Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

The comments are already all about nuclear safety, so I'll just say this:

Per watthour, nuclear power is the safest form of energy production, by a very large margin[1].

Chernobyl is the worst nuclear disaster in history. The UNSCEAR report states that 62 deaths can reliably be attributed to the disaster. Peer-reviewed estimates of additional deaths in the long-term range from 6,000 to 50,000.

You mightn't have heard of the Banqiao Dam, but you should have. In 1975, Typhoon Nina destroyed 62 dams in Henan Province, China. The biggest of these, the Banqiao Dam, released 700 million cubic metres of water over the course of six hours. The resulting flood destroyed six million buildings, killed 26,000 people and caused a humanitarian disaster that killed another 145,000.

The business of energy is inherently dangerous. We have an instinctive aversion to radioactivity, because it's strange and invisible, but it's just energy. Someone falling into a nuclear reactor seems inherently more horrible than a solar panel installer falling off a rooftop, but a death is a death. The Chernobyl exclusion zone seems innately more frightening than the beaches cordoned off after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but cancer from crude oil exposure is still cancer.

We've got very good at controlling the risks of nuclear power. We know what the worst case scenario looks like. Radiation exposure isn't nice, but neither is a mine collapse, a gas explosion or climate change. Stories involving radiation are attention-grabbing, but we can't allow that to distract us from the hard data.

[1] http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/10/snapshot-of-deaths-per-tera...

You are ignoring the elephant in the room, which is the distribution of the risk, both statistically and geographically.

Coal kills consistently, and mostly where it is used and mined. If you profit from cheap coal energy, you have a higher risk of pulmonary disease. If better filters are installed, your risk is reduced, incentivizing you to trade off risk and reward. If a country builds unmanagebly big hydro dams, a disaster will also affect mostly its own population.

With nuclear energy you have a few catastrophic incidents that render entire areas uninhabitable but also contaminate countries that don't even benefit from it (e.g. Austria got fallout from Chernobyl, having no nuclear power itself). At the same time, by pure luck, many reactors identical to Chernobyl did not blow up and provided the surrounding areas with ridiculously cheap energy.

This is a Black Swan type of risk that completely disconnects risk taking and reward. Even if you are very neglegient, the risk is still very low, allowing you to reap massive benefits. Even worse, countries that don't benefit but may be affected by a disaster may pay you for upgrading your security measures (this has happened in the EU).

I'd rather have technology that is more dangerous but where risk actualization mostly and consistently affects those who are rewarded if everything works out well.

It is always funny to check the numbers of pro nuclear sources. As an example in your source [1], the number of .04 deaths/TWh due to nuclear energy seems to be simply the WHO number of excess cancer death of 4000 divided by 112 PWh generated electricity. However in the original article [2] he links (as source for coal related death) to a IAEA bulletin [3], which also cites numbers for nuclear energy, ranging from .6 to 1.2 deaths per TWh. More in line with an estimate of about 40,000 deaths from chernobyl [4]. ( This source also gives a very nice summary of the problems of the WHO estimate.)

[2] http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener... [3] http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull411/... [4] http://allthingsnuclear.org/post/4704112149/how-many-cancers...

Not to argue with your point, but Chernobyl might not be the worst nuclear disastry anymore. It's not in the news anymore, but there's one still going one for more than a year now.

Death estimates from the Fukushima Daiichi disaster tally up to about 120. Five workers, 15 people that died in the evacuation, and a hundred future radiation deaths (of which there have so far been none).

Chernobyl is still the worst nuclear disaster.

Perhaps immediate number of deaths is not the best way to count. It would be valid for tsunami or earthquakes or other disasters with short term effect, bur not things with long term and large scale consequences. Or you'd also say that some of the plane crashes were far worse than Fukushima's or Chernobyl's accidents.

Well put. Environmentalism's opposition to nuclear power will go down in history as one of the most tragic ironies of all time. It would be funny if it weren't so horrible.

The hard data doesn't matter to those who suffer statistical deaths or through the thousands of extra non-fatal complications which are always missing from the statistics...

My concern with nuclear, is not the risk today, but the risk we are leaving for those 500, 1000 or 10,000 years in the future.

Turning to nuclear power means that we will have more waste to deal with - and more risks for the future of human-kind. I have no idea what society will look like in just 200 years, but it feels dangerous to be storing up these issues for them to deal with. (I have the same concerns about rampant fossil fuel use).

Yes in the short term nuclear power can also have a 'boogie man' affect, but that shouldn't take away from the concerns that many, who are wary of nuclear power, have for the future.

"10 000 years in the future" is propaganda to some extent.

There are two types of radioactive material: A, stuff that radiates very little but lasts very long. And B, stuff that radiates very much, but lasts only some months.

If you are concerned about stuff A, like uranium. There's plenty in nature. It is dangerous already because it emits Radon gas. People still live with that. But you really need large quantities for it to be dangerous.

Nuclear power plants need surprisingly small quantities of fuel. And that doesn't turn into large quantities of waste.

"In contrast, the amount of natural uranium required to provide the same amount of energy as 16 kg of fossil fuels, in a standard fission reactor, is 2 grams; and the resulting waste weighs one quarter of a gram."

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_16...

You are ignoring a very important point, A dam collapse does not have any significant affect on a person living on the same land for thousands of years.

"... Per watthour, nuclear power is the safest form of energy production, by a very large margin ..."

The kids in Fukushima disagree, segment from "Children of the Tsunami," BBC, March 1, 2012 ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JS0Rf_gWFA

Citing a single data point doesn't refute the quoted assertion. It is basically the same as me trying to refute that air travel is safer than automobile travel per passenger mile by mentioning a single notable crash.

I'm not trying to downplay the plight of those affected, but it's worth separating these concerns when evaluating the true risks involved with any technology that can potentially have great benefits for the bulk of humanity, the rare catastrophe notwithstanding.

You can always look at different statistics. If you count deaths per journey, air doesn't look that good anymore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_safety#Statistics

Deaths per journey is a silly statistic. People don't fly to the neighborhood supermarket to buy their groceries. All the inconsequential car trips at mostly sub-lethal speeds would significantly deflate an automotive death-per-journey statistic.

Could you tell which is safer then? It sure is not hydroelectric power which worst disaster killed over 150 000 people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Your point?

The dam wasn't engineered well enough, definitely not up to western standards.

Chernobyl is a similar situation. Anyone can build a dangerous power plant using whatever resource they want.

Safety is something you invest in. The question then becomes how expensive is safe nuclear power vs. safe hydroelectric? The biggest problem with nuclear is that "safe" nuclear power is very expensive compared to the alternatives, but if they can get costs down without sacrificing safety (or the alternatives increase in price), its a good option for us.

Where are you getting your information that we have to chose between safe but expensive plants, or cheap but dangerous ones? On some level you can cut costs just by using thinner pressure vessels or containment structures, but the key issue with facilities like Fukishma is that when things fail the reactor starts to go critical unless you actively stop it. Many new designs are specifically design to go sub-critical when failure happen.

One of the question that arised after Fukushima was if we were good enough from a technical POV to handle nuclear power in a safe way. Not speaking only about the cost it takes to do things The Right Way, but also the education of your staff, handling of operational errors, covering of the unavoidable design and material deffects, and so on...

For e.g. launching rockets to space can still fail from times to times, despite the effort and care it takes to do it. Crashing planes also occur from times to times, despite our extensive knowledge of the field and all the effort we can put in preventing disasters.

Wouldn't it be sane to assume that nuclear power will also fail from times to times, and you can't do much about it?

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