[moxie]

I think there's a lot of uncertainty in talking about Chernobyl, since most of the information published by the Soviet authorities was intentionally incorrect or misleading, designed to downplay the significance of the accident.

One thing I've found interesting in talking about Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they confirm the idea that nuclear power is still relatively "safe" even in case of disaster.

I don't know what the exact numbers are, and I'm not sure if any of us will ever know for sure, but one of the documentaries I like is Discovery's "Battle of Chernobyl," since it includes a lot of interviews with people who were actually there and participated in the events. They interview Nikolay Antoshkin, the colonel general in charge of the helicopter operations there, which is where the 600 pilot deaths number comes from. I'm more inclined to believe that account than what the state published.

[arcticbull]

> One thing I've found interesting in talking about Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they confirm the idea that nuclear power is still relatively "safe" even in case of disaster.

I believe the IAEA report (which you can read yourself) put together by the United Nations and relevant affected governments in the mid-2000s. It shows that over the entire course of time 4,000 people will have died prematurely as a result of the accident at Chernobyl (including people who killed themselves because they feared they were "contaminated"), and between 31 and 54 people died between both the explosion itself and to acute radiation injuries in the immediate aftermath -- including the helicopter pilots you mention. [1]

I also believe that 7.3 million people die every year as a direct result of the burning of fossil fuels. [2]

Everything is trade-offs. The accident was bad, and it could have been an awful lot worse. On the other hand, it's important we not lose sight of the big picture. When humans get hurt, they learn why, and move forward - this should not be an exception.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents

[nostromo]

Most of those 7.3 million deaths are from people burning local fuels (wood, trash, dung, etc.) for heating and cooking.

It's seems unfair to compare subsistence, low-tech energy (dung burning) to nuclear energy.

It makes a lot more sense to compare high-tech nuclear energy with high-tech renewables (with storage).

[mrpopo]

> It makes a lot more sense to compare high-tech nuclear energy with high-tech renewables (with storage).

If you really want to compare that, rooftop solar actually has a significant risk of worker death. I am willing to bet that, per TWh, there would be significantly more deaths with solar than nuclear.

[sifRAWR]

Your hypothesis made sense to me, so I did a bit of research to try and back up the claim.

No idea about the biases or accuracy of the information supplied in these links, so take it with a grain of salt, but they seem to support the idea that Solar (installation) is indeed more dangerous than Nuclear per TWh.

Too many factors to call it more "dangerous", and also disingenuous because the absolute worst case scenario for solar power doesn't have the possibility of negatively impacting millions of peoples lives.

But hey, this is a bit of a fun fact that might stop people demonising nuclear energy so much.

Sources:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/06/update-of-death-per-te... https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

[TheOtherHobbes]

The absolute worst case scenario for Chernobyl would have happened if the corium had melted through to the water table and caused a huge steam explosion. This was narrowly avoided. It's hard to estimate the impact but at the very least a much larger area would have been heavily irradiated.

Deaths/TrKWhr isn't a useful measure, because nuclear has a binary risk profile. When it goes badly wrong it does a lot of lasting economic damage, in ways that other energy sources don't.

There's also no way to compare "TCO" like for like because coal etc are nasty immediate pollutants, while nuclear waste remains a problem for a very long time.

The real problem with nuclear isn't the technology, it's the trustworthiness of the management culture around it. If the industry was a byword for truth, honesty, and straight dealing it would be perceived in a much less negative way.

That doesn't seem to be how the industry operates.

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

[godelski]

Interestingly enough Wiki notes a EU study[0][1] that shows that nuclear and wind are some of the cheapest energy sources when you price in environmental effects and health costs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_co...

[1] http://www.externe.info/externe_2006/exterpols.html

[goto11]

People "demonizing" nuclear typically do it because of the potential devastating consequences of an accident, and the uncertainty of storing waste for thousands of years. Not because they think nuclear have a high death toll in everyday use.

[stevenjohns]

But the potential devastation isn’t rooted in reality - anyone can assume the worst could happen, and when it did happen in Chernobyl the numbers haven’t been very high.

The alternatives, even the green ones like hydroelectric, have dwarfed nuclear-related deaths hundreds, if not thousands, of times over with single catastrophes[0].

Arguments against the storage of nuclear fuel usually don’t understand how little waste there is and, even still, burying a problem for 200 years while we figure out how to deal with it is an infinite number of times better than dealing with the fallout of global warming by not shifting to nuclear energy.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

[godelski]

Well let me give you another number then. 1 million deaths, annually, are linked to coal ash.

[paganel]

Are you telling me that this chart [1] is pure correlation with no causation whatsoever? Do you live in the area affected by the Chernobyl disaster? (I do). Or do you live half a world away with no direct health-related stake in this? Even so, why are you content with hiding under the rug these "statistical anomalies"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#/media/File...

[zaroth]

The 7.3 million figure is like the “12 years left” figure, that is to say it requires a little work to understand where it came from and what it means.

“Ambient air pollution was responsible for 4.3 million deaths” and “3.8 million deaths every year as a result of household exposure to smoke from dirty cookstoves and fuels”.

I haven’t dug into the indoor figures but a quick reading suggests that attributing the death toll to fossil fuels in general is misreading the report.

For example, ”91% of those premature deaths occurred in low- and middle-income countries” so the bigger problem is how the fuel is used - since richer countries actually use more fuel per capita.

Cooking with coal on an open stove in an unventilated room will slowly kill you from the carbon particulate. Apparently this is a large percentage of the indoor pollution death statistic. The problem here is coal stoves specifically not fossil fuels in general.

The outdoor statistic is a bit more interesting. The Model they use to calculate the number [1] basically takes a curve of PM exposure level across populations around the world, multiplied by an integrated exposure-response (IER) function.

Over the last few years they have lowered the counterfactual concentration (the point below which PM has no efffect) and steepened the IER.

Through this methodology they can arrive at a death rate of nearly 5 million without a single death certificate ever actually stating “air pollution”.

They do this by trying to tease out the damage done by PM by observing places where PM has changed and then looking at how mortality rate due to cancers and such also changed.

It’s an interesting figure, but in a sense misses the forest for the trees.

Particulate matter definitely has adverse heath effects. One study said an average shortening of life expectancy in Europe of 9 months. But the overall “industry” that creates PM (everything from cars kicking up dust on the road to smokestacks) also is responsible for the modern world where ~8 billion people can survive. Is PM shortening lifespans? Or is PM drastically extending lifespans (e.g. preventing mass starvation) while simultaneously also somewhat shortening an idealized life that could have magically gotten everything it needed to survive except without any PM.

If you are going to publish a number of the harm of PM by extrapolating from an IER and PM levels, it would also be useful to consider the net effect, which would be staggeringly positive in terms of lives saved and lengthened not shortened.

[1] - https://www.who.int/airpollution/data/AAP_BoD_methods_March2...

[arcticbull]

> If you are going to publish a number of the harm of PM by extrapolating from an IER and PM levels, it should be a net effect, which would be staggeringly positive in terms of lives saved and lengthened not shortened.

Respectfully I disagree. You've conflated the primary effect and the side-effect. The primary effect is energy is generated and energy is what has improved our lives. The side-effect is PM exposure which is killing us. Burning fossil fuels isn't extending anyone's lives. Generating energy is. If we can trade it out for a better method the same extension of life persists, and the premature deaths drop. Thus, we can factor it out. The truth is, it does both things, and we need to switch it out for an energy source which only does the former without doing the latter.

Imagine for a second a power plant that generates electricity but once in a while it murders a random passer-by. It think it's fair to say the power plant is responsible for those murders, and we can talk about replacing it without having to talk about all the good it's doing.

[zaroth]

I actually agree with you and edited my comment before reading your reply to soften that specific part (should be -> could be useful to consider)

I think the interesting thing which the statistic misses is that people are still choosing to light that stove with coal even though the PM it creates is damaging their health, because it’s the least worst option.

Outside PM is different because it can come from the factory down the road producing widgets for some other country, but the fact that inside PM contributes to nearly the same negative health impact, that is not a government intervention / negative externality! Starve with clean air or cook food for your family. This isn’t a fossil fuel problem, and isn’t something that can be switched out in any sense.

A makeshift stove can burn coal and cook a meal. You’ll never match that with any non-emitting technology because it will always require some investment where literally none is available.

[arcticbull]

Yeah, I think that's totally reasonable and I should have addressed that in my reply too. There's definitely a big difference between PM released by factories and that of individuals cooking/heating/etc with coal.

> A makeshift stove can burn coal and cook a meal. You’ll never match that with any non-emitting technology because it will always require some investment where literally none is available.

True, I just hope that cheaper, clean power (whatever that means) allows more people to make the healthy choice.

To be clear, the other points I agreed with in large part.

[tehsauce]

This is the proper analysis

[tptacek]

I see interviews with Antoshkin about the lack of precautions taken for the pilots, in stories citing the "600" number as the total number of pilots involved, but nothing establishing 600 fatalities.

I screened the Discovery documentary you're referring to and watched all the segments in which Antoshkin appears. It's the narrator of the special who claims 600 helicopter pilot fatalities, not Antoshkin himself, unless I've missed something. Can the 600 number be squared with the number of helicopters involved (the documentary claims 60, I think) and the number of missions the pilots fly (dozens per day), and with the fact that you can find some of those pilots giving interviews just a few years ago?

[rootusrootus]

> One thing I've found interesting in talking about > Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often > willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they > confirm the idea that nuclear power is still relatively > "safe" even in case of disaster.

I figure it balances out the people who are extremely critical of nuclear power and accept that there could actually have been a 5 megaton explosion.

I'm not a strong advocate of nuclear power myself, but I tend to discount the value of Chernobyl as an argument for/against nuclear power. It was a terrible design in addition to being old, had little in the way of containment, and the games the operators were playing with the plant were off-the-charts stupid. Compared even to the oldest commercial Western-design reactors, it is a horrid contraption.

[arcticbull]

And even still the remaining 3 reactors at the Chernobyl plant continued to operate safely, the last one closing in the year 2000. There’s a number of RBMK reactors in use today; they learned from the accident and patched up the issues. Not to say the new western reactors aren’t better, the very much are.

[guscost]

Even the older western reactors were much better. Look up “positive void coefficient” and “passive nuclear safety”.

[arcticbull]

I believe it. In this case I think it's fair to say the results speak for themselves.

[speaker1]

Sure, but Fukusima incident speaks itself for their safety.

[guscost]

After a magnitude 9 earthquake, one of those older reactors at Fukushima "just" melted down, and core material probably hasn't escaped secondary containment (unfortunately the water pumped through the core is a different story). In contrast, during a botched safety test the reactor core at Chernobyl exploded.

The impact to the surrounding environment was many orders of magnitude greater at Chernobyl, which is what happens when the reactor core explodes.

~50 people died at Chernobyl from acute radiation exposure in the first few weeks, and a couple employees actually got exploded. Lots of people died in the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, but none like that.

Please consider how you're hurting folks' ability to make good decisions when you spread misleading absolutist nonsense.

[Tepix]

I don't see thousands of people adversely affected by renewable energy for years (due to cancer, displacement and other health issues). Only counting deaths does not paint an accurate picture.

Besides, noone knows the total cost of nuclear energy because noone has solved the nuclear waste problem for 100,000+ years. There are likely to be billions of dollars needed to be spent on this long term issue.

[orbital-decay]

Sorry but 600 pilot fatalities in the Chernobyl disaster is just plain nonsense, no matter what you might believe about soviets.

> I think there's a lot of uncertainty in talking about Chernobyl, since most of the information published by the Soviet authorities was intentionally incorrect or misleading, designed to downplay the significance of the accident.

You seem to be assuming malice when there's mostly incompetence, and giving too much credibility to huge organizations; they aren't perfectly coordinated black boxes in control of everything they are trying to do. Chernobyl disaster has been cross documented top to bottom in that regard. Most of the missing info was due to corruption, see the song "Я вынес из зоны" by Sergey Uryvin as an example. There was an attempt to downplay the incident early on, but one simply cannot hide the disaster of that scale. Neither there was much desire to do this internally, after the scale became apparent. Besides, most of the information wasn't coming from authorities.

The only reason one can be uncertain about such ridiculous claims is unfamiliarity with the details of the disaster, and/or lack of understanding of culture at the time and also the language.

[roenxi_]

1) If you prefer we can multiply all the numbers by 100, nuclear is still better than what we actually did over the past 40 years since Chernobyl.

2) We have actual evidence of how a similar-era nuclear reactor fails in Fukushima (it was built in the 80s iirc). If we write off the Soviet numbers as misinformation, then using a strictly evidence-based approach and extrapolating from Fukushima, their numbers were overexaggurating the damage.

I doubt they were exaggurating, I think Chernobyl was a lot nastier than Fukushima, but as a commited nuclear advocate, the idea that I'm relying on Soviet numbers is a misrepresentation. I'm relying on the divide-by-40-years, the linear-no-threshold-model-is-not-sensible and the by-gum-we-know-a-lot-more-about-how-to-design-things-safely-since-we-are-now-in-2020 arguments (3 sig. fig). Also the this-thing-is-millions-of-times-more-energy-dense-than-anything-else-it-is-amazing-we-are-talking-orders-of-magnitude-improvment-your-brain-probably-can't-imagine-that-without-special-training motivating factor.

[effie]

Fukushima is 60's design, launched in 1971-75.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and...

[pippy]

> since most of the information published by the Soviet authorities was intentionally incorrect or misleading

There's also the opposite - cold war era propaganda trying to make the Russians seem backwards and primitive. The Soviet Union at the time was also opening up through glasnost.

On top of this, fossil fuel companies had a lot to gain through scaremongering around nuclear energy. It worked as very well as almost all planned nuclear power plants were mothballed.

[holoduke]

Discovery channel where every single documentary is staged, exaggerated and filled with useless emotions. Even the department of information in the Soviet Union is more reliable than that.

[BurningFrog]

Even if a thousands died from Chernobyl, it reflects the danger of the Soviet system, not of nuclear energy.

Just take the thing we learned in this week's episode: The design flaw on the RBMK reactors that caused the explosion had been observed before, but the report was classified to not put the glorious Soviet nuclear technology in a bad light!!!

In any remotely sane system, security risks are published and compensated for. The operators would have known about this risk, and not pressed the fateful AZ-5 button that caused the explosion

[speaker1]

I kinda miss your point. What then does the Fukushima incident reflect? Danger of Japanese system, lol? Or as the US contractors built it, the US system? As according analysis [1] the Fukushima station design itself did not consider the natural features of place. Chernobyl incident happened due to human error, according to same source.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Fukushima_and_Ch...

edit: formatting

[BurningFrog]

Fukushima was a very extreme natural disaster striking at a precise location to expose that the Fukushima reactors were not fully ready for a theoretically possible but never in 1000+ years of Japanese history observed earthquake.

15,897 people died in Japan that day, in buildings, roads, and vehicles. None from the nuclear incident. Yet no one talks about how the building, road, and vehicle security failed and wants to ban those.

Sure, the Fukushima security could and should have been better. The industry has learned the lessons, as it does from all accidents. But even if it didn't, we could easily absorb accidents like these for once in a 1000+ years and still be the cleanest energy form there is.

The comparison with Chernobyl is no comparison. That was an unforced error on a calm spring night. Operators doing experiments on badly designed reactors with known flaws they were not informed about because it would look bad to spread the information that pressing a certain button in a certain situation was risky. So they pressed the button, and the reactor exploded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

[vidarh]

We could have a Fukushima and a Chernobyl a year and it would still be a net improvement.

[BurningFrog]

In numbers of dead, you're right. In left behind "exclusion zones", it would become untenable.

[vidarh]

If the exclusion zones were made as excessive as Chernobyl, sure, but most of the Chernobyl exclusion zone is safe today, and most of the rest could be made safe with relatively little additional effort. With even a somewhat more reasonable exclusion zone, if that was the trade-off and we could save those who die from fossil fuel plants today, it'd be an easy choice for my part.

Of course it's not a realistic trade-off - it's "easy" to make plants vastly safer than either.

[paganel]

> I think there's a lot of uncertainty in talking about Chernobyl, since most of the information published by the Soviet authorities was intentionally incorrect or misleading, designed to downplay the significance of the accident.

I'd add the Romanian authorities to that list (I'm from Romania). Looking at the areas contaminated with Cesium-137 [1] one can see that Bulgaria is reasonably high in that list while Romania is no-where to be found, even though my country physically stands between Bulgaria and Chernobyl. The reason for that is that Ceausescu's regime was either too incompetent or too ideologically corrupt to correctly measure the Chernobyl disaster's effects on the country's population and ecosystem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Environment...

[onetimemanytime]

>>One thing I've found interesting in talking about Chernobyl is that advocates of nuclear power are often willing to accept the Soviet numbers as fact, since they confirm the idea that nuclear power is still relatively "safe" even in case of disaster.

The other posters mentioned the trade-off, or people die in plane crashes but many more would have died had they taken the car. Power needs to be generated one way or another...

Also, can we agree that the Chernobyl plant's design and management might have been lacking? New models are much safer.

[vidarh]

It's safe even if you take the worst case estimates. There's no need to accept the Soviet numbers to justify nuclear power.

[charlinski]

Hehe. Discovery channel? I would rather trust Soviet lies. Of course Soviet lied to cover up but i believe there was also symmetric campaign to exagerrate impact o Chernobyl. And the very hbo series is going to be rather scary propaganda. I read a lot on topic. After Chernobyl ca half a million people were relocated. Most of it just for psychical comfort as there was no risk involved.