I love how your article refers to dams as "secure". I don't think there is a form of energy that killed more people directly in accidents. Beyond the fact that some people will object to flooding every valley in the Alps.
2 incidents in 15 years: 175,000+ killed. Plus they emit methane in huge quantities (from the decay of plant materiel in the reservoir)
I would bet that for New Zealand the best form of energy would be geothermal even though the long-term effect studies around cooling the earth's crust are lacking.
It's a lesser evil. Better a dam that, on catastrophic failure, will kill a few thousand people, or a nuclear reactor that will do that and irreparably pollute the earth for millions of years? (Sure, you can go solar, wind etc, but those are less efficient in terms of space required and on-demand reliability)
Besides, I know of several dams in Italy and only one failed with loss of life, afaik.
Hydro Dams cause immense catastrophe when they fail. They have killed far more people than Nuclear power. According to Wikipedia, the failure of a single Dam in China caused:
26,000 dead from flooding,
145,000 dead from subsequent famine and epidemics,
11 million homeless
All forms of power generation have risks and tradeoffs. We should use the best available science to evaluate those risks - not emotion and fear. The future of our planet depends on it.
Yes, I brought up the dam since hydropower is something that's typically seen as good; but still has the potential for big disasters. (I totally think hydropower is good on balance.)
Fossil fuels, and especially coal, have worse impact in total but they are typically more diffuse. So I left them out of the discussion.
hydro power is restricted to very specific terrain and has a devastating effect on local ecology...
... and isn't any safer than nuclear power. Four people died when the Japan earthquake caused a dam to fail -- that's more deaths than the Fukushima NPP has caused, but oddly enough nobody is calling for a worldwide halt to dam construction.
Hydroelectric dams actively save lives by reducing flooding. It’s the only power source with net negative death rates and as such doesn’t see the same kind of pushback from disasters.
Attributing casualties from a dam break as energy-related is a stretch. The vast majority of dams are built for flood control. Energy production just helps pay the bills. It's not the 'purpose' of the dam.
Lots of people have been killed by dam failures. 240,000 people just from the failure of the Banqiao and Shimantan Dams in 1975, according to wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure
But I don't see anyone calling for an end to hydroelectric power. Fission power certainly has it's issues, but I think a lot of the opposition to it is more emotional than rational.
Hydroelectric dams typically cause even more damage when they fail, but I rarely see people worrying about whether using them for power will lead to war-time issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure
Of course, the Geneva Convention bans attacking dams, just like it bans attacking nuclear power plants.
The pollution from burning coal has already killed more people than nuclear disasters conceivably could.
If we could use only wind and solar power to fully replace fossil fuels and hydro, that could be a reasonable argument...
But it seems unrealistic to get enough energy without using some higher-density sources of energy, whether that's hydro or nuclear or oil, and if we're picking based on which one causes the least death, even accounting for wars and failures, nuclear seems to be a head and shoulder above the rest.
The primary thing that seems to be driving using coal plants and not using nuclear is purely monetary cost: nuclear plants take a huge up-front investment, coal plants already exist, and wind/solar can be transitioned to gradually with less up-front cost. The talk about nuclear's "danger" to me seems, quite plausibly, to be a post-facto justification based on not wanting to put up the money.
> Build hydro-pump-storage plants, and you fixed the storage issues.
You do realize that the largest ever energy-generation accident was a dam failure? 171000 people killed in 1975 when a dam in China failed. And overall, hydroelectric facilities claim 94% of the fatalities of energy-production accidents.
Okay, but wouldn't a hydroelectric dam encourage people to build in areas that would be otherwise unsafe, thus putting them at risk of a terrorist attack on the dam?
Certainly. The issue is that the above table is weighted by TWh. If we just wanted risk/dam it would make sense, but that's not what the above table was measuring. A staggering amount of dams exist that don't generate electricity, so if I had to guess we'd be on average at around 1 death or less per dam.
Personally I think that the best solution is to switch to nuclear for all the baseload and then some and convert existing dams to pumped storage if necessary.
> Hydroelectric dams typically cause even more damage when they fail, but I rarely see people worrying about whether using them for power will lead to war-time issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure
I believe the reason people worry less about hydroelectric dam failures is because, if they fail, they do not leave behind a contaminated area. Besides, it's just water; many people are used to floods caused by heavy rain, and the danger feels similar. In fact, hydroelectric dams can even help prevent (or contain) flooding, so it's the opposite of causing damage in that case. Of course, we're not talking about tailings dams, which do leave behind a trail of contamination when they fail.
(An interesting case is the failure of a tailings dam many years ago which flooded the Rio Doce with pollution, with that flood being mostly stopped by a hydroelectric dam downriver. The hydroelectric dam contained the damage instead of causing it.)
Wasn't the dam to primarily to prevent flooding, rather than enable power generation?
Anyway I don't think it makes sense to compare hydro where the risk dynamics are simple, to nuclear where they are complex and require great long-term competency to mitigate.
Pretty dark take (by all means feel free to correct me), but I am sometimes wondering if the fact that dam failures kill everybody and most of their families at once helps its public image since there's few remaining affected people that can spread awareness.
(not saying that hydro is a bad choice; it looks to be the best when possible thanks to load following and ability to double as storage)
If you're just talking about potential loss hydropower is not the argument you want to make here. Just the Banqiao dam failure alone has caused far more fatalities than nuclear power ever has including Chernobyl.
Even just recently in the United States the Oroville dam came pretty close to catastrophe and required the evacuation of 188,000 people. Repairing the Oroville dam cost $1.1 billion, even back in the 70s the Teton Dam collapse cost over $300 million.
I'm all in favor of using hydroelectric power in places where we need to build a dam to control flooding but building a dam for power alone is ecologically damaging, floods tons of land, and even if you wanted to try to build more, there's not a lot of suitable locations.
As for the complexity of keeping a nuclear reactor under control, this isn't the 50s, we have reactor designs that are dramatically safer than older reactors, we aren't building them. I think you're wrong about trying to conserve energy as well. I'm not saying that we should waste it, but real conservation of energy isn't going to happen without significantly changing our current lifestyles. We don't need to do that if we just invest in sustainable clean energy in the form of nuclear power in the first place.
The reason we care about those things is that they kill people. It turns out that, even with those things, nuclear kills fewer people than everything else. Wind turbines kill people other ways. Hydro dams literally have the record for the single most catastrophic energy related disaster in the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure. And even dams that don't fail are so much worse for the environment that I can't even explain it. Dams on the west coast are probably the single biggest reason for the collapse of west coast salmon populations (among countless other species). Dams are an ecological disaster even when they are working perfectly. Nuclear at least has to fail before it causes major issues.
Hydro not just alters ecosystems. It also kills a lot of people in construction and maintenance accidents.
As you point out, it's vital they're well-constructed, but so far we've not done very well in that respect. E.g. nuclear is far safer per unit of energy output.
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