / Sellafield and many others across the globe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
These disasters were huge, newsworthy and alarmingly regular. People read about those getting sick and dying directly as a result. They felt the cleanup costs as taxpayers. They saw how land became unusable after a large event, and, especially terrifying for those who had lived as adults through Cold War, saw the radioactive fallout blown across international borders by the wind.
It’s not Greenpeace or an anti-nuclear lobby who caused the widespread public reaction to nuclear. It was the public reaction seeing it with their own eyes, and making an understandable decision that they didn’t like the risks.
Chernobyl was one hammer blow to the coffin lid, Fukushima the second, but nuclear power was already half-dead before either of those events, kept alive only by unpopular political necessity.
I’m not even anti-nuclear myself, but let’s be clear: the worldwide nuclear energy industry is itself to blame for the lack of faith in nuclear energy.
Coal kills far more people than nuclear yet you never read about it. I think partly because any nuclear catastrophes are visible and concentrated to a single area.
Coal smoke kills over a much wider area and this impacts that 'newsworthiness' of this fear to spread. It's a class data vs feelings issue and yet again peoples feelings trump the data and undermines what experts familiar with both the danger and the data say.
Don't judge plane safety from the design of the brothers Wright aircraft
Fun fact: in the 90's, the reference gauge for aircraft safety was 1 accidental fatality per 100 million hours of passenger flight. Which is amazingly safe, far better than car and on a par with train.
Now, facing the growth of air travel, it was decided to raise this bar to 1 per billion hour. Not as an end by itself - this comes at very high cost and had a significant impact on travel prices. But because, with the growth of air travel, this would have implied one major accident per fortnight on average. And because those accident are more spectacular and relayed by media, civil aviation authorities feared this might raise angst and deter the public from air travel.
So, safety was enhanced, but mostly for marketing reasons.
I'm trying to reconcile your numbers with the Wikipedia "Aviation safety” article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety
which for 2019 describes "0.5 accidents per million departures" and "40 fatalities per trillion revenue passenger kilometers". Considering that many or most passengers fly close to 800-1000 km/h, we're still quite a bit above above 1 fatality per 100 million passenger hours.
Would a factor of 10 be enough? Suppose we go from one major accident per fortnight to one per five months (10 fortnights). Is that higher than what we have seen in the past thirty years?
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It's absolutely insane how safe we've managed to make plane travel considering all the variables involved.
Statistically, taking a flight from NYC to London is safer than walking from 5th avenue to 4th avenue in Midtown Manhattan.
And yet we could regulate even more to make flying even safer, but likely negatively impacting the cost of flying.
This is a balance/tradeoff. We agree for some deaths, for a given price. It is the same for food safety, workplace safety.
With the latest designs and regulations there has been no major issue across all the nuclear facilities, except for Fukushima which sustained a 9 earthquake + a tsunami... and yet hardly any death (in the 10 years after, one death by cancer got compensated but still not clear if it was directly linked... the evacuation itself might be responsible for up to 50 deaths though, showing how the perception of nuclear can be overhyped).
It is possible that the nuclear industry is over-regulated (done mostly after Chernobyl) and could benefit to be reviewed based on the current knowledge.
But how much does a modern jet cost, including insurance? Compared to an armada of solar driven mini drones?
Without doing or seeing the actual math, my intuition leans on the side of it's probably much more efficient to put people together under certain constraints and fly them in one big container, than lots of unconstrained individual containers. See public transport vs cars for a similar tradeoff.
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And yet if you look at the "Fatalities" column, you see a stream of zeroes with a handful of non-zeroes, the worst being Chernobyl at 50 direct fatalities. Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths.
Nuke plants are scary when they fail, but the actual threat is way lower than we play it out to be.
I'm open to Nuclear if it can be done safely and if we can show we have the cultural maturity to keep it safe...but in the case of Chernobyl at least I think that statistics and other officious BS has been used to greatly downplay the true human cost in death, sickness, displacement and on many other metrics.
Two points:
Chernobyl was a poor, badly run reactor that was designed badly decades ago. I don't know why we paint all of nuclear with that brush, other than folks fall victim to availability bias all the time.
The other point is that we sweep aside externalities for all forms of power generation. People don't think of coal as dangerous, but it's killed far more than nuclear.
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Ok plenty of responses to the Chernobyl thing, but without a definition of "safe" it's a moot argument. The injury per watt hour speaks for itself, unless you had something else in mind.
It turns you are right that there was a ton of BS around the Chernobyl accident...but going in the other direction.
Every decade, the WHO publishes a report on the health effects of Chernobyl. Every decade, they had to reduce the projections for casualties.
By an order of magnitude.
When it happened, we didn't know better. Now we do.
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It's not just about deaths. That's the thing. People can get sick, the environment gets polluted. A whole town got pulled out of their flats and was never allowed back. The area will remain closed for generations.
Counting deaths does not do the actual damage justice.
How many towns were closed in order to strip mine coal? And no, that's not just a thing of the past but still happening today.
How many people's health was impacted from coal and coal burning exhaust, which btw. also includes radioactive particles.
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A whole town got pulled out of their flats and was never allowed back
How does that measure against a whole planet being pulled out of thermal equilibrium, and the projected displacement of 1 billion people?
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> Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths.
On the other hand, me falling of my roof, isn't going to put sheep farmers livelihoods at risk 1,800 miles away
Most importantly if you scale fatalities by power generated Nuclear is one of the best (last I checked only bested by solar). Coal generates releases way more radiation into the environment and has way more deaths during mining.
People are irrationally scared by large incidents and under-represent the regular deaths and costs that occur during operation.
What sort of nonsense statistic is fatalities per watt hour?
People agree with fatalities per hour of travel because it makes sense. If you're a really frequent flyer, you are more likely to die. In nuclear, I don't give a crap how many watt hour the plant 1000km away from me is generating, I don't want it to affect me. I am however OK with the plant next door affecting me, because I have a say in that. I can choose to live elsewhere.
Someone mentioned rooftop solar causing more deaths. If my rooftop solar falls on my head, only I die.
You can't just reduce everything to aggregate statistics. The relationship and proximity of the affected to the thing that causes the accident also matters.
> Coal
Yes, but the miners die, and only his family face the consequences. Some unrelated guy 50km away doesn't. BIG difference.
Now, modern nuclear plants have way better containment, and e.g I advocate heavily for SMRs [1]. But the fear of nuclear pre-SMR is completely justified and correct as I argued above.
[1] I suppose practically, the ones with 10km radius are also OK. Gen III I think? That is a reasonable region to tell people "if you live here, you might have to evacuate and you might be screwed". Any system with a zone beyond that should always be opposed.
Yes, that’s my point. They are scary - memorably so - in a way that very few other forms of power generation are. The closest equivalent I can think of is a major hydroelectric dam breaking.
Also remember that at each major incident, despite the failures that led to it, people fought tirelessly, in several cases sacrificing themselves, to reduce the scope of the disaster. Each of them could have potentially been worse. We are lucky in that the worst case death figures have not been added to the statistics.
Yes that's the point. Dam failure is much worse and actually the largest event of fatalities related to power generation was a dam breaking. Yet people are not against dams at all, even though they are not much better in terms of risks.
It's entirely irrational just like people who are scared of flying.
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Why you would be downvoted for mentioning this is beyond me. The numbers are well documented and hold up. Compared to every other major source of energy production, nuclear has the lower rate of fatalities by far, by any metric, and this despite it being far from a minor source of power globally.
Not only that, but it also produces less radioactive leakage than many other kinds of power sources that depend on resource mining on a large scale (looking at coal plants in particular here)
>50 direct fatalities
This is a crazy understatement of just how many human-years of life have been lost due to that incident. How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short. I am amazed this isn't more widely known, and I always find it suspicious when people downplay the real extent of the damage that has been done, to human lives.
Just saying that only 50 people died is pretty messed up in my opinion.
It's actually not, as it correctly states 50 direct fatalities.
What is grossly messed up are, or were, the initial projections of thousands, ten-thousand, no hundreds of thousands or even millions of fatalities.
The WHO does a report every decade on the health effects of Chernobyl. Each report had to reduce the projected fatalities by an order of magnitude.
One or two reports ago, the psycho-social effects of the evacuation and loss of income from the plant became greater than the effects of radiation, whether direct or indirect.
And of course all the fatalities and more or less all the negative health effects of Fukushima were due to the unnecessary evacuations.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
Neither case justifies turning off other nuclear reactors. Not even a little.
Radiophobia is more dangerous than radiation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
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> How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short.
Not that many, according to long term studies.
Not many unlike what you want to believe. And there is no mechanism to directly link them to the nuclear meltdown. Since they are suspiciously clustered in specific places, it is more likely that there are other environmental and genetic problems that have more influence than the result of secondary radiation.
In addition to what other comments have said below, it's also important to state that the indirect impacts of the alternatives aren't widely studied, so it's practically impossible to compare. How do we figure out how many people have a significant impact on their life because of the fossil fuel we burn and put all sorts of crap into the atmosphere?
People fear what the media tells them to fear. I still remember the (publicly funded so not really independent from government) TV here having someone refer to a beech near Fukushima as "possibly one of the most dangerous places on earth" while holding up a Geiger counter that showed radiation levels barely above background levels.
Nuclear accidents have been a nothing-burger compared to all the deaths and health issues caused by coal and gas - but those are more spread out over time and don't make for as exciting news so no one cares. Shutting down nuclear instead of coal was never a rational decision but an emotional one.