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Is the implication that NIMBYs are generally speaking pro-renewables? Because my experience is that they fucking hate wind power because they think they look ugly.
If anything, nuclear is more popular with the NIMBY crowd around here since you need fewer of them, and the chances of them happening to be in your backyard is hence way lower.
Genuinely curious as to how and where we got the 140k deaths from renewables? It doesn’t appear on the paper you linked but it cites the structural collapse of a Hydroeletric Dam in china which caused 230k deaths.
I’m curious where you got the renewables figure from, is it from dam collapses (which are structural failures rather than a product of the power source) or is there some sort of issue with wind turbines where they magically sprout legs and march into Cities like Godzilla with PMS?
The chinese claim only 26k deaths some estimates place it at 260k deaths i’m not being exact its a ballpark. No one source tracks all deaths from renewables or fossil fuels or nuclear. 52 dams collapsed not one.
structural failures rather than a product of the power source
and what do you think collapsed the dams if not the power source?
Its mismanagement and failure to properly engineer for the situation on hand. Water is heavy the built weak dams to generate hydro power. They had a cascade of containment failure events. likely ~130k people died directly from this event. The other ~10k is a rough estimate on other deaths from similar incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures
so… hydroelectric power stations collapsed, thus renewable energies like wind turbines and solar power are bad?
If nuclear is too scary because it killed ~5k why is hydro considered safe when it has a kill count 100X higher?
that’s not the question here. Why are you throwing unrelated things in with hydro?
Ah yes the unrelated renewable sources that doesn’t make up 1/2 of all renewables production.
https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energyyour post wasn’t about percentage of generation, it was about quantity of deaths
You havent been attacked by a solar panel? Theyre awfully vicious in my area /s
Real answer is probably engineering issues, DIY, and a healthy dose of propaganda-number-fudging
I left solar off cause its the safest only deaths are falls and accidental electrocutions unless you count the odd deaths from being hit in the head or crushed.
When you burn the remains of these ancient life forms it releases their ghosts and that’s what kills so many when they breathe haunted air
Yeah there’s a reason I’m leaving the energy sector. The choice to use fossil fuels for grid in the last 50yrs has been and will continue to be a purely political one.
Absolute numbers are meaningless. It needs to be weighted against how much electricity was produced with each.
(And why is solar not mentioned? Plenty of solar installers die from falling off of roofs and whatnot.)
On the site there is also a direct comparison: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Grouping Hydro with other renewables is not very nice for wind and solar, which are pretty safe - with the added benefit of being cheaper than nuclear power.
And Nuclear is on par with the safety of solar and wind but you seem prompt to forget that. Your also not counting the cost incurred by renewables being non continuous sources of power. So yes it is cheaper to run a wind or solar farm untill you have to kick on the peaker plant cause the wind died and teh sun went down unless your in one of the super rare places that has pumped storage.
why is solar not mentioned >Because when a accident happens on a solar farm its one guy eating a few KW or falling not entire towns worth of people being erased.
Because when a accident happens on a solar farm its one guy eating a few KW or falling not entire towns worth of people being erased.
So, killing people one by one doesn’t matter – only matters if a lot of people die at once?
im not here to play the trolley problem with you. Solar is the safest. It just doesn’t run all day so to compensate we need something that does like nuclear.
DEATHS per TWH
im not here to play the trolley problem with you.
No, no – I’m here for the trolley problems!
Let’s fucking go!
You are the conductor of the train the switch track is ahead there are two lines of equal length between you and your destination both 1000km long. one is clear 999km and has one guy on the last km of track before your station. The other line has 83 guys tied up over the next 1000km basically one per 120km.
Sharks kill more people on a case by case basis.
Ive swam/surfed with sharks a few times, ive only seen a cow a couple times and been bit once by one.
I’d be willing to put money on the amount of deaths from fossil fuel power generation related accidents (mining coal isn’t exactly the safest job) is higher than the rest on its own. Even before the millions who’ve had their lives shortened by the pollution.
A cow is more likely to kill you than a shark (on land).
If you get into a pool with a cow, its not going to be nice to you either.
What if you put a shark and a cow in a pool?
In the majority of cases, the cow is more dangerous. Only 3 species of sharks are dangerous out of more than 500.
You get arrested for animal cruelty
For the cow or the shark?
Assume I’ve been careful enough to add enough salt for the shark to be happy, and it’s not deep enough to drown the cow
I see you are not familiar with sea cows.
Good thing that the petrochemical industry has not polluted the land air and water then…
Quoting 5k deaths when Chernobyl was a single incident probably contributing to most of them.
Most of the renewables count is one dam that failed in China too.
Yes, exactly. From your link:
1975 Banqian Dam failure: 26,000 dead from flooding, 145,000 dead from subsequent famine and epidemics, 11 million homeless.
That accounts for 122% of the number on the meme.
Only 30 people actually died as a direct result of the Chernobyl disaster. It’s very hard to know how much indirect deaths however. Or the overall impact on health for people in Europe. Estimations range from 4000 (WHO) up to 16000. No idea what OPs numbers include or don’t include.
That’s the trouble, just under 5000 deaths when you take away freak accidents (like the Japanese worker who was inundated with highly radioactive liquid) so those numbers must fall under a specific estimate.
The only reason it killed so many was the poop grade soviet response. Men were cheaper than machines. Saving face was more important than casualties. Russia still employs blocking brigades in Ukraine for the same beleifs the USSR mindset never died.
I never even considered that nuclear power isn’t renewable until now. 🤣 Can’t make more radioactive rocks if we run out.
Can’t make more radioactive rocks if we run out.
Well … unless you use your uranium reactor to create plutonium… But, you’re right – even then, it would eventually run out. So fission power isn’t renewable.
Fusion power, though… If you can make a viable fusion reactor ecosystem that can use regular ordinary hydrogen as its input fuel, then that’s at least psuedo-renewable. Yeah, eventually you’ll have converted so much hydrogen into helium that hydrogen might start running low. But I’m guessing you could power 100 earths for 10 billion years before you used even half the hydrogen available.
We can actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Breeder reactors don’t create fuel. They convert not-quite-usable isotopes into usable isotopes.
The process is analogous to “cracking” crude oil, converting heavy, less-usable components of the crude into lighter, more valuable fuels.
were not running out of thorium for the next few 10k years and we already have massive stocks as its a byproduct of rare earth element extraction. If we haven’t cracked fusion by then i guess were boned.
😮
Renewable nuclear energy?!
Pretty much the only way we will get to post consumerism space communism
Bah, that will never happen. It will be tried of course, but coalition forces will come a knocking on Revachol’s door to maintain the status quo.
Does that include like building the hoover dam or what?
Maintaining wind turbines is very dangerous. You’d think it’s falls but the leading one is electrical injuries (that may then lead to a fall).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure Mostly that but a few others.
Oh look, yet another person with an opinion on the LNT model for radiation exposure. As a safety professional, let me explain in really basic terms.
Everyone knows the model is pretty shit for long-term exposure to small doses. This isn’t news, and hasn’t been new for the past half century.
Similarly, we all know that chemical exposure levels are, for the most part, entirely bullshit. The exposure lengths are often based on 40 years of 40 hours a week, which is almost never true, and are even then very conservative.
The problem is that you can’t get accurate data. You can’t expose a couple of hundred people to hazardous conditions for decades, just to get better data. Everyone bitching about LNT for radiation or all sorts of chemical and biological exposure limits is overlooking one key detail.
We don’t have a better model. We can’t develop a better model in any remotely ethical way with current or near future technology either.
LNT is wrong
We know it’s wrong
We don’t know how to get to a different model
Let’s do nothing
Like, to clarify, this is your argument, yeah? Wouldn’t “the highest levels we know don’t cause excess deaths” be a better standard? You could claim that that isn’t particularly rigorous, but neither is LNT. And it allows more movement than “We must spend every penny we can on radiation mitigation, regardless of harm reduction”
Its the best model we have it may not be 100% accurate but it is better than nothing and assumes any radiation exposure is carcinogenic. However in gen pop (read healthy adults) our natural repair mechanisms are generally apt to repair damage caused by exposure to doses less than 5mSv/y
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1350448715000086
Exactly! The model is wrong for low level, long term exposure. We know that, it’s not new or shocking. But there isn’t anything else, and you can make a decent argument there won’t be anything else either, so we’re kinda stuck with it.
I’m failing to see why you seem to be implying that low level exposure is dangerous then as we both seem to agree the current limits are abundantly over cautious as evidenced by high natural background exposure studies.
I’m failing to see why you seem to be implying that low level exposure is dangerous then
I’m not?
I’m complaining about people who can only go “LNT bad, waaaah”. Put up something better to use.
I apologize for misinterpreting your comment
I know the whole “humans are not mice” thing … but wouldn’t tests on lab animals go a long way toward refining exposure models?
Yes, you can’t just assume that things will affect humans the same way they affect mice. And maybe a mouse model of long-term exposure is hampered by the short lifespans of mice. But surely that data, used in combination with the human data we already have, could help produce a more accurate, reasonable model?
In part, yes, that’s where many of our chemical and exposure limits come from.
But got it right in one. You can’t expose a mouse to decades of low level radiation, because mice rarely live to be 3. And you can’t just use 10 times the radiation because that’s exactly what you want to research.
What we have is pretty much how we know LNT is wrong, because we don’t really see more health risks in people who live in naturally more radioactive areas. But you can’t really construct a proper model from that kind of data. If you want to use a model for tens of millions of people over decades, even the tiniest change can make it go from “no harm at all” to “tens of thousands of corpses”.
https://www.cleanfutures.org/dogs-of-chernobyl/
cough cough
Sooo you base this on an opinion piece disguised as journal article in a low impact journal by a guy that has, let’s say interesting views on radiation damage and global warming.
96 cited references supporting a thesis is a opinion piece?
Sentences like “It is exploited in attempts to strangle development of atomic energy, the cleanest, safest and practically inexhaustible means to meet the worlds energy needs” or retelling of the events from his perspective or constant self citation make it a definitive opionion piece.
And I looked at random papers that cited this paper. Some are not even listed anymore and most others I randomly selected (~20) cited the paper for random facts (“release of around 70 tons of nuclear fuel”, “radioresistant microbes can tolerate a high radiation incidence”, “many of these communities have not, and will not, be repopulated due to the current radiation”) or outright contradicted the paper (“[his] assumptions [about cancer incidence] are in conflict with observations from Russia…”).
The amount of citations a paper has is absolutely useless information without context to whether the citations support/contrast or are incidental
Citations aren’t support.
Did you read any of the citations and find they disagreed with the journals findings?
