"excluding the biggest failure" - that's beyond cherry picking into just outright lying isn't it?
(Not aimed at you: you've obviously been very fair in capturing the issues with the data as presented).
Nuclear advocates will often complain that the deaths from Chernobyl get disproportionate press compared to the perpetual toll that is daily operations for coal. But just ignoring the deaths - I can't see how that's justified in good faith.
As others have pointed out, this is a nuanced question.
The dams were not built to produce power, they were built to protect the area. The power generation was done _because_ the dams were there, not the other way around.
That is, even if the power wasn't wanted, this disaster would have happened, so from that perspective, this is not deaths caused because of power generation.
In the other power generation cases, the object causing the deaths is _only_ being created to create that power. Without that power need, the object would not have existed.
For example, it is possible to generate energy from tidal waves. However I don't think that anyone would suggest that means that all deaths from a Tsunami should be attributed to tidal wave power generation.
The parallel here is that this (series of) dam(s) was built to control nature, and failed spectacularly at doing so. Is that the result of the power generation?
There _are_ dams that are build primarily for power generation, these would make sense to include in the stats. If the dam failed because of a malfunction in the power generator, that would make sense to include in the stats. But that does not appear to have been the case here.
Similarly, the Russian RBMK nuclear reactors were designed for dual purpose: Producing electricity and producing weapons grade plutonium. Following your argument, we should weight down the Chernobyl disaster, when counting statistics for nuclear power?
Can you cite where the Chernobyl disaster was made the worse by the weapons grade plutonium production?
I have never seen that, but of course you would reduce the numbers.
It would be zero, if like some nuclear facilities the electricity was purely a byproduct. Unless I guess something that does the power creates the mess.
Arguing that the power generation is not really at fault would be great for defending the power company from lawsuits, but it's irrelevant to determining how often dams fail.
If you're addressing a question like, say, whether it would be safer to build more nuclear power or more hydropower, then you really just need to know "if I build N dams, how many people will they kill in the next 100 years," and the same for nuclear plants. Unless you have reason to believe that hydropower dams are inherently safer than dams built primarily for other purposes, it makes sense to look at all dam failures.
Well no, it's not, because the dam would have been built anyways to prevent flooding. You'd have gotten the dam and a nuclear reactor instead of just the dam.
I'm not talking about old dams, but about building new dams specifically for the purpose of providing renewable energy. Pumped storage is the cheapest way to store excess energy from wind/solar.
If we want to know the risk of doing that, we should get the largest sample size by counting all the dams.
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.
Good point. Only dams which generate electricity should be included, so deaths/TWh makes sense. (And if there are dams which generate less electricity than they could for their size, because generation was an afterthought, that should be accounted for too.)
On the other hand, none of the deaths are caused by the power generation, they are caused by the infrastructure built for that power generation. It just happens that there's no reason to dig up coal and build a massive furnace to burn it for no reason, but there are other reasons to build dams. So it would be better to compare dangers associated with that infrastructure (ie. dams vs coal power plants), but then it's comparing apples to oranges; there's no simple metric to compare these things.
Quite easily, I imagine: Banqiao Dam needed to be built anyway in order to control downstream flooding and supply water. There was no option in which China just didn't build it and saved huge numbers of lives. There was also no option of building a nuclear power plant instead even for the electricity generation side; commercial-scale nuclear power didn't exist at the time it was built, so you're inherently comparing over very different timescales. (Given the construction, engineering and operation standards of the dam in question, that's probably a good thing. Especially since if China did manage to set up a nuclear power plant close to that era it'd almost certainly have been an early RBMK design like Chernobyl.)
Those things were, blindingly obviously, never intended to produce electrical power. The Banqiao dam was, and failed under similar environmental stresses to Fukushima, killing - by any even vaguely sane analysis - an order of magnitude more people.
If you count disaster deaths for some methods of producing a resource (power) and ignore them for others, I'm calling you a bad-faith actor.
62 upstream dams were broken before Banqiao dam failed. No dam in the world is capable to stop 15 700 000 000 000 tonnes of water. The flood was catastrophic anyway.
The primary responsibility of Banqiao dam is to control flood. Power generation was secondary.
I know that you are claiming to be sarcastic, but one should point out that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were not used to generate power, so I don't suspect that anyone would suggest to include them in the power generation deaths.
And in this case, the flooding was almost certainly made worse by the dam, since there was a calamitous failure mode. That is _not_ to say that people would not have died otherwise from the flooding.
Ok, let replace Hiroshima bombing with Fukushima disaster. Imagine that instead of 62 dams broken bi Nina typhoon, about 10 nuclear reactors were flooded instead. (We don't need a flood control when we use nuclear energy. Right?) How many deaths you will expect in addition to drown and ill in this imaginary case?
(Not aimed at you: you've obviously been very fair in capturing the issues with the data as presented).
Nuclear advocates will often complain that the deaths from Chernobyl get disproportionate press compared to the perpetual toll that is daily operations for coal. But just ignoring the deaths - I can't see how that's justified in good faith.