we cut out a whole section of us grumbling about the Chernobyl TV programme. It's basically part of the background cultural assumptions that Chernobyl killed loads of people! But I really don't think it did
If renewables are cheap, why does a higher proportion of renewables generation correlate with higher electricity costs across multiple countries?
The answer includes - the additional costs of back-up reliable generation, and the costs of connecting and balancing widespread unreliable sources generating unpredictable fluctuating outputs.
Interesting stuff, butI had a couple of gripes. Right at the start you assert nuclear power is 'safe' and then go on to consider only one metric of safety - directly attributable deaths / unit of power produced. But with nuclear accidents. the direct death toll is lowered by the enormously disruptive containment measures put in place after an accident. Surely something that doesn't kill me but forces me to leave my home, never to return, cannot be regarded as totally 'safe'? You did allude to this with the discussion on whether to include the death toll from the Fukushima evacuation. which, although it may have been botched, does seem directly attributable to the accident. My point is that , anything that renders a large area of countryside or entire towns such as Pripyat uninhabitable, even if nobody dies, cannot be regarded as totally safe. Of course there is a debate as to whether the exclusion zone is too large, or too long lasting, but its definitely an impact
My second gripe is more statistical - nuclear accidents are very rare but high impact events. It's not obvious that a simple 'historic deaths per unit of power' metric is statistically a good measure even of lethality risk. Do we really know that these (Chernobyl, Fukushima) are 'representative' of the range of possible risks from nuclear power? It is often claimed that Chernobyl could have been much worse (and indeed the Windscale fire in the 1950s). So of course could non-nuclear power accidents, but it's hard to imagine any single event having the same impact in , say, the oil industry, as a foreseeable-but-so-far-not-happened nuclear accident. Everybody is fairly relaxed if the Russians destroy a coal fired power station in Ukraine, but much less so the Zaporizhznia nuclear plant. It's a bit like arguing that nuclear weapons are safer than handguns because over the past 100 years far more people have been killed by handguns. Of course future nuclear power stations should be safer (and as you say at the cost of expensive safety measures) and I am personally not anti-nuclear - I would argue that its environmental impact is far less than fossil fuels . But you need to be more rigorous in considering the safety argument.
Not episode-specific, but is there any chance of transcripts for paid subscribers? [They wouldn't need to be perfect, just rough output from Descript or one of the other programs that transcribes podcasts/audio for you... ]
As a kid of the 80s, I would never have guessed the Chernobyl death total was so low!
we cut out a whole section of us grumbling about the Chernobyl TV programme. It's basically part of the background cultural assumptions that Chernobyl killed loads of people! But I really don't think it did
https://www.climatedepot.com/2025/03/26/lomborg-the-global-evidence-is-clear-not-a-single-country-that-relies-heavily-on-wind-solar-power-has-low-average-electricity-costs/
If renewables are cheap, why does a higher proportion of renewables generation correlate with higher electricity costs across multiple countries?
The answer includes - the additional costs of back-up reliable generation, and the costs of connecting and balancing widespread unreliable sources generating unpredictable fluctuating outputs.
https://euanmearns.com/green-mythology-and-the-high-price-of-european-electricity/
Interesting stuff, butI had a couple of gripes. Right at the start you assert nuclear power is 'safe' and then go on to consider only one metric of safety - directly attributable deaths / unit of power produced. But with nuclear accidents. the direct death toll is lowered by the enormously disruptive containment measures put in place after an accident. Surely something that doesn't kill me but forces me to leave my home, never to return, cannot be regarded as totally 'safe'? You did allude to this with the discussion on whether to include the death toll from the Fukushima evacuation. which, although it may have been botched, does seem directly attributable to the accident. My point is that , anything that renders a large area of countryside or entire towns such as Pripyat uninhabitable, even if nobody dies, cannot be regarded as totally safe. Of course there is a debate as to whether the exclusion zone is too large, or too long lasting, but its definitely an impact
My second gripe is more statistical - nuclear accidents are very rare but high impact events. It's not obvious that a simple 'historic deaths per unit of power' metric is statistically a good measure even of lethality risk. Do we really know that these (Chernobyl, Fukushima) are 'representative' of the range of possible risks from nuclear power? It is often claimed that Chernobyl could have been much worse (and indeed the Windscale fire in the 1950s). So of course could non-nuclear power accidents, but it's hard to imagine any single event having the same impact in , say, the oil industry, as a foreseeable-but-so-far-not-happened nuclear accident. Everybody is fairly relaxed if the Russians destroy a coal fired power station in Ukraine, but much less so the Zaporizhznia nuclear plant. It's a bit like arguing that nuclear weapons are safer than handguns because over the past 100 years far more people have been killed by handguns. Of course future nuclear power stations should be safer (and as you say at the cost of expensive safety measures) and I am personally not anti-nuclear - I would argue that its environmental impact is far less than fossil fuels . But you need to be more rigorous in considering the safety argument.
Not episode-specific, but is there any chance of transcripts for paid subscribers? [They wouldn't need to be perfect, just rough output from Descript or one of the other programs that transcribes podcasts/audio for you... ]