Comment by AnthonyMouse
19 hours ago
What's the fatality rate per GWh of civilian nuclear power in the US vs. other forms of power generation?
19 hours ago
What's the fatality rate per GWh of civilian nuclear power in the US vs. other forms of power generation?
Nuclear and renewables are far, far safer than fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels and biomass kill many more people than nuclear and modern renewables per unit of electricity. Coal is, by far, the dirtiest.
https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#safety-of-nuclear-...
Are you rhetorically or actually asking? I'd guess significantly lower than coal and gas, and in the ballpark of (but still higher than) solar and wind combined (in the expected value, i.e. probability of a Chernobyl-like disaster times the death toll of that).
No member of the public has died from civilian nuclear power in the US. Significantly more people have died installing solar panels by falling off of roofs.
That's why I mentioned expected values. Historical data alone is too sparse.
I don't doubt that that resulting number is still very low, or there (being intentionally optimistic about politics and society here) wouldn't be any nuclear plants.
Especially long-term storage is tricky, and if you need to consider time horizons of millenia, even small risks add up.
> Significantly more people have died installing solar panels by falling off of roofs.
In fairness, you then also have to consider "regular" industrial accidents at nuclear plants, which are probably still much lower (due to the presumably much higher energy output per employee hour than other forms). But that's besides the larger point of low probability and historical risk.
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Nobody has died from nuclear accidents. If we’re including workers falling off of roofs then we should include nuclear power plant workers dying from mundane industrial accidents which has happened in the US.
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Tiring with arbitrary limitations to exclude major accidents of a fleet in the hundreds.
The difference between renewables and nuclear power is who gets harmed.
When dealing with nuclear accidents entire populations are forced into life changing evacuations, if all goes well.
For renewables the only harm that comes are for the people who has chosen to work in the industry. And the workplace hazards are the same as any other industry working with heavy things and electric equipment.
> For renewables the only harm that comes are for the people who has chosen to work in the industry.
We are definitively not including hydro power and their dam projects in that category.
On a whole hydro has saved lives due to managing rivers which previously caused devastating floods.
The reason a ton of dams exists is not to make power, it is manage the river. Making power is a secondary concern.
But when we’re done with climate change we should of course restore as many rivers as possible due to the ecosystem damage they cause.
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> When dealing with nuclear accidents entire populations are forced into life changing evacuations, if all goes well.
There have been multiple nuclear accidents in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_t...
Which of them resulted in "entire populations [] forced into life changing evacuations"? Which ones were the implied something worse than that and what happened then?
> For renewables the only harm that comes are for the people who has chosen to work in the industry.
Solar panels are essentially semiconductors. "Silicon valley" is called that because they used to actually make such things there. You can tell from the number of superfund sites.
"The newer ones are safer" has a certain symmetry to it, right?
> And the workplace hazards are the same as any other industry working with heavy things and electric equipment.
Those things are actually the dangerous things though? There were no fatalities from Three Mile Island but a plant worker at a nuclear power plant in Arkansas was killed and several others injured when a crane collapsed and a generator fell on them. Power company line workers have a worse-than-average fatality rate from getting electrocuted.