
Death rates from energy production per TWh - peter_retief
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
======
craigc
What would be interesting would be to have a poll of which forms of energy
people _think_ lead to the most deaths and put it next to this. I have a
feeling nuclear would be the top.

The New York Times published an article that touched on this fairly recently
too:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-
ch...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-change-
nuclear-power.html)

~~~
kuro68k
Would be more interesting to know what the actual damage from these different
sources are, rather than just is one cherry-picked statistic.

And where are wind and solar?

~~~
crdoconnor
Nuclear industry is notoriously shy about making comparisons to wind and
solar.

~~~
acidburnNSA
No we aren't. I compare carbon emissions to wind and solar all the time.
Nuclear's on par with wind, 4x lower carbon than solar PV, 40x lower than
natural gas, 80x lower than coal.

Wind has a 35% capacity factor in the US, nuclear has 90%. Solar has 25%

Wind and solar capital cost is 4x lower than nuclear right now, thanks to the
fact that they're at low generation fractions and have lots of fracked gas and
hydro to integrate their variability. As generation fraction goes up, their
cost goes up non-linearly. Nuclear cost is terrible right now. Some people are
trying to bring it down, but no great progress yet. In 10-20 years when 20
countries have 20% or more variable renewables, nuclear will probably start
looking really good again for deeply decarbonizing.

And nuclear roughly as few (and probably a little bit fewer) people than wind
and solar per kWh generated, all of which are orders of magnitude safer than
fossil. People fall off roofs installing solar panels and wind turbines catch
fire and sometimes do ice-throw.

------
seren
I think when talking about nuclear accidents, there is too much a focus on the
actual death rate, but not on the impact of the evacuation area.

For example, if you look at Cattenom Nuclear Power Plant location on a map and
create a 80 km radius exclusion zone, Luxembourg, as a country probably ceases
to exist. This is not something that could happen with a catastrophic failure
of wind turbines or solar panel.

By definition, nuclear plants are near coastal areas or a river, so prone to
ocean rising water (or tsunamis), floods or droughts.

This is something that is harder to evaluate than simply a death count.

I believe this is less relevant for the US, where I assume there is enough
space left in sparsely populated areas, but in denser areas like in Europe or
South East Asia, it seems to be a bigger factor.

~~~
petre
An 80 km exclusion zone is a gross exageration. There hasn't been such a huge
exclusion zone, not even in the cases of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

~~~
seren
Fair enough, 80 km is some kind of absurd extreme value, but Luxembourg city
centre is about 25 km from Cattenom, so you can at least expect some real
estate upheaval at the very least.

~~~
roenxi
At the tiny, tiny scale of risk we are talking about I'm not certain it makes
sense to worry. Statistically, the inhabitants of Luxembourg are more at risk
of being driven out by hostile forces (they were invaded in WWII, for example)
than threatened by a nuclear disaster.

Not to mention that of the 2 major nuclear disasters we've had, half were
caused by a less-than-once-in-a-generation tsunami. If something that
disastrous hits Luxembourg ... I dunno, the situation would already be pretty
grim. And all this is assuming they actually need to be evacuated, which is
debatable in itself.

Fun fact, it is possible to build a world-class city in 40 years [0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen)

------
317070
Is uranium mining included in these numbers?

Edit: it seems to be what mainly contributed to the nuclear numbers:
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067360...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673607612537?via%3Dihub)

> The sources of the effects and indeed the effects themselves for the nuclear
> fuel cycle are very different from those for the fossil fuel cycles. They
> can arise from occupational effects (especially from mining), routine
> radiation during generation, decommissioning, reprocessing, low-level waste
> disposal, high-level waste disposal, and accidents.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Recall that because it's getting energy from the nucleus rather than from
electron shells, there is 2,000,000x more energy in the mined raw material
when you're using nuclear. That's why a train car of nuclear fuel per year can
power a city, where a coal plant needs a mile-long train car per day. Nuclear
energy density is crazy high. So you don't have to mine a lot, you don't have
a lot of waste, you don't need lots of land, and you don't emit any carbon
dioxide.

See: [https://www.xkcd.com/1162/](https://www.xkcd.com/1162/)

~~~
mimixco
The uranium cycle requires heavy equipment (dozers, loaders, trains, trucks,
etc), all of which run on fossil fuels, so it's not "carbon free."

~~~
acidburnNSA
That's included in the number of 11 gCO2-eq/kWh. Please refer to this comment
where you were lightly reprimanded for saying that.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19905223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19905223)

I say carbon-free for anything that's under 40 gCO2-eq/kWh (so I can include
solar), which is 10x less than natural gas, 20x less than coal. Nuclear is 40x
less natural gas! It's the lowest carbon energy source we know, tied with
wind.

~~~
mimixco
Thanks but you've said elsewhere that you work in the nuclear industry. HN is
not a place where we need to "reprimand" each other.

~~~
acidburnNSA
We do need to provide meaningful feedback to things that are incorrect, such
as the suggestion that nuclear is not tied with wind as the lowest-carbon
full-lifecycle energy source we know.

I chose to work in the nuclear industry specifically to help avert climate
change. I was like: "I want to help reduce climate change. Aha, nuclear is
interesting because it's low-carbon and also not perfected. That's a good
challenging problem to work on!"

This doesn't invalidate anything I've said. In fact, it bolsters things I say
because it means I know what I'm talking about.

~~~
mimixco
That's fine and you're free to do that, but it doesn't make what I said
"incorrect." The uranium cycle uses carbon and, what's worse, produces vast
amount of tailings (radioactive waste) which contaminate land and water. This
is in addition to the spent fuel rods which most people think of as "nuclear
waste." I hope that you could agree that those are true statements.

~~~
DuskStar
By that standard, there are no carbon-free energy sources.

~~~
mimixco
So people should stop claiming that nuclear is one. It's an advertising term
used by the industry, nothing more.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Nuclear fission is neutron + uranium = fission products and energy. This
process is literally carbon-free. Solar PV is photons + semiconductors =
electric current. This is directly carbon-free. Wind is wind + blades =
mechanical motion. This is directly carbon-free. Coal, natural gas, oil, and
biomass are Carbon + heat in the presence of oxygen is CO2 + energy. These are
not carbon-free. This is the purpose of the term carbon-free.

Now, literally everything has non-zero carbon lifecycle costs as long as we
are using carbon-derived energy in our infrastructure. It is impossible to be
fully carbon-free with coal, natural gas, oil even if all your infrastructure
is electric. With solar, nuclear, wind, etc., you can get to a truly carbon-
free lifecycle if you work hard to electrify or otherwise clean up your
trucks.

Meanwhile, today, nuclear lifecycle is the most carbon-free overall, tied with
wind.

The term carbon-free is used colloquially to mean anything that doesn't
directly make carbon alongside energy. It is right and proper to point out
lifecycle carbon costs too, and again nuclear is tied for lowest lifecycle.

Nuclear is the most carbon-free thing we have. You bet it is advertising. It's
truthful advertising of the positive characteristics of nuclear energy. People
have a right to know how carbon free various energy sources are.

------
gtirloni
"Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds"

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-
dont...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-
our-minds)

------
strainer
This kind of chart should have its workings and data readily available. It
appears the only deaths included for nuclear are from some cancer estimate
which is not readily accessible. It is not clear what the others death count
includes.

Here is the entire data download that is actually included for this chart:

    
    
      Entity,Code,Year, (deaths per TWh)
      Biomass,,2014,4.63
      Brown coal,,2014,32.72
      Coal,,2014,24.62
      Gas,,2014,2.821
      Nuclear,,2014,0.074
      Oil,,2014,18.43
    

With it lacking any discussion of what these quite mysterious counts mean -
this is often taken as proof of safety. Yet Nuclears exceptional score could
be transformed by the kind of catastrophic accident which nuclear is capable
of and which by great expense and some luck has avoided to date.

For example if weather during Fukushimas accident had blown fallout over
Tokyo, or if a reactor anywhere releases similar or greater amounts of fallout
anywhere in the world where a large population center is downwind, many
thousands of cancers are possible, with children disproportionately affected
by radiation exposure. Large areas of land can be made uninhabitable to
civilization for decades or more, and depending on future civilizations
standards.

~~~
petre
It blew the fallout northwest. An aproximate 50x20 km eliptic strip was
contaminated. Tokyo is too far away. Uninhabited by people, yes, mainly due to
fear if radiation. For other animals and plants that aren't aware of
radiation, not really.

~~~
_ph_
The problem with radiation for humans is, that humans live far longer than
most species - at least common to the two regions with a reactor blowup. An
e.g. 10 year loss of projected lifespan would be considered unacceptable for a
human population, but most animals don't live long enough to get significantly
impacted.

~~~
petre
Ever heard the word _samosely_? That the name given to the people that live in
the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-
sh/moving_to_Cherno...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-
sh/moving_to_Chernobyl)

~~~
_ph_
What about them? By the way the article is about people living outside the
exclusion zone, though at its borders. Only about 150 humans are currently
living illegally inside the zone, according to the article. And of course,
they are not dying immediately, but certainly have a larger risk for cancers.
Though, if they don't smoke and as they are not exposed to many other
contaminants, it might not be too bad.

------
kozak
Where would solar and wind be in this chart? It's definitely not zero (falls
from height, etc).

~~~
trothamel
Rooftop Solar is 0.44 deaths/TWh, wind is 0.15 deaths/TWh, Hydro is 1.4 or
0.1, depending on if you count the biggest accident or not.

[https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-
all...](https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-
sources.html)

I don't think that would count natural gas emissions for backing renewables.

~~~
pcl
The referenced hydro accident is the Banqiao Dam failure, which Wikipedia says
resulted in between 171,000 and 230,000 deaths.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam)

------
resters
Does this include deaths from oil wars?

~~~
dotancohen
Though initially I was inclined to treat this as a troll, this is actually a
good point. Major power consumers can acquire solar and wind energy without
causing widespread destruction to other countries. Not so for oil, and to a
much lesser extent that I think has not been realized since the 1940's,
uranium.

~~~
resters
It certainly wasn't intended as a troll, fwiw.

------
calebegg
The associated article has more discussion and context:

[https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-
energy](https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy)

~~~
Tepix
I really dislike their headline "It goes completely against what most believe,
but out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest" because it ignores
solar, water and wind energy which is likely to be the safest and far from
insignificant today and in the future.

~~~
toong
1\. I think hydro doesn't score so good after
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam)

2\. Wind is not without issues either:
[http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/AccidentStatistics.htm](http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/AccidentStatistics.htm)

3\. And even more moralities with people falling down their rooftop installing
solar panels.

~~~
mcv
The problem with these kind of statistics is that mere numbers mean very
little, because the sources of the deaths are very different. Do you count
roof work? Do you count mining? Do you count the creation of construction
materials and _their_ mining? How do you count cancer from slightly increased
nuclear radiation? Especially when it's hard to prove whether it really comes
from nuclear waste, but it certainly could be? And are birth defects deaths?
Are miscarriages?

These are things that need to be addressed for these kind of statistics, or
you end up comparing apples to oranges.

Still, I think everybody can agree that the death rates for coal and oil are
insane. However you compare nuclear vs solar, coal and oil need to go.

------
westurner
Apparently the deaths are justified because energy.

Are the subsidies and taxes (incentives and penalties) rational in light of
the relative harms of each form of energy?

"Study: U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending"
[https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-
news/fossil-f...](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fossil-
fuel-subsidies-pentagon-spending-imf-report-833035/amp/)

> _The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in
> the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was
> $599 billion._

> _The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It
> accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices and how
> much consumers would pay if prices fully reflected supply costs plus the
> taxes needed to reflect environmental costs” and other damage, including
> premature deaths from air pollution._

IDK whether they've included the costs of responding to requests for help with
natural disasters that are more probable due to climate change caused by these
"externalties" / "external costs" of fossil fuels.

~~~
leereeves
Energy saves lives so some risk probably is justified.

~~~
westurner
Why isn't the market choosing the least harmful, least lethal energy sources?
Energy is for the most part entirely substitutable: switching costs for
consumers like hospitals are basically zero.

(Everyone is free to invest in clean energy at any time)

~~~
leereeves
Switching costs for the entire society are far from zero.

~~~
westurner
100% Renewable Energy
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy)

> _The main barriers to the widespread implementation of large-scale renewable
> energy and low-carbon energy strategies are political rather than
> technological. According to the 2013 Post Carbon Pathways report, which
> reviewed many international studies, the key roadblocks are: climate change
> denial, the fossil fuels lobby, political inaction, unsustainable energy
> consumption, outdated energy infrastructure, and financial constraints._

We need to make the external costs of energy production internal in order to
create incentives to prevent these fossil fuel deaths and other costs.

------
codingdave
I've worked in oil & gas, and the deaths come primarily from human error,
which increases as operations scale up, as you end up hiring people who are
not already experienced at running plants, and have to train them up --
mistakes happen.

So what we need to ask to be sure nuclear is really as safe as the number
makes it appear is... what happens when we scale up and introduce more new
employees, and more errors? What is the worst thing that can happen if a new
worker makes a bone-headed move and causes an incident?

I honestly don't know the answer, and would be interested in hearing more. But
I'm not going to be sold on nuclear safety by a chart, not when I've seen how
crazy hard it is to keep a large operations staff in energy plants safety-
conscious enough to prevent accidents, injury, and deaths. These are human
issues that need to be addressed to be sure safety levels stay on track.

~~~
Ettvatre
> I've worked in oil & gas, and the deaths come primarily from human error

The article says:

> Deaths related to air pollution are dominant, typically accounting for
> greater than 99% of the total.

I understand that you are talking about a subset of the data the article are
talking about. But if 99% is due to pollution then it sounds like your subset
is not so relevant.

~~~
codingdave
Thank you, I had missed that.

While that does strengthen the point of the chart, it doesn't invalidate my
concerns. It was almost 10 years ago now, but I recall an incident that made
national news, when a gas hub in Texas exploded, and there were impressive,
but sobering, photos of flames shooting 500 feet into the air from the
resulting fire. That is one worst-cases for oil & gas. Some of the spills
we've had from tankers are other worst-cases. And they do happen.

So again, I need to know what the worst-case for nuclear is before I'm going
to be sold on it. Because if it scales to the capacity of our gas industry...
something will happen. And we need to know what it will be and be ready to
handle it.

~~~
solveit
That's nowhere near a worst case for oil&gas. It's the most visible
spectacular case. The worst case is mass extinction events due to climate
change. The worst case that's actually happened is a million deaths/yr due to
air pollution. Accidents are barely a blip in the calculus, the bulk of the
damage happens even when everything is working as intended.

~~~
codingdave
You don't have to sell me on the poisonous nature of oil & gas. It is a given
that those are bad ideas and need to go away. The real debate is
wind/solar/geothermal/hydro. Once pollution and climate change is removed from
the equation, accidents absolutely come into the calculus.

------
KirinDave
So, it's fairly obvious this was written with a pro-Nucelar bent, which is
disappointing for something branded with YC. Even if we ignore that when
nuclear power plants DO fail, they're cataclysmic in consequences. Simply put,
there are only so many 500-year-no-go-zones we can create in our environment
before the problems presented by them start to scale upwards into places we
don't understand.

What I think is most interesting is that very few entrepreneurs are talking
about the exciting world of a more distributed grid. Distributed Grids running
on renewables with backup from a larger centralized grid is a really
interesting idea, and it's one where long term servicing costs will be pretty
big.

It'd be a good time for folks in SV to think about swinging at the big
formerly-state-subsidized behemoth power company. Because the alternative is
that they make their case that they need state subsidization while still
maintaining autonomy.

I don't really understand why so many folks like to think it's a clever take
to say, "Actually Nuclear is quite safe." Even if that's the case, it is
dependent on having a centralized power grid (which is very hard to maintain
and occasionally causes wildfires), it depends on fuel mining and manufacture
(also not a very safe proposition for those involved, uranium mining has
similar risks to coal mining), and the proliferation of these fuels also
proliferates an important component of the means by which weapons that turn a
city to ash in mere moments are manufactured.

Compare this to the plunging cost of solar and wind. It just... doesn't seem
very smart except for the most densely stacked industrial regions.

~~~
scrumper
It isn’t written from a pro-nuclear perspective: it’s just data, with
attributed sources. And the majority of those nuclear deaths are from uranium
mining.

~~~
KirinDave
There is an associated article with an obvious bias.

~~~
leereeves
It's pretty clear you're starting with an anti-nuclear bias. Are you sure
you're not just seeing a neutral article through the lens of your own bias?

~~~
KirinDave
Can you clarify which of the following you mean: "It is biased to point out
bias in the writing accompanying this chart?" Or "It is biased to point out
the facts regarding the realities of nuclear cleanup" or "It is biased to
point out that other rather significant forms of energy generation were left
out of this comparison without any justification?"

For the record, I am biased against centralized power grids. I'd rather see
decentralized power grids and as a strategy for those I think RTG piles are a
safe and well-understood technology for backstopping other forms of small
scale renewable power.

Fission is just... it's too expensive for what it is. It centralized too much
power with states. It's very dangerous when its safety is inevitably bypassed
by industry that could never be held accountable for the tens of thousands of
years of human no-go zones that it can produce.

~~~
scrumper
So your decentralized grid involves large-scale deployment of RTGs? Have you
thought about the security implications of that? It makes it massively easier
for bad actors to obtain fissile materials.

At least it's feasible to provide high security for centralized nuclear
facilities. (In the UK there's even a special police force for this.)

------
VikingCoder
I'd love to see "Clean Coal" on here.

And solar, wind, hydro-electric, thermo-electric, etc.

~~~
hannob
"Clean Coal" is a meaningless marketing term. Unless you specify what that
means. (It used to mean CCS - which doesn't exist at scale - or more efficient
coal plants - which probably only makes a very minor difference, because
they're still terribly inefficient.)

~~~
VikingCoder
I know. I want it called out on the graph.

------
batisteo
I'm pretty sure uranium extraction in Africa is killing. Doen't seems to be
taken in account in this 12yo study.

------
base698
.

~~~
Causality1
No, one couldn't. Chernobyl was a perfect storm of negligence and incompetence
and still killed less than 60 people, including fallout cancer deaths. Nuclear
reactors are not bombs.

~~~
lm28469
I'm all for nuclear but let's be honest here, many more people died
prematurely because of Chernobyl, the nuclear cloud were all over Europe, the
thousands of people who were on site to contain the disaster got very high
doses of radiation too.

[https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-
cher...](https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-
and-fukushima)

~~~
roenxi
> In the published estimates below, studies have utilised a methodology termed
> the 'linear no-threshold model'

The numbers already round to 0 when compared to pretty much any other
industrial process we undertake. Then on top of that the model used is the
LNT. That model needs extraordinary evidence to support its wild assumptions.
I haven't been able to find a source for that evidence yet.

LNT is a paranoid model. Under the LNT, building with granite is killing
people through increased radiation. The airplane industry has probably killed
more people with radiation under the LNT model than Chernobyl has. We have yet
to picket airports for their radiation risk.

The unproovable deaths from Chernobyl may as well be ignored. We don't count
that sort of statistical hypothesizing for _any_ other _anything_ that is
comparable to building a power plant.

------
Tepix
I don't believe in the numbers the nuclear industry publishes. As long as you
don't drop dead inside one of their reactors, they don't count nuclear energy
as the reason (not surprising, if i were in their shoes I'd probably do the
same).

By the way, why are solar panels and wind turbines missing in the list? It's
awfully misleading.

\--

Edit due to downvotes:

As an example, here's a study that came to the conclusion that leucemia is
twice as common as normal among small children growing up near nuclear plants
in Germany:
[http://doris.bfs.de/jspui/handle/urn:nbn:de:0221-20100317939](http://doris.bfs.de/jspui/handle/urn:nbn:de:0221-20100317939)
Why is noone counting the resulting deaths in these statistics for nuclear
energy?

~~~
lm28469
Even if you take the most pessimistic estimate of the worst nuclear accident
we experienced (Chernobyl) you top at <100k related death [0]. A far cry from
the annual 4+ million death due to outdoor air quality [1].

Outside of direct exposure to radioactive material there isn't much going to
kill you.

The very big difference is that a functioning nuclear plant doesn't kill
people whereas the oil/gas industry kills by default even in the best case
scenario.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster)

[1]
[https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/](https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/)

~~~
dsfyu404ed
If you're gonna talk air quality and radiaton you need to use YPLL (or some
other metric that considers age). Wheezing into the grave at 70 or getting
cancer at 65 is very different in terms of impact than a 25yo that falls off a
roof installing solar or gets run over by heavy equipment in a mine.

Of course nobody uses age adjusted metrics because you can't make grandiose
"bazillions of lives lost" claims using them.

~~~
lm28469
The vast majority of people will never encounter any radiation caused by a
radioactive plant in their life, so this line of thought doesn't even make
sense.

> 91% of the world population live in area where air quality exceeds WHO
> guideline [0]

If I had the choice I'd go for a < 0.01% chance of dying of radiation related
death over a 100% chance of slowly but surely destroying my respiratory
system.

And let's be real, accident related deaths are a drop in the bucket.

[0]
[https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/](https://www.who.int/airpollution/en/)

