Coal power kills 1000x as many people per unit as nuclear. Natural gas kills 40x as many. Solar kills 4x as many. Humans have shown themselves to consistently be incredibly bad at comparing chronic and acute risks at scale. 1: https://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArt...
I dispute this number. Are you considering roof mounted residential solar? Most solar in a solar-powered world will be on the ground.
>Most solar in a solar-powered world will be on the ground.
It is probably more accurate to say that most solar in a solar-powered world should be on the ground. The reality is that roof-top solar is the most expensive form of power in the world and yet it continues to be heavily subsidized. These subsidies are in the form of direct tax breaks and usually higher electricity prices paid by those who can't install it. A dollar wasted on roof-top solar would be MUCH better spent on solar panels installed on the ground by the utility.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
This is a poor metric to use. The official death count from Chernobyl was 31. It may be as high as 50. There are probably more deaths attributable through long-term effects, etc but you start getting into subjective modeling to figure out a number for that.
It's almost 40 years later and the absolute exclusion zone is still 1,000 square miles. Treating this as only 31 (or 50) deaths grossly under-represents the magnitude of the disaster.
1: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
The comment I was replying to was arguing nuclear power caused the least deaths and I was explaining how that's a bad metric because it doesn't capture the impact and damage of the absolute exclusion zone.
So if the actual death count is 27,000 instead of 31 or 50 that's actually much worse, which further undermines that commenter's argument.
I would add:There are none so blind as those who will not see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
Very long list. Impossible to clean many up in any sort of human scale.
When are we outlawing hydroelectric dams? Accidents with those have killed far far more people.
1. Using deaths as a metric;
2. Focusing on operational cost of a nuclear power plant rather than total cost (ie including capital cost). The total cost is borne out in the relatively high cost of nuclear power to users. If that point is even acknowledged, let alone conceded, it's just dismissed as the fault of government regulation or that scale will somehow magically solve the problem; and
3. Writing off disasters as irrelevant outliers because they're inconvenient to the argument. Less than 700 nuclear power plants have been built and we've had multiple huge disasters.
So are deaths a bad metric? And by "deaths" here I mean any form of the metric (eg absolute, per-kWh generated, etc). Because deaths doesn't capture the negative externalities and consequences of nuclear power. Chernobyl killed less than 100 directly. Who knows how many contracted various cancers in a wide area. But 1,000 suqare miles of land remains uninhabitable nearly four decades later with no real end in sight.
Deaths as a metric doesn't capture that, which is precisely why pro-nuclear advocates focus on it. Nuclear power has its own propaganda just like the oil and gas industry does.
The way to account for the cost of deaths is by the "statical value of a human life", a finite quantity that is considered what would be reasonable to spend to avoid one death. The NRC uses a figure of $9 million when evaluating reactor safety systems.
Using that figure, deaths in normal operation contribute negligibly to the cost of energy from nuclear or renewables (but not for coal; there deaths contribute greatly to the real cost.) Because of this, if nuclear stans are focusing on deaths, what they're doing is implying that the $9 M figure is much too low. And that would imply that the NRC is not imposing enough safety systems on nuclear plants. I doubt this last point is one they'd be happy with.
So if you’re that worried about it, find the least populated place in western Kansas or Nevada or Maine and build the biggest plant you can. Worst case scenario it turns into Chernobyl and you fence it off and call it a day.
Alternatively, we can keep using slave labor in China to build solar panels fabricated with toxic compounds obtained via strip mining that require natural gas and coal power plants to actually function on hot days.
Either you care about climate change or you just hate nuclear power. Discussions like these are great at revealing where folks stand on the issue when push comes to shove.
A serious question I don't have an answer to: is Chernobyl the worst-case scenario? Is there a way for there to be an even worse disaster? I do not know.
Though really we can walk and chew bubble gum. Build reactors and more renewables. I can't put a nuclear reactor on the roof of my home after all! I just really feel like this trope that anti-nuclear sentiment is why we don't have nuclear reactors everywhere has always felt weird when we're talking about market-based economies. Maybe it's just that unworkable in general! Why else would we not build these supposed money printers?
A counter question to yours: How many Chinese slave laborers would you tolerate before you'd accept another Chernobyl style disaster as a tradeoff? When you talk about substituting solar power for nuclear power, that's exactly the tradeoff you're making.
According to a google search:
> American-made solar panels generally cost from $0.50 to $0.80 per watt (W) – about $0.10 to $0.30 more per watt than imported panels. The highest quality, ‘premium’ American panels may even come in around $1.00/W.
I would be more than happy to pay that premium (though really I would like to see working conditions improve across the globe). I do not live in the US so my calculus is perhaps different from yours.
I have heard statements about labor being huge factors of solar panel installation, but google is saying 15%.
And I would like to restate that I think we can walk and chew bubble gum here. The problems with nuclear being more expensive are real, maybe resolvable, but cannot simply be handwaved away in our current economic models. But hey, if we can get a good mix going on I'm all for it. It's not an either/or!
And hey, if we had a full planned economy, there would be a lot of things that we could do differently that would also have great effects.
The Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone is quite literally 1000 square miles. Nuclear advocates try to treat Chernobyl (and Fukushima and [insert nuclear disaster here]) as an irrelevant outlier rather than what it is: tangible evidence of the impact of inevitable human failure.
A plant has to be well-maintained and competently run. Waste products have to be safely stored and transported. As soon as you add corporations to the mix, you've now created a profit motive to neglect safety and maintenance because the risk of disaster is low but the failure modes are incredibly large. Humans have shown themselves to consistently be incredibly bad at managing low-probability high-impact failures.
> The US navy has fielded nuclear reactors in warzones since 1954 and no Chernobyl.
Military use of nuclear reactors is quite limited, being largely limited to a handful of submarines and aircraft carriers using highly enriched fuel. It's not done out of economic merit either. Having a nuclear missile submarine that can stay deployed for months can literally be done no other way.
All that has very little to do with commercial power generation.