The World’s Safest Source of Energy

http://metals.visualcapitalist.com/safest-source-energy/

by StreamBright • 8 years ago

32 57 8 years ago

metals.visualcapitalist.com

davedx2• 8 years ago

Since this is Hacker News, I knew it would be nuclear before opening the article.

And for an article making use of the word 'source' multiple times, it sure doesn't provide any, does it? What a surprise.

Where do the 150 deaths per 1000 TWh from wind energy come from? Skeptical minds would like to know.

vezycash• 8 years ago

Nuclear is safer than solar?

(Couldn't read the article, because the read more button needs JavaScript.)

kingkongjaffa• 8 years ago

The materials and quantities of said materials, needed to make solar panels, are dug up from the ground, mines are not very safe.

bryanlarsen• 8 years ago

They specifically said rooftop solar. I imagine it's the rooftop part where the deaths come from.

simonh2• 8 years ago

EDITED - Found it. Complete report on wind farm related accidents and deaths world wide. It's pretty extensive, so I've not had a chance to check it in any way. It seems to go up to 2018. It seems to include things like studies on increased suicides from the noise. It's a PDF so not very easy to analyse the figures.

http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/fullaccidents.pdf

joosters• 8 years ago

I wonder how they extrapolated from a list of accidents into deaths per 1,000TWh? Do you divide the estimated world output by the number of deaths? Do you 'weight' deaths by the year in which they happened and the output at that time? There's lots of ways to mangle those figures...

jusssi• 8 years ago

This list seems to include some incidents that are only tangentially related to wind power:

"Second of three public fatalities at the same location put down to driver distraction. Accident spot is where turbines become visible to drivers"

"34 year old was killed when his car collided with a truck carrying large wind turbine components"

"47-yr old man killed when the snowmobile he was driving stuck a fence around a wind farm construction site"

mattlondon• 8 years ago

Likewise - was keen to understand what deaths are attributable to solar panels as well, especially since they wre more than turbines.

For wind turbines I can kind of imagine a few disaster scenarios (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-16115139/storm-caused-wind-t...) with all the large, heavy, moving parts swinging around at height. But solar? The same solar panels that sit there stationary like widow glass or floor tiles with zero moving parts?

I guess there are deaths from the manufacturing and raw resource extraction? Otherwise I can only assume they include people falling off of the roof installing them?

pasta• 8 years ago

Yes, it's because people are falling of a roof while installing panels.

Tarrosion• 8 years ago

Here's a similar article with lots of sources (which also reports nuclear as extremely safe):

https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

davedx2• 8 years ago

I can't find wind or solar in that article?

hoppi• 8 years ago

If you follow the links that are inlined in the article you eventually find referenced articles that they themselves have then referenced. Not optimal.

These are the linked articles that contain the references for this data (haven't checked it out so I am assuming on a cursory glance)

https://forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-death... and https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

PJDK• 8 years ago

I don't know how this article calculates things, but both Solar and Wind require lots of sites, and lots of working at heights.

Every time someone goes up on a roof to instal a panel there is a non zero chance that they will fall off and die. The kind of people installing domestic solar don't tend to perform the same level of health and safety analysis as those installing nuclear reactors!

sametmax• 8 years ago

Plus the radiation from the 3 major nuclear accidents caused a lot of problems the article doesn't acknowledge.

In France the number of cancers increased a lot for the generation living on the east border during Tchernobyl. One of my friends had to have his thyroid removed.

Fukushima is still leaking radiation in the ocean (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/fukushima-nucl...) and we can't (don't ?) measure the consequences.

Then of course you have the burring sites. And the fact it's used to create bombs and we need only to fail one time to prevent a terrorist to getting one, but they can try again and again.

So yes, nuclear energy is an interesting source of technology, but it's not the perfect source HN readers love to depict.

It's also very expensive, and the calculations for the cost of nuclear energy usually completely ignore the cost of destroying the plant on retirement.

I'm glad we have it, it has many benefits, but let's keep trying to find something better. Wind, solar, fusion...

dwighttk• 8 years ago

Has wind produced 1000TWh of energy yet?

lucidguppy• 8 years ago

Its interesting how people have weird biases.

Nuclear accidents do happen - and when they do - they poison the area pretty much forever.

If you had the choice of building a power plant - or building a solar / wind factory - it's a no brainer. You're building a power plant factory rather than one single power plant.

Everyone but he US sees the potential.

fabatka2• 8 years ago

In the case of Chernobyl, I would argue that the area is not poisoned "pretty much forever". The effects of radiation on local wildlife is up for debate[0], but note the fact that mammal population is increasing(cited in [0]). From this I would think that the local wildlife is not worse off than it would be if humans continued living in that area.

[0] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl...

EDIT: forgot reference

olavk2• 8 years ago

Of course wildlife is not worse off - anywhere humans leave an inhabited area (ghost towns) you will see it gradually reclaimed by nature. If you want to argue that radiation is healthy for mammals, you would have to compare with a similar unpolluted wildlife area, not with how wildlife fared when the area was a populous industrial city!

legulere• 8 years ago

Here in Bavaria, over 1500km away, we still today have problems that game and mushrooms are often too much contaminated with radioisotopes to be fit for human consumption.

bhickey3• 8 years ago

Nuclear accidents do happen - and when they do - they poison the area pretty much forever.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is about 1,000 mi^sq and the Fukushima exclusion zone is about 240 mi^sq. This is a lot of land, but it must be dwarfed in comparison to the land destroyed, essentially forever, through mineral exploitation.

titzer2• 8 years ago

Not to mention, the rebound in local wildlife in Chernobyl, due to the simple fact that it's an exclusion zone for humans, show that nuclear accidents are bad for people, but, in the long run, great for wildlife.

The picture isn't all roses, of course, but this article is pretty interesting: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclus...

shawnz• 8 years ago

Its interesting how people have weird biases!

athenot2• 8 years ago

It's like airplanes vs. cars.

There are several orders of magnitude more deaths in cars than there are in airplanes, but it is immensely spectacular when there are aiplane accidents, leading to a perception of unsafety. On the flip side, there will be at least one person dying in your city, TODAY, due to cars. But that is not spectacular and we gloss over it.

codingdave2• 8 years ago

If every airplane crash poisoned the ground for 100 miles surrounding it, there would be a far different measurement of their impact. I don't know anyone who denies the safety record of nuclear if your only metric is human casualties. But that simply isn't the only impact.

rascul• 8 years ago

Maybe we do see the potential and it's not yet cost effective for us to implement wind or solar on a large scale. There are lots of smaller scale solar farms around the country, though, and I'm seeing more and more wind turbines, so it's not like we're ignoring it.

tolpp• 8 years ago

And, there is an asterisk.

* Rooftop solar only

Why?

mdekkers2• 8 years ago

Why?

Gravity

ebbv• 8 years ago

This is THE statistic that nuclear proponents love to cite. There have been articles blasting about nuclear’s low fatality number as long as I’ve been on HN. And just as long I’ve been pointing out it’s a bogus, stupid metric.

Solar gets a higher fatality rating because of folks falling off their own roofs. It’s a tragedy sure but does that mean solar is dangerous? Of course not. Climbing up on the roof of your house is dangerous and everybody knows that.

It’s also a number that tries to gloss over the worst parts of nuclear; the extremely long lived impact of nuclear accidents. The areas around Chernobyl and Fukushima are destroyed for generations to come. Finding responsible, safe ways to store spent nuclear fuel continues to be an issue.

Renewables are cheaper and cheaper all the time. More countries are finding they can power a larger portion of their needs with renewables every year. Frankly we just don’t need nuclear and it’s serious risks and downsides.

emiliobumachar• 8 years ago

"It’s a tragedy sure but does that mean solar is dangerous? Of course not. Climbing up on the roof of your house is dangerous and everybody knows that."

That danger is sure a relevant factor when evaluating energy policy. People can know the danger all they want, they'll still do it more often if governments subsidize or otherwise promote rooftop solar.

I think it's fair game to compare those deaths to radiation poisoning deaths from nuclear spills.

mdekkers2• 8 years ago

Frankly we just don’t need nuclear

You lambast the actual statistics cited, but fail to provide anything yourself. How much TW is currently produced globally by Nuclear, and how much Solar or other renewables? What is the timeframe until there is parity?

bhickey3• 8 years ago

The biggest risk posed by nuclear power is that we don't build it and carbon levels rise to stratospheric heights.

codingdave2• 8 years ago

Some quick google-fu shows that renewables have already surpassed nuclear worldwide...

nl6• 8 years ago

Eyeballing [1] (from 2016) it looks like renewable will surpass nuclear sometime this year. [2] shows that "other" sources already has, but I think that includes hydro-electricity.

[1] https://www.iea.org/newsroom/energysnapshots/oecd-electricit...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/data/browser/#/?id=2-IEO201...

bhickey3• 8 years ago

The areas around Chernobyl and Fukushima are destroyed for generations to come.

Along with basically every surface mine in the world. Garzweiler mine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garzweiler_surface_mine), which I'd never even heard of until I spent 30 seconds on wikipedia, is nearly a tenth of the size of the Fukushima Exclusion Zone.

fabatka2• 8 years ago

Frankly we just don’t need nuclear and it’s serious risks and downsides.

I guess you're not from India or China. It is coal that nuclear should displace, not renewables.

nl6• 8 years ago

Except the solar/wind mix is a better solution than either.

nl6• 8 years ago

Yeah, it's funny how these type of articles never report that this isn't an accepted view at all.

We summarize the results of a recent statistical analysis of 216 nuclear energy accidents and incidents (events). The dataset is twice as large as the previous best available. We employ cost in US dollars as a severity measure to facilitate the comparison of different types and sizes of events, a method more complete and consistent that the industry-standard approach. Despite significant reforms following past disasters, we estimate that, with 388 reactors in operation, there is a 50% chance that a Fukushima event (or more costly) occurs every 60–150 years. We also find that the average cost of events per year is around the cost of the construction of a new plant. This dire outlook necessitates post-Fukushima reforms that will truly minimize extreme nuclear power risks. Nuclear power accidents are decreasing in frequency, but increasing in severity.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462961...

sureaboutthis• 8 years ago

I've been curious enough to wonder why very small plants could not be created to serve much smaller areas. I don't know what I'm talking about but would it be possible to make a small nuclear box, say the size of a refrigerator, that could serve a small city alone? A large city would have several of these sprinkled around. In case of a meltdown, or other accident, there would be minimal damage? I don't know what I'm talking about.

korantu3• 8 years ago

Registered to post this - http://www.nuscalepower.com/ This is exactly the idea of smaller, factory-produced walkaway-safe nuclear reactors.

It is weird how people compare safety of 50 year old technology (nuclear incidents) and cutting edge solar/wind

spodek• 8 years ago

If a penny saved is a penny earned, then conservation is the safest of all.

I'm not saying we don't need sources, but most Americans could reduce their energy use by probably 50% - 90%, probably improving their standards of living if they did it thoughtfully.

In terms of deaths caused, conservation is probably be negative, by saving lives from power industries, which tend to be dangerous.

To talk about energy and safety without talking about conservation seems irresponsible.

The World’s Safest Source of Energy

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