I already showed the death rate per hour of US driving is lower than worldwide commercial aviation. In the last decade, per the Boeing stats posted earlier, there have been ~7.3 deaths per million flights.
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I’ll need to look at the assumptions here. This is literally 30 times the number I found
I think you are looking at the flights with a fatality per million flights data, which is obviously not comparable to total deaths per X in cars. My point was, people suck at probability and risk analysis, pointing out that this thing you do all the time is more likely to kill you than this thing you rarely do is an example of that. That is like saying more people die walking around their house than skiing, therefore walking in your house is more dangerous than skiing.
Organizations have limited resources and if the risk assessment shows more people being hurt or killed walking around your ski condos / resort vs on the slopes then you split those resources accordingly.
You must take into account the likelihood of the risk occurring AND the frequency it can occur to compare risks. Otherwise you are only looking at half the picture.
What is the worst consequence from a wind turbine failing? What the worst consequence from a nuclear power plant failing? How many orders of magnitude more operating hours do wind/solar have than nuclear?
Well let’s compare from that link I provided in the last post:
“ This is how a coal-powered Euroville (150,000 people) would compare with towns powered entirely by each energy source:
- Coal: 25 people would die prematurely every year;
- Oil: 18 people would die prematurely every year;
- Gas: 3 people would die prematurely every year;
- Hydropower: In an average year 1 person would die;
- Wind: In an average year nobody would die. A death rate of 0.04 deaths per terawatt-hour means every 25 years a single person would die;
- Nuclear: In an average year nobody would die – only every 33 years would someone die.
- Solar: In an average year nobody would die – only every 50 years would someone die.”
Do you disagree that things that have a higher consequence of failure should have a lower probability of failure?
Obviously they should and they do. That’s why the risk of a death from nuclear is down around the risk from solar and wind. Nuclear can kill many more so it’s likelihood is much lower because western governments force the industry to have more significant hazard controls in place
In commercial aviation, a failure that would prevent continued safe flight and landing should occur less than once in a billion flight hours. What rate is acceptable for potentially contaminating a major watershed/hundreds of square miles? Or just the billions of dollars in clean up like at TMI?
That’s a policy question. If we look at the cost to eliminate the risk we might shed some light on it.
If we eliminated all nuclear risks by shutting them down and replacing them with fossil fuels then the risk is essentially 1:1 that uncontrolled climate change occurs, flooding all coastal port towns, disrupting food production and likely resulting a population reduction of 10-90% - Apocalyptic
If we eliminate the risk by eliminating all power generation we can no longer support a modern society and population will likely reduce by 99% along with lifespans dropping back into the 30’s.
Now compare that to the actual record of the western commercial nuclear industry. Over the last ~70 years they had TMI which was mostly contained to the complex and Fukushima. Fukushima contaminated a decent sized area but only after a 9.1 magnitude earthquake, a tsunami, and some poor design decisions. These risk factors are not applicable to most reactors.
Finally the most likely change to the nuclear industry is fission reactors are slowly phased out over the coming years and replaced by renewables and grid storage (and potentially fusion). That means decreasing likelihoods of nuclear hazards without the major negatives from above.
As reference, remembering "catastropic" generally means a death or loss of vehicle not a meltdown:
Any death is catastrophic but each hazard needs to be assessed individually. Hazard analysis and probabilistic risk assessment are tools to rigorously evaluate hazards, assign limited resources to control those hazards and assess if the remaining residual risk is acceptable.
At my work we say If you (royal you) want no risk at all never launch.