[nathantotten]

From Nate Silver: “This article is full of terrible statistical logic. Yes, it's hard to exactly quantify the risk of a highly deadly nuclear accident. By nature, tail events are rare. There is intrinsically some guesswork. But empirically the chances are very low.

The author also blatantly cheats by counting Fukushima as 3 separate accidents, as though they occurred independently from one another and didn't have a common cause like oh I dunno a magnitude 9 earthquake.“

https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1558530091860336640...

[mchusma]

This article is so flawed in so many ways. The most obvious issue is failing to show the actual safety statistics! I mean, at least start with the obvious starting point: that nuclear energy's record is that it is one of the safest forms of energy. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

There could be a disaster tomorrow 1000x worse than all previous nuclear energy disasters combined and it would still have been net-safer than coal (and this is excluding climate change effects, if you choose to include those.

I mean, if you want to then say "we got really lucky over the last 60+ years" I guess you can do that. In 1970, sure there were a lot more unknown risks. That was 52 years ago.

[arcticbull]

It's funny that hydro gets left off these charts, and when it's put on, it's super contentious. The worst hydro accident in history, the Bangqiao Dam failure killed ~200,000 people in one fell swoop. Wiped settlements off the face of the earth. [1]

Brown coal kills 100 people per TWh generated, coal on average about 25. [2]

Chernobyl killed 4000 (31 immediately, the rest were computed over the full course of time including forward looking estimates and counting the people who committed suicide because they feared they were 'contaminated'), Fukushima killed 0, Three Mile Island killed 0.

The US generates about 960TWh from coal per year, or 24,000 deaths. The US' coal consumption alone is equivalent to 6 Chernobyl's per year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

[ZeroGravitas]

That is a terrible link to use as evidence. You think discussion in 2022 about what the 'safest forms of energy' is should be based on a table from 2012 that doesn't include grid scale solar PV?

Lets look at some slightly more up to date numbers:

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

See, nuclear does fine. Basically drawing with the cheaper forms of energy this article is arguing for that are being rolled out in ever greater numbers around the world.

[arcticbull]

Also zero people died in the immediate aftermath of Fukushima, and one employee sadly eventually died years later of a cancer that's being attributed to it after receiving an annual dose of radiation in the incident. Counting it as anything other than an indication of how safe these plants have gotten is pretty disingenuous.

The data is clear, it's the safest form of energy in deaths per TWh generated. [1]

Anyways while we fitter around and argue, China is building 150 new reactors in the next 15 years, as much as the entire world has built in the last 35. To go with their massive solar deployment. Now that's an energy grid getting cleaned up neatly. [2]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...

[akamaka]

It’s really ridiculous to say that nuclear is the safest form of energy, when deaths at Chernobyl and Fukushima were prevented only by enormous cleanup efforts that will probably easily exceed $100 billion each. That doesn’t include the lost economic value of the exclusion zone, higher energy prices, etc.

Meanwhile, there has been a worldwide effort to spend billions of dollars upgrading existing reactors with enhanced safety equipment after Fukushima, which suggests that many nuclear operators had not been accurately calculating risk factors up to that point.

The more accurate statement would be to say that humans are capable of overcoming the inherent danger of nuclear energy, with enough money, will, and sacrifice.

[Teknoman117]

It's almost nutty to me that the number of workers who've fallen to their deaths from wind turbines per GWh is more than the number of people killed by nuclear power accidents and maintenance per GWh.

[cplusplusfellow]

> how safe these plants have gotten

Consider that Fukushima was designed in the 1960s and that virtually no reactors with designs that date more recently than that have been built, and we have an absolute quorum that this is the safest form of base load energy you can procure.

It’s saddening to me the green movement ruined our chances of clean energy and averted climate crisis in my lifetime.

[ZeroGravitas]

I was expecting something much less throrough than the article turned out to be based on this comment.

It's mostly the official evidence of people covering up incovenient safety facts in the article that I would say qualify as "terrible".

[atwood22]

The empirical changes are not very low. Assuming each plant has a uniform probability of failing once every 10,000 years, that comes out to an accident once every ~50 years in one of the ~500 nuclear power plants on Earth.

[AstralStorm]

That is ignoring the scale of an incident.

We had a major radiological incident in a Polish coal plant recently. That not counting a whole power plant block failing, contaminating water and emitting tons of fumes.

It still has not been fixed as the replacement block turned out to not meet new emission standards.