This article originally appeared on Quora as Ryan Carlyle's answer to the question:What are some policies that would improve millions of lives, but people still oppose?

Anti-science activism and statistics-illiterate fear-mongering are killing millions of people. It's shocking and horrifying to realize how many completely-preventable deaths happen every year due to unnecessary fear of 20th-century inventions. Sometimes, the legitimate science in favor of a beneficial technology is so crushingly overwhelming that I have to call opposition to it tantamount to mass murder.

I feel very strongly about this. Well-intentioned activists and media fear-mongering are making large swathes of the public into unwitting participants in a vast global calamity of scientific-illiteracy. It is outright killing millions of people. There are several global issues like this, but the one most on my mind lately is...

Expansion of Nuclear Power to Replace Coal.



First, some background. Coal is the largest global source of electrical power:

Coal is also the worst source of electrical power. Leaving aside global warming, coal power outright kills a million people worldwide per year [1] due to massive air pollution and the occasional mining accident.

Annual premature deaths from coal power, for a few nations/regions that have access to nuclear power:

US - 13,000 deaths per year [2]

deaths per year [2] Europe - 22,300 deaths per year [3]

deaths per year [3] India - 115,000 deaths per year [4]

deaths per year [4] China - Estimates vary from a few hundred thousand up to over a million -- it was estimated at 400,000 in 2006 and has risen steadily since then [5]

Stop for a second and really look at those numbers. A million deaths per year is a tragedy, but a million preventable deaths per year is an embarrassment to our species. We can do better, guys. We have to do better.



Just about anything would be better than coal. Unfortunately, there aren't actually very many economical, scalable options for replacing base load power plants. They have to run 24/7 with a reliable output, and renewables don't fit the bill. Solar and wind are too variable to directly replace coal. Geothermal, hydroelectric, and tide/wave power are limited by the number of sites around the world with suitable conditions for large-scale generation. Natural gas isn't available in sufficient quantities for any nation but the US right now, and even that's controversial due to the massive shale gas drilling required.

There is only one power source than can act as a direct 1:1 replacement for coal power, is cost-competitive with coal power, and has no global warming implications: Nuclear Fission.

Despite what you may have been told, nuclear power is fantastically safe. The only way it's possible to think nuclear power is worse than the other base-load alternatives is to simply not know the actual statistics. One graph should instantly end the safety debate over nuclear power for anyone with eyeballs and a shred of intellectual honesty:

Seth Godin

Page on The9billion



To my mind, that's the only chart you need. Feel free to stop reading and upvote now if you're convinced. But I'm going to get into the details to make sure there's no room for doubt in anyone's mind.

Let's get a few things straight, before people flip out and start writing off-topic rebuttals:

This isn't an argument about whether wind or solar power are good, because they are good. They serve a valuable role in providing distributed, non-base-load power generation to offset a certain amount of fossil fuel consumption.

This isn't an argument about whether expanding nuclear power has challenges, because it does have challenges. Weapons proliferation risks and waste disposal are obviously politically-sensitive issues.

This is a simple question of which economically-feasible , base-load power technology harms the fewest people per unit of energy produced. That's the type of power generation we should be using to replace coal power... as fast as possible.

The clear winner is nuclear. The safety statistics are just so cut-and-dried that it's flabbergasting to me that anyone even bothers arguing the point. Depending on who you believe, it's either AS SAFE as renewables, or EVEN MORE SAFE than renewables. People differ on the exact number of deaths, but every credible estimate puts nuclear, wind, and solar in a league entirely separate from fossil fuels.

People claim that intermittent accidents make nuclear power unsafe. No, they don't. Fukushima hasn't caused a single death due to radiation exposure, and experts expect no measurable increase in cancer rates. [6] The supposed "high rates of thyroid abnormalities" that people have been making a big deal about lately are actually no higher than the normal baseline rate for non-exposed parts of Japan. [14]

Even Chernobyl, the only nuclear accident that has ever killed any significant number of people, only caused 64 confirmed deaths in the initial incident and following 20 years. Our best understanding of radiation dose response says a few thousand additional people will die someday due to slightly-increased cancer rates, which puts the cumulative eventual Chernobyl death toll at 4,000 according to the official UN committee on radiation exposure, UNSCEAR. The highest estimate anyone has ever made for Chernobyl's cancer impact is 985,000 deaths, but scientists consider this to be an extremely flawed and wildly-inaccurate number. It was made by a single Russian who was trying to sell a book about Chernobyl at the time, and his calculations failed peer review. The highest estimate by a credible scientific entity for eventual increases in cancer deaths due to Chernobyl is 60,000, and even that was based on the now-discredited Linear no-threshold model for cancer rate estimation. [7,8]

To recap, the best scientific estimate is 4,000 deaths from Chernobyl, with a safe upper bound of 60,000 deaths. Why is this rate so much lower than people expect? Because our bodies are naturally tolerant of small amounts of radiation. Normal, natural Background radiation dose levels all over the planet vary from under 2 mSv/year up to 6 mSv/year. This is the level that we've been evolving for over a billion years to tolerate without issues. The global average marginal radiation exposure from human sources is about 0.6 mSv/year, almost entirely from medical devices. The generally-accepted limit for safe radiation exposure to the public from human sources is 1 mSv/year. This is an incredibly conservative level, and there is no evidence of harm occurring until much higher doses.

Chernobyl only dosed inhabitants of the region with 10-50 mSv over a 20 year period. This is roughly equivalent to simply living in a region with naturally-high radiation levels.

Fukushima only dosed inhabitants of the region with 1-15 mSv. This is far below the safe threshold for lifetime exposure in nuclear workers of 100-250 mSv.

Emergency responders receive higher doses. The exposure levels to the public are low in large part because of evacuations. But they're also low because nuclear plant accidents release much less radiation than most people think.



Compared to a million per year for coal, nuclear's estimated 4,000 deaths from a single incident in 1986 is just fantastic. Most of those 4,000 haven't even died yet -- they're predicted deaths prior to 2065. Frankly, even the implausible upper-bound estimate of 60,000 deaths is still fantastic. Even if we were building more of those awful Chernobyl-style Soviet RBMKreactors, we would STILL be better off with nuclear than coal. Coal kills as many people as 16 to 250 Chernobyls every year. But the types of failures that occurred at Chernobyl and Fukushima are actually impossible with modern reactor designs. New "Gen III" plants built today contain passive cooling loops that eliminate the risk of Fukishima- or Chernobyl-style meltdowns. So that risk won't even exist for any reactors we build today. Nuclear power is getting even safer.

In comparison, a single hydroelectric dam failure in 1975 -- theBanqiao Dam -- killed far more people than every nuclear accident in history combined. "But what about nuclear plant radiation evacuations," you ask? Hydroelectric power over the years has permanently displaced somewhere between 40 and 80 million people from their homes due to reservoir flooding [9] versus 160,000 displaced for Fukushima [10] and 350,000 for Chernobyl. [7] Unlike permanent displacements from hydroelectric power, nuclear meltdown evacuations are temporary. People started moving back into many areas around the Fukushima plant in 2012 because the worst radiation had already passed.

Is hydroelectric power scary? No. And nuclear shouldn't be either. These statistics prove that the only reason people are more afraid of nuclear power than hydroelectric power is ignorance. If you think nuclear power is dangerous, you could not be more wrong.

People are scared because they don't understand radiation. They're scared because it's invisible, and because the media sensationalize the hell out of every tiny nuclear incident, no matter how little impact it actually has. It's pure, mindless fear devoid of any real data whatsoever. The fear is encouraged by entities who profit from it -- by the fear-mongering news media, and the coal lobby, and environmental groups who get donations and manpower from scared activists.

And that mindless fear kills people. Fear of radiation literally scares people to death. Stress and mental illness caused by the over-reaction to the Fukushima meltdown have clearly been the biggest impact of the accident. Many estimates say that the stress from the Fukushima evacuation killed more people than just having everyone stay in place would have. Some people did need to be evacuated, particularly families with young children immediately around the plant, but about a hundred thousand people would have been safer staying in place than evacuating. [15,16,17] Small amounts of radiation just aren't anywhere near as harmful as people think.

But the direct alternative to nuclear power, coal, is harmful. China, Germany, and Japan have all recently moved away from nuclear because of the Fukushima incident, towards coal and other hazardous power sources. China's decision to build relatively little nuclear power in favor of more coal power is going to end up killing millions of its citizens. Not all nations have nuclear technology, but the worst coal-power-abusers -- India, China, Europe, and the US -- certainly do.

Opposition to nuclear power has already killed millions of people, and will continue to kill millions more. It causes massive CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. It puts mercury, cadmium, and all sorts of other heavy metals into the ecosystem. I can't stress enough how utterly counterproductive anti-nuclear activism is for human health and the environment. It makes me want to tear my hair out how backwards people are getting this.

The facts are in, the research is done, and you can either believe the data or you can be a tiny part of the anti-science juggernaut of public opinion that is killing millions of people. It's that simple. Nuclear power is safe. The alternatives are not.

"But is there enough fuel," you ask"? Yes. Even if we quadruple nuclear power production to eliminate coal, we have roughly 50 years of usage in known conventional uranium deposits, and another 250 years in thorium deposits. That compares quite well to the 300 years or so of reserves we have for coal. (And these reserves figures are very likely to continue to increase as technology develops and we find more deposits.) Even if we run out of all of that, we have many thousands of years worth of additional uranium dissolved in the world's oceans. [20]

"But can we afford it," you ask? Yes. In terms of cost, nuclear is fully competitive with its dirtier and less-reliable alternatives:

But this really overstates the cost of nuclear relative to fossil fuels, becausenuclear power is the only electricity source that fully prices all of its waste streams into the user's electricity cost. [11] We technologically solved the waste disposal problem a long time ago -- vitrify the waste and put it in deep geological storage in salt formations like the US military does at theWaste Isolation Pilot Plant. The salt creeps into the excavated caverns and seals away the waste for millions of years -- locking it away until long after it's harmless. This level of waste disposal is included in the price of nuclear power, unlike coal.

And coal does produce a massive amount of toxic waste. An incredible 131 million tons of it annually in the US alone... mostly dumped in landfills and open-air ash ponds. When people talk about "clean coal" and coal pollution controls, what they really mean is just using expensive scrubbing equipment to redirect pollution from the smokestack to these massive ash ponds. [18] Here's a satellite image of 5.4 million cubic yards of the Tennessee Valley Authority's heavy-metal-contaminated Fly ash spilling into a river and small town in 2008:

Kingston Coal-Ash Spill, December 30, 2008 Skytruth / Flickr

There are over 200 documented cases of coal ash ponds significantly contaminating the environment in the US alone. [19]

The real kicker to coal's toxic waste problem is that coal ash is radioactive. Coal plants emit more radioactivity to the environment around them than nuclear plants do. [12] That's still not enough radiation to hurt anyone, but it certainly adds insult to injury.

Coal power producers also don't have to pay the cost of lung diseases and heavy metal poisoning caused by their emissions. Nuclear plant operators not only pay damages to people affected by meltdowns, as TEPCO continues to do in Japan, but also pay all of the handling and disposal costs for their entire routine waste stream... all the way through plant decommissioning. [13] When you include the cost of all these negative externalities, nuclear is dramatically cheaper than coal power. Actually, you don't even need to factor in decommissioning and site remediation costs -- on the simple basis of public health impact alone, coal is one of the most expensive power generating options:

The United States' reliance on coal to generate almost half of its electricity, costs the economy about $345 billion a year in hidden expenses not borne by miners or utilities, including health problems in mining communities and pollution around power plants, a study found.



Those costs would effectively triple the price of electricity produced by coal-fired plants, which are prevalent in part due to the their low cost of operation, the study led by a Harvard University researcher found.



"This is not borne by the coal industry, this is borne by us, in our taxes," said Paul Epstein, a Harvard Medical School instructor and the associate director of its Center for Health and the Global Environment, the study's lead author.

"The public cost is far greater than the cost of the coal itself. The impacts of this industry go way beyond just lighting our lights."



Coal-fired plants currently supply about 45 percent of the nation's electricity, according to U.S. Energy Department data. Accounting for all the ancillary costs associated with burning coal would add about 18 cents per kilowatt hour to the cost of electricity from coal-fired plants, shifting it from one of the cheapest sources of electricity to one of the most expensive.

Coal's hidden costs top $345 billion in U.S.: study (emphasis added)

Coal just sucks. The only good thing about it is that you can build coal plants fast and cheap. Then they start killing people and destroying the environment, and the costs start adding up. Practically anything is cleaner and cheaper than coal in the long run.

Nuclear is a vastly superior power technology. Engineers solved the energy crisis a long time ago, and now it's time for politicians to catch up. All of the common complaints and fears are either already solved by modern technology, or are based on outright misconceptions. I'm not saying nuclear power is perfect -- nothing is -- but it's worlds better than the alternatives. The challenges inherent in expanding nuclear power are surmountable and require no new technology.

It's an objective fact that we could save millions of lives and improve the quality of life for countless others by phasing out coal power and replacing it with nuclear energy. That's before you even start worrying about climate change! This is a crisis where science simply has to triumph over ignorance, it just has to. We're literally killing ourselves here, and the solution was invented decades ago. I think educating the public to stop fearing nuclear power is truly a moral imperative for our generation.