Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2021–2023
9:13 · 11M views · Feb 2, 2021
Kurzgesagt compares how many people nuclear accidents have killed against other energy sources. It walks through the worst nuclear accidents and puts their death tolls in context per unit of energy.
HN uses it as a short, well-sourced overview showing that fossil fuels kill far more people than nuclear power.
12 comments from Hacker News
I really find it gross the extent to which fear mongering over nuclear happens. Countries decommissioning nuclear plants to switch to coal, which kill far more people, even scaling by use. Instead of using a source of power that's overall incredibly safe, and which produces relatively small amounts of highly manageable waste, people have pushed to switch to these incredibly environmentally harmful power sources. This is especially surprising from countries like Germany that, as someone who doesn't live anywhere near them, see them as technically adept. My province in Canada got 60% of our power in 2018 from nuclear (plus 1/4 from hydro), and a different province got 95% of theirs from hydro, but then that's offset by other provinces that get 90% of theirs from natural gas and coal. Sure not every place is ideally suited for a lot of nuclear (though hopefully SMRs will help), but 90% is too high. We need less fossil fuels and more nuclear to bridge the gap to more renewables. For an interesting comparison of the deaths from nuclear energy, compared to other sources, I highly recommend "How Many People Did Nuclear Energy Kill? Nuclear Death Toll" [1]. [1] this video
This reminds me of a video I watched, just 6 days ago[0]. The video goes into detail about how deadly each of our energy gathering methods are. It also goes into detail about how many are killed per kWh. I had no idea hydro was as deadly as it is before this video, I highly recommend anyone with 10 minutes to spare give it a watch. The channel is incredibly great in general. [0]: this video
Did a control-F for "kurzgesagt" and saw that it had not been mentioned yet. I really recommend watching this short video which gives a really excellent overview of the dangers of nuclear power in the context of the alternatives. The TLDW is even if a very pessimistic estimate of the dangers of nuclear power is still much better than a very optimistic take on the dangers of fossil fuels once you combine the effects of air pollution and climate change. That includes both Chernobyl and Fukushima. this video
Will you be factoring in the healthcare costs associated with burning more diesel and natural gas? (Not even getting into the externalities of climate change.) --- I thought Kurzgesagt did a pretty good job of breaking this down: this video . Basically, no matter how you look at it, nuclear is among the safest forms of energy we have, behind only solar, wind, and hydropower. Admittedly, deaths ≠ costs, but I imagine the numbers would be similar.
Yes, there were a lot of deaths from these nuclear disasters, they were horrible, we should have avoided them. But nuclear energy is still much less deadly than fossil fuels. Air pollution-caused diseases are lung cancer and stroke for example. I think nuclear plants have become much safer and there is more international regulation to maintain their safety. I recommend this excellent video on this topic from Kurzgesagt: this video