
Deaths per unit of energy for various sources - johndcook
http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/2e5d4dcc4fb511e0ae0c000255111976/comments/2e70ae944fb511e0ae0c000255111976
======
ghshephard
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...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html)

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

~~~
mistermann
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?)

~~~
code_duck
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?

~~~
krschultz
Haven't people been visiting Pripyat and finding it to be habitable to a lot
of species of life? It won't be a wasteland for 10,000 years. And Chernobyl
was so pooring designed it is not analagous to everything else (as was the
damn that killed 50,000 people).

~~~
gamble
Are you joking? It's only 'habitable' in the sense that wildlife doesn't drop
dead the moment it enters the exclusion zone. The animals are still receiving
substantial amounts of radiation, and will continue to suffer for decades. The
worst areas will be dangerous for centuries.

~~~
iujyhgtfhj
Towns like Picher, Oklahoma, will still be toxic when the sun goes out.

Radioactive Ceasium and Strontium are a pain for a few decades - lead, mercury
and cadmium are for ever.

~~~
gamble
Non-sequitor. Just because something else is bad doesn't make this situation
any better.

~~~
iujyhgtfhj
Oh my god they had a nuclear accident in Japan - we must shut down our nuclear
reactors and instead pump out many millions of tons of dangerous radioisotopes
and chemical poisons from new coal plants instead.

It's standard knee jerk procedure. We had a rail accident (the first in
10years) so the reaction was to close a bunch of inter city lines for months
while they checked everything. Where did all those extra travellers go? onto
the roads!

I hope the government doesn't hear about the problems with Toyota in america -
they would then ban ABS and give everybody Tiger tanks to commute on.

~~~
code_duck
I think most people who are opposed to nuclear are hoping governments and
industry will seriously pursue more sustainable and non-toxic sources of
power, not coal.

------
jshen
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?

~~~
yummyfajitas
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>

~~~
jshen
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.

~~~
dstorrs
> I also fail to see how dumping our waste on generations to come for our own
> selfish desires is less bad.

You're assuming that just because we consider it waste, they will too.
Personally, I'm expecting that at some point some use will be found for the
'waste' -- maybe highly efficient reprocessing or materials for low-radiation
(think 'easily traced') medical nanobots -- at which point future generations
will thank us profusely for generating such convenient stockpiles of the
stuff.

~~~
jshen
I'll begin dumping all of my garbage on your lawn. I expect at some point you
will find a use for this "waste". At some point you will thank me profusely.

------
pinko
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.

~~~
ghshephard
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.""

~~~
pinko
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.

~~~
borism
that's what nuclear fanatics here don't seem to get.

as I argued in other thread about the original numbers, what matters aren't
direct deaths attributed to one or the other energy source.

what matters (to me at least) is how different energy sources affect our
_quality of life_. I suspect nuclear isn't the worst offender here, but it
isn't all butterflies and roses either.

For the record: I am _responsible_ nuclear fission proponent.

~~~
NickPollard
Wikipedia[1] cites a claim that France (which generates on the order of 80% of
it's power from Nuclear) has the cleanest air of any industrialised nation,
due in large part to the lack of fossil fuel burning plants.

I for one think that's a reasonable trade to make for a few nuclear waste dump
designated areas being radioactive until we can get some breeder reactors or
similar to break them down more quickly.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power>

~~~
borism
really? Some better [citation needed].

2002:

 _Scandinavia and the Baltic countries had the cleanest air in Europe this
summer while Greece, France and Italy faced the worst smog levels, said the
European Environment Agency (EEA)._

<http://www.am.gov.lv/en/?id=574>

And BTW, I am fully in favor of replacing coal plants with nuclear.

~~~
tjogin
Scandinavia is mostly driven by nuclear and hydro power. So the point still
stands.

~~~
borism
Hydro - yes. Nuclear - no.

Denmark and Norway - no nuclear.

Sweden - 45% nuclear.

Finland - 30% nuclear.

~~~
tjogin
Uh, you're saying nuclear no, but then nuclear 45% of Sweden and 30% of
Finland, so you must mean nuclear yes.

------
billybob
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.

~~~
jhamburger
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.

~~~
holri
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.

~~~
gmarceau
Nope. Even when you count per hours, planes remains vastly safer than car --
more than 4 times safer.

Deaths per billion hours Bus: 11.1 Rail: 30 Air: 30.8 Water: 50 Van: 60 Car:
130 Foot: 220 Bicycle: 550 Motorcycle: 4840

Deaths per billion kilometres Air: 0.05 Bus: 0.4 Rail: 0.6 Van: 1.2 Water: 2.6
Car: 3.1 Bicycle: 44.6 Foot: 54.2 Motorcycle: 108.9

Reference:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_safety#Accidents_and_incide...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_safety#Accidents_and_incidents)

~~~
holri
This of course depends on the sources. Mine are the official Austrian
statistics. With your sources bus is still more than 2 times safer per hour.

------
joblessjunkie
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
_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
I redo the space shuttle risk using the data from
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_shuttle_missions#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_shuttle_missions#Flight_statistics)

    
    
      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.

------
michaelchisari
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
Chernobyl: the nuclear disaster to end all nuclear disasters?

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

~~~
pjscott
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.

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

------
pedalpete
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.

~~~
pjscott
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...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html)

~~~
eliasmacpherson
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.

------
kalendae
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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
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)

------
A1kmm
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/...](http://manhaz.cyf.gov.pl/manhaz/strona_konferencja_EAE-2001/15%20-%20Polenp~1.pdf)).

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.

------
jvdongen
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.

------
chrismealy
Are they counting Iraq War deaths?

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

------
kragen
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.

------
porkbird
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.

------
ecounysis
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.

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

------
varjag
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.

------
pbhjpbhj
It's just a visualisation of [http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-
by-energy-so...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-
source.html) 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-Fish
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.)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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 ...

------
foresterh
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
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

~~~
foresterh
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.

------
saidulislam
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
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
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.

------
lysium
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
> 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/>

~~~
lysium
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.

