Deaths per unit of energy for various sources

http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/2e5d4dcc4fb511e0ae0c000255111976/comments/2e70ae944fb511e0ae0c000255111976

by johndcook • 15 years ago

203 247 15 years ago

www-958.ibm.com

billybob• 15 years ago

So basically, according to this graph, coal, oil and natural gas cause way more deaths per unit of energy produced than other energy sources, and notably, nuclear energy is by far the least dangerous.

That's interesting, if it's true.

jhamburger6• 15 years ago

Same reason people are much more afraid to fly than drive, despite statistics- We're not scared of dying so much as dying in a catastrophe. Also notice that natural gas is especially low, even though everyone who's ever had gas heat has imagined their house exploding.

I'm pro-nuclear myself, but you could argue that these stats are somewhat misleading, since nuclear deaths would tend to come in bunches and the fears are based on what could happen, not what has happened.

You could also conclude that nuclear weapons are extremely safe to have around since they haven't killed anyone for 65 years.

cubix• 15 years ago

You could also conclude that nuclear weapons are extremely safe to have around since they haven't killed anyone for 65 years.

Indeed some people have come to this conclusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_assured_destruction

john616• 15 years ago

If you compare flying vs. car driving upon the live-time spent with this activities, then 2h flying is much more dangerous than 2 hour car driving. Usually this is compared by distinance, but this is wrong. For example last year I spent my holiday nearby driving by car, this year maybe I am going to fly to a distant place utilizing the same transport time. The flying holiday is far more dangerous than the driving one. I do never decide between car and plane for a given goal, therefore the risk relation to the distance is wrong.

kprobst• 15 years ago

I think in our lizard brains we prefer to have an imaginary measure of control over how we go. So we'd rather have a 20-foot wall of water bearing down on us at 80mph than to be exposed to invisible radiation. We imagine that we have a chance with the tsunami, but culturally we "know" that we're screwed with the fallout. This is cultural detritus from the duck-and-cover times, when we were told that even if we survived the initial blast of a nuclear weapon, the radiation would inevitably kill us (which isn't necessarily true).

I read a book years ago called WarDay, about a hypothetical limited nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the US in the mid-80s. In the beginning of the book, after the attack, the authors describe how they took refuge in a school building and constructed a makeshift geiger counter, which told them how safe it was to go outside to scavenge for food and water and help other survivors. The credit that with saving their lives. In other words, they approached the fallout exposure problem from a scientific standpoint, rather than an emotional one. People can't seem to approach the irradiation problem in other than emotional terms, so the end result is sheer panic. If more people were aware of how to measure and limit exposure, that would give them the control they need to function successfully. Sadly, very few do.

abecedarius• 15 years ago

Wasn't natural gas among the safest? Third after nuclear and hydro. (I couldn't see any figure for solar, I guess because it's currently negligible?)

pinko2• 15 years ago

The thousands of children (now adults) near Chernobyl with thyroid cancer don't show up in these stats, since they're not all dead.

Doesn't necessarily change the conclusions but worth noting.

te_platt• 15 years ago

I read through the article explaining how the numbers were calculated and the thyroid cancer is noted. The analysis provided could be disputed on methodology but at least there are references you can check if you want to improve upon it.

ghshephard3• 15 years ago

From the sources:

"But what about Chernobyl ? The World Health Organization study in 2005 indicated that 50 people died to that point as a direct result of Chernobyl. 4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous.

He explains that there have been 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children, but that except for nine deaths, all of them have recovered. "Otherwise, the team of international experts found no evidence for any increases in the incidence of leukemia and cancer among affected residents.""

pinko2• 15 years ago

My point is that you or your child getting thyroid cancer, even if you or she recovers, is a pretty horrific outcome, and might deserve to be considered somehow -- not just fatalities.

Tichy2• 15 years ago

Residents of what, the world? How did they measure that?

sfgfdhgfdshdhhd• 15 years ago

In that case you should also include all the people breaking their bones etc from falling down the roof without dying while installing solar panels.

Tuna-Fish3• 15 years ago

Neither do the vast amount of respiratory ailments caused by pollution. Coal kills a lot of people, but it cripples more than it kills.

john616• 15 years ago

There are studies from the russian science acadamy that there are 270.000 cancers caused by Tschnernobyl and 93.000 are expected to end deathly.

http://www.n-tv.de/panorama/93-000-statt-4-000-Tote-article1...

It also doesn't include the destruction of a huge territory for thousand of years and the thousand's personal dramas caused by that. Counting only direct deaths is wrong. One has to take the whole risk into account not only one.

sorbus7• 15 years ago

All of those points apply to coal as well. Increased risk of cancer, asthma, all sorts of health difficulties. Strip-mining literally destroys land, not just makes it uninhabitable (which is what you meant, not "destruction of a huge territory").

ghshephard3• 15 years ago

The sources look good [1] In particular, the deaths as a result of hydroelectric power caught some catastrophic failures. Dams are very, very dangerous constructions, and have a failure mode that makes a nuclear plant look safe by comparison. Just one major Hydroelectric Dam [2], Bangiao, was responsible for on the order of 50,000 deaths related directly to the Dam Failure.

[1] http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

mistermann5• 15 years ago

If 50,000 people were to die from a nuclear incident, a large portion of the public would absolutely lose their minds and insist that a nuclear reactor never again be built on the planet.

50,000 deaths resulting from <choose any other technology> however, is just an unfortunate incident. Hundreds of people will die year after year mining coal with nary a whimper of complaint, but we will hear about people sufferring from thyroid cancer 20 years after Chernobyl until the end of time.

(Sorry, a tad snarky....but also very true, no?)

borism6• 15 years ago

but also very true, no?

yes. but why do you think that is? people aren't afraid of nuclear for no reason. While it isn't magic, it isn't exactly trivial either, even for experts.

Could you explain to me how the hell fuel in Reactor 4 storage pond at Fukushima 1 went critical?

TorbjornLunde• 15 years ago

I think people are less critical towards casualties from damns because it’s water, and therefore perceived as natural.

I think if 50 000 dies from a oil-related incident you would get some serious backslash against fossil fuels as well. (Electric generation from oil or gas is already quite controversial here in Norway.)

eliasmacpherson7• 15 years ago

You are being selective about the truths you raise. You are also downplaying peoples reaction to massive numbers of deaths from other technologies, saying it is nary a whimper of complaint. Some would argue that 50,000 have already died from a nuclear incident, and a large portion of the public do insist that a nuclear reactor never be built again. Any of these people would have the same problem with building a dam over a populated area, they would insist that one never be built again. Go and ask someone. There isn't a choice that has to be made between coal, hydroelectric dams or nuclear. Look at the waste you are surrounded with. The difference in reaction to the technologies you are noting is fear of the aftermath of an accident, leaving an area uninhabitable for generations.

iujyhgtfhj6• 15 years ago

Depends on their surface reflectivity.

A few 10s of European people die at chernobyl = crisis, ban nuclear now. A few 10,000s of Indians die at Bhopal = so what.

Of course sometimes you have to be a little more discriminating. A damn breaks in China killing poor yellow people = so what. A reactor accident in Japan affecting rich yellow people = crisis.

Strangely 1800 people being killed on trains in a Tsunami doesn't seem to matter. Germany hasn't decided to cancel ICE services between Munich and Wien until the track can be made Tsunami proof.

code_duck5• 15 years ago

If Chernobyl had been a dam burst incident, people would be living in Pripyat right now.

What if a nuclear disaster like that happened next to say, Philadelphia, and left the area uninhabitable for 10,000 years?

rue3• 15 years ago

I think it's mostly just a rooted fear of anything “nuclear”, but there's an argument to be made that the damage caused by dams is localized in a way that nuclear disasters can't be. In reality, of course, it's quite impractical to move everything away from dam failure zones.

Either way, historical data is very valuable and in that light modern nuclear plants are pretty safe but I think potential damage should play some role in the determination of course…obviously, the best thing would be to go full-tilt renewables (with pretty much only hyperlocal failures) but the question is can we get there without additional nuclear power even if everyone fully invests in it? If nuclear didn't linger such a long time after the plants are decommissioned, the risk/reward of building new nuclear to tide us over the next 20-30 years would be a no-brainer.

I think it's an important discussion that I'm not quite sure can be had rationally – but even that's better than not having it at all.

pbhjpbhj6• 15 years ago

>Hundreds of people will die year after year mining coal with nary a whimper of complaint

Doesn't anyone die mining Uranium ores?

With Chernobyl the fallout was measured across the whole of Europe whilst with some poor workers getting "miners lung" the effect is localised to those who were getting paid danger money to work in mines anyway.

Acid rain used to be big news ...

I don't believe your assertion incidentally.

fleitz4• 15 years ago

What most people don't realize is that there is uranium and thorium in coal itself. If you're worried about 'nuclear fallout' from power, worry about coal and not nuclear. By the way clean coal doesn't fix this because if they could filter it out, they'd be able to get more energy from the uranium than the coal itself.

joe_the_user3• 15 years ago

The common conception is that nuclear waste stays for a long time and thus 50K immediate deaths would be translated into 500K+ deaths later.

Also, 50K deaths all at once for any given energy source would also freak people out. I think that most people would unconsciously consider a coal mine disaster or a broken dam as "death from occupation" or "death from random accident" rather than "death from energy source". The unknown-ness of nuclear power tends to make people credit it directly with the deaths around it.

And yes, people have a psychological fear of the unknown. Evolutionarily, this is rather clearly justified.

If the education level in all industrial countries was raised to the point that the average person felt they had a strong understanding of nuclear power, the fear of it quite possibly would subside. But the cost of this might be considerably greater than the cost of converting to an "alternative" energy source.

Duff2• 15 years ago

Sure, if you conveniently ignore all of the children born in the Ukraine and Belarus with birth defects due to exposure, the plant workers and soldiers who were sickened or died heroically trying to shutdown the reactor, the increased incidence of cancer, the poisoning of prime agricultural land, I guess Chernobyl was no big deal.

And by the way, dam-building for power generation isn't exactly a popular practice today, particularly in areas were unmaintained industrial revolution era dams burst every few years.

noilly• 15 years ago

33,808 deaths in 2009 from traffic fatalities

http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

jhpriestley• 15 years ago

Yes; people also freak out when a few dozen people die of a mysterious new disease like Ebola, even though thousands die every year in car accidents. The reason is not "WAHHH viruses WAHHH," it's that sometimes, mysterious new diseases become epidemics which kill millions, like AIDS.

A higher level of caution with unknown new threats, whose full possible level of harm is not understood, is rational and appropriate.

paganel• 15 years ago

> but we will hear about people sufferring from thyroid cancer 20 years after Chernobyl until the end of time.

You can afford to be snarky when you didn't see a 8-year old died of leukemia because of Chernobyl. I don't care if HN bans me or anything, but as someone how has known and befriended such a kid, I tell you this: fuck you. Children dying of leukemia because of radiation is worst than hell on earth (not that I'm a spiritual person anyway).

And just FYI, my brother lives close to a hydroelectric plant that were it to collapse then he would be dead in maximum 10-15 minutes (this is the plant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidraru_Dam). My father's uncle (after whom I'm named), who was a technician at that dam, actually died while working there (a control room got flooded before he could escape from it). But it doesn't matter, I would still choose hydro over nuclear, because it just feels right.

angus77• 15 years ago

I really doubt anyone ever claimed the disaster at Bangiao was just an unfortunate incident.

Who doesn't bash China for their blatant disregard of human life?

Not that I disagree with your point.

lt• 15 years ago

If Itaipu [1] bursts, it's said that it would flood and destroy a large part of Argentina. In the past, argentinians were worried that it could be used as a weapon against them.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itaipu_Dam

simpleTruth• 15 years ago

If you run a full analysis large scale wind farms are the safest form of power generation. The problem with a simplistic analysis is most wind deaths are upfront and most wind power generation is vary new. Build 1TW of just about anything and you see construction related deaths the first year. However, after you build the thing deaths related to the fuel used and the difficulty servicing and decommissioning the power plant start to dominate.

PS: Arguably dam's save lives by reducing flooding and change the landscape over a large area so it's hard to calculate deaths from Hydro power.

lysium3• 15 years ago

Why do you think the source looks good? It's from a nuclear lobby site.

The referenced data lists 0.04-0.23 deaths per TWh for coal fuel chain and 0.01-0.65.

The number 160 deaths/TWh for is made up from very rough estimates of WHO that 1 mio. people die due to coal air pollution. That's hardly a 'good source', IMHO.

Further, the effect of storing lethally radioactive material for very long time periods is completely neglected.

gcampbell• 15 years ago

The deaths from solar appear to be from falls while installing roof-mounted systems; this would be primarily applicable to residential and small commercial solar systems, whereas most larger systems will tend to be ground-mounted and safer to construct.

Tuna-Fish3• 15 years ago

This mostly serves to illustrate just how small the current solar install base is.

pbhjpbhj6• 15 years ago

It's just a visualisation of http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... figures from a couple of days ago, which I found highly dubious.

For example where are all the biomass deaths from? Why no figures for non-rooftop solar?

What does this "Hydroelectric power was found to to have a fatality rate of 0.10 per TWh (883 fatalities for every TW·yr) in the period 1969–1996" mean? How does spinning a turbine from dammed water cause death?

Ah ... further down the page "... Paul Gipe estimated ..." - so someones estimates without proper working or sources for death rates and such ...

I would love to see a well worked properly sourced analysis along these lines however.

Tuna-Fish3• 15 years ago

Burning biomass causes high levels of particulate emissions, which are a very significant health risk (Burning firewood is the most important source of air pollution in much of the developing world).

Hydro is completely safe most of the time, but when a dam fails, it typically kills a lot of people really quickly.

It would be really hard to collect figures for non-rooftop solar -- simply because there is so little of it. (They would be very favorable.)

pbhjpbhj6• 15 years ago

Biomass - comprehension error on my part, I thought that it was using dung in fermenters and like apparatus.

There seems to be enough solar farms to make the same sort of estimates as have been used in the article though.

I think what would be most helpful would actually be a comparison for a large country with similar safety standards across all industries looking at facilities over a fixed period. That would help, IMO, to rule out problems like people continuing with a hydro project even though the dam is cracked from the off ...

perokreco• 15 years ago

Think about what happens when a dam fails. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

jshen12• 15 years ago

I feel like this line of reasoning misses the point a bit. Nuclear waste is dangerous for a very very long time, while deaths from these other sources are front loaded. When can people move back to chernobyl? If we have significant radiation exposure in japan, how long will that land be uninhabitable? Nuclear waste we create today is dangerous for how long?

DanI-S• 15 years ago

How long would the atmosphere take to recover from CO2 emissions if we stopped burning fossil fuels today? How many people will have died as a result of climate change and lung problems before then?

afterburner7• 15 years ago

People keep dismissing renewables. Well, they won't get anywhere if we don't invest in them, and that investment has to come from a decrease in spending on other sources. Like nuclear.

Alex3917• 15 years ago

Exactly. This whole chart is irrelevant because what we care about is the expected impact on our health in the future, not the impact on our health in the past.

This is why all those people who say we shouldn't decide what to do about building more nuclear power plants until the events in Japan have stabilized are dumb, because the outcome in Japan has zero impact on expected future outcomes.

moxiemk1• 15 years ago

On that thread, it's important to look at new breeder reactors and Thorium reactors before denouncing waste from nuclear reactors as a permanent problem. We have technology that is much better, much safer, and less damaging than even what we have now.

afterburner7• 15 years ago

Are those technologies what is being lobbied for in today's governments?

yummyfajitas6• 15 years ago

Unless you have a negative discount rate, a few (hypothetical) deaths in the distant future is less bad than a few deaths now.

People currently live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, 24 years later:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,412954,00.html

There was significant radiation exposure in Japan a while back. This is what it looks like today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HiroshimaNight.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nagasaki_C1414.jpg

Tycho• 15 years ago

Is fallout from an atom bomb worse than fallout from a reactor meltdown?

jshen12• 15 years ago

couldn't it be a lot of hypothetical deaths? I also fail to see how dumping our waste on generations to come for our own selfish desires is less bad. I think it's less responsible to expect someone else to bear the risks in the future for a reward I want now. Maybe I'm not looking at this like a banker ;)

My default position isn't anti-nuclear, but I find a lot of the arguments and reasoning on the pro-nuclear side to be less than convincing, and in some cases disingenuous. Nuclear seems safer than coal, but the knee jerk reaction on this site from pro-nuclear people isn't helping that cause. Go read the comments on the posts the day after the earthquake, most of them said "everything is fine, nothing bad can possibly happen". Turns out that wasn't true.

maigret3• 15 years ago

Right, + the US crowd majority here probably have a hard time that Japanese cannot move to the other side of the country in case of a major disaster. It's just too small, too full.

foresterh2• 15 years ago

What about all of the plants and animals killed from the various resources? Or the land and water that can no longer sustain life because of one disaster or another...

jerf• 15 years ago

I'm not sure what you think this will prove, but if you're going to go this route it's going to make nuclear look even better. Much more confined mining operations, much smaller land use (something almost all "green" technologies are actually terrible with, IIRC nuclear is the most power-per-acre you can get with current tech), waste goes to uninhabited areas anyhow (and if we were less stupid about it there wouldn't hardly be any), and take a quick Google at "pictures of Chernobyl" [1] and note how it isn't a radioactive wasteland in the style of Fallout or anything.

Very little land has actually been rendered "unable to sustain life"; I'm not sure it measures in anything more than a handful of acres. Hollywood movies and video games are not a good way to learn how nuclear power works.

[1] http://www.grcade.com/viewtopic.php?t=2217 - note the greenery all the way up to the plant itself

foresterh2• 15 years ago

It may make nuclear look better comparably, but it will make all of these (oil, coal, nuclear) look worse.

When all you factor into the cost is human life and money, you miss the bigger picture of how we're affecting what doesn't have a voice.

ecounysis• 15 years ago

One problem with this visualization is that it does not account for future deaths and less noticeable health effects caused by radioactive waste and accidents related to its storage. On the other hand, it also does not account for the same caused by oil and coal and other pollution.

zwieback• 15 years ago

Illustrates again that people are afraid of what's scary, not what's likely to actually happen.

pjscott2• 15 years ago

Reminds me of the "Stranger Danger" scare a while back. Teaching children to beware of strangers makes them safer from kidnappers, but less safe if they get lost or need help from a random adult for some reason. Guess which of these situations is more common.

kalendae• 15 years ago

a great part of the fear is that you can not see radioactivity harming you. Water I can see. Mining coal feels like it is within my control whether I engage in that activity or not.

ChuckMcM4• 15 years ago

This is the most common reasoning for people who fear nuclear power. They reason that they can't see where the danger (radiation) is so they can't know if they are in danger or not, whereas with an oil spill, a gas pipeline explosion, or an oil refinery event, they have visible boundaries to 'this area is bad' vs 'this area is probably still safe' (note its not of course, you can have odorless and invisible threats like CO but many of the failure modes are visible in a spectrum our unaided senses can detect)

I don't have a good answer for re-assuring these folks. (carrying a counter with them seems to be a non-starter, but perhaps a cell phone app would be ok)

baltcode• 15 years ago

I'd like to see the cost in $ per TWh as another column.

pedalpete• 15 years ago

I'm missing (or the article is missing) the timeline that the calculations are based on. Is that yearly? last year? last 5 years?

We have to take a significant time scale on any of these for it to be considered reliable. Though there may have been 0 deaths from nuclear last year, over a 10 year span, would that number be the same?

I believe nuclear can be safer over the long-run, but I'd like to see some more depth in these stats.

pjscott2• 15 years ago

The nuclear calculations have a long timeline. They include mining deaths for plant construction and refueling, and one Chernobyl-scale event every 20 years or so. The numbers are explained in much more detail here:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...

eliasmacpherson7• 15 years ago

I read it as allowing for one of that scale every 45 years, the entire duration of data calculation, arriving at 0.037 deaths per TWh. There's no indication that more than one event of that scale is contemplated.

michaelchisari• 15 years ago

It should be pointed out that there will never be another Chernobyl. It was a perfect intersection of criminally inadequate design, early-adopter naivete, incompetence, and Murphy's Law.

In these discussions, bringing up Three Mile Island is fair game, but Chernobyl is not a realistic parallel.

rabidsnail• 15 years ago

Chernobyl: the nuclear disaster to end all nuclear disasters?

joblessjunkie• 15 years ago

Wait, are you trying persuade us with facts?

Airplanes are the safest way to travel by far. That doesn't prevent people from stubbornly refusing to fly (taking very unsafe road trips instead), it doesn't prevent panic attacks in the air, and it doesn't stop governments wasting billions on security checkpoint theater.

God speed, my friend, I sincerely hope the facts will make a difference.

Someone• 15 years ago

Airplanes are the safest way to travel by far

Yes and no. That depends on how you measure. The typical statistic used (deaths per man-kilometer) favors flying a bit.

For example, the space shuttle is safe, according to that metric (guesstimate: 60 shuttle flights for every crash => over a year in space for every crash, 16 times round earth a day => 60000 revolutions * 40k km => 2*10^9 man km per death)

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_safety#Statistics making one plane ride is riskier than taking a bus once.

Moreover, taking of and landing are the high-risk parts of flying. So, I would expect that flying would score worse than that when people starte making shorter flights.

gus_massa• 15 years ago

I redo the space shuttle risk using the data from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_shuttle_missions#...

  Total Orbits: ~20K
  Orbits Length: ~40K Km
  Crashes: 2
  (Assuming same number of crew in each flight.)
  Risk: 20K * 40K Km / 2 = 4*10^8 man Km per death
  Or: 2.5 deaths / billon Km

So using the Risk/Km criteria the space shuttle is as safe as (water)ships, safer than cars and riskier than trains.

chrismealy• 15 years ago

Are they counting Iraq War deaths?

SwellJoe• 15 years ago

This was my first thought, as well, and not just Iraq. There have been numerous wars for oil throughout the past century.

jacoblyles• 15 years ago

Didn't the war in Iraq reduce oil production from that country?

lysium3• 15 years ago

Even if reposted with fancy graphs, the data do not get better. Basically, they are from a nuclear lobby site.

The referenced data on the lobby site lists 0.04-0.23 deaths per TWh for the coal fuel chain and 0.01-0.65 for nuclear. I don't see that large a difference here between coal and nuclear.

The number of 160 deaths/TWh is made up from a very rough estimate of WHO that 1 mio. people die due to coal air pollution (without further reference). That's hardly a good source, IMHO.

Further, the effect of storing lethally radioactive material for very long time periods is completely neglected.

For me, this is a troll post and I bite.

grandpa• 15 years ago

> Basically, they are from a nuclear lobby site

Really? You may well know something I don't, but it doesn't seem that way to me: http://www.reddit.com/domain/nextbigfuture.com/

lysium3• 15 years ago

The info is based on such bogus data, I jumped to that claim. I currently can't check your reddit link, because reddit is down. Maybe it's just the article.

saidulislam• 15 years ago

flawed observation. true, nuclear accidents don't happen often but when they do you have to deal with immediate and long term effects. as far as I know, coal power plant accidents don't cause deformities for the next 2/3 generations. also I don't see the numbers on solar and wind.

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

Why are you people advocating for nuclear power so much? Solar and wind power should be the future, and they're renewable. Don't you think that's a much better future? Sure they might not be very effective now, but a couple of decades down the road with some big investments (like in nuclear plants) it should be orders of magnitude more effective than it is now.

Of course, a country like USA will never back down from using nuclear plants because they need their byproducts to make nukes.

relix• 15 years ago

At this point, it's the best option for our huge energy needs. Like you said, a few decades down the road, solar power might be somewhat interesting. What do we do until then? Burn coal, which is far more polluting?

Next, solar and wind energy yield but peanuts in how much energy we actually need. A recent article suggests that, with impossible 100% efficient solar panels, we'd have to cover 1/6000th of the earth to meet our current energy demands. A few decades down the road this will probably be doubled because of our growing demands.

porkbird• 15 years ago

I think we should also measure an average number of deaths caused by a single incident and the average number of deaths among strangers caused by a single incident. The incidents at nuclear plants are rare, but the consequences can be much more dangerous than from the other energy sources.

varjag• 15 years ago

So natural gas is the safest?

It is same order of causalities as nuclear, albeit with dramatically less safety effort. One can only imagine how safe would it be if as much was spent for safety measures as with nuclear per TW.

A1kmm• 15 years ago

The linked sited is an article that links to a blog post that doesn't really say exactly how they came up with their results, but provide some links (e.g. http://manhaz.cyf.gov.pl/manhaz/strona_konferencja_EAE-2001/...).

It sounds like they take into account deaths where coal air pollution was a contributing factor, but not deaths where radioactive fallout was a contributing factor, and they don't attribute global warming related deaths to fossil fuels.

They also don't take into account ongoing risks - some forms of energy present risks long after the energy has been harvested, so the numbers will continue to rise, while others don't).

I'd therefore take those results with a grain of salt.

kragen• 15 years ago

I can't find the crude death numbers in the article. It seems like there's a small chance that the number of deaths due to nuclear power in all of history could increase by a factor of 10 or more due to events in the next week or two, which would push it past rooftop solar energy, although it would still be nowhere near coal.

jvdongen• 15 years ago

Also good to take into account is that Chernobyl and TMI and Fukushima are installations from the 1970's or early 1980's.

And even for those old birds the stats seem fairly favorable.

But as long as emotions fueled by scare-mongering have the upper hand, rationality and facts make no chance. So really widespread adoption of nuclear energy (be it fusion or fizzion - I'd be surprised if the public at large makes any distinction between them) is probably not going to happen for the near future. And that's a shame as it could be our ticket out of both a lot of environmental issues and socio-economic issues.

Deaths per unit of energy for various sources

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