Wind power fatalities are higher than nuclear

On edit: changed title to correct attribution error.

I have not heard news of even a single death from civil nuclear energy production since the explosion and fire at Chernobyl. I doubt that the military mortality rate is much higher, and most of the historical deaths appear to be from either laboratory accidents or the side effects of nuclear medicine.

If you have heard otherwise, please let us know.

The overall death rate for the nuclear industry is 8 deaths per terawatt-year, or 0.0009 per terawatt-hour. This number includes the deaths from Chernobyl. Gipe cites 0.15 deaths per terawatt-hour for wind energy; it was about three times as high as recently as the mid-1990s, so, fortunately, progress is being made. (Gipe, op. cit. below; WNA, Comparison of accident statistics in primary energy production)

I will gladly post a correction if I can verify more (or fewer) deaths from nuclear energy. Although I support nuclear energy, I have no desire or motivation to whitewash its problems.

Percentage of world's electrical power from wind energy: <1%
Percentage of world's electrical power from nuclear energy: ~17%

If the wind power industry wants to reach the size of the present nuclear industry, it will have to do a better job at safety; the current mortality rates imply several hundreds of deaths per year with a wind power share similar to that of nuclear power.


(All formating is mine.)

Incidentally, Paul Gipe is pro-wind; as am I. Gipe is also anti-nuclear, but not strongly so; I respectfully contend that he is misinformed about the risks of nuclear energy. I likewise appreciate and applaud his long career in the support and development of wind energy.

We should have more wind energy production. Since there is growing international consensus to produce only 20% of our electrical energy from aerogeneration by 2020, we should also have more nuclear energy production.

--p!
Perspektivo gvidas kaj vidon kaj vivon ("Perspective guides both vision and life")
-- Esperanto proverb, attributed to L. L. Zamenhof, circa 1900

One would not swim near a hydro electric power plant, same could be said for the wind towers

Just how did these 13 deaths occur? If they're all sheer stupidity, like a parachutist sailing into a turbine, I don't see how that is the wind industry's fault.

What are the stats from the electrical industry? If nothing else, I can think of thousands that have died in recent years' heat waves, when the electric power failed.

Keep in mind that Gipe's data set is incomplete. Over 100 people have died working on wind plants since the 1970s. The dead and injured have mainly been construction and maintenance workers. This is primarily a job site safety issue, and some wind programs have no fatalities.

Stats from the electrical industry as a whole are at the WNA link. They have further attribution.

There was ONE skydiving accident; a 23-year-old newbie BASE jumper, IIRC. This accident is occasionally used to discredit Gipe's warnings that the wind industry, especially in the USA, should be more cautious. A Wind Workers' Union would be a good start, and if we want a 20% wind share in our "energy portfolio," it will be a necessity.

--p!

provided in the OP. If you have never seen or been close to a modern Wind Turbine, they are massive devices with the hub on top of a tower up to and exceeding 300 feet off the ground. Most of the deaths are from falls from this height and/or working in or on the hub.
http://www.wind-works.org/articles/DeathsDatabase.xls

Here is a .pdf of a GE Turbine;
http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/wind_turbines/en/downloads/ge_25mw_brochure.pdf

No, it might not kill a whole lot of people now, but what about the effects of the waste on humans and the earth in the future?

I think it is rather short sighted to assume that the "waste" won't be used in the future. They'll probably be digging up any storage containers we can devise to "mine" the resource.

Keep in mind that before the petrochemical industry much of our oil refining by product was considered waste, I recall reading that gasoline was once considered a waste product.

and the nuclear garbage is what has the lethal potential that will remain so over many thousands of years.

Nuclear energy will have the potential of killing many more than most other sources over that period of time.

I'll be enthusiastically in favor of nuclear energy when they figure out how t detoxify their garbage.

To a rather unsatisfying finish. You ought to see the five page article in IEEE Spectrum that I linked to. It's a good read, I learned a lot.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=102552&mesg_id=102895

Only a very small amount of nuclear "waste" has a long, hot half-life. It is possible to separate this out, as the French do for many (most?) of their reactors' "waste". Most of it decays to background level within a millennium; it is down to one billionth of its intensity after a century or two, depending on the radionuclide mix.

This is a non-trivial problem, but the present storage method has proven safe for decades. Even so, I strongly support developing better reprocessing and transmutation technologies to "encapsulate" the entire nuclear fuel cycle while waste and proliferation remain a concern. (I put that in bold format so no one else who may read this will mistake my position.)

Nuclear energy does NOT have anywhere near the potential of killing many more than most other sources over ANY period of time. All combustion sources and MOST "renewable" sources are either directly more poisonous, or can cause major environmental damage during construction and manufacture. Compare it to the nuclear waste generated by coal or petrochemicals: coal generates one hundred times the ambient radiation at a minimum, as well as about 50 tons of uranium and thorium in the fly-ash per gigawatt. Solar photovoltaic has long had a terrible toxic metal pollution problem that has only recently even been addressed -- imagine ramping it up by a factor of 1000 or more. Building aerogenerators will require a major industrial base, too.

Since I am likely to get asked, I will post more figures and attribution a little later; I have done so many times in the past and continue to study this issue.

Nuclear energy is turning out to be MUCH safer than we thought it would be. It may not be "too cheap to meter" but it is a good deal. It is time to "take back the power" from both the Right and the fear-mongers. I can forgive some, even many of the fear-mongers -- but I give no quarter to the Right. If we are to have even ONE nuclear reactor, the policies and regulations governing it should be in OUR hands, not the clutches of the Neo-Cons.

--p!

with stupid policy making by republicans and high powered democrats.

Because of the overwhelming edge that big business/power has with congress, there was no percentage in wind power, so it had to be pushed, fertilized and watered by people with more ideas than money, less room for the niceties as well as a lot of re-inventing the wheel.

I predict that fatalities will continue to fall as the culture of corruption and cronyism gets turned out and we can bring some sense to this developing industry.

The problem is that the average american can only think black or white and is not able to differentiate:

reducing global warming requires acceptance and evaluation of a lot of alternative energies...

:thumbsup: :toast: :applause:

--p!

Oh... wait... :eyes:

and much of the R&D of nuclear weapons was applied to energy production, perhaps you should include the deaths associated with that R&D into your totals.

nuclear weapons.

It is a matter of no comfort that both Canada and Mexico have nuclear power and thus nuclear weapons.

Like all humanity, I live in paralyzing fear of Japanese nuclear weapons, which are known to have caused Godzilla, Rodan, and many other dangerous monsters.

a worker falls to his death.

How many workers fall to their death while erecting the cooling towqer of a nuke?

I remember that in Port Jefferson Ling Island NY, the smoke stack for a power plant claimed 3 mean during construction. They fell into the wet concrete as the stacks were recieving wet concrete.

Rant over, now lets look at the actual info on the xls..

#8 driving tractor as tow vehicle, tractor flipped over crushing him.

#9 servicing Dynergy crane

#22 parachutist on first solo jump drifts into Enercon machine on Fehrman

#25 switching pad-mounted transformer for Enxco on Howden wind farm in the Altamont Pass

#30 Crop duster pilot killed after striking a guy wire on a meteorological mast installed one-month prior.

#34 Man hung himself from inside the tower. Apparent suicide.



You have got to be kidding me. How can anyone take this seriously?

If we counted nuclear deaths in this manner the nuke industry would have more than a reason to sue/gripe/bitch. How about the deaths of miners while mining plutonium? DO we count the truck driver delivering equipment, but gets into a accident?

Or how about an electrician is changing light bulbs on parking lot light towers, in nuclear employees parking lot, he falls to his death. DO we count that as a nuke connected death?

Gimme a fucking break....

a number of deaths at large construction sites when setting rates. Even in well-run and "safe" sites, industrial deaths and injuries are common.

Including falls from 30 foot towers under construction or during maintenance is a cheap shot-- as much as including such falls during bridge or skyscraper construction would be an argument aganinst bridges or tall buildings.

No they dont.

and operations are covered under NELIA and NEPIA which are public/private insurance programs. At least that's the way it was when I was in the business.

You are thinking of the nuclear exclusions common in most policies. Like war exlusions, they are there because of the catastrophic possibilities and the assumption that if there is a nuclear accident, only governments would have the means for any remedies. There are international reinsurance agreements that control such things.

At any rate, I was simply pointing out that deaths in construction projects are statistically projected.

& yes your point was well made.

I just dont see any methodology that I can compare. SO I have a low confidence rate on the numbers comparison.

Twh = "terawatt hour".

A LOT of people cite the parachutist as a reason to discredit the whole of the data. Nonetheless, she is dead. Ditto for the fellow who took his own life. The industry still recognizes their deaths. If there was a suicide inside a nuclear plant, it would be big news for a week.

Even with Chernobyl, the mortality rate is 0.0009 deaths per Twh for nuclear energy. The World Nuclear Association doesn't even use Twh, but Twy, terawatt-years. I link to their page, and they have further attribution.

The fatalities in ANY industry are determined by legal definitions, and those definitions are tested every time there is a lawsuit or a contested insurance claim. If you can make the case to reduce the number, please do so. Paul Gipe -- a wind energy pioneer -- has been quite rigorous about his inclusion criteria.

--p!

leukemia? They're not dead, yet.

They're not dead because most of them didn't even get sick.

Some did. There were cancers. There were deaths. The number is FAR lower than "tens of thousands".

Here's what the UNSCEAR report had to say about it:


The bold format is mine.

There is a great deal of material on Chernobyl. It was studied in depth. Although I do not expect to change anyone's mind with a few postings, I do hope that you will become better acquainted with what happened -- and with all aspects of the issue of nuclear energy. Thirty years is way too long to fear science fiction when science fact is within easy reach.

--p!

if not, some effort to reconcile the differences in methodology should occur.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf06.html

The above link leads to a page with dead links. I was not able to find an explanation of methodology, lacking that, the issue becomes moot to a large degree.

If you are counting accidents that occur during construction of a wind turbine installation, like a tractor flipping over, than I want to see that the same accidents are counted under the Nuke column. I have fialed to find any of this information. Comparing an industry that has International standards to one that has none, is what we're faced with. Mr Gipe has obviously taken the info thats available and done the best he can with it.

But until I see the methodology compared, it is what it is, apples and peaches.

maybe even including Chernobyl, deaths from nuclear power generation are far less than from most other forms of generation. Experts are continually arguing over disease caused by coal plants, and hydro seems the only "safe" generation in common use now.

Aside from the waste, it seems to me the fear of nuke plants is not from what's happening, but from the worst-case scenarios of what COULD happen if things go really wrong. Really, really, wrong.

One would be hard pressed to say that dangerous natural gas is less dangerous than wind energy.

Except for the manufacturing part, wind releases no dangerous fossil fuel waste.

Personally I have called zero times for opposing wind facilities. I'm no Robert F. Kennedy Junior.

to count the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two worst war crimes in the history of the world.

"Nuclear Power" is a part of the nuclear weapons industry. All first generation nuclear power plants were adjuncts to their nations' weapons programs, and all emerging nuclear powers use a nuclear power plant as the foundation of their weapons programs.

You also forgot to count the deaths caused by depleted uranium shells that litter the killing fields of Iraq, and Afghanistan, but we'll be counting them for the next few generations and documenting the sickness they bestow. But then you haven't mentioned sickness and cancer at all... And you won't.

How many cancer deaths have been caused by Wind Power so far?

Vietnam, Kobe, Rotterdam, London...

You also forgot the gasoline that drove the tanks and the jet fuel that fueled the bombers in Iraq. You forgot that petroleum caused the war.

In any case, you are completely out to lunch on the subject of the uranium there, what it is, what it does. We're all against tank shells, but the attention paid by rather uneducated people only to tank shells with uranium is frankly, absurd. Almost all of the toxicity associated with tank shells has to do that they're, well - maybe you haven't heard this before - designed to kill people.

Surprised?

I'm always filled with revelations.

In any case, you're not against petroleum, are you?

I am against petroleum, so I really don't need to hear from you about your piddling made up concerns about uranium.

Here's a clue for you bub, without uranium the doom that is about to be faced is going to be much, much, much, much worse.

How many cancer deaths have been caused by waiting around for wind to displace fossil fuels, something, by the way, it will never do.

And since you mention cancer, you have no evidence whatsoever that commercial nuclear reactors cause cancer. If you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, make stuff up.

And while we're talking about things you forgot or deliberately ignored:

You forgot the hundreds of millions of people who died in the 20th century from particulate pollution.

http://www.cancer.org/docroot/NWS/content/NWS_1_1x_Air_Pollution_Linked_to_Deaths_From_Lung_Cancer.asp

What?

You don't give a rat's ass about any of these?

Why am I not surprised?

Nuclear power doesn't have to be perfect to better than everything else. It merely has to be better than everything else and it is.

You have selective attention is arbitrary, which is why you have no fucking idea what you are talking about.

If you really cared about war - and you don't - you'd be screaming here to ban fossil fuels.

But that's not what you're doing. Your simply repeating slogans and mindless rhetoric you learned on science free websites in the vast circle jerk of self-referential antinuke websites. You're full of shit.

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Cancer Rate Near Vogtle Questioned
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jul 11 - Augusta Chronicle, The

A North Carolina environmental group unveiled a study Wednesday that showed significantly higher cancer deaths in the counties surrounding the Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant.

The Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League and its allies say that's all the more reason to oppose adding more reactors there. But the study author stopped short of saying the cancers are caused by radiation and not other factors.

Vogtle fired up two reactors in the late 1980s, and the Southern Co. is seeking regulatory approval to start up new units there. The Blue Ridge group opposes that move and commissioned the cancer death study late last year.

It found that since the reactors went online there has been a 25 percent increase in the cancer death rate in Burke County, while nationally the death rate has declined by 4 percent, said Louis Zeller, nuclear campaign coordinator for the group.

"There is an increase in Burke County that goes contrary to what is happening in the rest of the country," he said.

An Augusta Chronicle analysis of data from the Georgia Division of Public Health found a cancer death rate of 225 per 100,000, slightly below the group's rate of 231, but data for three years were not available. The U.S. cancer death rate is slightly below Burke's, at 207, and Georgia's was slightly below that for the same period, at 204.

Study author Joseph J. Mangano, the executive director of the New York City-based Radiation and Public Health Project, noted the area's higher rates of poverty and higher percentage of minorities, who traditionally have suffered higher death rates from many cancers.

"My point is this area has always been poor and high-minority," he said in a phone interview from New Jersey. "If you look at the period before Vogtle began operating, some of the death rates are actually low. The Burke County death rate was well below the U.S. And afterwards it was high. One would have to look at it further, but it's not apparent that the poverty status changed drastically in Burke County from the late '80s until now."

The Chronicle analysis also noted higher cancer death rates than Burke's in some surrounding counties, such as Wilkes.

"The more-populated counties and the less-populated counties, there are some differences," Mr. Zeller said. "But the overall trend is very plain. And that is that cancer deaths have increased, particularly as compared with the overall trend in the United States going down."

But Mr. Mangano said the report does not provide proof that radiation, whose emissions had increased, is the culprit.

"This report is really just a beginning, but it does raise, I believe, serious questions that should be answered," he said.

Georgia Power spokeswoman Carol Boatright said the company would review the report, but government studies around nuclear plants found no cancer link.

Judy Stocker, of Keysville, a member of the Women's Action of New Directions group, said the report has spurred her to try to stop any expansion of the plant.

Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213 or tom.corwin@augustachronicle.com.

nuclear plants are not immune from the usual stupidities like people falling off ladders.

Nuclear industry propaganda, however (1) will only count radiation-related deaths at nuclear facilities (since many of these deaths occur with a long latency period, measured in decades, and there's no good database for them while (2) counting all industrial deaths related to alternatives like windpower.

As epidemiology, that sort of argument is bogus.

It is extremely difficult finding accident data for wind energy, although every possible nuclear energy related incident is reported in detail. Greenpeace keeps a comprehensive list which it eagerly distributes. It gets its data from the nuclear industry. If this isn't a good database, I don't know what is.

When there is an accident at a reactor, heads roll; all other energy-related deaths are considered "tragic but unavoidable".

And Paul Gipe makes no secret of his methodology. He is also a proponent of wind energy; one of the first, in fact.

"Stochastic" and long-latency methods and results are also available for most, if not all, forms of energy production. None of this is being kept secret. Rather, the MSM has ignored ALL of these issues. Only greenhouse gases and reactor "waste" get any coverage, and both are poorly reported. Always.

If even just the toxic metal emission issue was reported on, the outcry would be volcanic.

Propaganda is as propaganda does. The de facto reactor construction moratorium of the last 25 years did not stop the growth of energy demand. That slack was taken up by coal, oil, and gas, all of which emit large amounts of carbon dioxide and environmental toxins which never decay. Coal alone puts almost 50 tons of radioactive material into the air each year per gigawatt.

ALL hazards should be considered; the idea that we can evaluate any method of power generation according to philosophy has led to a series of decisions that have caused the premature deaths of millions of people. A planetary climate disaster could conceivably lead to billions more deaths, and in a painfully short time.

--p!

and expresses an opinion that the military use situation is not much different. Both of these views appear to be independent from any factual basis.

I can't imagine how you can claim, with a straight face, on the one hand, that there are no deaths since Chernobyl and then turn around and claim, on the other hand, to be using statistics that include deaths you don't believe occurred.

The data on industrial accident deaths at licensed nuclear facilities in the US may indeed be reported to the NRC, but I am unaware of an systematic compilation of the data. If you have a link that actually contains the incidents (including cases such as deaths from falling off ladders, say), do feel free to provide it. Military data will, of course, be considerably harder to obtain.

JAMES BROOKE / NY Times 9aug04

TOKYO, Aug. 9 — Blasts of non-radioactive steam killed four workers and severely burned seven others today in the first fatal accident at a Japanese nuclear power plant, according to officials. ~snip~

http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/Japan-Accident-NPP9aug04.htm

See http://www.insc.anl.gov/neisb/neisb4/NEISB_3.3.A4.html

Brokdorf, Germany - Two men repairing the outside of a German nuclear reactor were killed Monday when a crane that had raised them up 50 metres fell over. Police said it was not clear why the crane had collapsed at the Brokdorf power station near Hamburg. ~snip~

http://www.nucpros.com/?q=node/1776

Feb 22 93 High pressure steam accident kills one worker and injures two others at Fukushima nuclear power plant (Japan)
http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/97/nuclear/reactor/calendar/standard/cal_feb.html

Jul 25 96 An accident at Khmelnitsky nuclear power plant causes fatal burns to an employee and leaks radiation inside the station (Ukraine)
http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/97/nuclear/reactor/calendar/standard/cal_july.html

Dec 9 86 Explosion at Surry nuclear power plant, four people killed (USA).
http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/97/nuclear/reactor/calendar/standard/cal_dec.html

y Irina Titova | Associated Press | Story updated at 11:36 PM on Saturday, December 17, 2005

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - Hundreds of pounds of molten metal splashed from a smelter at a Russian nuclear power plant, killing one worker and severely injuring two others, a scientist and the federal nuclear agency said Friday. The accident did not affect reactors, the agency said. ~snip~

http://onlineathens.com/stories/121705/news_20051217052.shtml