105
You can't claim to be an environmentalist and be anti-nuclear energy at the same time
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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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From your link:
So they are just looking at deaths from nuclear accidents, and not construction or mining? You would have to do the same for the others. What kind of wind and solar "accidents" are there (excluding construction and mining)? Was the sun or wind too powerful one day?
You're going to have to do better than that. Nuclear plants are guarded by barbed wire and guys with guns. Wind turbines are guarded by sheep. The solar panels on your roof are guarded by squirrels and crows. It's pretty obvious which one is more dangerous.
No I’m not. You are moving the goalposts. The source of the article I linked specifically speaks to mortalities from accidents and air pollution. Asking that statistic to do overtime and somehow speak to mining fatalities is whataboutism and totally ignores that coal mining has exactly the same problem. Mining fatalities are significant and not to be ignored, but to cite them as a reason to prefer coal over uranium is foolish.
Self-reporting that you didn’t even read the article lol. The cited graphic clearly indicates that more than 4x as many individuals have died from rooftop solar accidents, such as electricution and falls than have died from nuclear power, per unit of energy. Statistics like “look who is guarding the power source” are obscenely unfit to describe the situation in comparison to raw numbers of human deaths.
Those are from installation and construction. Your statistic doesn't include construction deaths for nuclear plants. So the metric is biased. People fall doing any type of construction, including nuclear plants and solar panels.
Also, construction of solar panels has more deaths because of the workers involved. The "construction team" adding panels to your house may be just two guys on meth. If the same two guys worked on a nuclear plant, they would have equally high fatalities. If you used the construction workers from a nuclear plant to do a basic home solar panel installation, it would virtually eliminate fatalities due to better safety.
You can't prove your point with flawed metrics, no matter how many times you repeat yourself. Nuclear plants are expensive and require constant maintenance. Solar panels are literally mounted on top of elementary schools. They're cheap and easy to put up and take down. Wind turbines need a little more maintenance and construction but they are also simple compared to nuclear plants. These are facts.
Even if every construction worker was hopped up on whatever you can imagine, it wouldn't even matter.
It takes 2 workers to install 10 kW in solar panels that (might) last 15 years. That's 75 kW-years of energy per construction worker.
It takes 1200 construction workers to build a 1000 MW reactor which will operate for (at least) 50 years. That's about 42 MW-years per construction worker, or 42000 kW-years per construction worker.
Nuclear construction could have over 500x the accident rate of rooftop solar installation and still be safer. Try again.
You linked an article about how hard it is to find nuclear plant construction workers, and you think it's a point in their favor?
You're comparing 10 years of construction to build a nuclear plant with one day of putting up some solar panels. And you're amazed that 10 years of work is more productive?
When you divide by the 10 years of construction you get:
Nuclear plant: (1,000,000 kW x 50 years) / (1,200 workers x 10 years) = 4,167 kW / worker
Solar panels: (10 kW x 15 years x 365 days per year) / (2 workers x 1 day) = 27,375 kW / worker
Looks like you're completely wrong. I don't know why you'd compare it this way, but it's definitely more efficient to install solar panels.
That's fair: construction workers aren't magically able to construct more than one reactor over those 10 years. It was late at night and I also lost track of the original point of this whole thread. The study cherry-picked rooftop solar, as opposed to utility solar, in order to prove a point. Nuclear power is safe. Fossil fuels are not safe.
the other account whom i blocked is still also totally ignoring that someone has to build the solar panels. it’s not like two (apparently drugged up) roofing dudes just pull some solar cells off the solar cell tree and slap them on a roof; there’s probably hundreds to thousands of man hours going into producing those.
id look into the math against the nuclear plant example if i thought it mattered. but compare stupid numbers and ya get a stupid answers yknow?
Absolutely; but it's hard to go that deep without someone arguing about hairs and how to split them. It's kind of stupid to be arguing which is "safer" when both are orders of magnitude better than fossil fuels. In order to successfully displace fossil fuel generation, we'll need to emphasize all the others: nuclear, solar, wind, pumped hydro, grid batteries, geothermal, etc. None of them are one-size-fits-all. They're all tools in the toolbox for designing an energy system that works for any given context.
agree :)
lol your meth comment made me lose all interest in this conversation. that was gross. im blocking you and standing by my words until someone who can actually cite a stat in good faith comes through, because i have based all my arguments off the best reasearch i can find and you have provided nothing but baseless assertions. take care ❤️
For other people reading this: yes, roofers take meth. I don't advocate doing roofing work on meth (or meth in general), but they do it. It's reality.
Reality is more than just numbers on a page. If anyone has fatality stats for different energy generation methods that stand up to mild scrutiny, please post them.