[eru]

Nuclear is held to a much higher safety standard (eg in terms of deaths per Joule) than any other form of electricity production. And that includes photovoltaic!

Nuclear is so safe--even fully factoring in the accident at Chernobyl--that people very occasionally falling off rooftops when installing solar panels is a bigger health hazard per Joule produced.

[ceejayoz]

No one has to evacuate a city when someone breaks a solar panel, though. Deaths aren’t the only parameter here.

Nuclear safety events are rare, rarely fatal, but can be very large in impacted area.

[eru]

Sure, please adjust the numbers for when we had to evacuate cities for nuclear scares. You can do calculations in 'quality adjusted life years' or some other ways to convert deaths and injuries and the cost of evacuations. It doesn't really change any conclusions, even with very pessimistic estimates. I just picked deaths, because they are relatively easy to get clear numbers for.

And don't get me wrong: solar is mostly fine anyway. It's coal that's really obnoxious. Both in the mining and in the burning, and in the accidents. (And to a lesser degree other fossil fuels.)

Photovoltaic is great! On a purely technical level both solar and nuclear can work well, nuclear perhaps a bit better and we had the technology for longer. On a practical level, solar will win, because people fear nuclear.

All electricity generation methods have engineering challenges. Eg solar has some big problems with daily variations and seasonal ones. We can solve the former with batteries, and the latter via big cables to (sub-) tropical regions.

Wind is also great! And we've only just started tapping waves and tides, too. And geothermal.

[jiggawatts]

Hydro dam failures can cause mass destruction and evacuations of entire cities. Nuclear is not unique in this aspect.

[ceejayoz]

I didn't say it was unique in this aspect; it's a difference between nuclear (and hydro) versus solar.

[pas]

nuclear safety has changed a lot. even though "walkaway-safe passively cooled" is not a technical term, but that's the design goal nowadays.

the real problem with nuclear is that the market is small, fragmented, US regulations are bad (as I elaborated upthread), so there's no real volume, no economies of scale, no healthy competition and there's basically no innovation even around the safety critical core...

[roenxi]

That isn't entirely fair.

1) The risk of evacuations happening is tiny and I'm not even convinced it is still a factor. We've not yet seen a messy meltdown of any plant designed and built after Chernobyl in 1986 and designs have changed a lot since then.

2) We don't know what a large-scale solar disaster looks like yet, but they might happen. For example I recall the Wikipedia page for the Year Without Summer [0] - we know that sometimes nature puts things in the atmosphere that might hamper solar in a way that nuclear can be designed around. IE, we might find we now have a risk of our power stations just deciding to produce less one year because of a usually unrelated disaster. Or maybe even stop if there is enough volcanic ash.

Plus renewable projects have had a more noticeable association with grid failures and mishaps than nuclear projects. We really don't have much experience with what mass solar failures (if they do exist, but they probably do) look like or how common they are.

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

[onethought]

It's not fair to point out very real impacts of Nuclear failures. But it's fair to compare to hypothetical-yet-to-occur "Mass Solar failures".

Solar relies on Light, just like life does. So you are kind of referring to mass extinction events. no?

[roenxi]

People can point it out, no worries. Disasters happen. But it isn't fair to claim that the risks of a nuclear disaster are worse than solar one. We haven't seen what a big solar disaster looks like yet because it has been a serious contender for ~5-10 years and it takes a few decades to figure out what a disaster looks like for any given form of power generation. For solar it could easily be quite bad and impossible to design out.

We have, to date, 0 methods of generating electricity at scale that are free of catastrophic failure modes. Solar will not be free of them either, and we don't really have the data yet to figure out how they compare relevant to nuclear ones (which, on balance, are the mildest of all the tested options!). It could do well, it could do badly, but it is not entirely fair to compare a known low risk in nuclear to an unknown risk in solar.

> So you are kind of referring to mass extinction events. no?

No, I'm not. I included a wiki link to the sort of thing I think could be a problem. It doesn't mention extinction.

[onethought]

But there was only evidence of a reduction in temperature in your link. Which would actually increase the effectiveness of Solar.

The idea of a global darkness for a significant period of time, would be extinction level.

[roenxi]

It was 1812; they'd barely discovered how to generate electricity. But note that they describe effects like a persistent dry fog dimming sunlight over NA. That would have an effect on solar production and that was half a world away from the eruption.

> The idea of a global darkness for a significant period of time, would be extinction level.

Your scenario not mine; and I don't know why it needs to be global. I'm talking a 12-month period with much less sunshine than normal. A scenario which other sources of power would be independent of but that solar would be very correlated with. Since the nuclear disasters we've seen so far can be escaped by walking away from them slowly, that sort of rare volcanic event influencing solar production would probably be more damaging than a nuclear plant meltdown. It could kill a lot of people.

It is similar to Fukushima where the fact that they had an unsafe nuclear plant that maybe roughly doubled the damage caused by the tsunami that hit Japan. Heavy solar use might do something similar with big volcanic eruptions. We don't really know because we've never tried mass solar use before so it is a bit hard to judge how bad catastrophic failures are vs. nuclear.

[duckmysick]

How much bigger of a health hazard is manufacturing/installing solar panels compared to nuclear? Let's say, per one terawatt-hour of produced energy, how many people die doing each?

[eru]

You can check some numbers (and sources) at https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml

[duckmysick]

I don't see solar mentioned on this page. And according to data found in a sibling comment, they are practically similar (0.03 nuclear vs 0.02 solar).

Maybe I read it wrong, but I don't see anything supporting the statement: "Nuclear is so safe--even fully factoring in the accident at Chernobyl--that people very occasionally falling off rooftops when installing solar panels is a bigger health hazard per Joule produced."

[cgravill]

Some comparisons of power generation by deaths here: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

[lazide]

First you’re going to need reliable worker safety data and population cancer rate data out of China (which makes almost all panels), which…. Good luck.

[onethought]

Is there a link between Solar production and Cancer? I mean there is a super obvious one with Nuclear.

[lazide]

Silicon Valley is full of cancer causing superfund sites due to improper disposal of chemicals used to produce semiconductors back in the 70’s and 80’s.

Solar panels are semiconductor based (the actual power generating parts are diodes, specifically).

If the chemicals are disposed of properly and workers wear the correct PPE, there are no measurable increases in cancer.

It’s a whole grab bag of chemicals, from TCE, Chromic Acid, Crystalline Silica, etc. etc. 130+ common ones with significant carcinogenic potential.

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209379112...]

It’s similar to Nuclear. If proper precautions are followed? No increased risk.

If not, well - I’m unaware of any of the actinides that are good for anyone to be around. For starters.

[eru]

Thanks for bringing up the concrete example of Silicon Valley's chemicals.

Btw, just to be clear: overall both solar power and nuclear are very good technologies in terms of overall harm done per Joule produced. Much, much better than coal or oil. But we shouldn't pretend that the harm per Joule is literally zero; and we should also be honest about what harm there actually is, and not just what sounds plausible or good.

[eru]

What is that 'super obvious' link of cancer with nuclear power?

There's lots of dangerous chemicals involved in both the production of solar panels (and semiconductor technology in general) and also in the production of nuclear fuel. And those have to be handled carefully and responsibly, to avoid causing problems like cancer.

Note: I'm deliberately not talking about radiation, because it's basically not a factor. You can live right next to a nuclear power plant, or even work in one, and your radiation exposure will be indistinguishable from background levels. Working as an airplane flight attendant (or even at the top of a really tall building or on a mountain) is much more dangerous in that regard.

According to https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-sources-and-doses even just living in Denver exposes you to a lot more radiation, because of the altitude.

[onethought]

Radiation destroys DNA and directly causes cancer. That's the super obvious link. Your deliberate avoidance doesn't change that fact.

Because of this are a bunch of safety protocols in the extraction, transportation, storage and use of radio active materials and their waste products.

100% sure that all of the chemicals involved in Solar manufacture are less toxic to the human body than handling Plutonium. So, we can probably design enough protocols to make it safe to manufacture given we did it for far more toxic materials.

> You can live right next to a nuclear power plant, or even work in one, and your radiation exposure will be indistinguishable from background levels.

So they dug up and replaced all the surface soil around Fukushima for no reason?

[lazide]

Don’t bet on that plutonium toxicity thing. For one, most reactors aren’t going to have any plutonium (or any other radioisotope) where anyone can touch it or interact with it in any way.

Concentrated Hydroflouric acid, and even pure fluorine gas however? That can be an easy turn of a tap away at most semiconductor plants. And much worse. And if you know anything about Florine, ‘much worse’ should be pretty chilling.

I’m honestly not sure if radiation poisoning (actually quite hard and rare to die from) is worse than dying from fluorine exposure (I’m sure it’s killed a lot more people than radiation), but fluorine is certainly going to be faster.

Most fire departments are going to be a lot more concerned about a semiconductor plant than a nuclear one.

[eru]

> 100% sure that all of the chemicals involved in Solar manufacture are less toxic to the human body than handling Plutonium. So, we can probably design enough protocols to make it safe to manufacture given we did it for far more toxic materials.

So?

You have to look at the amount of chemicals required to produce 1 Joule (or perhaps to install one 1 Watt of capacity).

For example, 1 kg of coal is much less dangerous than 1 kg of uranium. But you need much, much more than 1kg of coal to replace 1 kg of uranium.

Similar for solar power: you need to normalise the amount (and 'badness') of waste by the amount of energy produced. Semi-conductor manufacturing isn't exactly like organic farming, you know?

The best example is perhaps hydro-power: 1 kg of fresh water is basically the most harmless substance you can think of. But you need enormous amounts of water to produce reasonable amounts of electricity. And in these huge quantities water can become dangerous.

> > You can live right next to a nuclear power plant, or even work in one, and your radiation exposure will be indistinguishable from background levels.

> So they dug up and replaced all the surface soil around Fukushima for no reason?

Huh? Fukushima was not a normally operating nuclear power plant. Yes, accidents happen. That's why I'm suggesting to look at the impact of accidents per Joule produced (or per Watt of installed capacity, depending on context).

Nuclear power has had only a handful of accidents and lots and lots of Joule produced.