5 ms·
Experimental or not, it has among the least accidents per KWh. 500 is a big enough number for some reasonable statistics.
by Wientje 15y ago
Experimental or not, it has among the least accidents per KWh. 500 is a big enough number for some reasonable statistics.
- jshen 15y agoThis argument is popular, but I don't find it compelling. The dangers of most other energy sources are front loaded (let's ignore global warming for a moment), while the risks from nuclear power are spread over many many many years.
- tptacek 15y agoSo, your argument is that because it's harder to make judgements about the impact of fossil fuels, surely our judgement about nuclear power must be worse?
- jshen 15y agoMy argument is that I don't find those stats compelling. Nothing more, nothing less.
- tptacek 15y agoIsn't your analysis a victim of what Nassim Taleb calls the narrative fallacy? The fight is between "true" and "false", not "compelling" and "abstruse".
- jshen 15y agoI don't understand what you're saying. I am skeptical that the conclusion drawn from the previous stats follows logically from the stats themselves.
- yummyfajitas 15y agoThe carcinogens and particulates emitted by coal do all their damage immediately? They don't build up in people's lungs and cause cancer and other diseases many years later? Surface coal mining doesn't leave many square miles of more or less uninhabitable wasteland that remains uninhabitable for many years in the future? Underground coal mines don't catch fire and render entire towns completely uninhabitable? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania Many other energy sources have risks which are spread over many years. They just don't have that "omfg, scary scientific stuff I don't understand" factor.
- tptacek 15y ago... to say nothing of the stats for coal miners themselves; coal has killed tens of thousands of miners since 1950.
- jshen 15y ago"The carcinogens and particulates emitted by coal do all their damage immediately? They don't build up in people's lungs and cause cancer and other diseases many years later?" There are orders of magnitude differences between this time span and radioactive material, right? The same is true of all your points, right? I'm not anti nuclear, it may be preferable to coal, but it doesn't make the logic of those stats any better.
- tptacek 15y agoThe half life of some plutonium radionuclides is spectacularly long. But because of the nature of nuclear power (to wit: turning very big atoms into smaller ones), the stuff that actually contaminates the environment in the worst accidents is more boring. Cesium-137, one of the more obnoxious contaminants, has a half life of 30 years. Coal will do more damage than nuclear on this metric, too.
- jshen 15y ago
- Duff 15y agoOf course, catastrophic failure of a coal or wind power plant kills plant workers and maybe a few unlucky bystanders. The Fukushima disaster, on the other hand, is poisoning square miles of land, air, sea, most likely the groundwater and probably hundreds of workers. When you score risk, you multiply probability by impact. The power output and operational history of nuclear power indicates that the probability of failure is very low, but the impact is very high. (both in terms of severity and duration)
- rglullis 15y agoThe Fukushima disaster, on the other hand, is poisoning square miles of land, air, sea, most likely the groundwater and probably hundreds of workers. Should I say "citation needed" or just call it as FUD? I'd say that even with such a disaster at Fukushima, the impact has been very low. Even less so compared to the alternatives: 1) What are the levels of radiation that the workers were exposed to? Is that fatal or problematic for their health? How many people suffer from respiratory diseases related to fossil fuel burning? 2) What is more damaging to the environment: a nuclear plant or a coal mine? The amount of "poisoning" that happened will make the land inhabitable ever again? How much farm land would have to stop producing crops to give way to wind turbines?
- Duff 15y agoI don't know how you can accuse me of making up FUD, while asserting that the impact is "very low". Since the NY Times reported this morning that unprotected workers were burned by contaminated water suspected to be leaking from the #3 reactor, after ignoring warnings from personal radiation warning devices. I don't think its unreasonable to think that workers will suffer adverse health effects. A safely operating nuclear power plant with an uninterrupted supply of fresh water and electricity has less impact to the surrounding area than your average coal mine. The problem is, as Fukushima aptly demonstrates, is that many of these facilities do not fail safe. Again, think risk management. Probability vs. impact. You're letting your fondness for nuclear energy blind you from the obvious.
- 15y ago
- gamble 15y agoHow exactly are you quantifying severity? The worst case for a reactor is vastly worse than anything that can happen at other types of plant. The financial bill for cleaning up nuclear accidents is already in the billions of dollars, not counting Fukushima.
- tptacek 15y agoThe financial bill for mitigating the damages being caused to the environment (not to mention foreign policy) by fossil fuels is dwarfing that of nuclear power. A "severe" accident results in loss of life, or in square kilometers of land unexpectedly rendered unusable for habitation or agriculture.
- AJ007 15y agoThe worst case scenario for global warming involves a change in climate so devastating that the earth may be able to feed little more than 100 million humans and may take hundreds of thousands of years to return to the point we are at now. It makes the dangers posed by nuclear energy seem fairly trivial. I have yet to read any worst case scenarios for nuclear energy accidents which are anywhere comparable to this.
- wtn 15y agoOh nice point. People don't think of all the various costs. Lots of people die in mining accidents and mining byproducts cause water pollution. NO2 emissions are horrid for human health—I don't have death count numbers at hand.
- zizee 15y agoIs it much worse than the Banqiao Dam disaster where an estimated 90-230k people died? What would happen if there was a catastrophic failure of the Hoover dam? This is not to say nuclear failure isn't bad news, just that many large scale electricty generating schemes have a big downside and it's going to be a big ask to find 100% benign alternatives. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam