Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power relatively dangerous | Hacker News Reader

Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power relatively dangerous

nextbigfuture.com

54 pointslemming58 comments

Okay, that's DIY rooftop installations and though I'm usually against atomic fear-mongering I have to say that it's difficult to accurately gauge the effects of the Chernobyl incident. And to be fair, we also need to count birth defects and other permanent injuries. So I don't know if this is a valid comparison. By the way, without having the facts to support it, I'd wager that fossil fuels cost the most lives of all energy sources, but again, that's also impossible to ever measure accurately and in islolation.

Actually the effects of Chernobyl have been very accurately gauged by a number of international organisations and take into account birth defects and other permanent injuries. See these two posts for for more details including links to reports.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326672

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326129

Yeah, sorry, I had to edit the title to get it into 80 characters, and I cut out "Rooftop". I still thought the comparison was interesting. Edited: title to be a little less alarmist.

It is interesting, don't get me wrong! The larger message for me is that we have a lot of strange causes of death, simply because of the large population size. Of course every death is a tragedy to be avoided, but it follows - somewhat counterintuitively - that sometimes a few thousand highly linked and direct casualties drown out an even larger number of people who die routinely without anyone questioning why. The same issue became apparent when we started looking at the number of deaths resulting from terrorism compared to ...pretty much any other cause of death.

"The World Health Organization study in 2005 indicated that 50 people died to that point as a direct result of Chernobyl. 4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous."

In other words, this article only counts the deaths of reactor staff and emergency crew, and goes on to outrightly dismiss cancer deaths.

The article's stated purpose is to show a comparison of death tolls. The dramatic loss of quality of life due to radiation poisoning for thousands of people exposed to the highest levels of radiation surrounding the Chernobyl disaster, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands, is also worth considering when weighing the negative impact.

That said, with Chernobyl, we're talking about the absolute worst-case scenario for a nuclear reactor improperly contained (actually, not contained at all) and neglected long after warning signs were shown. We shouldn't practice historical revisionism or insult its victims by downplaying its impact, but we should also remember that its particular history will not be repeated with the containment barriers and safety measures in place at today's plants.

The 4000 people have not started dieing yet. Otherwise the two years of lifespan reduction from air pollution

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-DW9Uoz93Cvo/TXZo0dHQDNI/A...

http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/GlobalHe...

Would be applied to the shorten lifespans of billions of people.

Air pollution increases the cost of public health by about 30%. The effect is so widespread that people do not know it because it is constant and pervasive

To be clear: the NASB estimates that 93,000 deaths so far (as opposed to "eventual" deaths), the ICRIN estimates 500,000 deaths so far, and the RAS estimates 60,000 deaths so far and in Russia alone, were caused by Chernobyl. These are the deaths the article outrightly dismisses in favor of the IAEA/WHO's figure of 9.

The latter figure may be the correct one, but the article is still wrong in using this death toll to decide that "rooftop solar is several times more dangerous than nuclear power" if Chernobyl is the example of nuclear power against which we are comparing rooftop solar: this is a callous and casual dismissal of the horrific disfigurements we see in children at Novinki, the hundreds of thousands of displaced families, the rescue workers who lost body parts to the cancer they subsequently suffered, and to the many other horrors and humiliations Chernobyl's victims have suffered.

Woah, so that basically means that for coal in the US of the 3 or 4 cents per khw (wholesale price, not yet transmitted to your house) there is a hidden cost that is between 35 and 50% more, assuming $1mm / life (a standard non-conservative assumption by engineers). So basically coal isn't worth it at all? It's not just nuclear, natural gas could be made cheaper (and greener) than coal after you take in the human life costs. I also question why the oil cost in human life is so high. Do they take into account oil related conflicts like the Gulf War?

If we had more Pigovian taxes in the US (i.e. a carbon tax), the cost of coal would more accurately include all of negative effects (or externalities) it has. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

I'm doubtful that the large round number quoted as deaths due to coal pollution have any foundation. China has half a million? How can we know that? Its such a large, round, made-up number.

Fewer people die from car accidents. I know several dead from car accidents. Why don't I know one person dead from "coal pollution"?

Because coal pollution isn't listed as a cause of death (just like all pollution). It raises the incidence of many other diseases, and those diseases are listed as the cause of death. Coal also has additional direct deaths in e.g., mining accidents.

The numbers are nice round numbers because, well, there are somewhat imprecise. Looking up actual studies that came up with them would give methodology & margins of error.

Compare to, for example, smoking. The cause of death will be e.g., lung cancer. But had he not smoked for 30 years, he probably would have lived longer.

Global health risk studies (by the world Health Organization) compiled many other health impact studies. It was easiest for them to analyze and correlate particulate matter (10 micron and 2.5 micron)

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/global-health-risks.html

http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/GlobalHe...

In the year 2004, outdoor air pollution in urban areas was responsible for almost 1.2 million deaths (2% of all deaths) and 0.6% of the global burden of disease

Exposure to particulate matter, including metals, has been linked to a range of adverse health outcomes, including modest transient changes in the respiratory tract and impaired pulmonary function, increased risk of symptoms requiring emergency room or hospital treatment, and increased risk of death from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases or lung cancer. Particulate matter is estimated to cause about 8% of deaths from lung cancer, 5% of deaths from cardiopulmonary disease and about 3% of deaths from respiratory infections.

The impact of outdoor air pollution on the burden of disease in the world’s cities is large, but an assessment of sources of uncertainty, including the fact that only mortality impacts of exposure to PM were estimated, suggests that the impact is actually underestimated.

The coal pollution deaths are increased heart attacks and lung disease and more hospitalization from asthma and other illnesses.

Seems like at some point you also have to factor opportunity cost into this as well--so the numbers probably become even more compelling. So if a form of energy is especially expensive, that's dollars you could have spent on say healthcare, food, etc.

To me this is the real indictment against things like solar, not the risk of people falling off roofs.

Another problem is that solar is an alternative to nuclear in the same sense that sex is an alternative to food: no matter how much you enjoy it, attempting full substitution would be fatal. The alternative to nuclear is fossil fuels (+). Thus, you don't get the moderate increase in deaths from going nukes to solar, you get the massive increase in deaths from going nukes to fossil fuels. (And that's before you get to worrying about global warming, if that is your thing.)

There are a variety of reasons for this: the necessity of meeting the base loads, the fact that solar is ridiculously geographically restricted, the cost issues, etc etc.

+ Or decreasing per capita energy needs to below that of the late 1800s, which has aesthetic appeal to some people but absolutely nothing else to recommend it. Among other reasons, it would condemn the worldwide poor to perpetual grinding poverty, which kills a heck of a lot more people prematurely than every other cause combined.

It's dollars that would have been spent increasing the capacity of your local coal plant to handle peaks when evreybody's running an air conditioner. Solar electric isn't a substitute for large-scale power generation, but in many areas it's a great substitute.

In China rooftop solar is used for water heating. I imagine this use is more economical: http://ourdoings.com/davidsky/2010-08-08

> $4 billion is about the cost of one of the new 1.5 GW nuclear power plants, which would generate 12 TWh/year

In China maybe, but not in the western world. The EPR for example, is 1.65GWe, and is projected to cost €6.4 billion, or almost $9 billion in Finland. The one being built in France is now projected at €5 billion ($7 bililon), but may cost more as it'll take another 3 years to complete.

Why isn't that gap being arbitraged away? Sure reactors aren't exactly portable, but a 5bn gap surely can't be right.

1. Build reactor pieces in China 4bn 2. Ship over to Finland at 1bn cost 3. Installation 2bn 4. = 2bn profit

I'd love to see the NIMBY crowd's take on importing a cut-rate Chinese reactor.

But surely the electricity itself is fungible. I guess there's no grid connecting China to Finland to arbitrage the power directly (or conceivably no way to build Chinese reactors any faster than domestic demand and imperfect pricing mechanisms).

Electricity itself is hard to move over large distances due to resistive losses. However, energy-intensive industry will move, accomplishing a similar thing.

The cost differences may be due to required safety features or alternatively due to labor costs. Its a major construction project, after all.

My guess it's mostly due to regulations and labor / material costs in Finland. Moving a reactor really isn't easy, the things are made of tons of concrete, and need a pretty huge foundation.

That said, there probably is a market for portable reactors. However, I'm not sure how happy countries would be with importing a reactor made and filled in China :).

One difference: if you're killed falling off a roof it's probably because you failed to take appropriate safety precautions; if you're killed by one of those other things it's probably because it was out of your control. People are, understandably, happier to take risks where they feel in control of the outcome - which is why so many of them fall off roofs.

My first thought is that once a solar panel is installed on the roof, that death rate has to drop nearly to 0. That is, the risk is foremost in hoisting and installing these heavy fragile panels on your pitched roof.

With nuclear, though, I'd think that very little comparative risk is associated with construction. The bulk of the risk is in ongoing operation.

So the die is not yet cast on nuclear deaths.

I'm reminded of a case a few years ago at a nuke plant in Ohio where an acid leak above the reactor head had slowly eaten away... The 6-inch thick reactor head was, in this spot, corroded down to just 1/8 (!!!!) inch thick.

Now, politically, I do favor nuclear power. I think it's a national security issue to wean off fossil fuels. But i think this "study" is a little overheated and needed a healthy dousing of sea-water.

Side note: you are supposed to regularly clean your solar panel glass to keep it at peak efficiency.

How well would privately operated nuclear power sources work out?

Does it matter? Nobody's proposing nuclear power plants in your backyard. If central installation and professional operation are better, than we should go for it.

Just trying to say that this comparison might be comparing apples to oranges.

It doesn't even say what goes into those numbers, or where they come from.

For example, in Germany nuclear garbage is stored in old salt mines. Did they include the people who died creating the salt mines in the statistics?

If one is suggested as a substitute for another (as it is in this case), it's never an apples-to-oranges comparison. Maybe it should be apples-to-oranges, but that just means that one option is so out-of-left-field that it should never even have been suggested.

How many decades do nuclear plants need to run before you're willing to make a call?

It's stupidly irrational how people require hundreds and hundreds of time more proof for a power source that has OMGRadiation!!1! but require no evidence of the safety of other much much more dangerous sources of power.

Megan McArdle has a decent post discussing the problem of Japanese debt and reconstruction costs (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/03/how-will...). Naturally the nuclear power plants came up and eventually I agreed with another commenter about the overblown claims about radiation dangers with: "From decades of reading, I have come to the conclusion that Greens think you can get cancer from the word nuclear, actual exposure isn't required."

After three decades of nuclear power went by without incident you'd have presumably have felt confident making the call that there was no threat whatsoever from nuclear power accidents. But the number of deaths attributable to nuclear power in the its fourth decade were more than the first three decades put together. Would it be fair to say that the first three decades weren't a sufficient sample size?

Evaluating the safety record of something which due to extreme safety measures fails only very occasionally, but renders cities unsafe for human habitation and livestock on the other side of Europe unfit for human consumption decades later, clearly requires a different approach to evaluating risk than something which kills people only in regular small industrial accidents during manufacturing and on-site erections.

The known safety record of nuclear power thus far is pretty good, which is mainly because of huge investment in safety driven by paranoia. But even looking purely at the catastrophic failure scenario as the only nuclear-related cause of death, if you design nuclear power stations to be able to withstand natural disasters that only occur once every hundred years then you might have to wait sixty years for the first breach and another sixty for the first bad unavoidable breach. Making a call about the long term safety of something which can potentially cut short the life of millions of people just because it hasn't happened yet[1] could be a little premature, although with any luck we'll have something sufficiently better and safer than U235 fission to render most of today's power generation technology obsolete in a couple of decades time anyway.

[1]If you take the most extravagant claimed death figures published by scientists ["Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment" - Yablokov; V & A Nesterenko], Chernobyl could have been responsible for the premature deaths of as many as a million.

My opinion is that this sounds like judging how reliable and safe a car is by how it performs in its first 2 years. And you may say, then, "I've driven every day for 2 years. How many years do cars need to run before you're willing to make a call?"

Of course, as things age, problems become far more likely.

I would also like a more complete comparison of costs (including deaths, loss of arable land, ...) but I very much suspect that the picture would be similar. Renewable energies combined with nuclear energy seem to be a good idea.

I think if more people would operate nuclear power plants in their backyard (as they do with solar panels), we would see a different kind of statistic to emerge.

Also, what goes into this statistic? Maybe a lot of people die in chinese coal mines (don't know), or somewhere where they don't use up to date technology? People die from pollution, but could better filters be installed? And so on...

In the end, no power source will be free of side effects. Best to reduce power consumption.

You're missing the point which is that all forms of energy production are unsafe, and all forms of energy production can be made safer, but the public perception of the relative dangers between the different forms is completely wrong, and people are focusing their energy and fears on what feels the most dangerous instead of what actually kills most people.

The events at Fukushima will lead to a global backlash against nuclear power, and some countries will most probably shut down some plants or postpone the building of new ones in response to public fears, and since the same public is unwilling to cut back on their power consumption, some other form has to increase, which means that more people will die.

And to anyone with a rational mindset, this is just infuriating.

Let's wait how Fukushima plays out. If all is fine in the end, maybe the public opinion will also turn.

I don't think this "killing most people" comparison is very useful, there some to be a lot of aspects and details missing from the picture.

What kinds of "aspects and details" are you thinking of?

Production, consumption and disposal of fuels. Is it coal mined in some shoddy third world mine, could things be improved with better technology? (nuclear power received a lot of research money, can the same be said for other power sources?). Environmental impact (oil spills - blame on power plants, or on cars?). Quality of life (just surviving is not enough).

Sustainability (nuclear power also seems to be a limited resource).

small chance for big damage (nuclear power) vs higher chance for lower damage (fossile fuels).

And so on - honestly, I am not an expert on this stuff.

Do you know who is completely insane? People who think statistics like "deaths per TWh" have any meaning at all in public policy debates. You're in complete denial if you think the populace at large cares.

safety isn't just about deaths. we're all gonna die eventually, independently of our power source.

what is the most important factor to me is the quality of life provided by different energy sources.

personally wind is the big winner there for me.

Full disclosure: I like sailing.

I love sailing too, but I'm not huge on wind power. The problem with it is that it's not constant (whereas the demand on the power grid is). The only form of energy that we currently have that's sufficiently controllable to be able to top up wind is burning coal.

I'm also not quite sure what you mean by "the quality of life provided by different sources" - surely wind lights your lights just like nuclear does?

surely wind lights your lights just like nuclear does?

at what cost? and by cost I don't mean market cost. surely cost of electricity in Japan didn't account for nuclear meltdown possibility, thus far.

of course nuclear is still better than coal, which requires huge open pit mines and produces incredible amounts of dust, radioactivity of which is greater than all nucleotides released from nuclear power plants as far as I understand.

> surely cost of electricity in Japan didn't account for nuclear meltdown possibility, thus far.

They did, up to a point. All the safety measure that are build into the reactors have to be paid for.

> of course nuclear is still better than coal, which requires huge open pit mines

Many/most US coal mines are not open pit so "requires" is a bit strong.

really? looks like 50/50 to me, and the biggest ones are certainly surface ones:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_mines_in_the_Unite...

> really? looks like 50/50 to me

Yes, really. The claim, which I disputed, was that open pit was required. Showing 50/50 (open/closed) disproves that claim.

Nuclear's big win over wind (and solar and wave and tide and hydro and...) is it's density. The _little_ reactor at Fukushima daiichi is ~500MW. The other 5 are closer to 1GW. Big wind turbines (at least here in .au) are rated at ~2MW peak, but with 15-30% utilization (the wind doesn't always blow at just the right speed to provide the amount of power you're using). That means the littlest reactor at Fukushima daiichi would need about 1000-1500 large wind turbines to replace it, and the 10 reactors in the two Fukushima complexes would need 20,000 or 30,000 400 foot diameter turbines on 250 foot tall pylons. That needs a _lot_ of space. Putting them off shore increases the maintenance requirements and the difficulty of getting to them means the increased maintenance is also more expensive.

I really like wind power. I think wind farms look beautiful. But they aren't capable of supplying anything like as much power as we need.

I'm not against nuclear. Sure, fission is the most energietic natural force we conquered as of today and we have to use it. Hopefully fusion will come online in this century.

I'm just saying that of all energy sources we have today the wind energy has the least negative impact on our lives.

Wind has downsides for quality of life. I'm unfamiliar with particular research, but understand there are health effects on people who live near the installations, possibly from being constantly exposed to low frequency sound. It also affects visuals of the landscape, and you need to affect a lot of landscape to create small amounts of power.

My own disclosure: have positions in uranium, which have taken a bath this week :)

Hydro works well here in Sweden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_in_...

And geothermal works pretty well in Iceland, but we're not all in Sweden or Iceland.

well, we all live on planet Earth, so the question about geothermal is just about how deep you're willing to dig. Geothermal is pretty nice IMHO.

Norway even more, iirc it's around 99% of the electricity generation for the whole country.

Why isn't hydro used more? (2% of world production according to the post). Once built it will generate: * Alot of power, as opposed to wind/solar. * With zero emissions, as opposed to coal/oil. * That requires no storage of dangerous waste, as opposed to nuclear. Win, win, win.

But other than using wind for moving your boat, why is your quality of life affected by the `colour' of electrons?

Disingenuous opinionated twaddle masquerading as statistical reasoning.

Would you like to explain that?

Because you have some sort of substantiative criticism, or because it challenges your preconceptions and you have no rational response to make to it?

They're comparing an arbitrary and selective pool of deaths to the modern death rate of roofers & DIY and pretending it has some significance in energy policy. If you take that seriously maybe you need to look closely at why you're so keen on such questionable material.

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