[jjoonathan]

> in terms of cost, risks, environmental impact and power output, hydro is hard to beat if it's an option.

The death tolls tell a different story.

You aren't alone in this belief, but I've never really understood it. Banqiao dam bursts and kills 170,000 people: hydro is fine, we should do more. Chernobyl melts down and kills 30: nuclear power is inherently unsafe!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...

[drvd]

If a dam burst it kill a lot of people in short time. And 36 hours later rebuilding the infrastructure and towns begins.

If a reactor bursts it might not kill lots of people but it will devastate a large area for a very long time. We still do not know internal details about the Fukushima reactors because not even robots can go there.

A dam burst is a nightmare but it is a nightmare which is easy to clean up afterwards. A reactor catastrophe is a nightmare nobody knows how to clean up at all.

[mseebach]

Not quite. The majority of deaths from the Banqiao Dam burst was from subsequent epidemics and famine. The 11 million displaced also weren't exactly spending three nights in a hotel, then going home.

The construction of the Three Gorges (2012) dam flooded 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages, as well as 1,300 archaeological sites, and caused relocation of 1.24m citizens -- this is permanent and was done entirely on purpose, planned years in advance. Fukushima (2011) has a 20km exclusion zone that is now gradually being reopened a few years later, and 100,000 persons are still displaced.

One of these are acceptable collateral damage in the battle against climate change and the other is so bad that it constitutes conclusive evidence of the fundamental futility of the very technology itself. But you need to drink a lot of koolaid to see which is which on face value.

[fusiongyro]

Water is less scary than uranium. I agree with you, but it seems to be futile to convince people because there's just more movies about the harm of radiation than deaths by flooding. They keep rebuilding New Orleans and living in coastal Florida too.

[mseebach]

There's a chicken-and-egg situation here -- people are never going to get comfortable with nuclear while politicians are leading the FUD-charge.

[x0x0]

Yet we keep being told, "Oh no, it's safe this time. Really." and then Fukushima happens. Not to mention cleanup costs that started at $50B are now estimated to surpass $0.2T. I would be surprised if they don't double a couple more times before all is said and done, and that's fractions of a trillion dollars.

[mseebach]

Because compared to the cost of climate change, really is was safe this time, even after Fukushima. And a substantial fraction of the cost is due to extreme, very likely unwarranted caution, motivated by an unreasonable level of, exactly, fear.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/13/is-it-sa...

[fusiongyro]

The point I'm trying to make is that every system has risks and externalities, but for some reason they only get added up when we're talking about nuclear.

[mkesper]

You're not taking into account all the people who didn't die immediately but long before their time because of cancer.

“I know three women my age (between 30–40) who have experienced thyroid cancer. When one of them was surprised to get the diagnosis, her doctor told her they see women our age from the Soviet Union very frequently with the same. Not a coincidence.” — Z. K.

[mseebach]

Even the heavily agenda-driven Greenpeace report on Chernobyl deaths gives an upper limit of 200,000 (and if we're counting non-lethal casualties, the benchmark is 11 million displaced, so let's not go there) - so the absolute insane, totally reckless and avoidable nuclear disaster was in the worst case as bad as a hydro disaster that most people haven't even heard of because everybody had just decided that it doesn't matter. I think GPs point stands.

[boomboomsubban]

>You're not taking into account all the people who didn't die immediately but long before their time because of cancer.

Neither are you, you're speculating that they must exist in high numbers. That quote doesn't show anything, that could be a coincidence and frequently is a vague term for a very busy individual.

There has been a noticeable increase in thyroid cancer incidents in the area, but treated thyroid cancer is the second least fatal cancer. About 93% of people are alive thirty years later.

The highest peer reviewed studies estimate 27,000 deaths, still far below the Banqiao dam failure.

[ckastner]

The apparently most extensive study lead by the WHO even puts this at around 4.000 deaths [1].

[1] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

[boomboomsubban]

That's a writeup on the report from the Chernobyl Forum, a group created by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. The WHO was a member of the forum, and it won a Nobel Peace Prize, but there are some large issues with their projection methods.

That said, mine wasn't peer reviewed, and used the same method as the Forum report with some small tweaks. I didn't check my sources well enough, but I also can't find anything credible listing it far above that number.

[Shivetya]

and how many will die from starvation this year? Here's a hint, more than all those who died from nuclear accidents and dam breaks. You could total them all up and you might get to this year's starvation numbers.

The point is, there is no good outcome in a pissing match over what has the most negative impact when we routinely ignore any number of causes of death that we can be fixing but don't.

The threat to hydro is the reclamation of environment which tends to go unchallenged in many parts because of the feel good lobby.

[boomboomsubban]

>The point is, there is no good outcome in a pissing match over what has the most negative impact when we routinely ignore any number of causes of death that we can be fixing but don't.

That isn't the point, any time you mention nuclear power you get a swarm of people saying it's so unsafe and we need to move towards renewables. It's safer than the largest renewable source currently, and the UN considers some nuclear power a renewable source. The US doesn't, largely due to fossil fuel lobbying.

[slackingoff2017]

I think it should be kept in mind that the design of Soviet reactors was incredibly unsafe compared to their western counterparts. Fukushima had four meltdowns with only a few casualties.

[kodfodrasz]

This is not true in this form. There were unsafe soviet designs, but also there were unsafe western designs. Soviet designs were not all categorically unsafe. The design used at Chernobyl was a problematic design, but still many layers of human error had to be involved to create the accident.

Military reactor designs are generally less safe. Civilian designs were usually OK in the USSR.

[slackingoff2017]

Soviet era designs generally didn't use containment buildings. The RMBK (Chernobyl) in addition used graphite moderator with a positive void coefficient.

In combination this made such reactors intrinsically unsafe compared to their western counterparts, especially the positive void coefficient which can't be found in any western reactors as far as I'm aware.

Not all Soviet designs were as unsafe as RMBK but most were less safe than the average western reactor.

The meltdowns at Fukushima would have been as bad as Chernobyl if the design was similar. And the Fukushima reactors used an old western design dating from roughly the Chernobyl era. The cause of the meltdowns(loss of power) was similar.

The major difference was that Fukushima had containment buildings, no graphite in the core to burn, and a reactor designed to become less critical as the water boils (void coefficient less than 1.0).

[rb1]

It's not just the design(s), it is the implementation too.

At Chernobyl the powers at be (accountants?) got involved and decided to use flammable bitumen coverings on the roof of reactor 3, one would assume to save money. Unsurprisingly, the roof of reactor 3 caught fire.

[fusiongyro]

This is a good example of one of the failings at Chernobyl, but it took many of them coinciding to make the disaster as bad as it was.

They were required to use another material to build the roof, but they were also required to be finished with construction by a certain time. Soviet central planning led to a shortage of the proper roofing material. I'm sure the decision to use bitumen was either made in ignorance or with the assumption that it wouldn't matter for other reasons. Lots of mistakes were made with the assumption that the rest of the system was safe so it wouldn't matter.

[makomk]

If we do that, we also need to bear in mind that dams can be pretty safe if designed and operated correctly too.

[sampo]

> Fukushima had four meltdowns with only a few casualties.

The tsunami killed two workers, but the nuclear incident as such didn't kill a single person.

[dragonwriter]

> The tsunami killed two workers, but the nuclear incident as such didn't kill a single person.

The evacuation made necessary to avoid direct casualties from the nuclear incident killed 34.

[boomboomsubban]

I wouldn't say they were direct. That number is based on a comparison with a 1916 tsunami and earthquake death toll, and with around one of those thirty-four being under sixty that seems hard to calculate exactly.

[stickfigure]

All of this needs to be put in the context of a natural disaster that killed >15,000 people and leveled hundreds of thousands of buildings. The power plant really shouldn't lead the story here.

[eni]

May be because we are used to dangers of water, and floods for millions of years.

On the other hand, dangers of nuclear is a very recent thing. Common people's primary recollection point of nuclear is probably nuclear bomb.

[ralfd]

A hundredseventythousand?! :-o I have never heard of that dam accident.