[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

[goto11]

I'm actually pro nuclear, but I get concerned when I see people downplaying the risks. The only way we can have safe nuclear is if people actually understand and take the risks seriously and put oversight and safeguards in place. E.g. saying that Chernobyl is the "worst that could happen" is just willfully ignorant. Chernobyl was bad but could have been a lot worse.

Even then, nobody even knows or agrees how many victims Chernobyl have claimed or will still claim.

Comparing nuclear-related deaths to the Chinese dam disaster is a bit disingenuous also. China did not have nuclear power in the same time period, so of course no nuclear-related deaths happened. But if China had had enough nuclear plants to replace dams and they had the same amount of construction errors, removal of safety features, bad management and a "once in 2000 years" unforeseen natural disaster - are you sure no nuclear accidents would have happened?

If you just compare absolute numbers, you will see walking is more dangerous than skydiving.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> anyone can assume the worst could happen, and when it did happen in Chernobyl

The miniseries makes it clear that the absolute worst outcomes at Chernobyl were prevented through huge effort: water was drained from the tanks under the meltdown, so there was no steam explosion that would have smashed the other reactor cores as well. The meltdown then did not burn through the concrete and into the groundwater table.

[vidarh]

Hydroelectric is not "green". It has devastating ecologic impact. It is better than some alternatives, but it also tends to destroy whole ecosystems.

[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