Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

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Coal power kills 25 people per TWh vs nuclear's 0.04 (yes that includes the 4000 people who died at Chernobyl and the 1 person who died in Fukushima). [1]

The US generates ~22% of its power from coal, about 900TWh. As such, coal kills 22,500 people per year in America - five and a half Chernobyl's per year. [2]

Meanwhile the US generates ~19% of its power from nuclear, about 800TWh. This accounts for 32 deaths. [2]

The disparity is so huge that even if you include the 2202 people who died evacuating the area around the Fukushima plant (who may well have evacuated anyways due to the tsunami), the nuclear power plant saved significantly more lives than it cost vs. having a coal, oil or natural gas plant there.

[edit] For those curious about the math, the Fukushima plant has a nameplate 5306MW capacity and operated from 1979-2011. That means it generated a maximum of ~1500TWh. Based on the numbers in [1]:

- A coal plant at Fukushima would have killed 36,900.

- An oil plant would have killed 27,600.

- A natural gas plant would have killed 4,200.

- A biomass plant would have killed 6,900.

- Hydro would have killed 1,950.

So the second-worst nuclear accident in history was safer than a natural gas power plant even if you count the worst-case metric of everyone in the area who died leaving the area they may have left anyways.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

[2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

I think this logic is flawed.

Oil, coal, gas, hydro, etc inflict casualties gradually and predictably. They are, generally speaking, not capable of the sudden region-wide catastrophic disasters that nuclear power is capable of. Those are rare events. The Poisson distribution, with regard to inflicting mass casualties, is completely different for nuclear power.

We haven't had a true nuclear catastrophe yet. We came close with Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, but those events were not nearly as bad as they could have been. The number of casualties could have been orders of magnitude higher.

In other words, our sample size with nuclear power is small. All it would take is one nuclear catastrophe and the safety stats averaged over the last century suddenly look much different.

This is comprehensively untrue.

No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl. Passive safety is a given now.

Your emotion-driven conservatism has to be weighed against the real harms caused by other viable baseline power systems. Advocacy against nuclear power is advocacy for fossil fuels, like it or not.

> This is comprehensively untrue... Your emotion-driven conservatism...

I think your choice in phrasing speaks more to your emotional state than mine.

> No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl.

You are discounting the fact that many of the nuclear reactors that remain in operation today were designed decades ago and were built decades ago.

Of course newer nuclear technology is safer -- I don't think anyone would ever disagree with that. But we are considering the safety of nuclear power as it exists today. Why would we omit nuclear reactors that are currently in operation today (and will continue to be in operation for quite some time) from the discussion?

This comment is more clear. Above, you spoke about nuclear power in the abstract. It's good to separate out the discussion like this. Because nuclear power can mean building new safe reactors, or it can mean keeping really old ones running.

> But we are considering the safety of nuclear power as it exists today.

Even then, it's not a homogeneous blob of risk. There are different reactor designs, run by authorities of different competence levels, built at varying distances away from cities. There's no substitute for a case by case analysis.

I sense a hand-wavy aspect to the argument. I want some harder facts. What percentage of currently live reactors have an equal or greater risk than the Chernobyl plant? Is it 2% or 50%? Such distinctions make a big difference to the tail risk.

> No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl. Passive safety is a given now.

Current reactors are burner reactors. They cannot power the world (there is not enough sufficiently cheap uranium). To power the world, breeder reactors are needed.

Breeder reactors will burn the bred isotopes, either Pu isotopes or U-233. These isotopes, when fissioned, produce about half the delayed neutrons of U-235. As a result, reactors burning them are skating closer to the edge of prompt criticality than today's reactors. Chernobyl was a prompt criticality accident. A prompt criticality accident in a fast reactor (any breeder using Pu will be a fast reactor) is potentially much more serious than even Chernobyl.

>No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl

Fukushima is older than Chernobyl. This type of thinking is how these catastrophes happen. People keep obsolete designs in operation for 50 years or more and basically make any safety gains today pointless.

No, Chernobyl is about as worst- ase-scenario as it gets. Entire pressure vessel exploded, with no secondary containment. It was exposed to atmosphere for days (weeks?) Before being sealed.

Chernobyl was very close to being massively worse. At Chernobyl, the melting down core never came into contact with the large pool of cooling water, but it was awfully close. Had it come into contact with all that water, an enormous explosion would have resulted. Some experts say that explosion could have irradiated half of Europe.

Even the real consequences of the catastrophe are difficult to establish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

> At Chernobyl, the melting down core never came into contact with the large pool of cooling water, but it was awfully close.

No, it did not. That water was drained, precisely because of concerns that it would melt down and come into contact with water.

Yes, it did come close.

If it wasn't close, as you suggest, then why did a crew of people wade into highly radioactive water -- a probable suicide mission -- to manually operate the valves to drain the water?

I answered this in my comment:

> That water was drained, precisely because of concerns that it would melt down and come into contact with water.

Even if the concrete base under the reactor was breached, the water underneath had been drained. In retrospect this was unnecessary, but it added another layer of precaution.

Furthermore, what makes you think a potential explosion after coming into contact with water would be "massively" worse than the original reactor explosion? In case you aren't aware, the RBMK-1000 was a water cooled reactor. The explosion happened because the temperatures inside became so high that the pressure vessel ruptured. By comparison, the contact with the water beneath the reactor hall would not be trapped in a pressure vessel and wouldn't result generate such pressure.

What actually produced the most amount of nuclear contamination was the period of time when the fuel rods were exposed to atmosphere and burned. This put large amounts of contaminants - radioactive smoke, essentially - into the atmopshere.

You are certainly entitled to your own opinion, but others who have researched Chernobyl far more extensively than you or I have concluded differently. I am primarily getting my information from Andrew Leatherbarrow's book "Chernobyl 01:23:40". In that book, he states essentially the same as I have above.

However, it's not just Andrew Leatherbarrow who thinks so. All it takes is a simple Google search and you'll find reputable research papers hosted by the IAEA whose primary conclusion is that the accident could have been much worse. Here's one example: https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:18009127

Popular books have the incentive to garner sales - often through dramatization - not report accurate findings. Furthermore, the paper you linked was talking about wind directions not about whether the molten rods reached the cooling water underneath the reactor room floor.

> Furthermore, the paper you linked was talking about wind directions not about whether the molten rods reached the cooling water underneath the reactor room floor.

I did not say that the IAEA paper was about molten rods hitting the coolant water. There is more than one way that Chernobyl could have been much much worse. According to the paper, different wind and rainfall could have made the disaster 200-400x worse in terms of radiation consequences to humans. To say that is significantly worse would be an understatement.

> Popular books have the incentive to garner sales - often through dramatization - not report accurate findings.

It seems like you've made up your mind and no amount of evidence to the contrary will change it. I don't think I'll bother to continue participating in this line of discussion.

> why did a crew of people wade into highly radioactive water -- a probable suicide mission

This is a common myth (probably recently propagated by the scare-mongering TV series), but that mission was perfectly safe. Three men, equipped with dos meters, waded into the water and opened a valve, that was it. One died of a heart attack at 65 and the other 2 are still alive.

Furthermore, the operation was in the end unnecessary: there was no risk of such an explosion.

I'm getting my information from the book written by Andrew Leatherbarrow "Chernobyl 01:23:40" -- not a TV series. Yes, according to him they are still alive. It was indeed a probable suicide mission because all of them went in there knowing full well there was a significant chance that they would die from it.

So, considering that all three of them lived, was it that they got exceedingly lucky, or was their risk assessment just way off?

I guess the point is that it doesn't matter; if you believe something to be a probable suicide mission, then you don't do it unless you are very afraid that a disaster will otherwise occur.

But then you also have to question if their assessment of the risk of further disaster was also correct. But I guess subsequent studies have confirmed that high level of risk?

How many people would have died if that happened?

I always get a chuckle when people insist that the water under the core posed such a serious threat, given that the original reactor failure was caused by boiling water. The reactor failed after the water temperatures produced too much pressure for the pressure vessel to handle. This exposed fuel rods to atmosphere, at which point they started to burn. This is what produced the most severe contamination (that, plus debris from the reactor being ejected).

To stop this, loads of sand, boron, and lead were piled onto the ruptured reactor, eventually burying it. The concern is that the molten fuel rods underneath this blanket of material would melt through the concrete below and come into contact with water. But with no pressure vessel to contain the boiling water, it would not produced nearly as much pressure as the original failure.

That is from the TV show and was never a real danger to irradiate half of Europe.

> It was feared that if this mixture melted through the floor into the pool of water, the resulting steam production would further contaminate the area or even cause a steam explosion, ejecting more radioactive material from the reactor. It became necessary to drain the pool.[71] These fears ultimately proved unfounded, since corium began dripping harmlessly into the flooded bubbler pools before the water could be removed. The molten fuel hit the water and cooled into a light-brown ceramic pumice, whose low density allowed the substance to float on the water's surface.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Bubbler_poo...

> These fears ultimately proved unfounded, since corium began dripping harmlessly into the flooded bubbler pools before the water could be removed.

That line in the Wikipedia article seems to conflict with the book I read by Andrew Leatherbarrow "Chernobyl 01:23:40". In the book he states that if the water hadn't been drained and if the molten core had reached the water it "would have done unimaginable damage and destroyed the entire power station, including the three other reactors."

It's a shame that the Wikipedia article doesn't cite it's source on that claim. It would be interesting to reconcile the seemingly conflicting information.

> would have done unimaginable damage and destroyed the entire power station, including the three other reactors

And how, pray tell, would it have generated an explosion so large without a pressure vessel to build up pressure?

"Assuming there are 500 reactors in use in the world, the above CDF estimates mean that, statistically, one core damage incident would be expected to occur somewhere in the world every 40 years for the 2003 European Commission estimated average accident rate or every 100 years for the 2008 Electric Power Research Institute estimated average accident rate." [1]

"5 serious accidents in 60 years represents an actual historic global annual risk of 1/12 or 8.3% per annum" [2]

"If no cooling system is working to remove the decay heat from a crippled and newly shut down reactor, the decay heat may cause the core of the reactor to reach unsafe temperatures within a few hours or days, depending upon the type of core."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_damage_frequency

[2] https://silo.tips/download/complexity-implies-unknowable-ris...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat

A coal plant at Fukushima would have killed zero people if we spent $200 billion on containing its pollution, which is what it will cost to clean up the radiation from the disaster.

And the CO2 emissions leading to rising sea levels? The mining? Transportation? And where do you plan to put the concentrated uranium, thorium, mercury, etc from the smoke stacks? These are all large sources of deaths.

If you spend $200B on one plant, the economics of that are nuts, right, which is why we don't. You'd have to spend $200B on each plant, where nuclear you'd have spent $200B twice in the last 60 years. These are of course just ballpark numbers.

You'd also need to clean up the pollution of all the other coal plants, the counterparties to the hundreds and thousands of reactors that didn't explode.

Which we can't do for ~any amount of money, and definitely not for 200 billion.

It is very likely that the “4000 deaths” due to Chernobyl is vastly overstated. Actual deaths at the event and subsequently are less than 100. The 4000 is a projection that ignores the biological process of mutation repair.[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_...

This completely ignores the stress of evacuating your home town and the fear of having been exposed to a cancer inducing radiation dose. Even ignoring those it would have resulted in poverty for those who had to evacuate and poverty is a known cause of increase death rates

Those were included in the 4000 deaths number. Irrational though the fears were they led to people believing they were 'contaminated' and committing suicide, etc. The overwhelming majority of cancers were thyroid which is 99% curable (especially when you're monitoring for it).

Damn, nuclear seems so obvious... though I know some people really hate it too. Seems very controversial, and fascinating in a way. Maybe we will react the same way to other advanced technologies, like cloning, AI, stem cell research e.g. instant shutdown.

Lots of people are even worried about CERN... monkey logic.

My province gets 90% of its electricity from hydro though, I'm glad I don't have to think about this issue too much

Coal is being phased out. There is no point in talking about coal.

Good news, the data in [1] shows its safety numbers have it sandwiched between wind and solar, and it produces significantly less greenhouse gas emissions than either (although all three are roughly zero).

Is it? Has anyone told China, India, and Australia that yet?

Or the UK.

UK Extends Life of Third Coal Plant to Secure Winter Electricity https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-13/uniper-ex...

Wars trigger emergency measures. It would be extremely foolish to project this as a trend.

Who is building new coal plants? Who does not have plans to close coal plants? Who is exploring for new coal reserves?

China is building new coal plants. https://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/press/7488/plans-for-new...

China announces plenty, breaks ground for less. Announcements are cheap. Likely, they will not end up fueling any they do build, because it costs too much.

China's command economy creates perverse incentives that do not translate to the outer world. And, announced plans often do not reflect reality.

They have also announced >200 new nukes, and last I checked had broken ground on three. I doubt those will end up operating, even if finished, because of cost. But they might be, because [see above].

China has tripled their nuclear power generation capacity from 2014 to 2019 and doubled its share of the generation mix. I can't think of any reason they'd stop.

They're planning on building 30 reactors in OBOR countries by 2030 [2] and 150 domestic ones by 2035.

> China is one of the world's largest producers of nuclear power. The country ranks third in the world both in total nuclear power capacity installed and electricity generated, accounting for around one tenth of global nuclear power generated.

They're going to be a global nuclear powerhouse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-nuclearpower/china-...

And then will mothball them all in a few years when they become unable to produce at a competitive cost.

They will produce a lot of kWh and displace a lot of CO2 in the meantime. But nowhere near what the same money spent on solar and wind would have.

Most Australian coal plants are scheduled to be closed before 2050, and the timeline keeps shifting closer and closer, because they're becoming economically unsustainable[0].

This is projected to cause problems to the energy market's ability to provide reliable baseload power from now until the 2030s, but crucially, it's not government mandated. Coal plants are increasingly expensive to run, because renewables are eating their profits during the day and they're barely recouping that at night.

[0] https://www.leadingedgeenergy.com.au/blog/timeline-for-coal-...

Germany's energiewende has been faltering even before the energy crisis. But what do they have a ton of? I can guarantee their coal consumption will increase before it even thinks about dropping again.

Europe is in a war-driven crisis. Conclusions from activities of the moment would be foolish, at best, where not actually disingenuous and duplicitous.

Faltering how?

Everybody's coal consumption in Europe will go up this year. One of the few viable quick replacements for gas is power plants that were about to be turned off.

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