Nuclear power and the French energy transition: It’s the economics, stupid!

[kristopher]

46. That's a very convenient memory lapse

You were touting the propaganda of the nextbigfuture blog as if it were a milestone article in Science.

Here is my critique (that you pretended didn't exist) as a reminder of what You consider good science:

Solar: the stats are simply fabrications; numbers made up out of whole cloth by the author of the blog.

Wind: Cumulative deaths per TWh for wind isn't 0.15/TWh. Using the same source cited by the NBF blogger it is clearly 0.07/TWh and has been for several years. The author at nextbigfuture had to go back to the year 2000 to get the 0.15 number. That is simply lying.

Readers can download the spreadsheet themselves: http://wind-works.org/articles/DeathsDatabase.xls
The per TWh tab is labeled "deaths by year". It is also worth reading the "deathsdatabase" tab to see that the nature of the deaths includes everything that could possibly be related.

Similar gimmicks are used to under-report the deaths related to nuclear power. Again using the author's source, the Externe-E analysis. It's available at this link where it is the third graphic of the 4; just click any of them for a close up:
(link removed to deny advertising)

Note that the 0.04 quoted for nuclear is strictly "occupational fatalities" even though the more comprehensive number of "public fatalities", right next to it, is 0.65. The author uses a "piublic fatalities" number for wind - that is what Gipe tracks. He also goes to extra effort to use it for coal (see below). So what possible logic can justify choosing the far lower "occupational fatalities" only for nuclear except the deliberate intent to present fraudulent data?

Also, if you go to the Externe analysis and read it you'll find that Chernobyl is excluded from the total. To make up for that the author takes the most conservative estimate available - 50 deaths - and notes it as an aside. See study below for most recent independent study on Deaths to date from Chernobyl.

The source nextbigfuture post also makes available an estimate (from Externe E and others) for the coal fuel chain - the range is 0.04-0.23. In order to push that up the author goes to the trouble of finding and incorporating the deaths from particulate pollution associated with coal. It is a commendable effort but it begs the question of why such diligence wasn't applied across the board.

In short, this blog entry , and its continued use by nuclear industry proponents that know it is a deliberately crafted lie, is one of the reasons I turned against nuclear power in recent years. If you can't trust them on matters so easy to check, how in the hell can you trust them to promote the public welfare when they are shielded by the secrecy shrouding the technology itself?