This is not unusual for the nuke industry, both civil and military.
Which is the problem. This is primarily a managerial issue, not a technological one. And the quality of executive and managerial decision-making of all kinds across the entire industry is nowhere near the standard required for future confidence. Especially given increasing risks from extreme climate change events.
Since deaths from renewables scale linearly with installations I think that nuclear will continue to win that particular argument. Building more wind turbines and solar installations is not going to reduce the deaths from installation and maintenance.
I wonder what the clean-up costs are long-term for the groundwater contamination from solar panel production and for the dismantling and junking of wind turbines when they reach their EOL? Maybe not as much as nuclear but definitely not free -- right now they are a hidden negative externality just like coal plant fly ash, but eventually someone is going to have to pay the bill.
The type of renewable matters though, it seems like retrofitting existing houses with solar panels is relatively more dangerous than building utility scale solar farms (no roof to fall off from, higher yield).
> That's deaths per joule so far. How would nuclear compete if far more renewables were installed, producing far more joules?
I'd expect wind and solar deaths to increase more or less linearly with joules output. These deaths are mostly related to maintenance activities that will scale with deployment.
Whereas: nuclear deaths from reactors built after 1970 are what, zero? That isn't to say that there aren't a lot of very old reactors still online, but nuclear deaths are all outliers rather than modal. And we should expect fewer outlier events per joule with newer designs.
> How about clean-up costs?
All clean-up is relatively inexpensive compared to climate change. That said, wind and solar require expensive cleanup; it isn't clear that this is any less expensive than burying or processing waste.
Fukushima is an outlier, rather than the mode.
> This is not unusual for the nuke industry, both civil and military.
This is a very big jump from a single incident to a generate characterization of a global industry.
> Especially given increasing risks from extreme climate change events.
Climate change will only get worse as we continue to consume more and more electricity, and avoid building out nuclear power.
Wind and solar require a lot of labor and land per joule compared with other energy generation. They also have relatively short generation lifetimes and generate disposal waste at the end of their operating lifetime. Land isn't something we think of as especially finite in the US, but it is more precious in denser regions like Europe.
To the extent that wind and solar displace existing coal and gas generation; great, I support that. But the emphasis on wind and solar over the past decade has resulted in increased oil and gas energy generation, worsening climate change. Wind/solar and oil/gas are the classic "bootleggers and baptists" combination.
Except... we don't know what the deaths are. It will take tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years to know what the death toll is from nuclear power. Because humanity is stuck with the waste for hundreds of thousands of years.
We use only tiny amount of the energy available, then have waste to deal with through the ages.
I'm in favor of nuclear, but wow are we ever terrible at innovating & trying to make a respectful, compelling go at it. Kerry shutting down the Integral Fast Reactor keeps coming back to haunt me as one of those strong indicators that America doesn't want to put itself up to the challenge of doing nuclear responsibly.
Out of curiosity, is there a single death that is directly attributable to nuclear waste from a reactor? (want to add that last clause because I do not think nukes should get blamed for someone improperly dumping medical equipment with cobalt or cesium isotope generators) For some reason I want to assume this happened at some point, maybe back in the 50s or 60s when we were really sloppy with nuclear waste but I can't seem to find any.
Yeah, that was the one that made me add the medical waste clause in my question. There have been a couple of cases of poor handling of these devices, but as far as I can tell there do not seem to be any deaths from actual reactor waste.
We're stuck with the gaseous waste from fossil fuels for millennia. We're stuck with megatons of radioactive coal ashes forever. We're stuck with toxic chemical compounds necessary to build anything industrial at scale (including solar panels, batteries, windmills etc) forever too.
