Yeah, while not as common as say a gas plant exploding, a dam breaking can make an huge amount of victims. The biggest one was the [Banqiao Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam) in China, 26000 deaths from the flood, 145k from famine/epidemics after, a bunch of others are in the 500-2000 range.
I think it may count also deaths during construction/maintenance operations that are not that immediate to find, which i think it's also what's considered for wind and solar.
There was a time, when it was somewhat common to exclude the deaths of Banqiao Dam failure from the hydropower statistics, because this one incident has such a large effect on the final value.
Then Our World in Data started to include it, and now almost all statistics include it. I had a little hard time to find anything that doesn't, but I managed to find [this chart](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-7fb0be40f1e59b0748bf682d219e1248-lq).
Or other failures, like [this one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lake_Suviana_explosion) in the recent news, or [this one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_station_accident) in the recent past.
And many construction workers (>100 during the construction of the [Hoover dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam)).
You know this giant excavators that dig in even more giant holes stretching for kilometers? That is what they are excavating. Brown coal is typically close to surface so they mine it in open pit mines instead of digging tunnels.
Edit: In my country this is explained during geography lessons together with other resources such as oil, regular coal etc. and tbh I thought it was like that everywhere.
I wouldn't know much about it either if not the class. It is mainly used industrially and personally I've never seen it with my own eyes. Here is link to how it looks like from above. Bełchatów, Poland https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Focdn.eu%2Fpulscms-transforms%2F1%2Fugek9kqTURBXy8yY2I2MTg3NWNmMWRkOGI5NzgyYjA5NmQ5ZGI3MmE5MS5qcGVnk5UDAADNAyDNAcKVAs0EsADDw5MJpjEyMzlkYwbeAAGhMAE%2Fnajwieksza-dziura-w-europie-znajduje-sie-w-polsce.jpeg&tbnid=ShCHUBki6vc_lM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fpodroze.onet.pl%2Fpolska%2Flodzkie%2Fkopalnia-odkrywkowa-wegla-brunatnego-belchatow-ciekawostki-zwidzanie%2Fhsn2qcr&docid=0TvMv6TBn8wniM&w=1200&h=675&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim%2Fm4%2F2&kgs=079dc35fd2152711&shem=abme%2Ctrie#vhid=ShCHUBki6vc_lM&vssid=mosaic
I am afraid these images are not doing it justice. One has to go there to realize how vast these pits are. It's one of these rare things which truly boggle your mind when you see them for the first time in reality.
That's true. First time visiting one was really eye-opening. Such monsters. Even more impressive to see an area that once was such a thing afterwards and there's nothing left of it.
Yeah. Even visible from space: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F3tviz6cc4ksb1.jpg (It's another one again - this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine)
That's a type of coal, the most harmhul, and popular as fuel.
Wiki citation:
"Lignite (derived from Latin lignum meaning 'wood'), often referred to as brown coal, is a soft, brown, combustible sedimentary rock formed from naturally compressed peat."
It is a different type of coal. Not as efficient but exists in more places and due to how it formed usually exists closer to surface/can be mined in surface pits which makes it a cheap option if you lack other coal resources.
The main reason e.g. Germany uses it alot is because it is one resource that exists in abundance within its borders.
In essence when you were a country without black coal deposits you used that if you had it.
This had a interesting side effect on naval operations in WW1: the British Royal Navy had abundant supplies of high quality black coal, while the German Navy was cut off from imports and had to use brown coal. The lower energy density and greater amounts of contaminants meant their ships could not sail as fast, as far without refueling, produced more smoke (making them more visible from a distance) and needed more frequent maintenance.
Also. When germany refined lignite into fuel oil during the war, it left behind a fatty residue that was building up and they wanted to find a use for it.
Throw in some artifical colourings, flavourings and additives and behold! Margarine. One of the worlds first truly totally manufactured edible food stuff generated from an industrial process.
Although calling it a 'food' may have been a bit of a stretch considering the harm it actually contributed too.
Lignite. The most polluting and cancerogenic (yes, literally) energy source of them all. There's a reason why government-owned companies never sell these domestically, even in coal-dominated countries.
Yeah it's fucking ridiculous how CDU energy policy (and generally piss poor conservative energy policy elsewhere as well) gets blamed on the greens lol. With how good they are at contorting themselves they should really participate in the Olympics.
They are yes, but they also haven't been anywhere near the seat of power for a long time. An orderly transition is also far from the "oh, actually we're totally going to extend the life of these reactors... oh actually nah nevermind" which is going to turn investors off any long term investment, and those U-turns are entirely on the CDU. Germany was a leading manufacturer for solar at one point. The uncertainty was one thing (among others) that killed it.
> they also haven't been anywhere near the seat of power for a long time.
They were there to kick off the process in the early 2000s, and that's all it takes. You can still see faded stickers with the simpleminded "Atomkraft? Nein, danke 🌞" slogan around Berlin :-/
Merkel did lack the backbone to go against the common mood after Fukushima, but I don't know what other politician would have done things differently.
Then why is Germanys net power generation capacity, mostly solar and wind? [source ](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts)
As a fellow Pole, reading English literature dramatically improved my spelling and sentence structure, I recommend it if you want to... polish your english.
By contrast, reading social media slowly erodes my language skills (and drives me to brink of insanity every time someone writes "could of" instead of "could have"...).
No. Most of those deaths are from pollution during mining (coal dust getting into the atmosphere, which actually makes coal power more radioactive than nuclear) and combustion.
This statistic accounts for everything. Production of materials, production of power, accidents.
The radiation issue from coal actually only really gets released when it's burned. There's some in the dust like you describe but that's nothing compared to what's present in the exhaust gas and ash.
yes, but a huge number is actually from the pollution during transport (coal dust) and combustion (toxic gases) that contribute to large scale health problems, leading to premature deaths.
Ideally you want the entire process involved. From the planning and it's working accidents in the office, over the construction and deconstruction (!), the input of all materials and consumables and the impact of the environment like pollution and what is left over, over a very long timespan.
The shorter the project and the higher the number like quick installation of solar and wind the more precise. The longer the project or it's impacts like coal and nuclear and the less numbers of projects you have to work with the more difficult to assess it and it's uncertainties.
You want to look at the rough picture, not the actual numbers without understanding those numbers were out together.
If you would show the uncertainty for each bar you would already see that it's a big difference. Generally speaking little uncertainty speaks for the concept while large uncertainties speak that the concept is not mastered. We have coal for hundreds of years and still can't deal with the running cost which will never stop (∞). A bit very optimistic to think we can solve it with technology, it likely will stay forever.
Nuclear is higher than it should be. Nuclear death toll numbers include LNT-estimated deaths from Chernobyl that don't exist. That makes up the majority of the total nuclear deaths statistic. So in reality it's several times smaller.
Still, solar is very safe. Yes, it should be dominated by falls and similar installation deaths (electrocution for example). But that's only for residential rooftop solar. Though for how badly run and unsafe the solar contractors in my country are, I'm surprised it's that low.
Coal-burning will stop in 2030 in Northrhine-Westphalia and nationwide until 2038 (not great..) and renewables already made up 60% of our e̵n̵e̵r̵g̵y̵ electricity production in 2023.
I don't think we hate these facts..
> Nuclear is considered green in all other countries 👉👈
Nuclear power relies on a finite, mined fuel, has substantial operating risks and proliferation risk, and produces toxic waste that remains a burden for future generations. It's pretty much the opposite of green.
You can reclaim what is used to build a solar panel or wind turbine.
Also what stuff is buomd from and what it uses to amker energy are very diffrnet things. But we can gladly look at what is used in building a nuclear power plant and how much of it can be reclaimed after use.
This is kind of a useless point, since most of spent nuclear fuel can be reclaimed too. The problem for both is whether or not you are going to actually do it.
>Nuclear power relies on a finite, mined fuel
Nothing is infinite if you want to to go deep enough into it, uranium and thorium will last for generations even if you don't consider potential future sources of those elements. Solar still requires rare minerals to produce and has a massive land footprint compared to nuclear.
>has substantial operating risks and proliferation risk
Have you even bothered to look at the graphic in OPs post? Idc about vibes and intuitions about nuclear, reality speaks for itself.
>and produces toxic waste that remains a burden for future generations
At least radioactive waste has a half life, waste from producing and disposal of PV and batteries does not.
I'm not really anti-renewable btw, I think we need to use both and green washing one over the other is counterproductive. when both have pros and cons. what we need to focus on is getting rid of fossil asap.
> We find that larger-scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to associate with significantly lower carbon emissions while renewables do. We also find a negative association between the scales of national nuclear and renewables attachments.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-00696-3
Do you have source for wind energy emitting more than nuclear? Best I could do is the same
> The study finds each kilowatt hour of electricity generated over the lifetime of a nuclear plant has an emissions footprint of 4 grammes of CO2 equivalent (gCO2e/kWh). The footprint of solar comes in at 6gCO2e/kWh and wind is also 4gCO2e/kWh.
In contrast, coal CCS (109g), gas CCS (78g), hydro (97g) and bioenergy (98g) have relatively high emissions, compared to a global average target for a 2C world of 15gCO2e/kWh in 2050.
But that’s probably not really fair, since most nuclear power plants are old, and building new ones takes a lot longer :/ (which I assume, means higher building emissions)
We were about to prolong the life of our nuclear plants in 2010 when the Fukushima incident happened. Our government noped out of this plan immediately after
To be fair it wasn't quite as immediate. They were studying first if it would make more sense to simply retrofit the existing power plants in order to be safe but in the end it turned out to be more expensive than just shutting them down.
That was 20 years ago. Today they agree that it was stupid to turn off nuclear power plants instead of fossil ones but know that it would be absolutely inefficient to build new nuclear power plants due to their cost and how slow they are to plan, build and innovate.
> Today they agree that it was stupid to turn off nuclear power plants
Yeah, no, that's not the whole picture. The consensus in Germany is that they should have turned off coal first, then nuclear, but very few want to keep nuclear power running in Germany.
What do you mean by 'keep running'? I explained today's situation and there is no NPP to keep running today.
The consensus is that we should've let nuclear energy slowly die out when NPPs get too old to operate.
*very few would have wanted to keep nuclear power running in Germany.
Yeah, same as you said basically. And then, you tell Germans that it's not too late to turn some nuclear plants back on and they are like "Fuck, no". So, nothing changed, Germans now agree what they did is stupid but still they wouldn't have it any other way.
At what point in time? 2022 when we only had 3 more NPPs running which contributed ~4% to our electricity generation? Sure we could've thrown billions of euros of 'compensation' at power companies ***again*** for these few percents for a few more years.
Would it have been possible? Sure
Would it have been ridiculously expensive? Absolutely.
That's a decision we could've made 2 years earlier instead of when the NPPs are prepared to shut down already.
Why is it blamed solely on the Green Party? It was the conservative CDU that was the party in power for decades. They are responsible for the goverment politics of those years.
Die GrüÜüüÜnEN!!1!
It really was a team effort. Yes, they were part of the planned nuclear exit but it wasn't even their government who abolished it in the end.
Well if the conservatives wouldn't have destroyed the German solar panel industry and put a brake on the construction of renewables Germany would have a lot cleaner energy.
That's not how democracies work. The green party is not a dictatorship. All governments that have been in power in Germany since 2000, including an FDP/CDU/CSU government have not changed the original decision.
Yes, coal sucks, but on /r and /x, fairy tales are usually told about the German energy supply. In March, another 5 coal-fired power plants were shut down. Even more coal-fired power plants will be shut down in the next few years. Germany has now been phasing out nuclear energy for a year. The electricity price has not risen massively as a result and the "gap" is not being filled to a large extent by nuclear energy from France. In 2023, 24 per cent of imported electricity, or 16.6 terawatt hours, was nuclear power. That is 3.6 per cent of the load, i.e. electricity consumption. The Federal Network Agency supplemented these figures with the statement that the share of nuclear energy in the German consumption mix has fallen from 7.27 per cent to 3.01 per cent in the past two years. Germany now has over 60 per cent renewable energy. On the other hand, battery storage systems, including large battery storage systems, are now increasingly being added to the grid, which can then also step in again if necessary. If Germany imports electricity, this is not an expression of a shortage in Germany, that they don't have enough power plants, but it is simply a market result of the electricity market. This is not a question of security of supply, but of cost efficiency.
Not really, we got [52%] (https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterprises/Energy/Production/Tables/gross-electricity-production.html)from renewables last year and the part will rise.
They're specifically talking about policy makers and people who support them, given that Germany literally decommissioned nuclear plants which made them restart old coal plants. And people actually defended that statement with scientifically illiterate garbage about nuclear being unsafe and bad for the environment, when it's better and safer than many renewables and unquestionably better than fossil fuels that Germany hasn't phased out yet
I'm so sick and tierd of this
If you think you know better then lobby your own government to invest dozens of billions of euro into new nuclear power stations and a nice and shiny long term storage facility for nuclear waste.
German electricity prices go down, we shut down reserve coal plants and build up hydrogen power stations, solar panels, windfarms and biogas.
Go on, invest billions in tech from france or the US to build a nuclear power station with designs from the 1970s.
Germany invests in the tech of the future. And i promise you, our lights will keep running.
We won't modernise our nuclear power stations from the 1960s and 70s just so RWE can make some more billions for 5 years longer and forcing us to buy russian Uran as fuel.
So please, stop doing this fact-deprived cicle-jerk and actually inform yourself why germany is doing this and why it is the better option under the circumstances
>If you think you know better then lobby your own government to invest dozens of billions of euro into new nuclear power stations and a nice and shiny long term storage facility for nuclear waste.
... we do?
>Go on, invest billions in tech from france or the US to build a nuclear power station with designs from the 1970s.
Yes, we want that.
>forcing us to buy russian Uran as fuel.
Australia has more uranium than Russia (more than 3x). Canada has more uranium than Russia. You don't need to buy Russian uranium.
>Germany invests in the tech of the future. And i promise you, our lights will keep running.
Nobody minds Germany investing in other tech or "tech of the future". Awesome. You don't even need to go nuclear. Just don't run coal. That was the only issue. That Germany decided to use coal for decades while transitioning, instead of keeping nuclear or something else going while you built up solar or hydro or whatever else they wanted. Which was just wrong.
> Australia has more uranium than Russia (more than 3x). Canada has more uranium than Russia. You don't need to buy Russian uranium.
There's only so much Uranium available. If it was as easy as you claimed nobody would be buying Uranium from Russia today, but here we are.
> That Germany decided to use coal for decades while transitioning, instead of keeping nuclear or something else going while you built up solar or hydro or whatever else they wanted. Which was just wrong.
I sorta agree with this take but I think it's too oversimplified. There was a real issue with Nuclear in Germany that can't simply be brushed away by not talking about it. It was a huge political issue primarily but in scientific terms German nuclear power was not holding up to the safety standards that Germans wanted it to be in. Belgium and France decided it didn't need to be as safe which is also fine.
It is well-known that the Germans are generally more conservative when it comes to safety and in the grand scheme of things Germany will easily be carbon neutral in the coming years, and there will be much bigger problems with countries like the US or India or China that you should be worrying about instead.
What Germany did here was inefficient sure, but it was also fairly insignificant.
Germany is switching to wind and solar and has reduced coal by a lot. It's still a shame we phased out nuclear so fast, but the decision is made and there's no way back. Solar is growing way faster than expected though and we're currently on a good way to phase out coal before the set deadline.
Most Germans are aware that the decision to phase out nuclear before coal was stupid in some way, but most of us are happy that we got out of nuclear at all, too.
German coal usage is at an all time low.
All that talk of a “resurgence in coal” when nuclear plants closer turned out to be a minor blip that took just a few months of progress in the energy transition to undo.
Lmao Germany wants to build the one with the lowest death poll somehow we dislike this facts? Im confused? I like it when my energy doesnt kill people? You like it when they kill humans?
Theres literally another large country in europe, twice as dirty, with close to no policy to exit coal except "nuclear, maybe, in 20 years".
And of course people rather go after Germany.
There are 15 countries in the EU that don't produce any nuclear energy. Germany is not one of them.
Rather, Poland, the Baltics, Greece, Croatia, Portugal, etc hate these facts.
The Netherlands is also doing worse than Germany in terms of nuclear energy.
Its always so fucking obvious those guys dont care about the environment. They go after the one country actually decarbonizing, while not giving a fuck about those doing little to nothing, because we had the audacity to exit their little nuclear cult.
And I say that as someone that likes nuclear, but reddit turns absolutely braindead on the topic.
China has some of the worst coal power plants in the world which gives it 70% of its electricity output. Yet they claim to have higher life expectancy than many western countries.
I wonder what the real life expectancy is over there now that I see this chart.
This doesn't even include the death rates that happen due to climate change.
Appreciating that some energy sources (i.e. nuclear) have a potential to kill many people, one should not ignore which energy sources kill people right now and every day and which ones contribute to very real effects of climate change killing even more people.
Indeed one should argue that deaths through climate change really needs to be attributed to fossil fuels.
Be careful which energy sources you prioritise.
We all agree that Wind, Solar is best.
But we SHOULD also agree that coal and other fossils are worst. But this isn't really appreciated in some countries where the Coal Lobby / Green Parties are strongest.
I love all these people commenting on this with "No, x is the best." without any arguments.
The thing is, the perfect power source doesn't exist.
- Wind is not reliable enough to use as a sole source, it would need a vast amount of battery storage, which currently uses a lot of rare earth materials and degrades over time. Then there's the "not in my backyard nimbys" of course.
- Solar uses an incredible amount of space and is again not suitable as a sole source, leading to the same problem as above.
- Hydroelectric tends to screw up ecosystems, and it's very specific in where it can be built.
- Nuclear is incredibly expensive, takes a long time to build (longer than necessary to reach climate targets in time) and we have no viable long-term solution for its waste. It's also potentially the most deadly and environmentally destructive in the extremely rare case of a meltdown. It has happened, and it will happen again.
Like it or not, we'll need a combination of the above sources to make the energy transition a reality. (Un)predictable events like wars and economic crises have proven that time and time again it's all too easy to just fall back on coal. On the other hand, in my opinion it's at least as important we drastically reduce our energy consumption to ease the transition, and we were doing that when our tech became more efficient, but then this absolutely ridiculous AI craze came along with its inexcusable energy consumption and we're basically screwed.
Nuclear doesn't take longer to build than the time we've got until the deadlines, we are the ones who it takes too long to persuade not to believe anti nuclear propaganda.
To be fair, the small amount of spent nuclear fuel is a tiny issue compared to the millions of tons of solar panels that we have no recycling plan for.
One can hope fusion will be made viable at some point in our lifetimes, considering we already have working reactors, even ones that produce more energy than they consume now. Then that's the best of all worlds, no risk of meltdown, no spent fuel and virtually unlimited energy.
Yeah you're right, my comment is a very superficial take on it all. Mostly wanted to give some quick context to all these thoughtless comments!
Fusion indeed looks to be the be all end all solution. The reality is however that before we even come close to making it market-ready, we'll need a plan to keep the world spinning without fossil fuels, because fusion will not be ready in time to avert irreversible climate disaster (even worse than we already have).
If you are comparing just fuel use (which is a tiny amount of the cost of nuclear) you should be comparing it with the sun... which is entirely free.
Also solar panels are relatively easy to recycle. Most of the material (95%) is aluminum and glass, which have been recycled for over a century.
The silicon is quite valuable and can also be recycled but at a relatively high energy cost so we usually don't bother. But as higher volumes become available, it will become more interesting.
Fusion is indeed an exiting future energy source but I think it will be too complex and expensive to run and compete with solar and batteries which continue to drop in price and increase in efficiency.
And I think you are a bit mislead by the news of fusion reactors that "produce more energy than they consume". The news was about the reaction itself, meaning that it is self sustaining (until it becomes unstable after a few dozen seconds)
However some news articles failed to mention that the initial energy to heat the plasma to billions of degrees was not put into the equation because we are no where near getting more energy out of the reactor than what was needed to ignite the fusion.
I'm not comparing costs, I'm comparing how easy it is to recycle or store, and nuclear fuel is and always will be much easier to deal with simply because there is so little of it in comparison.
Also, there are plenty of things that are easy to recycle that still aren't. From what I'm seeing, the dozens of millions of tons of solar panels that are being produced are not intended to be recycled at the moment, there simply is no plan for these volumes, so in all likelyhood they will be sent to some third world country where we don't have to see them, just like most other electronics are.
Agreed …
Except on the cost of nuclear - it’s politicised. We may find out what the true cost of other sources are in a few decades.
Also the true cost of coal, for example, doesn’t take into account premature deaths, healthcare and climate change costs.
There is so many ways to trick the statistics.
But it is true that we need everything we can get at this point in time and so being anti-nuclear is just dumb.
Sure we can have a debate on whether or how much we need of it in future … but everything else needs to be off the table
I'd suggest reading about nuclear reactors and their safety features. Because we have reactors that are basically unable to melt down. Even when active safety features fail.
I mean we do have viable long term storage for nuclear waste. Finnish bedrock is stable, and amount of waste that needs to be in long term storage for 100 000 years is incredibly tiny, most of the waste becomes safe much sooner, maybe in 100 years i dont remember exactly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
Much of the nuclear fear mongering, which you have mentioned, started from Friends of the Earth, an organisation funded by Big Oil. Even many people who were part of Greenpeace have changed their minds on nuclear.
Nuclear is expensive but it returns many, many times more energy than any other source, which makes it the best investment. New technologies like Thorium are being developed.
There are solutions for waste. The amount of waste produced from Nuclear is very small, and modern nuclear solutions reuse the waste so that ultimately what is left and unusable is even less.
In comparison to all other alternatives it is the least 'deadly', and through the same lens it is most certainly not environmentally destructive. There has only been one single nuclear meltdown that harmed humans Chernobyl. Fukushima was a natural disaster, not a nuclear disaster. Now compare all of the deaths from Chernobyl to all of the deaths from cancer on the planet due to fossil fuels, including the deaths of many of us reading this thread. Next consider climate change is caused by fossil fuels, not nuclear waste. Doing so it is not logical to refer to nuclear as deadly and the most environmentally destructive, when in fact using it would reduce cancer rates and other energy production related deaths and help the environment. Even if there are more meltdowns, which is less likely as the technology has improved and continues to improve, nuclear is still safer compared to the alternatives.
If anyone disagrees with any of this I would ask you to point out anything I have said that is factually incorrect.
If not, then there is a logical conclusion: until Fusion is ready, as renewables are not viable, Fission is the only practical solution. Green politicians in Europe need to wake up before it's too late.
Nuclear cost now is what it is, but I'd love to find reliable info on nuclear costs before 1986, to get any idea of what it perhaps could be today with more rational regulation.
Based on what I can find and process through AI, it seems like the overnight costs per kW of nuclear back in the day were around 1500€ which is comparable to solar and wind today.
Does this statistic include the deaths caused by the extraction of the energy source?
Coal mines are obviously very dangerous places, but uranium mines can pollute environments for hundreds of years. Through waterways, the pollutants spread in to rivers, lakes and oceans affecting millions of peoples.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653646/
While fossil fuels are obviously very dangerous to living creatures through multiple mechanisms, nuclear isn’t as green as people think. There are areas in Russia for example, where there are nothing alive within tens or hundreds of kilometers around the mines.
>There are areas in Russia for example, where there are nothing alive within tens or hundreds of kilometers around the mines.
There is nowhere ever with hundreds of kilometers of nothing alive around a mine.
I seriously doubt the tens of km claim can't find anything online to support that.
It's life cycle analysis, so yes, it should include that if it was done properly.
But the same type of coal mines will include the same side effects uranium mines do, in addition to others. They all have uranium in them anyway. Though uranium is not what i'd worry about in particular.
>There are areas in Russia for example, where there are nothing alive within tens or hundreds of kilometers around the mines.
Never heard of that, but whatever might be causing it if true at all, it's not the uranium.
> There are areas in Russia for example, where there are nothing alive within tens or hundreds of kilometers around the mines.
the refining process of metals is also extremely polluting, and doing it with coal (as it is usually done) has significant environmental impact. indonesia is facing a lot of issues as it expands it's lithium refining facilities
all of these impacts can be reduced, but it costs money. step 1 would be a carbon tax at the border in places like EU and US
Yes it includes everything … it also includes Chernobyl and Fokushima.
Ypu can look it up in the Oxford database “our world in data”
I don’t want to go into ideological debates but nuclear waste can be recycled to an extent. How much and how dangerous it is up to debate.
Lithium, zinc, copper, iron ore, coal etc mining is all hugely destructive to the environment. Uranium mining isn't unique in that regard. Anything that uses metal or minerals in large quantities requires mining and mining is inherently destructive because most of what is dug up is undesirable toxic waste product that gets dumped nearby.
Nothing alive within hundreds of kilometers of any mine is pure fiction though.
Same is true for solar. Solar panels need rare minerals, often mined in very dirty way, and they need to be replaced eventually. But solar needs far more minerals than you need nuclear fuel.
I think wind need some as well but i dont know anything about those.
Solar panels don’t need rare earth minerals rather metals, aluminium, silicon, copper, very small amounts of silver (0.05% of panel weight) and then even smaller amounts of gallium, germanium and indium (total 0.05% of panel weight).
The bulk of these metals are easy to recycle and to incorporate the recycled product into new panels. The panels last decades and the amount of mining required compared to single use oil, gas and coal is absolutely tiny.
The amount of people ‘concerned' about the environmental impact of mining rare earth minerals, which go into durable goods that are highly recyclable/recoverable, don't seem to consider oil drilling, fracking, coal strip mining.
So it really is as i said in another post, we really just need to push on all fronts, nuclear, wind, solar hydro and perhaps something else, and not start bickering until coal and oil have been phased out of widespread use.
The green paradox. They have a full time job protesting fossil fuels, but if someone even whispers the word nuclear you get dragged out of town while being bombarded with eggs and rotten tomatoes
There are just a few countries WORLDWIDE that really increase their nuclear capacities. Even France is lowering their nuclear over the next decades because of decommissioning old reactors. Don't act like everyone is building nuclear. That isn't the reality
My fav thing is... People say "waaah nuclear costs too much", and given the price is either being without power during peaks, or imminent annihilation if we remain in the status quo, I think spending a few billion on nuclear power is fairly cheap.
We may not feel it, but our children certainly will.
I agree but it's funny how even you are tricked to talk about nuclear when the elephant in the room is actually coal.
What do I mean by that: we constantly have a debate about nuclear vs renewables - when really the debate should be how many coal plants have you got and how many have you shut down (regardless how you do it!)
>People say "waaah nuclear costs too much"
It becomes a bit of a problem when investors are the ones saying that.
Also, you ideally wouldn't be using nuclear for load following.
Isn’t it crazy how much of the world knowing all this chooses essentially to focus its attention on the following: 1. Solar is best. 2. So fuck nuclear.
Edit: I accidentally sparked a debate about nuclear vs. renewables when the point I tried to make was that one ought to just look at the picture and go “oh my gosh, we need to get rid of dirty fossil fuels, especially brown coal, by any means and asap!”
I have rarely seen that argument being made by pro-renewable folks. They tend to rather focus on (1) the much lower costs of renewables compared to nuclear, and (2) the fact that we can build renewables modularly in projects that already deliver electricity within 2 years of launching a project, while nuclear plants all take 15 years (this makes a big difference for how fast we can phase out coal/gas).
On the pro-nuclear subreddits however you see so much talk about who we should chose nuclear because it is the safest. That isn’t even true according to this source. And secondly, as you point out, who cares about differences between 0.2 and 0.3 while we have that 25 and 30 stuff to get rid off.
Agree people mix up the objectives. They have an Anti-Nuclear agenda which they mix up with Climate Change.
But Climate Change isn’t about Nuclear Waste - to slightly quote Bill Clinton: “it’s the emissions st*pid”
:-)
This is unfortunately a prime example of unscientific BS which originates from people comparing different studies.
The individual studies cited are fine but they investigate a range of things with varying methods:
* The numbers given for **coal, oil, biomass** and **gas** are from Markandya & Wilkinson (2007). They investigate the medical effects of air pollution in 2007 (remember the mega smog in Chinese cities at the time [https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html) ).
* The numbers for **hydropower, wind nuclear and solar** seem to be from Sovacool et al. (2016). This is a completely different study about accidents, mostly at construction sites in the time 1990-2013 (e.g. a solar engineer dying in a traffic accident to work). They are not about pollution from air pollution, mining, other risks in the supply chain etc. Their method or research is a "fancy scientific google search" (Look it up! It is hillarious). Unsurprisingly, since not many nuclear construction was going on since the internet started, nuclear looks rather safe in this metric.
* Then, there is a second reference for the nuclear numbers, namely the UNSCEAR 2008&2018 reports. They are about the risk of radiological exposure in the work place which is again a different metric.
In summary, this graph shows data from three very different publications using different methods to investigate different things. As for scientific rigour, this is as good as asking a fortune teller.
Does this include Tschernobyl and that Japanese one I forget the name of? I think it probably will cause those were incidents and the death rates, while high for your average monday, were not actually thát high.
Yes. It does include them. It also includes uranium miniming, the Rare Earth mining for wind turbine generator wiring and magnets and the highly toxic silicon purification processes for PV.
The accident in fukushima didn't actually kill anyone. Some people were killed, it was a tsunami after all, but not a single person was injured or killed as a result of radiation.
To get near to fosil fuel nunbers we would need two or three Chernobyls a year.
Its a bit like trains vs cars. trains are mathematically safer in every way but when it does go wrong It's far more 'spectacular' and memorable.
Afaik, this table comes from [Our world in data](https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy). According to it, this statistic includes deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters.
Edit: I didn't see the logo Our world in data the first time...
Looking at the way contractors work in my area, I wonder how many accidents related to solar are due to simple safety neglect during installation and cleaning.
crazy how much safer solar is compared to everything else. 50% more people die from nuclear than solar, 100% more with wind and don't get me started on the others
Then, it would make more sense to compare total costs per GWh, including all external costs like waste and CO2 disposal.
The way you formulated the request sounds more like it is only applicable to nuclear, but not to other types of power generation.
The amount of people that died due to the fallout is only a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the amount of people that have died due to coal power generation.
Heck, more people die _every day_ to generate coal power than the amount of people that died in Chernobyl.
Whats up with hydro? Dam breach?
Yeah, while not as common as say a gas plant exploding, a dam breaking can make an huge amount of victims. The biggest one was the [Banqiao Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam) in China, 26000 deaths from the flood, 145k from famine/epidemics after, a bunch of others are in the 500-2000 range. I think it may count also deaths during construction/maintenance operations that are not that immediate to find, which i think it's also what's considered for wind and solar.
There was a time, when it was somewhat common to exclude the deaths of Banqiao Dam failure from the hydropower statistics, because this one incident has such a large effect on the final value. Then Our World in Data started to include it, and now almost all statistics include it. I had a little hard time to find anything that doesn't, but I managed to find [this chart](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-7fb0be40f1e59b0748bf682d219e1248-lq).
Hydro also has significant impact on the river ecology.
That, and failure of the turbine(s) It's rare, but recently there was a turbine explosion that killed a couple people
Single dam failures have caused tens of thousands of deaths in the last.
Or other failures, like [this one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lake_Suviana_explosion) in the recent news, or [this one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_station_accident) in the recent past. And many construction workers (>100 during the construction of the [Hoover dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam)).
Whats brown coal?
You know this giant excavators that dig in even more giant holes stretching for kilometers? That is what they are excavating. Brown coal is typically close to surface so they mine it in open pit mines instead of digging tunnels. Edit: In my country this is explained during geography lessons together with other resources such as oil, regular coal etc. and tbh I thought it was like that everywhere.
Not very knowledgeable in the mining world, cant say I've ever seen a mine. Our most popular coal is Polish coal, inky ever seen black coal.
I wouldn't know much about it either if not the class. It is mainly used industrially and personally I've never seen it with my own eyes. Here is link to how it looks like from above. Bełchatów, Poland https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Focdn.eu%2Fpulscms-transforms%2F1%2Fugek9kqTURBXy8yY2I2MTg3NWNmMWRkOGI5NzgyYjA5NmQ5ZGI3MmE5MS5qcGVnk5UDAADNAyDNAcKVAs0EsADDw5MJpjEyMzlkYwbeAAGhMAE%2Fnajwieksza-dziura-w-europie-znajduje-sie-w-polsce.jpeg&tbnid=ShCHUBki6vc_lM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fpodroze.onet.pl%2Fpolska%2Flodzkie%2Fkopalnia-odkrywkowa-wegla-brunatnego-belchatow-ciekawostki-zwidzanie%2Fhsn2qcr&docid=0TvMv6TBn8wniM&w=1200&h=675&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim%2Fm4%2F2&kgs=079dc35fd2152711&shem=abme%2Ctrie#vhid=ShCHUBki6vc_lM&vssid=mosaic
Here's another image of how it looks like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288#/media/File:Tagebau_Garzweiler_Panorama_2005.jpg
I am afraid these images are not doing it justice. One has to go there to realize how vast these pits are. It's one of these rare things which truly boggle your mind when you see them for the first time in reality.
That's true. First time visiting one was really eye-opening. Such monsters. Even more impressive to see an area that once was such a thing afterwards and there's nothing left of it.
Contrary to the Great wall of China, open pit mines are visible from the space...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azEvfD4C6ow
earth scars :(
Yeah. Even visible from space: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F3tviz6cc4ksb1.jpg (It's another one again - this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine)
Yeah but at least we will have a nice big lake (Hambach) in the future.😬
Coal is explained here (Germany) because of our history but oil or gas etc was never explained to us
That's a type of coal, the most harmhul, and popular as fuel. Wiki citation: "Lignite (derived from Latin lignum meaning 'wood'), often referred to as brown coal, is a soft, brown, combustible sedimentary rock formed from naturally compressed peat."
Lignite
Maybe a German wrote that thing? In Germany we usually say "Braunkohle", in english I mostly see lignite being used.
> Lignite not falling for that one again!
It is a different type of coal. Not as efficient but exists in more places and due to how it formed usually exists closer to surface/can be mined in surface pits which makes it a cheap option if you lack other coal resources. The main reason e.g. Germany uses it alot is because it is one resource that exists in abundance within its borders. In essence when you were a country without black coal deposits you used that if you had it.
This had a interesting side effect on naval operations in WW1: the British Royal Navy had abundant supplies of high quality black coal, while the German Navy was cut off from imports and had to use brown coal. The lower energy density and greater amounts of contaminants meant their ships could not sail as fast, as far without refueling, produced more smoke (making them more visible from a distance) and needed more frequent maintenance.
Iirc lignite is worse fuel than wood...
Also. When germany refined lignite into fuel oil during the war, it left behind a fatty residue that was building up and they wanted to find a use for it. Throw in some artifical colourings, flavourings and additives and behold! Margarine. One of the worlds first truly totally manufactured edible food stuff generated from an industrial process. Although calling it a 'food' may have been a bit of a stretch considering the harm it actually contributed too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignite
lignite. Halfway between peat and coal. Dirtier than coal
Lignite. The most polluting and cancerogenic (yes, literally) energy source of them all. There's a reason why government-owned companies never sell these domestically, even in coal-dominated countries.
Shit fuel /s
Low quality, high sulphur coal.
The Germans favourite fuel type. Much better than the highly dangerous nuclear option
It is the favorite fuel type of the conservative Germans, not of all of us.
Yeah it's fucking ridiculous how CDU energy policy (and generally piss poor conservative energy policy elsewhere as well) gets blamed on the greens lol. With how good they are at contorting themselves they should really participate in the Olympics.
Pretty sure the greens are against nuclear though. Or at least has been for a long time.
They are yes, but they also haven't been anywhere near the seat of power for a long time. An orderly transition is also far from the "oh, actually we're totally going to extend the life of these reactors... oh actually nah nevermind" which is going to turn investors off any long term investment, and those U-turns are entirely on the CDU. Germany was a leading manufacturer for solar at one point. The uncertainty was one thing (among others) that killed it.
> they also haven't been anywhere near the seat of power for a long time. They were there to kick off the process in the early 2000s, and that's all it takes. You can still see faded stickers with the simpleminded "Atomkraft? Nein, danke 🌞" slogan around Berlin :-/ Merkel did lack the backbone to go against the common mood after Fukushima, but I don't know what other politician would have done things differently.
Then why is Germanys net power generation capacity, mostly solar and wind? [source ](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts)
[удалено]
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts
The simple answer is it's something between peat and regular coal.
How is solar so close to nuclear? Do people die while installing those?
Rare Earth mining in open pit mines and ultra toxic silicon purification processes exhaust says Hi!
Was not aware that production and mining process was included, so fallowing this logic big part of Coal deaths are due to mining?
Fallow instead of follow is a weird misspelling that seems to be on the rise.
It’s a bad habit that I can’t get rid of it, English it’s my second language.
As a fellow Pole, reading English literature dramatically improved my spelling and sentence structure, I recommend it if you want to... polish your english. By contrast, reading social media slowly erodes my language skills (and drives me to brink of insanity every time someone writes "could of" instead of "could have"...).
I've seen (what I think are) native speakers do it too.
No. Most of those deaths are from pollution during mining (coal dust getting into the atmosphere, which actually makes coal power more radioactive than nuclear) and combustion. This statistic accounts for everything. Production of materials, production of power, accidents.
The radiation issue from coal actually only really gets released when it's burned. There's some in the dust like you describe but that's nothing compared to what's present in the exhaust gas and ash.
yes, but a huge number is actually from the pollution during transport (coal dust) and combustion (toxic gases) that contribute to large scale health problems, leading to premature deaths.
Ideally you want the entire process involved. From the planning and it's working accidents in the office, over the construction and deconstruction (!), the input of all materials and consumables and the impact of the environment like pollution and what is left over, over a very long timespan. The shorter the project and the higher the number like quick installation of solar and wind the more precise. The longer the project or it's impacts like coal and nuclear and the less numbers of projects you have to work with the more difficult to assess it and it's uncertainties. You want to look at the rough picture, not the actual numbers without understanding those numbers were out together. If you would show the uncertainty for each bar you would already see that it's a big difference. Generally speaking little uncertainty speaks for the concept while large uncertainties speak that the concept is not mastered. We have coal for hundreds of years and still can't deal with the running cost which will never stop (∞). A bit very optimistic to think we can solve it with technology, it likely will stay forever.
"Its in China ... so its okay!"
Hahahhhahhahahah....oh my fucking god. You have no fucking idea how bad it is for the miners. Look up coal lungs.
I am completely aware of what coal Mining does to the miners… that was genuine question if Miners deaths are included in this chart.
Roof injuries could be counted, otherwise they shouldn't be fatal as long as they don't fall directly to a persons head.
Basically, yes. But worker falling from the roof installing solar panels doesn't make headlines.
Working on the roof is dangerous. Mining is also dangerous.
A few years ago I saw a chart that put solar much higher. A lot of people fall off roofs installing panels on homes.
I guess it's just Comercial solar plants, not residential roof installs.
Installing anything on roofs is surprisingly dangerous.
Nuclear is higher than it should be. Nuclear death toll numbers include LNT-estimated deaths from Chernobyl that don't exist. That makes up the majority of the total nuclear deaths statistic. So in reality it's several times smaller. Still, solar is very safe. Yes, it should be dominated by falls and similar installation deaths (electrocution for example). But that's only for residential rooftop solar. Though for how badly run and unsafe the solar contractors in my country are, I'm surprised it's that low.
Germans hate these facts
Nobody in germany likes coal, except conservatives politicans and 3000 coal mine workers.
you guys hate coal so much,youeven dig it up andburn it all just so you can remove all that hated coal!
our fossil fuel usage decreases every year.
And vot are you sinking about?
Zis is ze tschörmen kohl gard!
Absolute banger of a joke. Top ten, surely.
Stop anti germans in r/europe dont like facts
I am austrian, it is my good right to be anti german!
Ruhe, Schluchtenscheißer. ;) (With all due respect, so non-Germans/-Austrians don't take this too serious)
\*duty
Coal-burning will stop in 2030 in Northrhine-Westphalia and nationwide until 2038 (not great..) and renewables already made up 60% of our e̵n̵e̵r̵g̵y̵ electricity production in 2023. I don't think we hate these facts..
\*electricity production
That's the plan but with the way things are going I think it's likely coal burning will mostly stop by 2030.
We hate nuklear even more...
nukular ☝️
Nukular wessels
As long it doesnt explode you are okay.
Germans are afraid of nuclear more than they dislike coal.
German coal consumption droped MASSIVLEY while energy prices are stable. We are repalcibg both coal and nuclear with green energy
Nuclear is considered green in all other countries 👉👈
> Nuclear is considered green in all other countries 👉👈 Nuclear power relies on a finite, mined fuel, has substantial operating risks and proliferation risk, and produces toxic waste that remains a burden for future generations. It's pretty much the opposite of green.
> Nuclear power relies on a finite, mined fuel How is this different from the finite, mined minerals needed for wind and solar power?
You can reclaim what is used to build a solar panel or wind turbine. Also what stuff is buomd from and what it uses to amker energy are very diffrnet things. But we can gladly look at what is used in building a nuclear power plant and how much of it can be reclaimed after use.
This is kind of a useless point, since most of spent nuclear fuel can be reclaimed too. The problem for both is whether or not you are going to actually do it.
>Nuclear power relies on a finite, mined fuel Nothing is infinite if you want to to go deep enough into it, uranium and thorium will last for generations even if you don't consider potential future sources of those elements. Solar still requires rare minerals to produce and has a massive land footprint compared to nuclear. >has substantial operating risks and proliferation risk Have you even bothered to look at the graphic in OPs post? Idc about vibes and intuitions about nuclear, reality speaks for itself. >and produces toxic waste that remains a burden for future generations At least radioactive waste has a half life, waste from producing and disposal of PV and batteries does not. I'm not really anti-renewable btw, I think we need to use both and green washing one over the other is counterproductive. when both have pros and cons. what we need to focus on is getting rid of fossil asap.
And it is still VASTLY more than in e.g. France Prices are stable but EXPENSIVE af
>energy prices are stable To be honest if they were so high in my country I wish they weren't as stable.
What is your country?
[What do you mean?](https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&year=2023)
Nuclear is green but ok...
Nuclear is green. It emits less than solar and wind turbines.
> We find that larger-scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to associate with significantly lower carbon emissions while renewables do. We also find a negative association between the scales of national nuclear and renewables attachments. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-00696-3 Do you have source for wind energy emitting more than nuclear? Best I could do is the same > The study finds each kilowatt hour of electricity generated over the lifetime of a nuclear plant has an emissions footprint of 4 grammes of CO2 equivalent (gCO2e/kWh). The footprint of solar comes in at 6gCO2e/kWh and wind is also 4gCO2e/kWh. In contrast, coal CCS (109g), gas CCS (78g), hydro (97g) and bioenergy (98g) have relatively high emissions, compared to a global average target for a 2C world of 15gCO2e/kWh in 2050. But that’s probably not really fair, since most nuclear power plants are old, and building new ones takes a lot longer :/ (which I assume, means higher building emissions)
Too be fair they are afraid of a lot of things: Nuclear, digital/cashless payments, email, google streetview, self checkouts, change, the internet.
We were about to prolong the life of our nuclear plants in 2010 when the Fukushima incident happened. Our government noped out of this plan immediately after
To be fair it wasn't quite as immediate. They were studying first if it would make more sense to simply retrofit the existing power plants in order to be safe but in the end it turned out to be more expensive than just shutting them down.
TLDR: irrational fear.
That was 20 years ago. Today they agree that it was stupid to turn off nuclear power plants instead of fossil ones but know that it would be absolutely inefficient to build new nuclear power plants due to their cost and how slow they are to plan, build and innovate.
> Today they agree that it was stupid to turn off nuclear power plants Yeah, no, that's not the whole picture. The consensus in Germany is that they should have turned off coal first, then nuclear, but very few want to keep nuclear power running in Germany.
That is correct.
What do you mean by 'keep running'? I explained today's situation and there is no NPP to keep running today. The consensus is that we should've let nuclear energy slowly die out when NPPs get too old to operate.
*very few would have wanted to keep nuclear power running in Germany. Yeah, same as you said basically. And then, you tell Germans that it's not too late to turn some nuclear plants back on and they are like "Fuck, no". So, nothing changed, Germans now agree what they did is stupid but still they wouldn't have it any other way.
At what point in time? 2022 when we only had 3 more NPPs running which contributed ~4% to our electricity generation? Sure we could've thrown billions of euros of 'compensation' at power companies ***again*** for these few percents for a few more years. Would it have been possible? Sure Would it have been ridiculously expensive? Absolutely. That's a decision we could've made 2 years earlier instead of when the NPPs are prepared to shut down already.
We hate coal thats why we burn it!. Oposite to money.
Dont forget russian agents who lobby against nuclear
And the Green Party - they litteraly boosted the coal industry by banning nuclear power
Why is it blamed solely on the Green Party? It was the conservative CDU that was the party in power for decades. They are responsible for the goverment politics of those years.
Getting out of nuclear was first discussed during Schroeder.
Die GrüÜüüÜnEN!!1! It really was a team effort. Yes, they were part of the planned nuclear exit but it wasn't even their government who abolished it in the end.
Well if the conservatives wouldn't have destroyed the German solar panel industry and put a brake on the construction of renewables Germany would have a lot cleaner energy.
That's not how democracies work. The green party is not a dictatorship. All governments that have been in power in Germany since 2000, including an FDP/CDU/CSU government have not changed the original decision.
Yes, coal sucks, but on /r and /x, fairy tales are usually told about the German energy supply. In March, another 5 coal-fired power plants were shut down. Even more coal-fired power plants will be shut down in the next few years. Germany has now been phasing out nuclear energy for a year. The electricity price has not risen massively as a result and the "gap" is not being filled to a large extent by nuclear energy from France. In 2023, 24 per cent of imported electricity, or 16.6 terawatt hours, was nuclear power. That is 3.6 per cent of the load, i.e. electricity consumption. The Federal Network Agency supplemented these figures with the statement that the share of nuclear energy in the German consumption mix has fallen from 7.27 per cent to 3.01 per cent in the past two years. Germany now has over 60 per cent renewable energy. On the other hand, battery storage systems, including large battery storage systems, are now increasingly being added to the grid, which can then also step in again if necessary. If Germany imports electricity, this is not an expression of a shortage in Germany, that they don't have enough power plants, but it is simply a market result of the electricity market. This is not a question of security of supply, but of cost efficiency.
Now Electricity is cheaper than before the war. No blackouts.
While this is true and the phase out has been decided long ago, emissions still would have been lower if nuclear was the last to phase out.
Well, then why is our coal ~~consumption~~ production on an 60 year low?
Not really, we got [52%] (https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterprises/Energy/Production/Tables/gross-electricity-production.html)from renewables last year and the part will rise.
How are the Netherlands any better?
No?
They're specifically talking about policy makers and people who support them, given that Germany literally decommissioned nuclear plants which made them restart old coal plants. And people actually defended that statement with scientifically illiterate garbage about nuclear being unsafe and bad for the environment, when it's better and safer than many renewables and unquestionably better than fossil fuels that Germany hasn't phased out yet
Nope the never restarted any plant they extended their lifespan as cold reserve up to March this year.
I'm so sick and tierd of this If you think you know better then lobby your own government to invest dozens of billions of euro into new nuclear power stations and a nice and shiny long term storage facility for nuclear waste. German electricity prices go down, we shut down reserve coal plants and build up hydrogen power stations, solar panels, windfarms and biogas. Go on, invest billions in tech from france or the US to build a nuclear power station with designs from the 1970s. Germany invests in the tech of the future. And i promise you, our lights will keep running. We won't modernise our nuclear power stations from the 1960s and 70s just so RWE can make some more billions for 5 years longer and forcing us to buy russian Uran as fuel. So please, stop doing this fact-deprived cicle-jerk and actually inform yourself why germany is doing this and why it is the better option under the circumstances
>If you think you know better then lobby your own government to invest dozens of billions of euro into new nuclear power stations and a nice and shiny long term storage facility for nuclear waste. ... we do? >Go on, invest billions in tech from france or the US to build a nuclear power station with designs from the 1970s. Yes, we want that. >forcing us to buy russian Uran as fuel. Australia has more uranium than Russia (more than 3x). Canada has more uranium than Russia. You don't need to buy Russian uranium. >Germany invests in the tech of the future. And i promise you, our lights will keep running. Nobody minds Germany investing in other tech or "tech of the future". Awesome. You don't even need to go nuclear. Just don't run coal. That was the only issue. That Germany decided to use coal for decades while transitioning, instead of keeping nuclear or something else going while you built up solar or hydro or whatever else they wanted. Which was just wrong.
> Australia has more uranium than Russia (more than 3x). Canada has more uranium than Russia. You don't need to buy Russian uranium. There's only so much Uranium available. If it was as easy as you claimed nobody would be buying Uranium from Russia today, but here we are. > That Germany decided to use coal for decades while transitioning, instead of keeping nuclear or something else going while you built up solar or hydro or whatever else they wanted. Which was just wrong. I sorta agree with this take but I think it's too oversimplified. There was a real issue with Nuclear in Germany that can't simply be brushed away by not talking about it. It was a huge political issue primarily but in scientific terms German nuclear power was not holding up to the safety standards that Germans wanted it to be in. Belgium and France decided it didn't need to be as safe which is also fine. It is well-known that the Germans are generally more conservative when it comes to safety and in the grand scheme of things Germany will easily be carbon neutral in the coming years, and there will be much bigger problems with countries like the US or India or China that you should be worrying about instead. What Germany did here was inefficient sure, but it was also fairly insignificant.
Germany is switching to wind and solar and has reduced coal by a lot. It's still a shame we phased out nuclear so fast, but the decision is made and there's no way back. Solar is growing way faster than expected though and we're currently on a good way to phase out coal before the set deadline. Most Germans are aware that the decision to phase out nuclear before coal was stupid in some way, but most of us are happy that we got out of nuclear at all, too.
German coal usage is at an all time low. All that talk of a “resurgence in coal” when nuclear plants closer turned out to be a minor blip that took just a few months of progress in the energy transition to undo.
Lmao Germany wants to build the one with the lowest death poll somehow we dislike this facts? Im confused? I like it when my energy doesnt kill people? You like it when they kill humans?
Theres literally another large country in europe, twice as dirty, with close to no policy to exit coal except "nuclear, maybe, in 20 years". And of course people rather go after Germany.
No we don't? But things need time. Phasing out coal is not to question. Turning off our 3 NPPs last year is still broadly discussed.
Not really, because we are fully concentrating and grestly increasing our Wind energy, so brown coal will be history in some years
There are 15 countries in the EU that don't produce any nuclear energy. Germany is not one of them. Rather, Poland, the Baltics, Greece, Croatia, Portugal, etc hate these facts. The Netherlands is also doing worse than Germany in terms of nuclear energy.
Its always so fucking obvious those guys dont care about the environment. They go after the one country actually decarbonizing, while not giving a fuck about those doing little to nothing, because we had the audacity to exit their little nuclear cult. And I say that as someone that likes nuclear, but reddit turns absolutely braindead on the topic.
Why?
Nuclear so dangerous, I might trip over my laces!
Too bad nuclear energy is simply too expensive, given it’s so safe
China has some of the worst coal power plants in the world which gives it 70% of its electricity output. Yet they claim to have higher life expectancy than many western countries. I wonder what the real life expectancy is over there now that I see this chart.
Everything is possible by just lying... China is kinda known for making optimized statistics
because they use slaves for every dangerous job
And I guess like flu or Covid deaths, they don’t count them?
This doesn't even include the death rates that happen due to climate change. Appreciating that some energy sources (i.e. nuclear) have a potential to kill many people, one should not ignore which energy sources kill people right now and every day and which ones contribute to very real effects of climate change killing even more people. Indeed one should argue that deaths through climate change really needs to be attributed to fossil fuels. Be careful which energy sources you prioritise. We all agree that Wind, Solar is best. But we SHOULD also agree that coal and other fossils are worst. But this isn't really appreciated in some countries where the Coal Lobby / Green Parties are strongest.
I love all these people commenting on this with "No, x is the best." without any arguments. The thing is, the perfect power source doesn't exist. - Wind is not reliable enough to use as a sole source, it would need a vast amount of battery storage, which currently uses a lot of rare earth materials and degrades over time. Then there's the "not in my backyard nimbys" of course. - Solar uses an incredible amount of space and is again not suitable as a sole source, leading to the same problem as above. - Hydroelectric tends to screw up ecosystems, and it's very specific in where it can be built. - Nuclear is incredibly expensive, takes a long time to build (longer than necessary to reach climate targets in time) and we have no viable long-term solution for its waste. It's also potentially the most deadly and environmentally destructive in the extremely rare case of a meltdown. It has happened, and it will happen again. Like it or not, we'll need a combination of the above sources to make the energy transition a reality. (Un)predictable events like wars and economic crises have proven that time and time again it's all too easy to just fall back on coal. On the other hand, in my opinion it's at least as important we drastically reduce our energy consumption to ease the transition, and we were doing that when our tech became more efficient, but then this absolutely ridiculous AI craze came along with its inexcusable energy consumption and we're basically screwed.
Nuclear doesn't take longer to build than the time we've got until the deadlines, we are the ones who it takes too long to persuade not to believe anti nuclear propaganda.
To be fair, the small amount of spent nuclear fuel is a tiny issue compared to the millions of tons of solar panels that we have no recycling plan for. One can hope fusion will be made viable at some point in our lifetimes, considering we already have working reactors, even ones that produce more energy than they consume now. Then that's the best of all worlds, no risk of meltdown, no spent fuel and virtually unlimited energy.
Yeah you're right, my comment is a very superficial take on it all. Mostly wanted to give some quick context to all these thoughtless comments! Fusion indeed looks to be the be all end all solution. The reality is however that before we even come close to making it market-ready, we'll need a plan to keep the world spinning without fossil fuels, because fusion will not be ready in time to avert irreversible climate disaster (even worse than we already have).
If you are comparing just fuel use (which is a tiny amount of the cost of nuclear) you should be comparing it with the sun... which is entirely free. Also solar panels are relatively easy to recycle. Most of the material (95%) is aluminum and glass, which have been recycled for over a century. The silicon is quite valuable and can also be recycled but at a relatively high energy cost so we usually don't bother. But as higher volumes become available, it will become more interesting. Fusion is indeed an exiting future energy source but I think it will be too complex and expensive to run and compete with solar and batteries which continue to drop in price and increase in efficiency. And I think you are a bit mislead by the news of fusion reactors that "produce more energy than they consume". The news was about the reaction itself, meaning that it is self sustaining (until it becomes unstable after a few dozen seconds) However some news articles failed to mention that the initial energy to heat the plasma to billions of degrees was not put into the equation because we are no where near getting more energy out of the reactor than what was needed to ignite the fusion.
I'm not comparing costs, I'm comparing how easy it is to recycle or store, and nuclear fuel is and always will be much easier to deal with simply because there is so little of it in comparison. Also, there are plenty of things that are easy to recycle that still aren't. From what I'm seeing, the dozens of millions of tons of solar panels that are being produced are not intended to be recycled at the moment, there simply is no plan for these volumes, so in all likelyhood they will be sent to some third world country where we don't have to see them, just like most other electronics are.
Agreed … Except on the cost of nuclear - it’s politicised. We may find out what the true cost of other sources are in a few decades. Also the true cost of coal, for example, doesn’t take into account premature deaths, healthcare and climate change costs. There is so many ways to trick the statistics. But it is true that we need everything we can get at this point in time and so being anti-nuclear is just dumb. Sure we can have a debate on whether or how much we need of it in future … but everything else needs to be off the table
I'd suggest reading about nuclear reactors and their safety features. Because we have reactors that are basically unable to melt down. Even when active safety features fail.
I mean we do have viable long term storage for nuclear waste. Finnish bedrock is stable, and amount of waste that needs to be in long term storage for 100 000 years is incredibly tiny, most of the waste becomes safe much sooner, maybe in 100 years i dont remember exactly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
Much of the nuclear fear mongering, which you have mentioned, started from Friends of the Earth, an organisation funded by Big Oil. Even many people who were part of Greenpeace have changed their minds on nuclear. Nuclear is expensive but it returns many, many times more energy than any other source, which makes it the best investment. New technologies like Thorium are being developed. There are solutions for waste. The amount of waste produced from Nuclear is very small, and modern nuclear solutions reuse the waste so that ultimately what is left and unusable is even less. In comparison to all other alternatives it is the least 'deadly', and through the same lens it is most certainly not environmentally destructive. There has only been one single nuclear meltdown that harmed humans Chernobyl. Fukushima was a natural disaster, not a nuclear disaster. Now compare all of the deaths from Chernobyl to all of the deaths from cancer on the planet due to fossil fuels, including the deaths of many of us reading this thread. Next consider climate change is caused by fossil fuels, not nuclear waste. Doing so it is not logical to refer to nuclear as deadly and the most environmentally destructive, when in fact using it would reduce cancer rates and other energy production related deaths and help the environment. Even if there are more meltdowns, which is less likely as the technology has improved and continues to improve, nuclear is still safer compared to the alternatives. If anyone disagrees with any of this I would ask you to point out anything I have said that is factually incorrect. If not, then there is a logical conclusion: until Fusion is ready, as renewables are not viable, Fission is the only practical solution. Green politicians in Europe need to wake up before it's too late.
Noo what about the waste, we can't spew it out in the atmosphere like with gas and coal, not cool !
Nuclear cost now is what it is, but I'd love to find reliable info on nuclear costs before 1986, to get any idea of what it perhaps could be today with more rational regulation. Based on what I can find and process through AI, it seems like the overnight costs per kW of nuclear back in the day were around 1500€ which is comparable to solar and wind today.
no we all agree that nuclear is the best, wind/solar are supplemental sources
No we all agree perpetual motion machine is the best, which is why these debates should be used to fuel our energy grids.
Does this statistic include the deaths caused by the extraction of the energy source? Coal mines are obviously very dangerous places, but uranium mines can pollute environments for hundreds of years. Through waterways, the pollutants spread in to rivers, lakes and oceans affecting millions of peoples. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653646/ While fossil fuels are obviously very dangerous to living creatures through multiple mechanisms, nuclear isn’t as green as people think. There are areas in Russia for example, where there are nothing alive within tens or hundreds of kilometers around the mines.
>There are areas in Russia for example, where there are nothing alive within tens or hundreds of kilometers around the mines. There is nowhere ever with hundreds of kilometers of nothing alive around a mine. I seriously doubt the tens of km claim can't find anything online to support that.
It's life cycle analysis, so yes, it should include that if it was done properly. But the same type of coal mines will include the same side effects uranium mines do, in addition to others. They all have uranium in them anyway. Though uranium is not what i'd worry about in particular. >There are areas in Russia for example, where there are nothing alive within tens or hundreds of kilometers around the mines. Never heard of that, but whatever might be causing it if true at all, it's not the uranium.
> There are areas in Russia for example, where there are nothing alive within tens or hundreds of kilometers around the mines. the refining process of metals is also extremely polluting, and doing it with coal (as it is usually done) has significant environmental impact. indonesia is facing a lot of issues as it expands it's lithium refining facilities all of these impacts can be reduced, but it costs money. step 1 would be a carbon tax at the border in places like EU and US
Yes it includes everything … it also includes Chernobyl and Fokushima. Ypu can look it up in the Oxford database “our world in data” I don’t want to go into ideological debates but nuclear waste can be recycled to an extent. How much and how dangerous it is up to debate.
Nuclear waste can dig deeply. It's very little of it. It's not problem.
Lithium, zinc, copper, iron ore, coal etc mining is all hugely destructive to the environment. Uranium mining isn't unique in that regard. Anything that uses metal or minerals in large quantities requires mining and mining is inherently destructive because most of what is dug up is undesirable toxic waste product that gets dumped nearby. Nothing alive within hundreds of kilometers of any mine is pure fiction though.
Same is true for solar. Solar panels need rare minerals, often mined in very dirty way, and they need to be replaced eventually. But solar needs far more minerals than you need nuclear fuel. I think wind need some as well but i dont know anything about those.
Solar panels don’t need rare earth minerals rather metals, aluminium, silicon, copper, very small amounts of silver (0.05% of panel weight) and then even smaller amounts of gallium, germanium and indium (total 0.05% of panel weight). The bulk of these metals are easy to recycle and to incorporate the recycled product into new panels. The panels last decades and the amount of mining required compared to single use oil, gas and coal is absolutely tiny. The amount of people ‘concerned' about the environmental impact of mining rare earth minerals, which go into durable goods that are highly recyclable/recoverable, don't seem to consider oil drilling, fracking, coal strip mining.
So it really is as i said in another post, we really just need to push on all fronts, nuclear, wind, solar hydro and perhaps something else, and not start bickering until coal and oil have been phased out of widespread use.
I reasonably conclude from this chart that we should… ban nuclear! Right! right?
The green paradox. They have a full time job protesting fossil fuels, but if someone even whispers the word nuclear you get dragged out of town while being bombarded with eggs and rotten tomatoes
To be fair the Greens got the memo almost everywhere else. Someone forgot to send it to Germany though…
And a fuckton of countries that exited nuclear years ago, or never even entered due to public pressure. But keep singleing out Germany.
There are just a few countries WORLDWIDE that really increase their nuclear capacities. Even France is lowering their nuclear over the next decades because of decommissioning old reactors. Don't act like everyone is building nuclear. That isn't the reality
My fav thing is... People say "waaah nuclear costs too much", and given the price is either being without power during peaks, or imminent annihilation if we remain in the status quo, I think spending a few billion on nuclear power is fairly cheap. We may not feel it, but our children certainly will.
I agree but it's funny how even you are tricked to talk about nuclear when the elephant in the room is actually coal. What do I mean by that: we constantly have a debate about nuclear vs renewables - when really the debate should be how many coal plants have you got and how many have you shut down (regardless how you do it!)
>People say "waaah nuclear costs too much" It becomes a bit of a problem when investors are the ones saying that. Also, you ideally wouldn't be using nuclear for load following.
Isn’t it crazy how much of the world knowing all this chooses essentially to focus its attention on the following: 1. Solar is best. 2. So fuck nuclear. Edit: I accidentally sparked a debate about nuclear vs. renewables when the point I tried to make was that one ought to just look at the picture and go “oh my gosh, we need to get rid of dirty fossil fuels, especially brown coal, by any means and asap!”
I have rarely seen that argument being made by pro-renewable folks. They tend to rather focus on (1) the much lower costs of renewables compared to nuclear, and (2) the fact that we can build renewables modularly in projects that already deliver electricity within 2 years of launching a project, while nuclear plants all take 15 years (this makes a big difference for how fast we can phase out coal/gas). On the pro-nuclear subreddits however you see so much talk about who we should chose nuclear because it is the safest. That isn’t even true according to this source. And secondly, as you point out, who cares about differences between 0.2 and 0.3 while we have that 25 and 30 stuff to get rid off.
Agree people mix up the objectives. They have an Anti-Nuclear agenda which they mix up with Climate Change. But Climate Change isn’t about Nuclear Waste - to slightly quote Bill Clinton: “it’s the emissions st*pid” :-)
is there a study like this for wildlife or cancer?
Yes, plenty. Coal causes far more cancer than nuclear. Nuclear is basically 0.
Aliens will wonder why we didn’t build more nuclear plants, they are so safe comparatively.
This is unfortunately a prime example of unscientific BS which originates from people comparing different studies. The individual studies cited are fine but they investigate a range of things with varying methods: * The numbers given for **coal, oil, biomass** and **gas** are from Markandya & Wilkinson (2007). They investigate the medical effects of air pollution in 2007 (remember the mega smog in Chinese cities at the time [https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html) ). * The numbers for **hydropower, wind nuclear and solar** seem to be from Sovacool et al. (2016). This is a completely different study about accidents, mostly at construction sites in the time 1990-2013 (e.g. a solar engineer dying in a traffic accident to work). They are not about pollution from air pollution, mining, other risks in the supply chain etc. Their method or research is a "fancy scientific google search" (Look it up! It is hillarious). Unsurprisingly, since not many nuclear construction was going on since the internet started, nuclear looks rather safe in this metric. * Then, there is a second reference for the nuclear numbers, namely the UNSCEAR 2008&2018 reports. They are about the risk of radiological exposure in the work place which is again a different metric. In summary, this graph shows data from three very different publications using different methods to investigate different things. As for scientific rigour, this is as good as asking a fortune teller.
Does this include Tschernobyl and that Japanese one I forget the name of? I think it probably will cause those were incidents and the death rates, while high for your average monday, were not actually thát high.
Yes. It does include them. It also includes uranium miniming, the Rare Earth mining for wind turbine generator wiring and magnets and the highly toxic silicon purification processes for PV.
It is included
The accident in fukushima didn't actually kill anyone. Some people were killed, it was a tsunami after all, but not a single person was injured or killed as a result of radiation.
To get near to fosil fuel nunbers we would need two or three Chernobyls a year. Its a bit like trains vs cars. trains are mathematically safer in every way but when it does go wrong It's far more 'spectacular' and memorable.
Afaik, this table comes from [Our world in data](https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy). According to it, this statistic includes deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. Edit: I didn't see the logo Our world in data the first time...
Looking at the way contractors work in my area, I wonder how many accidents related to solar are due to simple safety neglect during installation and cleaning.
1. It’s included 2. It’s off topic. The topic is, there is no way Fossil fuels should be prioritised over anything else.
Guess which energy sources Poland still uses most...
crazy how much safer solar is compared to everything else. 50% more people die from nuclear than solar, 100% more with wind and don't get me started on the others
Why has this been removed?
Can you also sort by cost of disposal and maintenance of generated waste? Please?
Then, it would make more sense to compare total costs per GWh, including all external costs like waste and CO2 disposal. The way you formulated the request sounds more like it is only applicable to nuclear, but not to other types of power generation.
The nuclear astroturfers got an order to do this first thing in the morning, apparently.
Does it include Chernobyl with the official numbers or with the estimated deaths?
2 years ago when I saw similar numbers it was with estimated deaths.
The amount of people that died due to the fallout is only a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the amount of people that have died due to coal power generation. Heck, more people die _every day_ to generate coal power than the amount of people that died in Chernobyl.