The sources look good [1] In particular, the deaths as a result of hydroelectric power caught some catastrophic failures. Dams are very, very dangerous constructions, and have a failure mode that makes a nuclear plant look safe by comparison. Just one major Hydroelectric Dam [2], Bangiao, was responsible for on the order of 50,000 deaths related directly to the Dam Failure.<p>[1] <a href="http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html" rel="nofollow">http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam</a>
I feel like this line of reasoning misses the point a bit. Nuclear waste is dangerous for a very very long time, while deaths from these other sources are front loaded. When can people move back to chernobyl? If we have significant radiation exposure in japan, how long will that land be uninhabitable? Nuclear waste we create today is dangerous for how long?
The thousands of children (now adults) near Chernobyl with thyroid cancer don't show up in these stats, since they're not all dead.<p>Doesn't necessarily change the conclusions but worth noting.
So basically, according to this graph, coal, oil and natural gas cause way more deaths per unit of energy produced than other energy sources, and notably, nuclear energy is by far the least dangerous.<p>That's interesting, if it's true.
Wait, are you trying persuade us with facts?<p>Airplanes are the safest way to travel by far. That doesn't prevent people from stubbornly refusing to fly (taking very unsafe road trips instead), it doesn't prevent panic attacks in the air, and it doesn't stop governments wasting billions on security checkpoint theater.<p>God speed, my friend, I sincerely hope the facts will make a difference.
It should be pointed out that there will never be another Chernobyl. It was a perfect intersection of criminally inadequate design, early-adopter naivete, incompetence, and Murphy's Law.<p>In these discussions, bringing up Three Mile Island is fair game, but Chernobyl is not a realistic parallel.
I'm missing (or the article is missing) the timeline that the calculations are based on. Is that yearly? last year? last 5 years?<p>We have to take a significant time scale on any of these for it to be considered reliable. Though there may have been 0 deaths from nuclear last year, over a 10 year span, would that number be the same?<p>I believe nuclear can be safer over the long-run, but I'd like to see some more depth in these stats.
a great part of the fear is that you can not see radioactivity harming you. Water I can see. Mining coal feels like it is within my control whether I engage in that activity or not.
The linked sited is an article that links to a blog post that doesn't really say exactly how they came up with their results, but provide some links (e.g. <a href="http://manhaz.cyf.gov.pl/manhaz/strona_konferencja_EAE-2001/15%20-%20Polenp~1.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://manhaz.cyf.gov.pl/manhaz/strona_konferencja_EAE-2001/...</a>).<p>It sounds like they take into account deaths where coal air pollution was a contributing factor, but not deaths where radioactive fallout was a contributing factor, and they don't attribute global warming related deaths to fossil fuels.<p>They also don't take into account ongoing risks - some forms of energy present risks long after the energy has been harvested, so the numbers will continue to rise, while others don't).<p>I'd therefore take those results with a grain of salt.
Also good to take into account is that Chernobyl and TMI and Fukushima are installations from the 1970's or early 1980's.<p>And even for those old birds the stats seem fairly favorable.<p>But as long as emotions fueled by scare-mongering have the upper hand, rationality and facts make no chance. So really widespread adoption of nuclear energy (be it fusion or fizzion - I'd be surprised if the public at large makes any distinction between them) is probably not going to happen for the near future.
And that's a shame as it could be our ticket out of both a lot of environmental issues and socio-economic issues.
I can't find the crude death numbers in the article. It seems like there's a small chance that the number of deaths due to nuclear power in all of history could increase by a factor of 10 or more due to events in the next week or two, which would push it past rooftop solar energy, although it would still be nowhere near coal.
I think we should also measure an average number of deaths caused by a single incident and the average number of deaths among strangers caused by a single incident. The incidents at nuclear plants are rare, but the consequences can be much more dangerous than from the other energy sources.
One problem with this visualization is that it does not account for future deaths and less noticeable health effects caused by radioactive waste and accidents related to its storage. On the other hand, it also does not account for the same caused by oil and coal and other pollution.
The deaths from solar appear to be from falls while installing roof-mounted systems; this would be primarily applicable to residential and small commercial solar systems, whereas most larger systems will tend to be ground-mounted and safer to construct.
So natural gas is the safest?<p>It is same order of causalities as nuclear, albeit with dramatically less safety effort. One can only imagine how safe would it be if as much was spent for safety measures as with nuclear per TW.
It's just a visualisation of <a href="http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html" rel="nofollow">http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...</a> figures from a couple of days ago, which I found highly dubious.<p>For example where are all the biomass deaths from? Why no figures for non-rooftop solar?<p>What does this "Hydroelectric power was found to to have a fatality rate of 0.10 per TWh (883 fatalities for every TW·yr) in the period 1969–1996" mean? How does spinning a turbine from dammed water cause death?<p>Ah ... further down the page "... Paul Gipe estimated ..." - so someones estimates without proper working or sources for death rates and such ...<p>I would love to see a well worked properly sourced analysis along these lines however.
What about all of the plants and animals killed from the various resources? Or the land and water that can no longer sustain life because of one disaster or another...
flawed observation. true, nuclear accidents don't happen often but when they do you have to deal with immediate and long term effects. as far as I know, coal power plant accidents don't cause deformities for the next 2/3 generations. also I don't see the numbers on solar and wind.
Why are you people advocating for nuclear power so much? Solar and wind power should be the future, and they're renewable. Don't you think that's a much better future? Sure they might not be very effective now, but a couple of decades down the road with some big investments (like in nuclear plants) it should be orders of magnitude more effective than it is now.<p>Of course, a country like USA will never back down from using nuclear plants because they need their byproducts to make nukes.
Even if reposted with fancy graphs, the data do not get better. Basically, they are from a nuclear lobby site.<p>The referenced data on the lobby site lists 0.04-0.23 deaths per TWh for the coal fuel chain and 0.01-0.65 for nuclear. I don't see that large a difference here between coal and nuclear.<p>The number of 160 deaths/TWh is made up from a very rough estimate of WHO that 1 mio. people die due to coal air pollution (without further reference). That's hardly a good source, IMHO.<p>Further, the effect of storing lethally radioactive material for very long time periods is completely neglected.<p>For me, this is a troll post and I bite.