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Comment by ciaron | Hacker News Reader

> uses the outdated stats that claim nuclear kills less people than solar and wind.

What's the latest data on this? I had also assumed this was still the case.

If you follow the link he provides to himself, then follow that link to it's cite, then follow that link to the source he's trying to cite you'll see they actually updated their numbers and now show nuclear as behind wind and solar (though obviously still far ahead of gas and especially coal):

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

I'm not even sure they ever had solar and wind, around that time it was fashionable to say "nuclear is safer than any other power source" and link to studies that didn't even include renewables. edit, actually confirmed this as the intermediate blog still has the old table screenshoted which shows nuclear in the lead, but only against coal oil gas etc, no renewables other than biomass (some of which is good and some of which is bad, it's a wide category).

But regardless of that, there were a few studies calculated around 2012 that showed solar and wind as slightly worse than nuclear per TWh as they hadn't scaled up and been producing for as long and the deaths are generally front loaded, while the generation is constantly growing and the stat naturally biases against new tech that has a construction phase before generation starts.

Deaths due to nuclear and renewables are both negligible. There's no point in discussing it where there are common sources causing few orders of magnitude more.

It would be interesting to know if the difference in deaths between solar, wind and nuclear is from how the mining of rare earth minerals differs from mining of uranium. Is it because of the quantity, the different countries where the mining occur and related safety regulations, or something else?

But regardless of how we cut it, if we include hydro with renewables then nuclear is safer. Arguably hydro has one of the highest rate of human life per produced unit of energy, depending on how one want to account for deaths caused by failing dams (intentionally and unintentionally). If we only look at accidents and compared chernobyl in 1986 with Banqiao in 1975, chernobyl had around 100 deaths and 68,000 people displaced. Banqiao had 26,000 deaths and millions of people displaced. If we include later deaths caused by illnesses such as cancer, chernobyl is estimated to have about 4,000 deaths while Banqiao is attributed to about 145,000 deahts.

It is simply a fact that elevated 492 million m3 of water has a massive amount of destructive power, and is to a degree harder to make safe than a fission reaction.

Banquiao isn't a sound case here.

It "took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution when most people were busy with the "revolution" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

The "Cultural Revolution" began in 1966.

In such a context an otherwise avoidable catastrophe may happen.

This Revolution followed the "Great Leap Forward" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward ), with famines. "In the subsequent famines of the early 1960s popularly attributed to the Great Leap Forward, Henan was one of the hardest hit and millions of lives were lost." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henan#Modern_Era .

Moreover all this came after a civil war and violent Japanese invasion, during which dams were bombed, causing "massive flooding in Henan" (same source).

Predicting and adverting this catastrophe was possible, but given such a context nobody was able to do so.

Moreover the exact amount of victims of the Chernobyl disaster remains an open question, see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

I am unsure how well USSR in 1986 were as an operator of nuclear reactors in what can be describe as occupied Ukraine. It is distinctly possible that in that context the accident could have been avoided, or that it was always doomed for failure.

Through looking at the list of dam failures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...), I am less certain that the technology has been demonstrated to be safer than nuclear.

The Chernobyl disaster root cause is difficult to assess ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Safety_test ), however given the sheer amount of active nuclear reactors in USSR at the time one may consider that this country wasn't completely inadequate. The USSR wasn't in great shape at the time but Chernobyl added to the mess (Gorbachev famously declared "The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union" ): the pre-Chernobyl era wasn't as chaotic, this disaster suddenly broke many things.

As for the safety hydro and wind are clear winers (solar coming next, nuclear following): https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy Don't neglect that those stats take into account UN figures for nuclear victims, which are WAY lower than many other estimates ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the... )

The article mentioned “nuclear power kills fewer people per electricity produced than any other energy source” which matches the data from the link you posted.

Nuclear accounts for 4% energy at 0.07 deaths, while solar and wind are at 2% 0.04 deaths and 1% 0.02 deaths respectively.

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