Even though they do fail badly (when managed badly), they still kill fewer people per installed GW and produced GW-h compared to coal, gas and even solar.
When managed well (i.e. Adm. Rickover's US Navy) nuclear power produces zero health-related incidents over some 14,000 reactor-years. When managed super-badly (i.e. Soviet Navy) you get multiple deadly incidents per facility per decade.
I would say that calling this a "hydroelectric catastrophe" is misleading. The main motivation for building this dam was apparently to control flooding.
That first one might be of no use in a dataset for the US, UK etc. to make such decisions. It is a ridiculous outlier. 20-200k people die and there is a cover up.
Whether the government tries to cover up or not is of little consequence, the people are already dead.
Multiple 100+ fatality dam accidents happened in the US and other Western countries about the same time, lower fatalities owing to lower population density rather than some different level of diligence.
The solar claim is dubious (due to assuming installation of solar on residential roofs, when large scale solar would involve installation at ground level, a safer process.) But in any case, the cost of putative lives saved for the excess $ spent vs. solar would far exceed the $9 M statistical value of a human life used by the NRC to judge if regulations are cost effective. So, the argument you are making would imply a much higher value per human life, which would imply the NRC is dramatically underregulating nuclear power plants.
There are plenty of complaints about burning coal. I don't think I've seen an article arguing for that, and if I did I would imagine people would be very against the idea.
The high cost of nuclear _is the reason_ we still burn coal. If we hadn't over-regulated it 50 years ago there wouldn't be a coal power plant left in the country, and tens of millions of human-years would have been saved over the past several decades. And it's because we completely ignored the safety risks of coal while hyper-focusing on nuclear. There is no mythical "zero risk" power generation. Everything is context dependent. It is potentially true that at this point, cheap energy storage is close enough to make 100% renewable a reality and therefore that it's too late to make the switch to nuclear (although I'm not entirely convinced), but failing to switch fifty years ago is one of the greatest civilizational mistakes humanity has made.
Bad as coal is, it's a consistent, lower level of bad. In aggregate it's way worse, but it's not the impending doom and enormous clean up that happens when you have a nuclear accident.
An average coal plant produces ~1twh power per year for 40 years of its lifespan. Death directly attributable to emissions from coal plants average around 25 per 1 twh of power. So coal plants just in their operation kill at least 1000 people each, conservatively. So far there has been 1 confirmed radiation death from Fukushima Daiichi, and it operated for almost exactly 40 years. Even Chernobyl killed fewer than 50 people, though it was SUPER expensive to clean up.
The "confirmed" death bit is a dog whistle. The cancers from population radiation exposures are largely statistically undetectable (and would not all have happened yet), but regulators cannot just act as if they do not happen. Radiation is not a defendant that must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
The best evidence suggests there will be no cancers related to Fukushima due to both the low levels of exposure and the long time horizons of the relevant cancers. The population effected will in all likelihood die of other causes before the cancer would occur.
Chernobyl is obviously harder to parse because of confounding lifestyle issues and poverty in the region, and now the war. But I’m not sure a badly designed and run soviet RBMK should be the basis for western nuclear policy anyway.
What "best evidence"? I find it strange that coal deaths from air pollution predicted by epidemiological considerations is taken for granted while similar predictions for nuclear from uncontrolled emissions are completely rejected by nuclear proponents. Of course numbers are far lower, but I still wonder what level of cognitive dissonance can lead to this being rejected completely.
I also always wonder whether mining deaths are correctly accounted. Even just add the number from a single east German mining company alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wismut_(company) should change the picture somewhat.
> while similar predictions for nuclear from uncontrolled emissions are completely rejected by nuclear proponents
This isn't the case at all. The same epidemiological modeling definitely shows that no one exposed to radiation from Fukushima will live long enough to develop cancers associated with exposure.
Right, I don't dispute your figures at all, I'm just saying the general population doesn't get headlines about this for coal plants and it's just "a thing that happens" as a result of running a coal plant. A nuclear incident is something that is an accident. It could have been prevented. There's tons of headlines about it, and it goes from minimal cost to a gigantic cost immediately.
I think this is a culture/News problem. There have been plenty of coal accidents. A coal dust explosion in the 1940s killed over 1000 people. Mining accidents and deaths are somehow unconnected in the popular imagination.
> This can be traced to a constantly shifting regulatory environment, which has continuously changed plant design requirements, and added more and more safety features, which often were required to be implemented on plants under construction.
> By stabilizing regulations, making them clear, and making changes to them predictable, we can prevent cost overruns associated with expensive and time-consuming on-site rework.
> Some experts think these QA/QC requirements and their downstream market effects are the prime reason for high nuclear construction costs
And one example of intrinsic issues:
> Meeting these requirements for a site-produced material is difficult. Nuclear concrete typically has multiple closely-spaced reinforcing bars that can be difficult to arrange properly (the Royal Academy of Engineer’s 30-page Guide to Nuclear Concrete mentions “congestion” 13 times). Concrete placement issues have plagued every recent nuclear project and are frequently the source of delays and cost overruns. Examples abound: a 6 month delay from incorrectly placed rebar on Vogtle 3 and 4 in Georgia, a 4 month delay on the VC Summer plants for similar reasons, and a 9-month delay from poor concrete composition at the Olkiluoto 3 in Finland.
> The difficulty of meeting requirements, combined with the lack of construction expertise due to long periods without constructing new plants, means that any new construction inevitably struggles as the builders learn how to meet the high level of stringency required. Delays at Vogtle Units 3 and 4 were partially due to a contractor unprepared for the difficulty of nuclear construction. Similar issues seem to be responsible for delays and cost overruns on Flamanville in France and Olkiluoto in Finland.
Some of the other QA/QC issues are likely due to over-regulation, but you're probably not going to find any person in a management position in overseeing these projects who would agree to reducing those regulations. Nobody wants to be the person making the call to "cut corners" which then creates an accident, and there's good money to be made in adhering to the regulations.
Yes, regulations makes construction expensive, but changing regulations makes it even more expensive.
The author concludes that while stabilizing regulations would make construction cheaper, it still wouldn't be cheap. And to further reduce costs, we would need to find ways to apply economies of scale in the build process.
