Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste

[SupremeSpod]

There are more deaths attributable to hydroelectric power than nuclear in the past 60 years. Mainly due to catastrophic dam failures that happened in China after a devestating earthquake. Hundreds of thousands died.

Have you started "writing" for the "Wail"?

[NotAllThere]

Grauniad, surely? I've corrected the spelling mistake now - thanks.

It was 171'000 people - according to official figures. 21'000 killed immediately, the rest in the subsequent famine. Unofficial figures put the number of deaths at round 230'000, so "hundreds of thousands" is not hyperbole.

However, it was caused by Typhoon Nina, not an earthquake . But that did cause devastation - 69 dams failed for goodness sake!

The word catastrophic I stand by entirely - it's a term used in structural engineering to describe sudden, total and irretrievable failure.

[VectraMan]

1. It's not normal service that scares people about nuclear, it's the risk of abnormal situations. Coal-fired power stations don't melt down and make whole counties uninhabitable.

There are plenty of other industrial processes that potentially could. The Bhopal disaster was probably far worse than Chernobyl, yet there isn't the same fear of chemical plants. And Chernobyl is far worse than anything that could happen today. Nobody died at Fukushima.

[Ignis Fatuus]

NotAllThere, I take your point about dam failure: that's the abnormal accident that is equivalent to nuclear meltdown. Mind you I wouldn't live downstream from a hydroelectric dam either.

Actually as long ago as the 1970s, Gordon Rattray Taylor warned that dams seem to cause earthquakes, by the intense stress that the huge mass of water places on the crust. One of the depressing things about being as old as I am is that I have seen the warnings a generation or two ago: then they were ignored, now they are denied. Humans are idiots. Frogs boiling.