[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

[bombcar]

People are way more afraid of "secret silent invisible" killers than they are of "massive wall of water that wipes out everything in its path."

We're not wired correctly when dealing with rare occurrences.

[AstralStorm]

It so happens that hydrocarbon and coal power plant exhaust is a relatively invisible silent killer.

What people are afraid of is what they're told to be afraid of.

Maybe if we linked oil to fuel bombs or other explosives we'd get more headway.

[BrandoElFollito]

In general, we are not wired correctly to deal with concepts outside of our immediate neighborhood.

You can say with confidence that there are 3 people in a room. Or about 20. Or roughly 100-200-300. Or a lot. A stadium filled with 10,000 people is not different from one filled with 100,000 people - for someone who sees them for the first time.

A million times bigger does not mean anything. What is a hair x 1M? No idea.

I am an ex-physicist and I leaned to just look at the numbers and compare them when needed. 10^-18 is fine for something because I learned that but I cannot imagine it. Same for 10^23.

This is also the reason why homeopathy does not sound bad to people when it is written 100 CH on the bottle. 100 looks good. It is a 10^-100 dilution ratio.

[bee_rider]

Unless I'm misreading the chart, it seems to compare quite well to coal and oil, and in line with natural gas. Why would that be contentious?

The only quibble I'd have is that dams serve multiple purposes -- they could help prevent flooding and help out with agriculture. So in some sense a dam could be helping to save lives (apart from the obvious benefits of... having electricity). This seems like a unique perk.

[arcticbull]

The same is true of any bridge past a cliff edge.

[bee_rider]

Err, I'm not sure I follow sorry, is this an expression?

Edit: Oh -- I mean unique among power sources, not unique in general. Clearly other things exist to save people.

[duped]

One should be skeptical of the Chernobyl numbers. However even if it was 100x worse it's still a net win for humanity to invest in nukes.

[natmaka]

About Banqiao: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301436

[arcticbull]

I agree but one could say the exact same thing about the Soviet Union running tests at 2 in the morning at Chernobyl. So if you're willing to discount one it's only fair to discount the other no?

[natmaka]

The Banqiao dam suffered from major flaws then from decades of a fair amount of diverse very adverse conditions and absence of proper maintenance... and it kept up. Then it took a typhoon to finally destroy it. The grotesquely bad handling continued during the crisis which followed.

A few hours of improper use were sufficient to trigger a disaster at the Chernobyl's reactor, then the authorities' reaction (evacuation, liquidators...), albeit imperfect, was way better than at Banqiao.

[sofixa]

Chernobyl was of a flawed design with a very serious bug which was known (but classified), and it took a terrible very poorly coordinated drill to cause it to actually meltdown.

A more accurate comparison would be Fukushima, where the design was wrong (backup generators in the basement, in a flood prone zone) that survived a 9 on the Richter scale earthquake and was only damaged by the resulting tsunami (but only because the operator had ignored all the warnings about the placement and protection of backup power).

[natmaka]

The design flaw (every equipment has some...) did not condemn it: this Chernobyl's reactor was a RBMK, many RBMKs ran for decades after the disaster, and some do run right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#List_of_RBMK_reactors

Fukushima was designed to survive to earthquakes (all most things are in Japan). The mishap at this nuclear plant had, indeed, a very simple cause (a wall wasn't high enough) and it caused 2203 deaths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... then a very expensive cleanup (which is considered as far from perfect) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup

The Onagawa plant, more exposed, survived: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...

A non-maintained flawed huge dam copes with decades of major problems then a typhoon breaks it, while a nuclear plant missing a few bricks exposed to a huge tide breaks havoc in a few hours.

[yetanother4968]

The flaws in the RBMKs which were known before Chernobyl were fixed afterwards (with changes that had been proposed before Chernobyl) in the other reactors that were kept running, though. Not claiming that the RBMKs were flawless after the fact, but the specific flaw that led to the disaster was fixed.

[arcticbull]

There were 2203 deaths in the evacuation. Nobody died of radiation. If you had an oil plant with an inadequate levee you’d have had to evacuate too. This is at best tangential.

[arcticbull]

Give me a few hours and I guarantee you I can do just as much damage with a dam and I can with a nuclear reactor.

[natmaka]

I seriously doubt so.

[arcticbull]

I mean, Bangqiao wiped out numerous settlements. On the other hand you know the remaining RBMK reactors at Chernobyl continued to operate for years after the incident, the last one closing in 2000, and only after the international community conditioned funding for the New Safe Containment installation on it. There's still a few RBMK reactors operating - after the safety retrofits of course.