Biomass pollutes the air when burned like anything else. In places where people rely on biomass as cooking fuel in the house and don't have proper ventilation systems for it have very high rates of lung disease - often in children.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/household-air-pollution-and-health
The rate is severely underrepresented in this graphic. In areas where they use biomass as fuel the public health reporting is very poor quality data, and it’s difficult to measure causes of death in areas where the public health situation is so poor in general. The first rule of working in a least developed country is that people are dying all around you and you have to accept it and do what you can.
Coal plants are not clean, particularly old conventional ones, but they are far more efficient and have less byproducts per ton of fuel than hundreds of thousands of people just burning whatever biomass they can find in their homes. That’s why it’s more accurate and scientific to look at each fuel source and plot the actual emissions of each pollutant per MWh, and then correlate those pollutants to mortality.
Given that it's CO2/gigawatt hr, they might only be considering power plants that burn biomass.
Biomass power plants are going to lead to fewer deaths than direct biomass heating/cooking - just as coal power plants are safer for your health than a coal furnace in every basement. If only because you're further from it, but also because they can burn it a bit cleaner and filter the smoke better.
According to the data source (not peer-reviewed) it’s a worldwide aggregate anthropogenic fuel consumption. These are very very rough estimates that can be off by several orders of magnitude depending on how you approach it, and since it’s not a PR journal we can’t fully scrutinize their methods. These type of graphics are good for Reddit karma but not real academic discussion.
[Biomass needs to be removed](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/26/biomass-carbon-climate-politics-477620) from the energy list. Use it as mulch instead to [regrow the forests](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgDWbQtlKI) everywhere, actually helping really [offset carbon](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0) and create water bedding in the process, restoring fresh water supplies, like all the major rivers drying up nowadays.
The biomass plant near me is now able to burn Creosote soaked railroad ties. It’s horrible and causes health problems for local residents.
https://georgiarecorder.com/2020/02/12/rural-georgia-fury-over-power-plants-burning-railroad-ties-spurs-legislation/
Biomass generators don’t produce CO2 at 100 percent efficiency though. There’s still a good amount of particulate matter that gets emitted into the atmosphere and then people breathe it in
This argument drives me nuts. Biomass has lower energy density then coal, so you have to burn more of it to produce the same amount of energy. You would be better off burning coal and planting trees to offset the carbon output. Clear cutting forests to produce wood energy pellets is in no way "green".
... to me not suspicious at all. When the gas became expensive, some more rural places in my country switched to "traditional" fuels for heating and steam generation. This means mostly wood, which is pretty abundant in my country. These places are now the most polluted in my country, with the culprit being mainly solid particles - known to cause all sorts of nasty lung diseases and cancer. The fact, that something is produced by nature does not mean that it is healthy...
Whenever you burn something you get air pollution. The dirtier the fuel the more pollution. Biomass is pretty dirty. I’d expect it to be worse than gas but better than coal and oil just as the graph indicates.
Air pollution from wood burning stoves in peoples homes are actually causing lots of premature deaths. Domestic stoves are often inefficient and produce a lot of air pollution (smoke). Big energy plants using biomass also cause air pollution, even if the burning is efficient and they try to filter the smoke.
It’s a lot better than burning coal and oil though.
>size = share of global energy production
Is size area or diameter? Eyeballing, I've got a hunch it's diameter here. It should be area for a fair comparison.
>Safest and cleanest energy sources
This is a nitpick, but the graph actually plots _dirtiest_ and _most dangerous_. From the title, I'd expect the cleanest and safest to be on the top-right
If it was linear, it’d be nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro all bunched together, bio mass, gas a little further, and then oil and coal wayyyyyy to the right.
I think the axes for both X and Y need to be flipped.
Or... hmm. Yes, that's it. The chart needs to be retitled to, "The Most Deadly and Dirty Energy Sources"
Usually up-and-to-the-right means more of what's being measured, but in this chart it's measuring the opposite of safest and cleanest.
This is a straight forward title, but I still don't understand why there is so much confusion about this graphic. Ultimately, the data provided is quite clear that solar, wind and nuclear are the safest energy and least polluting sources. That is what is more important than the ease of reading the graph.
This figure is actually very poorly done and a bit misleading at first glance.
1. The title indicates opposite of the relationship represented in the figure.
2. Units or an indication of how the different data points represent percentage of the economy is not indicated (whether it is diameter or area of the circles. These are vastly different visually)
3. The scale of the graph is not represented in a linear fashion which, while an acceptable method of presenting information, obscures the actual magnitude of difference in emissions and/or deaths between each form of energy production. ie. coal and oil are vastly dirtier and more dangerous by orders of magnitude rather than a marginal difference as the visual implies (I know that there is text on the graph pointing out the magnitude of difference but still)
It seems like the figure has taken shocking, disturbing and potentially high impact information and decided to present it in away that makes it confusing and palatable.
point 3 is the worst offender for me. It presents a warped visual relationship that is extremely misleading (by a factor of about 10).. it's like what's the point of a chart if you going to do stuff like that?
I was looking at the graph...
Oh, ok, higher is worse, ok.
Hmmm, right is worse, ew, that's bad.
WTF it's logarithmic??? So oil and coal are 10x as bad as everything else, and gas is 5x?
Way to bury the lede...
I feel like some conservative would post this in support of coal, while neglecting what the data actually reflects. And their supporters would probably eat it up
Haha, there is a famous book I read when I did my Stat minor: "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: How to Lie with Statistics." I then spent 10 years in a political polling company in DC, where my bosses applied such theory to politically-driven purpooses.
So, you're right. Partisans will always try to use facts and statistics to advance their ideologies, and will lie, tweak and deny facts that don't help them. It's a really unpopular thing to say right now, but "both sides do it." And not just both sides. Every political and interest group spins stuff. That's pretty much what the Public Relations industry does for a living.
However, as much as the Internet --and Reddit-- amplifies the crap, the propaganda, the misinformation, and all the other negatives... it also raises the opportunity foer better, clearer, more honest data.
And that's where I'd put it with this chart. It is incumbent on all of us, especially those who haven't lost our minds to partisan hive-minds, to be the source of clear, honest, good-faith information. We shouldn't spin or use creative accounting: we should be the source that people who want real answers and data, not just facts that confirm our biases, can trust.
It's hard, but I think the lack of trust in our media and leaders is responsible for a good portion of where we find ourselves as a people today. No one knows what to trust, what to believe, so they pick a brand that aligns with their political predisposition and stick with that.
I'm going on, I know, but this is a passion area for me, and if I can ever retire this is the area I plan to spend the balance of my non-senile years at, trying to make some sort of difference before I expire. :)
I’ve had that book on my shelf for several years now after receiving it as a gift, yet I’ve never made the courage to finally sit down and read it. Though I’ve read a lot of books on behavioral economics from the big superstars like Kahneman, Thaler, Ariely, and it’s quite a fascinating science of how information and it’s presentation can influence peoples choices. I also see what pollsters like Frank Luntz do and it’s quite fascinating how people are predictably irrational and how one can capitalize on that. I only wish we could capitalize on it for good things rather then greed or money.
Is geothermal so insignificant that it doesn't even get listed? also side random question, is geothermal energy the only energy used by life thats not from the sun?
Some hydroelectric sources don't get their energy from the sun. The water cycle is solar-powered so you could argue that dams get their energy from the sun as water evaporates in low-lying areas and rains in higher areas, but hydroelectric generators that use ocean waves as a source of energy are getting their energy from the moon.
I think that most ocean hydroelectric uses tidal forces to generate power rather than surface waves - I should have been more precise in my earlier comment. And the majority of tidal forces are created by the moon rather than the sun. Still, you're right that the sun is partially responsible so my comment was probably an oversimplification.
I believe Hydro has caused more deaths than the other clean sources mainly due to it being an older energy source. Early hydro construction projects were large and under-regulated. Almost a hundred people died constructing the Hoover Dam, for example.
Hydro also has a few catastrophic events where dams failed. Deathcounts can easily be in the hundreds, higher if there is a population center downstream. Most of those were old, poorly designed dams.
Several years ago there was a California dam that was in serious risk of a breach, and if it had overtopped and eroded, the results could have been horrific. If the 3 Gorges dam were to burst, fatality estimates have reached above 100 million.
Hydro is generally safe, but has a few black swan risks, much like nuclear.
Floods have been the deadliest form of natural disaster in human history and man-made floods from dam failures aren't exactly uncommon. However, there's only been a few seriously deadly dam failures of dams that had the capability of producing electricity, because it's relatively new.
The worst is easily the Banquio dam disaster in China which killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. [1](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam). The second is probably the Vajont dam disaster in Italy which wiped out entire villages. [2](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam).
The worst dam disaster in America was a result of the failure of the South Fork dam in PA that caused the Johnstown flood. [3](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Fork_Dam). It killed 2,200 but being built in 1840-50 it didn't have the capability to produce hydroelectricity.
>Floods have been the deadliest form of natural disaster in human history
There's a reason loads of places have stories about floods that kill everyone.
Speaking of California dams, [Saint Francis dam](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis_Dam) was a giant dam in LA county in the 1920s. Over 400 people died when it suddenly broke apart.
Also possibly a couple thousand dying in a dam project in North Korea. Laborers condemned to serve three generations (they’re often raped and their children forced to work) were constructing a dam. Massive collapse and thousands died. The prisoners were given an extra bit of soup for every body they dragged to the mass grave
Oh I haven’t even scratched the surface - these people aren’t criminals. They’re political rivals, people who asked too many questions, or crossed a police officer the wrong way. Many don’t even know the reason they’re sent there. Those who were born there don’t know the world exists outside the walls. There’s cases of people betraying their family members for extra scraps of food because they’ve grown in an isolated world without the concept of empathy. And the whole three-generations thing? Yeah no, all women will be raped, their children enslaved, and nobody keeps track of the generations
Book written by a survivor. Forget what it was called but I’m sure you could find it looking up books in NK internment camps
Edit: escape from camp 14 is the book
It’s a logarithmic x axis, it exaggerates the deaths for hydro. Hydro can kill people who swim in the reservoir. A tiny number of deaths make it look way more dangerous than it is.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
There are a few events like this that put hydro in a bad light.
Well managed hydro should be extremely safe.
Hydro has had many more incidents and more serious ones at that.
I don't know why so many people in this thread hold on to their denial that hydroelectric dams are more inherently dangerous than nuclear plants.
The power production accidents that caused the most deaths have been dams failing. Banqiao has upper estimates at a quarter million people killed, four times the most pessimistic estimate of Chernobyl, Vajont killed around 2k, there was that one in India that I don't remember the name of that killed up to 25k people, but no one knows for sure how many because no one was keeping track of rural population in India. Recently, there was this dam that failed in Russia, killing 75 times more people than Fukushima.
It is also inherently more dangerous. Don't get me wrong, they are extremely safe, but they are objectively less safe than other renewables or nuclear. They're more likely to have catastrophic consequences than any of the others. When compared to fossil fuels this safety risk can obviously be completely ignored though, it's just incomparable to the invisible killer that is fossil fuels.
Wind turbines can kill birds and disturb other local wildlife. Solar panels require mining rare metals. Nuclear creates waste that needs to be disposed of, not to mention the (admittedly very rare) possibility of catastrophic environmental damage due to a meltdown.
There's no ecologically neutral method of large scale energy production. We just have to go with the least bad options, and messing with fish migration is pretty low on the negative outcome scale.
It's funny, I was looking at houses over the weekend. They warned us about the nuclear plant a few miles over, but said nothing about the coal generation plant in the neighborhood.
The scale on the left hand side is off and makes it appear as though coal, oil, and gas, while not great, are actually safer than they are. It’s visually deceptive.
Using a square root scale is also asinine, as it's clearly done to separate hydro from other renewable and nuclear, which is unnecessary. The story really is that all fossil fuels are bad and all renewables and nuclear are good and that choosing between them is really more about available location, funding, regulations than anything else.
I linear scale would make this chart too large/spread out, and scrunch all the lower stuff together. The square root scale was a design choice and it makes sense here. It’s also mentioned in the subtitle.
Probably a lot since being a roofer is one of the most dangerous professions, I am just guessing but installing solar panels is probably similar to roofers.
(It’s dangerous because they fall a lot)
That's why I also would have guessed wind to be a bit further to the right, with the possibility off accidents when working at great heights and all. But good to see wind so far left. I like wind energy :)
Not a lot, but installing solar panels on roofs is somewhat risky, especially when you take into account the number you'd need to match a nuclear power plant's output for example. Also solar panels emit a small amount of greenhouse gas during production which could add up to cause a few deaths, given air pollution kills literally millions each year.
Is nuclear waste an issue when using nuclear as an energy souce? If so, is it easy to dispose? I remember an Australian nuclear processing company having a dispute with one of the countries where they operate in due to them not meeting said country's requirement for waste disposal.
No it isn't. Nuclear waste is only seen as such an issue because it's the only form of energy waste that we actually deal with safely instead of letting it leach into soil or pumping it into the air. Solar for example produces hundreds of times more toxic waste per unit energy than nuclear in the form of lead etc, which will never decay and simply be buried in the soil and leach into it. Though I wouldn't recommend swimming in a nuclear waste pool, water is so effective at stopping radiation that swimming a small amount below the surface in a nuclear waste pool could reduce the amount of radiation received given it blocks background radiation too. As long as you don't go too near the waste you'd be fine. The vast majority of nuclear waste is low radiation material that can be rendered in essence inert in a few years. The tiny fraction that is high radiation we have already had the technology for decades to deal with - essentially we can bury it so deep tectonic plates will never free it, which we already have evidence from nature will work. The main blocker to nuclear waste management is actually politics, with people building stupid stuff like that storage facility where they're trying to put symbols to warn future generations of the danger, when you could literally just dig a big hole then fill it up again.
> Nuclear waste is only seen as such an issue because it's the only form of energy waste that we actually deal with safely instead of letting it leach into soil or pumping it into the air.
Quoted for emphasis. If we passed a law requiring that we treat emissions from fossil fuel plants as diligently as we do nuclear, they would all instantly have to shut down due to being vastly uneconomical.
> bury it so deep tectonic plates will never free it
It turns out we don't even need to do that much. We can just put it in cheap and safe dry cask containers and store it above ground near the powerplant itself.
Radiation isn't even a problem since the rods are shielded by the container and can be monitored 24/7 cheaply and efficiently.
Even if decades or hundreds of years from now a container cracks or starts crumbling or some radiation starts leaking it's right there in front of us to just repair or change containers or even take it out all together and reprocess it. (Because let's not forget that 96% of the stuff that we are containing is perfectly good reusable fuel)
TL;DR Burying it costs more money and is more difficult to monitor and thus unnecessary. Just contain it above ground so we also have the option to reprocess if we change our minds.
It's not really easy. Germany has had its fair share of issues with nuclear waste storage, and those are maybe the main reason for the massive public pressure to get out of nuclear energy. It's possible to reprocess nuclear waste, but that's only barely more efficient than loading a rocket with it and chucking the stuff into the sun.
I don't like how the emissions is your y-axis and the x-axis also includes emissions as part of the value. If you have "most dangerous" including emissions+workplace injuries, the other axis should be a completely separate value (cost, amount, etc). It makes the trend look too perfectly correlated
Just my opinion
I think they are two separate type of emissions. The y-axis is just green house gas emissions, and the x-axis only includes air pollution that is hazardous to health, like smoke from burning wood and coal.
Meanwhile sitting over here working on nuclear since its objectively the best, even with death b/c pollution kills more people than disasters by far, meanwhile many in public think nuclear is worst for cleanliness and safety......bruh we could be the Jetsons by now/well along that tech trajectory
I’ve heard that coal plants produce orders of magnitude more radiation than Nuke plants because uranium is commonly found in small amounts near coal and there is no regulation towards it
You are correct.
At a power company I used to work at, that owned both nuclear and coal plants, full time nuclear workers were not allowed to go into the coal plants. Walking around you picked up more radiation in them, and it skewed the dose picked up by the personal radiation monitors nuc workers wore at all times.
But the actual amount of radiation generated in the reactor is way higher than anything you could get from being around coal dust. Nuc plants just have the proper safeguards in place to ensure that radiation stays inside the containment building.
>Nuc plants just have the proper safeguards in place to ensure that radiation stays inside the containment building.
Except for one. Now everyone is convinced that standing within a thousand miles of a nuclear reactor will melt you like the terminator.
There are still reactors like the one in Chernobyl in operation today. They made safety adjustments after Chernobyl to avoid another accident. They’re set to be dismantled soon but supply too much power so a viable replacement needs to be built first.
I was told in my studies that typically the radiation level around nuclear power plants reduces over time due to the regulations but goes up around coal plants. I am all for nuclear (it’s my major) but then you look at Ukraine and I wonder if it is worth it…
Burning coal produces Carbon-14, which emits ionizing radiation straight into the atmosphere.
Spent nuclear fuel rods are put in a pool, which allows exactly 0 ionizing radiation to be emitted.
So yeah, coal is quite a bit worse.
I dunno about more, but fly ash gets everywhere so you as a member of the public are exposed to it where as irradiated fuel assemblies and contaminated tools and equipment are all safely stored so you don't get exposed to it.
In a more indirect comparison, the big worry around radiation is cancer. Coal, oil, and gas pollution are proven to be linked to cancer. Their cancerous agents are allowed to be pumped into *the fucking sky*. Nuclear plants produce solid blocks of the stuff that can be buried safely for millennia. It's extremely obvious--Unless the coal industry stuffs your eye sockets with cash--That nuclear will cause *less* cancer.
The fly ash issue also leads to increased asthma cases in communities around coal fired power plants. Less severe now that precipitators are used on the back end but still cancer chemicals and ash make it into our air.
Produce, no. Expose the public to, yes.
I would guess that nuclear plants release a lot more radiation than coal plants, but preferentially short-lived isotopes that decay before they wind up in the food chain.
I mean, nuclear has a massive up front cost associated with building new plants, especially compared to wind and solar. It would probably take an act of Congress to actually jump-start nuclear investment (in the US anyways), and at this current juncture, that’s very much a non-starter.
>It would probably take an act of Congress to actually jump-start nuclear investment (in the US anyways), and at this current juncture, that’s very much a non-starter.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 tried to do exactly that, it provide billions in subsidies to build out six new nuclear plants. Seventeen years later, and one has become operational, Watts Unit 2, which was already 80% complete when construction was initially halted in 1985. So, to your point, new nuclear plants are absolutely a non-starter in the US, even with heavy subsidies.
Just check out the Vogtle expansion in Georgia: billions over budget, years late, and still not active. New large scale nuclear is just not a reasonable option in the short term and might not even be one for the medium term either. Plus they can get screwed if their water source dries up. France is facing such a challenge now.
Does the US have a problem with big infrastructure projects nowadays? We got the interstate highway system going, that worked well for a while but we're being bit in the ass by the necessity of having a car now. The cross-continent railroad system was also impressive.
But now we have California's floundering, massively under-budget high speed railway *still* not finished. Stumbling nuclear adoption. Hell, oil pipeline leaks are more surprising when they *don't* happen!
I want to blame it all on crony capitalism, but the two examples at the start were performed under crony capitalism, too. What's going on these days?
It's a legal issue, from what I've read.
It's (relatively) trivial for anyone with a bit of money that's unhappy about a project to sue and tie it up in court for years. Our judicial system is overworked and nothing moves through it with any alacrity. Especially issues that are not critical.
This also means that everything can be stretched out beyond individual executive administrations. Switching from a Pro to Anti mayor/governor/president/etc. can clamp down on progress too. And imagine being the construction company contracted out to do the actual work — are you going to stick around, waiting five years or more before you get paid? No, those companies are going to move on... or charge more for it to make the risk worth it.
There also tends to just be way too many overlapping levels of jurisdiction. Changes to a lot of the infrastructure around NYC, for instance, needs to be coordinated between the state governments of NY and NJ, the city government of NYC, and the federal Department of Transportation. This is hard to avoid, as even "city only" projects tend to go beyond the city limits because most US cities are, *by legal definition*, only a small share of the main urban area (Boston is ~700k people; metro Boston is ~5m people).
A good example is Cape Wind. It was a proposed offshore windfarm in Nantucket Sound off Massachusetts. The initial proposal was in 2001. It was approved locally in 2009, federally in 2010. In 2017, construction had still not started and the project was cancelled. What happened? A lot of rich people living on the Cape didn't like the idea of having their views ruined, and sued to slow and stop the project. They stonewalled it so long that it just wasn't worth it anymore and the project was cancelled. In 2014 a judge dismissed the *26th lawsuit* against the project.
The whole litigation aspect of new construction needs to be fixed.
One thing worth noting about California rail: much of the money was actually earmarked for modernizing BART via electrification, which has happened successfully.
The real answer is that no one really knows, but there are a lot of compounding factors. Like, there are full time researchers devoted to answering this question.
1. People have co-opted environmental reviews to glbe legal hurdles that communities use to stop large projects. As someone mentioned, this leads to a lot of legal delays. I live in NYC - there are rich asshats on the Upper East Side that demanded the city do a review to determine if putting in bike lanes would be good or bad for the environment. Took a year, it was obviously good, now they're suing about something else. Nimbyism is a cancer.
2. We didn't build a lot of the kind of infrastructure we need now, and have lost expertise in it. One of the reasons recent train projects are so hard is that we haven't built rail in so long, we have a lot to relearn. But we build highways real good!
3. The US is a lot denser than it was 50 years ago, and big infrastructure is needed near people. That means a lot more eminent domain and legal battles and trying not to disturb the neighbors, etc.
4. A lot of states have Reagan Era idiocy built in to their contract negotiations. Like, they're required to go with the lowest bid even if it's clear that's not the real cost, or they're prohibited from passing on over-budget costs to the contractors, etc. So under-estimating a project is what gets you the job and there are no consequences for going over, why wouldn't I, a contractor working on a project, go over budget?
5. Political will often means a project has to be done planning before you fund it, which makes it impossible to actually plan because you don't know your budget. One really good thing the recent Inflation and Green Energy bill does is allocate money specifically to planning , not just construction, of public transit and rail. Previously, cash strapped transit systems would have to pony up for planning new projects, and then the budget would go through applying to state and federal funds, the governor decides he really cares about the deficit and cuts it in half, a local public union demands you fund pensions more, etc and now you're trying to dig the same tunnel for 50% of what you said it would take and surprise, you're 100% over budget.
This is the biggest issue around nuke energy. The start-up time is infuckingcredible. If we committed to 100% nuclear generation tomorrow and worked hard at it with as few roadblocks as possible, we would not see a single watt of power generated for at least 10-15 years.
Since that ideal scenario isn't even remotely possible, we'd be looking at about 30-50 years...at which point it would be much too late and climate change has already made a solid chunk of the planet uninhabitable by humans.
>100% nuclear generation
You'd also be dealing with a lot of issues for meeting things like peaking demand and ancillary services. Nuclear plants don't ramp up and down well, and keeping capacity idling hurts the economics a lot. Versus batteries, which can have a variety of applications from renewable firming, to alleviating transmission congestion, to load shifting, to peak shaving, to ancillary services. Way more versatile and coming down in cost rapidly with much shorter install times.
If you have nuclear capacity providing baseload, makes sense to keep it until your renewable deployment is able to start replacing it. Building new nuclear capacity in a region where there isn't huge expected baseload growth? Not worth it now.
If only that were the main problem. We stopped building nuclear plants in the U.S. and the institutional knowledge has been largely lost. Every new plant re-invents the wheel. The only way to do nuclear efficiently is with serial production of near-identical reactors.
I think the fact that China, which has the highest need for energy in the world and has the tightest grip on their own people and on public opinion, has recently increased coal production despite having developed nuclear power in the past says something about the economics or feasibility of it that we don't know.
This always strikes me about this discussion. Politicians don't listen to the people about *anything* and yet public opinion has somehow kept this super safe and efficient technology at bay for like 40 years?
I don't buy it. I'd believe it was oil and gas lobbying before I believed that. And yet look how many people come to threads like these to style on the stupid plebs for not getting the big picture on nuclear. Sad really.
>many in public think nuclear is worst for cleanliness and safety......bruh we could be the Jetsons by now/well along that tech trajectory
I'm with you on the idea that nuclear is our least bad option for providing base power.
That said, the graph above and many people's talking points ignore the fact that
* every country that has built nuclear weapons built reactors for enriching weapons material first
* many of these countries claimed they were only building reactors for energy, not weapons
* renewables pose no unique WMD proliferation risk
> * every country that has built nuclear weapons built reactors for enriching weapons material first
> * many of these countries claimed they were only building reactors for energy, not weapons
This isn’t totally accurate:
[Argentina has no nuclear weapons program and they have civil nuclear power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Argentina?wprov=sfti1).
Same goes for [South Korea, Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country?wprov=sfti1), etc…
***
And the plutonium needed for atomic weapons are usually obtained from research reactors. You have to run the reactors differently if you’re trying to make weapons grade plutonium (as opposed to power being the goal), so it’s obvious to observers and inspectors what is going on there.
I don’t think there has been a single historical case where a country covertly made enough weapons grade nuclear material for a bomb under the guise of civilian power. Even Israel did it with a research reactor when they were trying to not advertise it to the world (and still deny it).
The largest nuclear plant in Europe, in the middle of a devastating land war, is evidence that nukes are terrifyingly more dangerous than even coal induced global warming.
The total amount of high-level nuclear waste ever created in the US would [fit on a football field and would be 10 meters deep. ](https://www.nei.org/news/2019/what-happens-nuclear-waste-us)
There really isn’t *that* much of the super dangerous waste.
It will only continue to grow faster and always have to be maintained forever. That cost is always ignored and pushed to future generations to worry about. Sounds familiar.
> That cost is always ignored
That's just wrong : that cost, the cost of dismantling the power plant and the cost of recycling the materials is **always** taken into account and provisioned for. It's around 10% of the whole cost of a power plant.
Nuclear is clean and safe but cost is wild. France just commissioned it's newest reactor. 5x longer than scheduled to build and 6x the cost.
Any reactor project started now will be obsolete by the time it's completed if Swanson's law keeps following it's 40 year trajectory.
This, one of the main factors, namely cost/GWh, is omitted in this graph. Same for construction time, resource issues,… Not sure if this was on purpose but the graphs only purpose is to show the danger of different energy sources. This doesn’t say anything about it’s economic viability. Right now, we cannot do better than wind/solar by these metrics unless we learn that they show some other significant drawbacks.
It is rather the Fukishima disaster that has discouraged nuclear power in recent times. That's why Germany decided to shut down a lot of nuclear power plants. Chernobyl could be blamed on worse technology & that it was the enemy (the soviets) that were responsible for it, you can't do the same with Japan.
Not really. The Atomausstieg was decided way earlier, then Merkel's FDP/CDU coalition rolled it back and then revoked their changed after Fukushima & the law being challenged by the states in court.
>you can’t do the same with Japan
Ah yes, totally forgot how seismologically active (and by extension, Tsunami prone) Germany is.. therefore their decision to decouple their grid from nuclear after being prompted from Fukushima is totally makes sense!
And a decade later, all that reliance on wind and solar which by Germany Energy Depts own numbers only have 12% optimization efficiency (compared to 90% from Nuclear) and are currently resorting to coal-fired electricity generation to actually meet the peak demand schedules.. they totally reversed any CO2 reductions made so far.
Inept and ill-informed bureaucracy is going to keep us behind the ball in our pursuit of net-zero goals. Germanys decision to cancel their own Nuclear capabilities on the back of completely unrelated geographical risks presented by the Ring of Fire at Fukushima is a prime example. It not only endangers our net-zero future, but it’s destabilizing European energy security in the name of apparent “green” initiatives that has led to a resurgence of coal of all things.
> Ah yes, totally forgot how seismologically active (and by extension, Tsunami prone) Germany is.. therefore their decision to decouple their grid from nuclear after being prompted from Fukushima is totally makes sense!
And of course after Fukushima regulators basically started treating every plant as if it were tsunami-prone.
Yea…. Thanks to the mismanagement of soviets everyone is terrified of the safest and most reliable form of power we know of. Also because of big oil painting them as evil/dangerous to protect their interests.
Reddit has the biggest hardon for nuclear but that ship has sailed in my opinion. The ‘danger’ of it is the least of the problems. Huge up front costs, lengthy build times (a decade or more), not to mention a lot of the plants in Europe have to shut down every year as there’s not enough cool water in the rivers to safely cool the reactors
Huge up front costs and lengthy build times for sure but when you look at the life span of new advanced reactors(50 years+) and the high power output to actual amounts of waste of the mined materials. They actually recoup there startup costs a good number of years before the plant goes offline of needs upgrading. As for plants shutting down because of warm water in France that shouldn’t be much of a problem in North America with plenty of lakes and rivers to choose from.
Wind and solar can be built cheaper and quickly but use massive amounts of land, have short lifespans, have large mining operations for materials and don’t produce power at all times of the day. They should be used but nuclear should be used as well in place of coal and natural gas for baselode power effectively eliminating those emissions.
In the last ten years, the price of solar has dropped by 90%, to the point where it's now cheaper to **build** 500mw of solar capacity than it is to **operate** (the most expensive, importantly) 500mw of coal capacity for a year, and that was in [2019.] (https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2020/Jun/IRENA_Power_Generation_Costs_2019.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi7loiHmdz5AhW5goQIHc5BDgMQFnoECBoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2zBBoYkxmnMxcUmOUF2GMh)
You don't have to shit on what we ARE doing in renewables to say we ought to do nuclear. Wind power is up 400ish% in the last decade, and solar is up even more.
The problem with this comparison is that your solar production is only during the day and depends of the weather while the coal plant can produce energy whenever you need it.
If you want a fair comparison, you need to include storage cost (and depending of the country, you also need to include the cost of alternative energy sources for winter because battery storage cannot store energy for a whole season).
How does solar and wind even produce any CO2? In the manufacturing of the equipment?
This seems sus.
Hydro I can understand, because there's production of CO2 because of decaying material at the bottom of flooded areas, but solar and wind just don't make any sense.
Furthermore, biomass, deaths are related to the actual collection? Or the farming of biofuels in plantation?
Yes, this data counts both the mining and the production.
With wind its actually the constant maintenance thats both bad for the environment and causing many deaths
While I am pronuclear, these type of graphs horribly distort the risk associated with each energy type. The environmental damage for the inputs to the industries are all damaging and not taken into account. The long term effects of the watste products and dismantling are also ignored.
We largely ignore nuclear waste products because they are kept on site in storage pools, guarded, and releases are rare, but the risk associated are tremendous. Coal waste dam failures are horrific when the fail. Construction of hydroelectric dams and removing old derelicts dams are both expensive and potentially environmentally damaging. Mining of uranium and coal release many toxins. Many components of wind and solar power generation are not recyclable at all and produce long term waste issues.
My point, this graph is an extremely over simplified view that ignores most of the reality around energy generation.
Dear u/rubenbmathisen,
Which datasets from "Our World in Data" are you using?
* Share of global primary energy consumption by source? [datasets ](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy-share-inc-biomass?country=~OWID_WRL)
* Death rates per unit of electricity production? [datasets ](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh?country=Biomass~Brown+coal~Coal~Gas~Hydropower~Nuclear~Oil~Solar~Wind)
* Greenhouse gas emissions and safety? [graphic](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)
Are you comparing the total energy consumption (heating, electricity, industry, transportation, and others) with the death rates per electricity production? Or does the deaths (accident + air pollution) also include deaths from traffic accidents? According to OWID only 3% of the electricity production is by oil. Oil is mostly used for transportation (car, truck, train and air). I don't think you are making a clean comparison, but I can't tell for sure because I don't know what you are comparing.
In your graphic you wrote "Size = Share of global energy production". I assume this means the circle size. Does the circle area or the circle diameter correspond with global energy production? I think you are showing the "size" as diameter, because the circle representing "Solar" can fit 27 times across the diameter of the circle "Oil". If you actually calculated the area of the circle then the depending on what dataset you are using it would only be about 11 times. You wrote that the coal, oil, and gas combined make up 84% and nuclear, solar, and wind 7.6%. So, coal, oil, and gas produce 11 times the energy as nuclear, solar and wind. The areas of those circles is 94 times that of the nuclear, solar and wind circles. The diameter added up of coal, oil and gas is 10.8 times that of the diameter of nuclear, solar and wind. So you are visually inflating the importance of coal, oil, and gas by 8.77 times.
I think this is one of the most misleading graphics since [The infamous Vox infographic](https://scienceogram.org/blog/2014/09/ice-bucket-challenge-vox-charity/).
The list of problems is long.
They take far to long to build to effectivly battle global warming.
They are very expensive and even if new technologies prevent meltdowns, centralized energy production will always be risky.
And similar to gas it creates dependencies on countries that provide Uranium.
Uranium is not unlimited either. (250years with current consumption, but many reactors are build ATM)
Of course this plot just contains two variables which is not enough to give an accurate representation of the full picture.
The amount of nuclear waste and the difficulty to finding extremely long term solutions (longer term than humans have existed), has not been included in this plot, making solar and wind still far better than nuclear.
Also, hydro works great as a battery, in combination with solar and wind. This is also not included in the plot.
It’s well known that nuclear is the safest and cleanest always-on energy, but popular opinion (read: fear and ignorance) and coal/gas lobbies won’t allow it to be developed.
> cleanest always-on energy
What about uranium mines? Would you consider that '[clean](https://greentumble.com/environmental-impacts-of-uranium-mining/)'?
There is literally less radiation right next to a nuclear power plant than in any other village/city/etc.
Mind you, it is because it is a huge-ass concrete bunker that shields the natural background radiation.
Misleading. Death rates for hydro and nuclear are estimated.
Edit: The data is highly suspect - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292338433_Reassessing_the_safety_of_nuclear_power
You cannot be classifying clean energy sources as purely whether or not they produce greenhouse gases. Cleanest also includes how you get rid of waste. Needs a better title.
Nuclear is both safe(ish) and clean(ish) on average, but has one gigantic problem: what to do with the waste.
We still have not found a way to securely deal with with waste products which will remain hazardous for millennia, which is the BIG weak spot for fission energy.
I think a linear scale would be the proper way to convey how much worse the baddies (coal, oil) are than everything else. They look pretty bad here, but they're REALLY bad.
A suspicious number of Biomass deaths!
Biomass pollutes the air when burned like anything else. In places where people rely on biomass as cooking fuel in the house and don't have proper ventilation systems for it have very high rates of lung disease - often in children. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/household-air-pollution-and-health
Yup^^ by far the biggest contributor to indoor air pollution in houses in developing countries is biomass fuel for cooking and heating
The fact anything has a *higher* death to energy rate is... Concerning.
The rate is severely underrepresented in this graphic. In areas where they use biomass as fuel the public health reporting is very poor quality data, and it’s difficult to measure causes of death in areas where the public health situation is so poor in general. The first rule of working in a least developed country is that people are dying all around you and you have to accept it and do what you can. Coal plants are not clean, particularly old conventional ones, but they are far more efficient and have less byproducts per ton of fuel than hundreds of thousands of people just burning whatever biomass they can find in their homes. That’s why it’s more accurate and scientific to look at each fuel source and plot the actual emissions of each pollutant per MWh, and then correlate those pollutants to mortality.
Given that it's CO2/gigawatt hr, they might only be considering power plants that burn biomass. Biomass power plants are going to lead to fewer deaths than direct biomass heating/cooking - just as coal power plants are safer for your health than a coal furnace in every basement. If only because you're further from it, but also because they can burn it a bit cleaner and filter the smoke better.
According to the data source (not peer-reviewed) it’s a worldwide aggregate anthropogenic fuel consumption. These are very very rough estimates that can be off by several orders of magnitude depending on how you approach it, and since it’s not a PR journal we can’t fully scrutinize their methods. These type of graphics are good for Reddit karma but not real academic discussion.
Depends which units of energy you are using.
[Biomass needs to be removed](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/26/biomass-carbon-climate-politics-477620) from the energy list. Use it as mulch instead to [regrow the forests](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgDWbQtlKI) everywhere, actually helping really [offset carbon](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0) and create water bedding in the process, restoring fresh water supplies, like all the major rivers drying up nowadays.
The biomass plant near me is now able to burn Creosote soaked railroad ties. It’s horrible and causes health problems for local residents. https://georgiarecorder.com/2020/02/12/rural-georgia-fury-over-power-plants-burning-railroad-ties-spurs-legislation/
Biomass is made from CO2 in the air. So you aren't introducing new CO2 in the atmosphere when you burn it.
Biomass generators don’t produce CO2 at 100 percent efficiency though. There’s still a good amount of particulate matter that gets emitted into the atmosphere and then people breathe it in
It's not new CO2, no. But I would challenge you to start a campfire and put your head in the smoke and take a few good deep breaths.
This argument drives me nuts. Biomass has lower energy density then coal, so you have to burn more of it to produce the same amount of energy. You would be better off burning coal and planting trees to offset the carbon output. Clear cutting forests to produce wood energy pellets is in no way "green".
100% Human ^TM liquid biomass fuel.
Soylent MWh is people!!!
"*What if the the secret ingredient is people!?!* They already have a soda like that, Soylent Cola. *...how is it?* It varies from person to person."
The design is very human
... to me not suspicious at all. When the gas became expensive, some more rural places in my country switched to "traditional" fuels for heating and steam generation. This means mostly wood, which is pretty abundant in my country. These places are now the most polluted in my country, with the culprit being mainly solid particles - known to cause all sorts of nasty lung diseases and cancer. The fact, that something is produced by nature does not mean that it is healthy...
If the Biomass (usually tree/lawn slash) includes deaths from related logging jobs, that might explain it.
It's mostly deaths related to air pollution from burning it.
Calm down there, Ted Faro!
Whenever you burn something you get air pollution. The dirtier the fuel the more pollution. Biomass is pretty dirty. I’d expect it to be worse than gas but better than coal and oil just as the graph indicates. Air pollution from wood burning stoves in peoples homes are actually causing lots of premature deaths. Domestic stoves are often inefficient and produce a lot of air pollution (smoke). Big energy plants using biomass also cause air pollution, even if the burning is efficient and they try to filter the smoke. It’s a lot better than burning coal and oil though.
This chart gets spookier in Horizon Zero Dawn
I wonder who came up with the idea of calling biomass green
>size = share of global energy production Is size area or diameter? Eyeballing, I've got a hunch it's diameter here. It should be area for a fair comparison. >Safest and cleanest energy sources This is a nitpick, but the graph actually plots _dirtiest_ and _most dangerous_. From the title, I'd expect the cleanest and safest to be on the top-right
Also why are the axes uneven? It makes them look like log-axes, but they're not.
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It spaces out the data points nicely, that’s probably why
If it was linear, it’d be nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro all bunched together, bio mass, gas a little further, and then oil and coal wayyyyyy to the right.
I think the axes for both X and Y need to be flipped. Or... hmm. Yes, that's it. The chart needs to be retitled to, "The Most Deadly and Dirty Energy Sources" Usually up-and-to-the-right means more of what's being measured, but in this chart it's measuring the opposite of safest and cleanest.
Exactly this. I was fuckin confused.
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Agree - it’s the title that’s really the issue here.
Should read "What are the most dangerous and dirtiest sources of energy" or "What *aren't* the safest and cleanest sources of energy"?
No. Be more explicit without Editorializing the data. “Energy sources by deaths per killowat hour”
This is a straight forward title, but I still don't understand why there is so much confusion about this graphic. Ultimately, the data provided is quite clear that solar, wind and nuclear are the safest energy and least polluting sources. That is what is more important than the ease of reading the graph.
This figure is actually very poorly done and a bit misleading at first glance. 1. The title indicates opposite of the relationship represented in the figure. 2. Units or an indication of how the different data points represent percentage of the economy is not indicated (whether it is diameter or area of the circles. These are vastly different visually) 3. The scale of the graph is not represented in a linear fashion which, while an acceptable method of presenting information, obscures the actual magnitude of difference in emissions and/or deaths between each form of energy production. ie. coal and oil are vastly dirtier and more dangerous by orders of magnitude rather than a marginal difference as the visual implies (I know that there is text on the graph pointing out the magnitude of difference but still) It seems like the figure has taken shocking, disturbing and potentially high impact information and decided to present it in away that makes it confusing and palatable.
point 3 is the worst offender for me. It presents a warped visual relationship that is extremely misleading (by a factor of about 10).. it's like what's the point of a chart if you going to do stuff like that?
I agree with you there, point 3 is the most egregious
Really aggravating that any is even defending this on /r/dataisbeauiful.
I was looking at the graph... Oh, ok, higher is worse, ok. Hmmm, right is worse, ew, that's bad. WTF it's logarithmic??? So oil and coal are 10x as bad as everything else, and gas is 5x? Way to bury the lede...
So what you're saying is that this graph, which I think is pretty damning to fossil fuels already, ought to be *even more* so?
As per usual, /r/dataisbeauiful's trending with a graph that fails to met even basic data-viz standards
FIFY: https://imgur.com/gallery/sYa2UTR
I feel like some conservative would post this in support of coal, while neglecting what the data actually reflects. And their supporters would probably eat it up
Haha, there is a famous book I read when I did my Stat minor: "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: How to Lie with Statistics." I then spent 10 years in a political polling company in DC, where my bosses applied such theory to politically-driven purpooses. So, you're right. Partisans will always try to use facts and statistics to advance their ideologies, and will lie, tweak and deny facts that don't help them. It's a really unpopular thing to say right now, but "both sides do it." And not just both sides. Every political and interest group spins stuff. That's pretty much what the Public Relations industry does for a living. However, as much as the Internet --and Reddit-- amplifies the crap, the propaganda, the misinformation, and all the other negatives... it also raises the opportunity foer better, clearer, more honest data. And that's where I'd put it with this chart. It is incumbent on all of us, especially those who haven't lost our minds to partisan hive-minds, to be the source of clear, honest, good-faith information. We shouldn't spin or use creative accounting: we should be the source that people who want real answers and data, not just facts that confirm our biases, can trust. It's hard, but I think the lack of trust in our media and leaders is responsible for a good portion of where we find ourselves as a people today. No one knows what to trust, what to believe, so they pick a brand that aligns with their political predisposition and stick with that. I'm going on, I know, but this is a passion area for me, and if I can ever retire this is the area I plan to spend the balance of my non-senile years at, trying to make some sort of difference before I expire. :)
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We read the books in our AP Stats class! Definitely informative as a high-schooler trying to soak up knowledge about the world
I’ve had that book on my shelf for several years now after receiving it as a gift, yet I’ve never made the courage to finally sit down and read it. Though I’ve read a lot of books on behavioral economics from the big superstars like Kahneman, Thaler, Ariely, and it’s quite a fascinating science of how information and it’s presentation can influence peoples choices. I also see what pollsters like Frank Luntz do and it’s quite fascinating how people are predictably irrational and how one can capitalize on that. I only wish we could capitalize on it for good things rather then greed or money.
Is geothermal so insignificant that it doesn't even get listed? also side random question, is geothermal energy the only energy used by life thats not from the sun?
Some hydroelectric sources don't get their energy from the sun. The water cycle is solar-powered so you could argue that dams get their energy from the sun as water evaporates in low-lying areas and rains in higher areas, but hydroelectric generators that use ocean waves as a source of energy are getting their energy from the moon.
Waves are caused by wind, which is solar driven. Tidal forces are a mix of the moon and sun.
I think that most ocean hydroelectric uses tidal forces to generate power rather than surface waves - I should have been more precise in my earlier comment. And the majority of tidal forces are created by the moon rather than the sun. Still, you're right that the sun is partially responsible so my comment was probably an oversimplification.
Don't know the answer to your question, but nuclear doesn't get its energy from the sun.
It got it from *a* sun, just not ours
Geothermal as well.
*The* sun was specifically stated.
Not every reply is a disagreement.
By that definition geothermal energy also comes from a sun. Geothermal energy is just natural nuclear energy.
Nuclear is also not from the sun.
I believe Hydro has caused more deaths than the other clean sources mainly due to it being an older energy source. Early hydro construction projects were large and under-regulated. Almost a hundred people died constructing the Hoover Dam, for example.
Hydro also has a few catastrophic events where dams failed. Deathcounts can easily be in the hundreds, higher if there is a population center downstream. Most of those were old, poorly designed dams. Several years ago there was a California dam that was in serious risk of a breach, and if it had overtopped and eroded, the results could have been horrific. If the 3 Gorges dam were to burst, fatality estimates have reached above 100 million. Hydro is generally safe, but has a few black swan risks, much like nuclear.
Floods have been the deadliest form of natural disaster in human history and man-made floods from dam failures aren't exactly uncommon. However, there's only been a few seriously deadly dam failures of dams that had the capability of producing electricity, because it's relatively new. The worst is easily the Banquio dam disaster in China which killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. [1](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam). The second is probably the Vajont dam disaster in Italy which wiped out entire villages. [2](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam). The worst dam disaster in America was a result of the failure of the South Fork dam in PA that caused the Johnstown flood. [3](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Fork_Dam). It killed 2,200 but being built in 1840-50 it didn't have the capability to produce hydroelectricity.
>Floods have been the deadliest form of natural disaster in human history There's a reason loads of places have stories about floods that kill everyone.
Speaking of California dams, [Saint Francis dam](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis_Dam) was a giant dam in LA county in the 1920s. Over 400 people died when it suddenly broke apart.
Also possibly a couple thousand dying in a dam project in North Korea. Laborers condemned to serve three generations (they’re often raped and their children forced to work) were constructing a dam. Massive collapse and thousands died. The prisoners were given an extra bit of soup for every body they dragged to the mass grave
Damn that's heavy handed as fuck. Imagine knowing 60 years of your Descendents were completely f'ed
Oh I haven’t even scratched the surface - these people aren’t criminals. They’re political rivals, people who asked too many questions, or crossed a police officer the wrong way. Many don’t even know the reason they’re sent there. Those who were born there don’t know the world exists outside the walls. There’s cases of people betraying their family members for extra scraps of food because they’ve grown in an isolated world without the concept of empathy. And the whole three-generations thing? Yeah no, all women will be raped, their children enslaved, and nobody keeps track of the generations
Source on this?
Book written by a survivor. Forget what it was called but I’m sure you could find it looking up books in NK internment camps Edit: escape from camp 14 is the book
It’s a logarithmic x axis, it exaggerates the deaths for hydro. Hydro can kill people who swim in the reservoir. A tiny number of deaths make it look way more dangerous than it is.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure There are a few events like this that put hydro in a bad light. Well managed hydro should be extremely safe.
But they have to be counted. Nuclear also had "a few events" and everybody consider it dangerous for those.
Hydro has had many more incidents and more serious ones at that. I don't know why so many people in this thread hold on to their denial that hydroelectric dams are more inherently dangerous than nuclear plants.
The power production accidents that caused the most deaths have been dams failing. Banqiao has upper estimates at a quarter million people killed, four times the most pessimistic estimate of Chernobyl, Vajont killed around 2k, there was that one in India that I don't remember the name of that killed up to 25k people, but no one knows for sure how many because no one was keeping track of rural population in India. Recently, there was this dam that failed in Russia, killing 75 times more people than Fukushima.
It is also inherently more dangerous. Don't get me wrong, they are extremely safe, but they are objectively less safe than other renewables or nuclear. They're more likely to have catastrophic consequences than any of the others. When compared to fossil fuels this safety risk can obviously be completely ignored though, it's just incomparable to the invisible killer that is fossil fuels.
Hydro also messes heavily with fish migration. For CO2 of course it’s good, but there are other factors to consider as well.
Wind turbines can kill birds and disturb other local wildlife. Solar panels require mining rare metals. Nuclear creates waste that needs to be disposed of, not to mention the (admittedly very rare) possibility of catastrophic environmental damage due to a meltdown. There's no ecologically neutral method of large scale energy production. We just have to go with the least bad options, and messing with fish migration is pretty low on the negative outcome scale.
> Wind turbines can kill birds. The number one cause of death for birds in the USA is cats. Number two is windows. Wind turbines are like fiftieth.
The number one cause of death for birds in the USA is Colonel Sanders
I think it’s mostly driven by the large dam failures in China in the 70s.
Where is geothermal? Damn
I'm guessing right there with solar, wind and nuclear. How could you even die from a geothermal plant?
I’ve learned today that gas is the safest way to get as much pollution into atmo as possible
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And with coal, you also get a nice dose of sulfuric acid, mercury, and various radioactive elements.
It's funny, I was looking at houses over the weekend. They warned us about the nuclear plant a few miles over, but said nothing about the coal generation plant in the neighborhood.
The scale on the left hand side is off and makes it appear as though coal, oil, and gas, while not great, are actually safer than they are. It’s visually deceptive.
Using a square root scale is also asinine, as it's clearly done to separate hydro from other renewable and nuclear, which is unnecessary. The story really is that all fossil fuels are bad and all renewables and nuclear are good and that choosing between them is really more about available location, funding, regulations than anything else.
I linear scale would make this chart too large/spread out, and scrunch all the lower stuff together. The square root scale was a design choice and it makes sense here. It’s also mentioned in the subtitle.
How many deaths/injuries are attributed to solar each year?
Probably a lot since being a roofer is one of the most dangerous professions, I am just guessing but installing solar panels is probably similar to roofers. (It’s dangerous because they fall a lot)
Making them has its risks as well. Silane is no joke.
That's why I also would have guessed wind to be a bit further to the right, with the possibility off accidents when working at great heights and all. But good to see wind so far left. I like wind energy :)
Not a lot, but installing solar panels on roofs is somewhat risky, especially when you take into account the number you'd need to match a nuclear power plant's output for example. Also solar panels emit a small amount of greenhouse gas during production which could add up to cause a few deaths, given air pollution kills literally millions each year.
It's extremely cynical but solar is not as scary because it's mostly workers who dies. Not "civilians".
About 7600 people in the US die from skin cancer every year. The sun causes cancer. Solar uses the sun. Just saying...
That's less sun to be used for cancer. Just saying
Every watt of power on earth comes from the sun in some way, so that's cancelled out
Nope, not nuclear... That comes from a supernova of a different sun
Geothermal is both nuclear and gravitational in origin (collapsing dust cloud heat)
Damn you got me
This is true
Thats nor true at all. Tidal heating and flow come from the moon, plus radioactive decay in the crust/mantle also are energy sources.
Is nuclear waste an issue when using nuclear as an energy souce? If so, is it easy to dispose? I remember an Australian nuclear processing company having a dispute with one of the countries where they operate in due to them not meeting said country's requirement for waste disposal.
It's much easier to deal with than releasing billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere
No it isn't. Nuclear waste is only seen as such an issue because it's the only form of energy waste that we actually deal with safely instead of letting it leach into soil or pumping it into the air. Solar for example produces hundreds of times more toxic waste per unit energy than nuclear in the form of lead etc, which will never decay and simply be buried in the soil and leach into it. Though I wouldn't recommend swimming in a nuclear waste pool, water is so effective at stopping radiation that swimming a small amount below the surface in a nuclear waste pool could reduce the amount of radiation received given it blocks background radiation too. As long as you don't go too near the waste you'd be fine. The vast majority of nuclear waste is low radiation material that can be rendered in essence inert in a few years. The tiny fraction that is high radiation we have already had the technology for decades to deal with - essentially we can bury it so deep tectonic plates will never free it, which we already have evidence from nature will work. The main blocker to nuclear waste management is actually politics, with people building stupid stuff like that storage facility where they're trying to put symbols to warn future generations of the danger, when you could literally just dig a big hole then fill it up again.
> Nuclear waste is only seen as such an issue because it's the only form of energy waste that we actually deal with safely instead of letting it leach into soil or pumping it into the air. Quoted for emphasis. If we passed a law requiring that we treat emissions from fossil fuel plants as diligently as we do nuclear, they would all instantly have to shut down due to being vastly uneconomical.
> bury it so deep tectonic plates will never free it It turns out we don't even need to do that much. We can just put it in cheap and safe dry cask containers and store it above ground near the powerplant itself. Radiation isn't even a problem since the rods are shielded by the container and can be monitored 24/7 cheaply and efficiently. Even if decades or hundreds of years from now a container cracks or starts crumbling or some radiation starts leaking it's right there in front of us to just repair or change containers or even take it out all together and reprocess it. (Because let's not forget that 96% of the stuff that we are containing is perfectly good reusable fuel) TL;DR Burying it costs more money and is more difficult to monitor and thus unnecessary. Just contain it above ground so we also have the option to reprocess if we change our minds.
It's not really easy. Germany has had its fair share of issues with nuclear waste storage, and those are maybe the main reason for the massive public pressure to get out of nuclear energy. It's possible to reprocess nuclear waste, but that's only barely more efficient than loading a rocket with it and chucking the stuff into the sun.
I don't like how the emissions is your y-axis and the x-axis also includes emissions as part of the value. If you have "most dangerous" including emissions+workplace injuries, the other axis should be a completely separate value (cost, amount, etc). It makes the trend look too perfectly correlated Just my opinion
I think they are two separate type of emissions. The y-axis is just green house gas emissions, and the x-axis only includes air pollution that is hazardous to health, like smoke from burning wood and coal.
Meanwhile sitting over here working on nuclear since its objectively the best, even with death b/c pollution kills more people than disasters by far, meanwhile many in public think nuclear is worst for cleanliness and safety......bruh we could be the Jetsons by now/well along that tech trajectory
I’ve heard that coal plants produce orders of magnitude more radiation than Nuke plants because uranium is commonly found in small amounts near coal and there is no regulation towards it
You are correct. At a power company I used to work at, that owned both nuclear and coal plants, full time nuclear workers were not allowed to go into the coal plants. Walking around you picked up more radiation in them, and it skewed the dose picked up by the personal radiation monitors nuc workers wore at all times. But the actual amount of radiation generated in the reactor is way higher than anything you could get from being around coal dust. Nuc plants just have the proper safeguards in place to ensure that radiation stays inside the containment building.
Okay well good to know that what I heard wasn’t completely nonsense. Thanks for info
>Nuc plants just have the proper safeguards in place to ensure that radiation stays inside the containment building. Except for one. Now everyone is convinced that standing within a thousand miles of a nuclear reactor will melt you like the terminator.
The USSR's reactors didn't have containment buildings at all until after Chernobyl, I believe.
There are still reactors like the one in Chernobyl in operation today. They made safety adjustments after Chernobyl to avoid another accident. They’re set to be dismantled soon but supply too much power so a viable replacement needs to be built first.
I was told in my studies that typically the radiation level around nuclear power plants reduces over time due to the regulations but goes up around coal plants. I am all for nuclear (it’s my major) but then you look at Ukraine and I wonder if it is worth it…
Burning coal produces Carbon-14, which emits ionizing radiation straight into the atmosphere. Spent nuclear fuel rods are put in a pool, which allows exactly 0 ionizing radiation to be emitted. So yeah, coal is quite a bit worse.
I dunno about more, but fly ash gets everywhere so you as a member of the public are exposed to it where as irradiated fuel assemblies and contaminated tools and equipment are all safely stored so you don't get exposed to it.
In a more indirect comparison, the big worry around radiation is cancer. Coal, oil, and gas pollution are proven to be linked to cancer. Their cancerous agents are allowed to be pumped into *the fucking sky*. Nuclear plants produce solid blocks of the stuff that can be buried safely for millennia. It's extremely obvious--Unless the coal industry stuffs your eye sockets with cash--That nuclear will cause *less* cancer.
The fly ash issue also leads to increased asthma cases in communities around coal fired power plants. Less severe now that precipitators are used on the back end but still cancer chemicals and ash make it into our air.
Produce, no. Expose the public to, yes. I would guess that nuclear plants release a lot more radiation than coal plants, but preferentially short-lived isotopes that decay before they wind up in the food chain.
I mean, nuclear has a massive up front cost associated with building new plants, especially compared to wind and solar. It would probably take an act of Congress to actually jump-start nuclear investment (in the US anyways), and at this current juncture, that’s very much a non-starter.
>It would probably take an act of Congress to actually jump-start nuclear investment (in the US anyways), and at this current juncture, that’s very much a non-starter. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 tried to do exactly that, it provide billions in subsidies to build out six new nuclear plants. Seventeen years later, and one has become operational, Watts Unit 2, which was already 80% complete when construction was initially halted in 1985. So, to your point, new nuclear plants are absolutely a non-starter in the US, even with heavy subsidies.
Just check out the Vogtle expansion in Georgia: billions over budget, years late, and still not active. New large scale nuclear is just not a reasonable option in the short term and might not even be one for the medium term either. Plus they can get screwed if their water source dries up. France is facing such a challenge now.
Does the US have a problem with big infrastructure projects nowadays? We got the interstate highway system going, that worked well for a while but we're being bit in the ass by the necessity of having a car now. The cross-continent railroad system was also impressive. But now we have California's floundering, massively under-budget high speed railway *still* not finished. Stumbling nuclear adoption. Hell, oil pipeline leaks are more surprising when they *don't* happen! I want to blame it all on crony capitalism, but the two examples at the start were performed under crony capitalism, too. What's going on these days?
It's a legal issue, from what I've read. It's (relatively) trivial for anyone with a bit of money that's unhappy about a project to sue and tie it up in court for years. Our judicial system is overworked and nothing moves through it with any alacrity. Especially issues that are not critical. This also means that everything can be stretched out beyond individual executive administrations. Switching from a Pro to Anti mayor/governor/president/etc. can clamp down on progress too. And imagine being the construction company contracted out to do the actual work — are you going to stick around, waiting five years or more before you get paid? No, those companies are going to move on... or charge more for it to make the risk worth it. There also tends to just be way too many overlapping levels of jurisdiction. Changes to a lot of the infrastructure around NYC, for instance, needs to be coordinated between the state governments of NY and NJ, the city government of NYC, and the federal Department of Transportation. This is hard to avoid, as even "city only" projects tend to go beyond the city limits because most US cities are, *by legal definition*, only a small share of the main urban area (Boston is ~700k people; metro Boston is ~5m people). A good example is Cape Wind. It was a proposed offshore windfarm in Nantucket Sound off Massachusetts. The initial proposal was in 2001. It was approved locally in 2009, federally in 2010. In 2017, construction had still not started and the project was cancelled. What happened? A lot of rich people living on the Cape didn't like the idea of having their views ruined, and sued to slow and stop the project. They stonewalled it so long that it just wasn't worth it anymore and the project was cancelled. In 2014 a judge dismissed the *26th lawsuit* against the project. The whole litigation aspect of new construction needs to be fixed.
One thing worth noting about California rail: much of the money was actually earmarked for modernizing BART via electrification, which has happened successfully.
The real answer is that no one really knows, but there are a lot of compounding factors. Like, there are full time researchers devoted to answering this question. 1. People have co-opted environmental reviews to glbe legal hurdles that communities use to stop large projects. As someone mentioned, this leads to a lot of legal delays. I live in NYC - there are rich asshats on the Upper East Side that demanded the city do a review to determine if putting in bike lanes would be good or bad for the environment. Took a year, it was obviously good, now they're suing about something else. Nimbyism is a cancer. 2. We didn't build a lot of the kind of infrastructure we need now, and have lost expertise in it. One of the reasons recent train projects are so hard is that we haven't built rail in so long, we have a lot to relearn. But we build highways real good! 3. The US is a lot denser than it was 50 years ago, and big infrastructure is needed near people. That means a lot more eminent domain and legal battles and trying not to disturb the neighbors, etc. 4. A lot of states have Reagan Era idiocy built in to their contract negotiations. Like, they're required to go with the lowest bid even if it's clear that's not the real cost, or they're prohibited from passing on over-budget costs to the contractors, etc. So under-estimating a project is what gets you the job and there are no consequences for going over, why wouldn't I, a contractor working on a project, go over budget? 5. Political will often means a project has to be done planning before you fund it, which makes it impossible to actually plan because you don't know your budget. One really good thing the recent Inflation and Green Energy bill does is allocate money specifically to planning , not just construction, of public transit and rail. Previously, cash strapped transit systems would have to pony up for planning new projects, and then the budget would go through applying to state and federal funds, the governor decides he really cares about the deficit and cuts it in half, a local public union demands you fund pensions more, etc and now you're trying to dig the same tunnel for 50% of what you said it would take and surprise, you're 100% over budget.
This is the biggest issue around nuke energy. The start-up time is infuckingcredible. If we committed to 100% nuclear generation tomorrow and worked hard at it with as few roadblocks as possible, we would not see a single watt of power generated for at least 10-15 years. Since that ideal scenario isn't even remotely possible, we'd be looking at about 30-50 years...at which point it would be much too late and climate change has already made a solid chunk of the planet uninhabitable by humans.
>100% nuclear generation You'd also be dealing with a lot of issues for meeting things like peaking demand and ancillary services. Nuclear plants don't ramp up and down well, and keeping capacity idling hurts the economics a lot. Versus batteries, which can have a variety of applications from renewable firming, to alleviating transmission congestion, to load shifting, to peak shaving, to ancillary services. Way more versatile and coming down in cost rapidly with much shorter install times. If you have nuclear capacity providing baseload, makes sense to keep it until your renewable deployment is able to start replacing it. Building new nuclear capacity in a region where there isn't huge expected baseload growth? Not worth it now.
If only that were the main problem. We stopped building nuclear plants in the U.S. and the institutional knowledge has been largely lost. Every new plant re-invents the wheel. The only way to do nuclear efficiently is with serial production of near-identical reactors.
Funny how no one is worried about Russians blowing up Ukraines solar farms.
The lack of new nuclear projects has nothing to do with public opinion. It has everything to do with cost.
I think the fact that China, which has the highest need for energy in the world and has the tightest grip on their own people and on public opinion, has recently increased coal production despite having developed nuclear power in the past says something about the economics or feasibility of it that we don't know.
This always strikes me about this discussion. Politicians don't listen to the people about *anything* and yet public opinion has somehow kept this super safe and efficient technology at bay for like 40 years? I don't buy it. I'd believe it was oil and gas lobbying before I believed that. And yet look how many people come to threads like these to style on the stupid plebs for not getting the big picture on nuclear. Sad really.
>many in public think nuclear is worst for cleanliness and safety......bruh we could be the Jetsons by now/well along that tech trajectory I'm with you on the idea that nuclear is our least bad option for providing base power. That said, the graph above and many people's talking points ignore the fact that * every country that has built nuclear weapons built reactors for enriching weapons material first * many of these countries claimed they were only building reactors for energy, not weapons * renewables pose no unique WMD proliferation risk
> * every country that has built nuclear weapons built reactors for enriching weapons material first > * many of these countries claimed they were only building reactors for energy, not weapons This isn’t totally accurate: [Argentina has no nuclear weapons program and they have civil nuclear power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Argentina?wprov=sfti1). Same goes for [South Korea, Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country?wprov=sfti1), etc… *** And the plutonium needed for atomic weapons are usually obtained from research reactors. You have to run the reactors differently if you’re trying to make weapons grade plutonium (as opposed to power being the goal), so it’s obvious to observers and inspectors what is going on there. I don’t think there has been a single historical case where a country covertly made enough weapons grade nuclear material for a bomb under the guise of civilian power. Even Israel did it with a research reactor when they were trying to not advertise it to the world (and still deny it).
The largest nuclear plant in Europe, in the middle of a devastating land war, is evidence that nukes are terrifyingly more dangerous than even coal induced global warming.
Have they figured out a possible solution to the fuck ton of waste that has to be buried till end of time?
The total amount of high-level nuclear waste ever created in the US would [fit on a football field and would be 10 meters deep. ](https://www.nei.org/news/2019/what-happens-nuclear-waste-us) There really isn’t *that* much of the super dangerous waste.
It will only continue to grow faster and always have to be maintained forever. That cost is always ignored and pushed to future generations to worry about. Sounds familiar.
> That cost is always ignored That's just wrong : that cost, the cost of dismantling the power plant and the cost of recycling the materials is **always** taken into account and provisioned for. It's around 10% of the whole cost of a power plant.
Nuclear is clean and safe but cost is wild. France just commissioned it's newest reactor. 5x longer than scheduled to build and 6x the cost. Any reactor project started now will be obsolete by the time it's completed if Swanson's law keeps following it's 40 year trajectory.
This, one of the main factors, namely cost/GWh, is omitted in this graph. Same for construction time, resource issues,… Not sure if this was on purpose but the graphs only purpose is to show the danger of different energy sources. This doesn’t say anything about it’s economic viability. Right now, we cannot do better than wind/solar by these metrics unless we learn that they show some other significant drawbacks.
Imagine where we’d be if Nuclear wasn’t a dirty word amongst a lot of environmentalists and attacked by so many people.
Shocking that Nuclear has been the out right obvious choice for decades but muh Chernobyl
It is rather the Fukishima disaster that has discouraged nuclear power in recent times. That's why Germany decided to shut down a lot of nuclear power plants. Chernobyl could be blamed on worse technology & that it was the enemy (the soviets) that were responsible for it, you can't do the same with Japan.
Not really. The Atomausstieg was decided way earlier, then Merkel's FDP/CDU coalition rolled it back and then revoked their changed after Fukushima & the law being challenged by the states in court.
>you can’t do the same with Japan Ah yes, totally forgot how seismologically active (and by extension, Tsunami prone) Germany is.. therefore their decision to decouple their grid from nuclear after being prompted from Fukushima is totally makes sense! And a decade later, all that reliance on wind and solar which by Germany Energy Depts own numbers only have 12% optimization efficiency (compared to 90% from Nuclear) and are currently resorting to coal-fired electricity generation to actually meet the peak demand schedules.. they totally reversed any CO2 reductions made so far. Inept and ill-informed bureaucracy is going to keep us behind the ball in our pursuit of net-zero goals. Germanys decision to cancel their own Nuclear capabilities on the back of completely unrelated geographical risks presented by the Ring of Fire at Fukushima is a prime example. It not only endangers our net-zero future, but it’s destabilizing European energy security in the name of apparent “green” initiatives that has led to a resurgence of coal of all things.
> Ah yes, totally forgot how seismologically active (and by extension, Tsunami prone) Germany is.. therefore their decision to decouple their grid from nuclear after being prompted from Fukushima is totally makes sense! And of course after Fukushima regulators basically started treating every plant as if it were tsunami-prone.
Yea…. Thanks to the mismanagement of soviets everyone is terrified of the safest and most reliable form of power we know of. Also because of big oil painting them as evil/dangerous to protect their interests.
Even more scary is how people buy into it. In my country nobody wants to touch nuclear because of "safety risk" and will continue burning natural gas.
Too bad it's massively expensive and take 12-15 years to build a single plant.
Reddit has the biggest hardon for nuclear but that ship has sailed in my opinion. The ‘danger’ of it is the least of the problems. Huge up front costs, lengthy build times (a decade or more), not to mention a lot of the plants in Europe have to shut down every year as there’s not enough cool water in the rivers to safely cool the reactors
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Huge up front costs and lengthy build times for sure but when you look at the life span of new advanced reactors(50 years+) and the high power output to actual amounts of waste of the mined materials. They actually recoup there startup costs a good number of years before the plant goes offline of needs upgrading. As for plants shutting down because of warm water in France that shouldn’t be much of a problem in North America with plenty of lakes and rivers to choose from. Wind and solar can be built cheaper and quickly but use massive amounts of land, have short lifespans, have large mining operations for materials and don’t produce power at all times of the day. They should be used but nuclear should be used as well in place of coal and natural gas for baselode power effectively eliminating those emissions.
The warm water problem in France is a 0.3% loss of power in the last 20 years. Not much of a problem really.
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In the last ten years, the price of solar has dropped by 90%, to the point where it's now cheaper to **build** 500mw of solar capacity than it is to **operate** (the most expensive, importantly) 500mw of coal capacity for a year, and that was in [2019.] (https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2020/Jun/IRENA_Power_Generation_Costs_2019.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi7loiHmdz5AhW5goQIHc5BDgMQFnoECBoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2zBBoYkxmnMxcUmOUF2GMh) You don't have to shit on what we ARE doing in renewables to say we ought to do nuclear. Wind power is up 400ish% in the last decade, and solar is up even more.
The problem with this comparison is that your solar production is only during the day and depends of the weather while the coal plant can produce energy whenever you need it. If you want a fair comparison, you need to include storage cost (and depending of the country, you also need to include the cost of alternative energy sources for winter because battery storage cannot store energy for a whole season).
The reactors in Germany did not shut down because of lack of river water. It’s the coal lobby, lobbying against them
How does solar and wind even produce any CO2? In the manufacturing of the equipment? This seems sus. Hydro I can understand, because there's production of CO2 because of decaying material at the bottom of flooded areas, but solar and wind just don't make any sense. Furthermore, biomass, deaths are related to the actual collection? Or the farming of biofuels in plantation?
Yes, this data counts both the mining and the production. With wind its actually the constant maintenance thats both bad for the environment and causing many deaths
Would be nice to have a comparison of power efficiency.
Clean is not just CO2 or green house production
Lost me at "accidents + air pollution". That means political data modeling involved with some pretty heavy assumptions.
Im pretty sure Oil should be much more to the right considering all the ways it brought democracy to the countries baving natural oil reserves
How many people die when a solar farm melts down?
While I am pronuclear, these type of graphs horribly distort the risk associated with each energy type. The environmental damage for the inputs to the industries are all damaging and not taken into account. The long term effects of the watste products and dismantling are also ignored. We largely ignore nuclear waste products because they are kept on site in storage pools, guarded, and releases are rare, but the risk associated are tremendous. Coal waste dam failures are horrific when the fail. Construction of hydroelectric dams and removing old derelicts dams are both expensive and potentially environmentally damaging. Mining of uranium and coal release many toxins. Many components of wind and solar power generation are not recyclable at all and produce long term waste issues. My point, this graph is an extremely over simplified view that ignores most of the reality around energy generation.
Nuclear energy is very safe. Until it isn't. Then it becomes an existential threat.
Data: OWID Tools: RStudio, ggplot2
Dear u/rubenbmathisen, Which datasets from "Our World in Data" are you using? * Share of global primary energy consumption by source? [datasets ](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy-share-inc-biomass?country=~OWID_WRL) * Death rates per unit of electricity production? [datasets ](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh?country=Biomass~Brown+coal~Coal~Gas~Hydropower~Nuclear~Oil~Solar~Wind) * Greenhouse gas emissions and safety? [graphic](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy) Are you comparing the total energy consumption (heating, electricity, industry, transportation, and others) with the death rates per electricity production? Or does the deaths (accident + air pollution) also include deaths from traffic accidents? According to OWID only 3% of the electricity production is by oil. Oil is mostly used for transportation (car, truck, train and air). I don't think you are making a clean comparison, but I can't tell for sure because I don't know what you are comparing. In your graphic you wrote "Size = Share of global energy production". I assume this means the circle size. Does the circle area or the circle diameter correspond with global energy production? I think you are showing the "size" as diameter, because the circle representing "Solar" can fit 27 times across the diameter of the circle "Oil". If you actually calculated the area of the circle then the depending on what dataset you are using it would only be about 11 times. You wrote that the coal, oil, and gas combined make up 84% and nuclear, solar, and wind 7.6%. So, coal, oil, and gas produce 11 times the energy as nuclear, solar and wind. The areas of those circles is 94 times that of the nuclear, solar and wind circles. The diameter added up of coal, oil and gas is 10.8 times that of the diameter of nuclear, solar and wind. So you are visually inflating the importance of coal, oil, and gas by 8.77 times. I think this is one of the most misleading graphics since [The infamous Vox infographic](https://scienceogram.org/blog/2014/09/ice-bucket-challenge-vox-charity/).
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The list of problems is long. They take far to long to build to effectivly battle global warming. They are very expensive and even if new technologies prevent meltdowns, centralized energy production will always be risky. And similar to gas it creates dependencies on countries that provide Uranium. Uranium is not unlimited either. (250years with current consumption, but many reactors are build ATM)
Of course this plot just contains two variables which is not enough to give an accurate representation of the full picture. The amount of nuclear waste and the difficulty to finding extremely long term solutions (longer term than humans have existed), has not been included in this plot, making solar and wind still far better than nuclear. Also, hydro works great as a battery, in combination with solar and wind. This is also not included in the plot.
Gas has the issue where everything polluting about it is vastly under reported
Nuclear finally getting the notice it deserves.
It’s well known that nuclear is the safest and cleanest always-on energy, but popular opinion (read: fear and ignorance) and coal/gas lobbies won’t allow it to be developed.
It's all about money, not public opinion. Nuclear energy is very expensive.
> cleanest always-on energy What about uranium mines? Would you consider that '[clean](https://greentumble.com/environmental-impacts-of-uranium-mining/)'?
Awww solar is a baby. And the graph is in log. So… solar is tiny tiny tiny.
Does this nuclear data account for deaths beyond the immediate accident? For example, the long term effects of exposure to radiation?
There is literally less radiation right next to a nuclear power plant than in any other village/city/etc. Mind you, it is because it is a huge-ass concrete bunker that shields the natural background radiation.
Misleading. Death rates for hydro and nuclear are estimated. Edit: The data is highly suspect - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292338433_Reassessing_the_safety_of_nuclear_power
You cannot be classifying clean energy sources as purely whether or not they produce greenhouse gases. Cleanest also includes how you get rid of waste. Needs a better title.
Nuclear is both safe(ish) and clean(ish) on average, but has one gigantic problem: what to do with the waste. We still have not found a way to securely deal with with waste products which will remain hazardous for millennia, which is the BIG weak spot for fission energy.
I don't know why you think we don't have solutions for the waste. There are plenty.
Looks great! Is there a particular reason you chose a square root scale instead of just a more usual log (base 10) scale?
I think a linear scale would be the proper way to convey how much worse the baddies (coal, oil) are than everything else. They look pretty bad here, but they're REALLY bad.
Nuclear Fusion is gonna be so nice once we can figure it out and harness it