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Clemency Burton-Hill
Clemency Burton-Hill

Clemency suggests


Risk and Relative Risk

Wednesday, 23rd July 2008

Jeremey Leggett has yet another piece at The Guardian about how awful the risks of radioactive contamination are from the use of nuclear power.

I've pointed out here before that the emissions from nuclear stations are actually smaller than those from coal fired (there's uranium and thorium in that coal that gets spread across the countryside).

But one comment on today's piece made me smile:

The most dangerous threat in power generation these days is probably people falling off ladders as they clean solar panels.

I'm not sure that is in fact true: I'm sure coal kills many. However, we only need one death from people either installing or maintaining solar or windmills for the technologies to kill more in the UK than nuclear has done.

There are risks from nuclear power, of course, being alive is a risk. But relative to other generation technologies it's actually rather low risk.

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dearieme

July 23rd, 2008 5:30pm

Is it time to recycle "Three Mile Island killed fewer people than Chappaquidick"? Chernobyl killed far, far fewer than New Labour's wars.

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