Talk:Energy accidents

Dam failures are not energy accidents
It seems obvious but apparently needs stating: dam failures are not energy accidents unless the accident was caused by the hydroelectric part of the dam or the dam was specifically build to generate electricity.

Dams with hydroelectric power stations are almost always built for some non-energy related purpose. In the case of the Chinese dam that failed electricity production was a nice side benefit, not the reason for the dam being built. That being the case the failure is clearly not an energy accident, it was a dam failure and the attached hydroelectric plan was destroyed along with it. To put it another way if your car crashed because the wheels fell off you wouldn't say it was a failure of the radio. The radio is a nice addition to the primary function of the car - to transport you. It would be fairly bizarre if the newspapers lead with "AM/FM radio injures car passengers", along side a photo of the car missing a couple of wheels. Mojo-chan (talk) 21:18, 17 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I agree, however, IMO more often than not, dams are being build for the sake of power generation. Anyway statements need references either way. -- Stratoprutser (talk) 15:06, 20 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Stop selectively editing out material that doesn't fit with your point of view. The material you removed is well referenced in the document cited. To be friendly, you should be aware that life cycle assessments(LCAs) studies of energy accidents include the failure of hydroelectric dams as they are a vital component for the production of hydro-electricity, no dam = no 'head height of water' = no electricity generation possible, so as dams are essential for the generation of electricity, their negative impacts are included in LCAs. Moreover the Chernobyl RBMK reactors were not built(much like the Banqiao dam) for the singular expressed purpose of electricity production. Neither were the UK's Magnox reactors for that matter, both are examples of production reactors with electricity cogeneration as a a nice side benefit, so by your own criteria, if you exclude Banqiao you also exclude Chernobyl, as it wasn't a dedicated electricity generating power reactor like a US pressurized water reactor.
 * Boundarylayer (talk) 04:28, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

This article needs to include the reports by the Paul Scherrer Institute
Look them up, energy fatalities.

Is pollution an "energy accident"?
I admit I've just run across the term "energy accident", but it it seems strange to call pollution (including London smog) and black lung "accidents". Are there reliable sources that call them energy accidents?--Wikimedes (talk) 07:42, 3 November 2013 (UTC)
 * You may wish to consult our resident expert on energy accidents, Prof. Benjamin K. Sovacool, at User:Bksovacool... Johnfos (talk) 08:56, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Johnfos, thanks for thinking of me. I know of two different definitions of energy accidents, neither of which include pollution.  Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute used to run a database of energy accidents.  The architects of that database defined a “severe accident” as one which involves one of the following: at least five fatalities, at least 10 injuries, 200 evacuees, 10,000 tons of hydrocarbons released, more than 25 square kilometers of cleanup, or more than $5 million in economic losses.  My own (from the study in Energy Policy I think you're referring to) defined a “major energy accident” as one that resulted in either death or more than $50,000 of property damage.Bksovacool (talk) 12:26, 3 December 2013 (UTC)


 * If pollution related deaths due to the use of an energy source, such as smog, are not regarded as "energy accidents" then that would exclude all off site deaths that are predicted to occur from Chernobyl's reactor no.4 fallout pollution, would it not? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.167.232.17 (talk) 01:49, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

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The list of Fatalities table is original research.
This is a homegrown analysis from blogger Brian Wang. To the best of my knowledge this analysis has not been published anywhere.

Forbes is not the original source; the author clearly attributes Brian Wangs blog. Even if Forbes was the original source, the list would still be original research.

It would be ok to reference this list, but it would need some serious commenting work first.

The list is rhetorics made to look like statistics in order to give it an aura of being scientific.

Putting original research in a blog entry does not transform it into non-original research.

gnirre (talk) 10:21, 28 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Blogs are usually not wp:reliable sources, but the content may sometimes be qualified if checked by reliable sources. The Forbes article is at best an opinion ("Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own"). I have not seen this WP article before, and I have not formed a certain opinion. The blog should be replaced by the sources it uses, with updates. The blog seems to be WP:Synth-esizing pollution into accidents. There should be a list of Externality deaths somewhere, with the controversy issues it brings. TGCP (talk) 08:20, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

All things conflated
I can't even cope with this article. It's the flip side of the assisted suicide debate, in which heroic measures "save" the afflicted to endure miserable, debilitating conditions, long after any pretense of life-quality silver lining has departed the building (yet the extreme care and pharmaceutical billings go on and on.)

The article is not even coming clean on foundational double-counting concerns.

If a heavy smoker lives near a coal plant, does his or her premature death count 100% under the column of "coal induced" (as well as 100% under the column of "smoking induced"?) This is not an incorrect approach: it's the marginal approach, where each margin is assessed separately (the sum of all margins often greatly exceeds the total number of deaths). If the question you are asking is what you can achieve on the margin by influencing any single variable, all else held constant, this is the right accounting approach. But it lends itself to horrifically inflated statistics if misunderstood or actively misrepresented.

The other approach is to normalize so the sum of all causes equates to the sum of all (premature) mortality. How then to partition smoking and coal? 90-10, 80-20, 50-50? Extremely subjective.

And then you still have the person with advanced dementia and mediocre organ function who dies at age 88, putatively of lung failure. Is this normalized, either? Usually not.

What you usually end up with, then, is a collection of eyebrow-raising statistics that are a complete crock, as compared to how they would be understood in proper context.

Hey, I have a great idea for a new NPR radio show: All Things Conflated. &mdash; MaxEnt 19:53, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

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What does Year column in table mean
That there were that many accidents in a single year? Or that that was a year in which the data was collected?

Also were 90 people really killed by nuclear in 2012? Most people will have difficulty converting to Terrawatt hours. If someone has the original data it would be good to also include the absolute number killed.

The article is, of course, totally POV. "Everybody knows" that nuclear is incredibly dangerous, and producing real statistics is not really fair. It is what I love about Wikipedia, coldly telling the truth. Tuntable (talk) 03:03, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

Deleted table
The table relied primarily on a polemical piece by pro-nuclear lobbyist James Conca. Deleted WP:RS JQ (talk) 21:57, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

"Energy accidents" vs. "Energy fatalities"
Both the redirect of "Energy fatalities" to "Energy accidents" and the article lede's use of "Energy fatalities" when the article is titled  "Energy accidents"  indicate confusion about the topic here. Previous discussion on the talk page suggests that people recognize that these are not the same thing. The lede currently says:

"Energy resources bring with them great social and economic promise, providing financial growth for communities and energy services for local economies. However, the infrastructure which delivers energy services can break down in an energy accident, sometimes causing considerable damage. Energy fatalities can occur..."

One possibility would be to rename this page "Energy fatalities", since that is the broader term, and then clearly identify "Energy accidents" as one type of "Energy fatalities". (If that happens, it also might be appropriate to create a related page such as "List of energy accidents" and move the "Selected energy accidents" there.) Another possibility could be to create two separate pages to clearly distinguish between "Energy fatalities" and "Energy accidents". I would like to get feedback from editors here about these or other ways to improve the page and what might be preferred. MaryMO (AR) (talk) 16:04, 15 July 2021 (UTC)


 * I agree there are too many inaccuarties here. I can read in every paragraph issues I can see of vagueness
 * This is way out of date
 * "March 2011: Fukushima I nuclear accidents in Japan. Regarded as the second largest nuclear disaster in history, after the Chernobyl disaster, there have been no direct deaths attributed to radiation at or around the Fukushima power station but a few of the plant's workers were injured or killed by the disaster conditions resulting from the earthquake and tsunami that struck the power plant which precipitated the accident. The estimated future cancer burden is a total of 180 cases in the years and decades ahead. As of 2013, 160,000 evacuees are still living in temporary housing. The difficult cleanup job will take 40 or more years, and cost tens of billions of dollars."
 * https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fukushima-cleanup-costs-swell-with-no-end-in-sight#:~:text=TOKYO%20%2D%2D%20Japan%20has%20spent,price%20tag%20is%20still%20uncertain. Supertoaster2 (talk) 06:17, 2 June 2023 (UTC)