The Costs of Major Energy Accidents, 1907 to 2007

Benjamin, you are your usual fount of disinformation. You refer to a 1975 dam accident in China in 1975. Actually the disaster involved the failure of 62 dams and put hundreds of square miles under water. The property loss in 2008 dollar terms must have run into the tens of billions of dollars. You have absurdly claimed that there were more losses involving nuclear power generation than hydroelectric. How did you arive at that figure.? You claim to have found 63 nuclear plant accidents at 23 percent; Aside from the well known instance of Three Mile Island and Chyrnobel what nuclear accidents did you count. You claim that in the last hundred years their were only 51 accidents involving coal, which was only 18 percent of the accidents you found.

Oh really, you don't count accidents in cola mines which produce coal for electrical generating plants, did you. For 2004 China reported 6,027 deaths in coal mining accidents. In 2006, 4,749 Chinese coal miners were killed by accidents. 3,786 died in Chinese coal mining accidents last year. Thousands of American coal miners have died between 1907 and 2007. Many were involved in mining coal for electrical generation.

Clearly if you count accidents coal mining accidents related to electrical generation far more accidents and deaths can be attributed to coal than all other energy sources combined. Of course you are hiding this fact because it does not fit your anti-nuclear agenda. As usual youo are cooking the books on nuclear power.

Coal emissions kill over 20,000 people per year in the U.S. alone, probably over a million per year around the world. If these are not accidental deaths would you classify them as murder?

http://www.sierraclub.org/cleanair/factsheets/power.asp

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5174391/

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update42.htm

Shouldn?t these deaths be included in calculating the risk of coal technology?

Charles,

In the spirit of open dialogue and debate, I am responding to your comments here (on Scitizen) and on your blog. But I am incredibly wary. While it is obvious you actually never read my study on energy accidents, that uncomfortable fact did not stop you from attacking it. For someone dedicated to ?educating people to overcome irrational fears,? this is embarrassing bordering on disingenuous.

I also find it disconcerting that every time I have responded to your comments on my Scitizen column, you pretend that I haven?t and even state so on your blog. You?ve called me incompetent and lazy, but what you?re doing?attacking someone without even reading their work, and then ignoring their responses?is much worse.

Now, to the study at hand and your comments on Scitizen. You claim that the 1975 dam accident involved the failure of 62 dams, not 1. Had you read my study, you would already know that the failure of the Shimantan hydroelectric facility caused all of the other dams to fail. Shimantan was a Soviet-style hydroelectric facility constructed in the early 1950s on the Ru River. Engineers designed it to be part of a flood control and electrification scheme intended to reduce the incidence of severe flooding in the Huai River Basin and provide local villages with energy services. In early August 1975, Typhoon Nina dumped almost 8 inches of rain into the Basin in 24 hours, exceeding the yearly precipitation rate, collapsing buildings and destroying thousands of villages. Sedimentation clogged the sluice gates on many of the adjacent reservoirs and dams, worsening the problem, and telegraphs to open nearby dams failed to reach any of the facilities because of the storm.

While Chinese policymakers were debating whether to open dams upstream and downstream by air strike to relieve the water pressure on Shimantan, shortly after midnight on August 8 the dam failed to handle more than twice its capacity and released 1,670 million tons of water in just five hours, creating a massive tidal wave that cascaded into the failure of 61 other dams. Approximately 16 billion tons of water were released in total, resulting in a flood wave 6 miles wide and 23 feet high that traveled at nearly 30 miles per hour as it destroyed 4,600 square miles of property. Seven county seats were inundated, 6 million buildings collapsed, and 11 million people lost their homes. The Hydrology Department of Henan Province reports that 26,000 people died immediately and another 145,000 succumbed to fatal injuries during subsequent epidemics and famine.

Also, had you read the study, you would know I never claim that nuclear caused more deaths than hydro. I said that it involved more property losses, and for that number, you?ll need to see table A1 of the study, which lists every single accident investigated along with a short description, the amount of damage, and associated mortality/morbidity. It also shows every single one of the 63 nuclear plant accidents. I?d be happy to send you a copy?just email me?but I do find it deeply disturbing that you presume to know what the study says (or doesn?t say) without reading it.

And yes, the study does include coal mines?which you obviously would know if you had, once again, read the study?but it only includes those accidents that could be confirmed. I mention explicitly the Chinese deaths in the study, but I also mention how since they could not be verified by independent sources they had to be discounted. I spent a good part of the first half of the study talking about its methodology, especially how it will be very conservative (better to underestimate than to overestimate, I say).

You also claim I ignore data when it doesn?t fit into my ?anti-nuclear agenda.? Had you actually read some of my other works (also published in peer reviewed journals), you would have discovered that I am not anti-nuclear. I have stated numerous times that nuclear plants are a superior alternative to coal and other fossil fueled plants. For instance, I said this in an article published in the Springer journal Policy Sciences:

While substantial parts of the fossil fuel waste stream are released into the environment (in the form of stack gases and particulates), the waste from nuclear power is seen as much easier to manage and control. Newer nuclear technologies appear to be much cheaper and safer than fossil fueled alternatives .. The impact on human health from fossil fuel combustion ? is much more immediately drastic than nuclear power since nuclear waste becomes less toxic with time as radioactive materials decay, whereas the chemicals emitted from coal combustion often become quickly ingested by humans and other organisms. One study even found that the waste generated by a large nuclear plant per year was 2 million times smaller by weight and a billion times smaller by volume than wastes from a coal-burning plant.

The place we disagree is between nuclear and renewables/energy efficiency; but we both seem to be on the same side against fossil fuels (another reason I find it so odd that you are so threatened by me).

As for the claims about my study not on Scitizen but on your blog, almost all of the accidents you mention?the one in Nigeria, gas and oil fires?are included.

Ultimately, whenever I publish something in a journal or on a website, it is my responsibility to defend it. While I certainly don?t agree that personally attacking people is the best way to move forward, it is important that we have discussions like this. That said, Charles, you need to hold yourself to a higher standard. Attacking a study that you haven?t read is, simply put, shameful. You?re better than that.

We can certainly continue to have discussions in the future, but only if you actually read my work and if you are open and honest with your blog readers. Otherwise, I won?t bother wasting my time in the future.

Bill,

You are absolutely correct--emissions from fossil fuel power plants is a serious issue. While the methodology of the study can always be questioned, the deaths from coal emissions were deemed not to be accidental (i.e., they do not result from some sort of malfunction or technical failure), thus they were excluded.

Benjamine, First I was responding to the account of your accident study which you posted on Scitizen. If I were going to study energy sector accidents, I would have certain methodological choices. First, I could go for a comprehensive data base. That might take years to compile, and probably would involve learning numerous foreign languages in order to do archival research. Clearly you did not seek to compile a comprehensive database. The second option would be to compile a represenative sample. That would also require considerable archival research. A third approach would be to limit the sample to say the United States. These approaches would yield valid statistical data. A fourth approach is to just find accounts of accidents and recover sufficient details to get a picture of what happened. This then would be a qualitative approach, because you collection method would not lead to valid statistical inferences. Your account of your research methods in Scitizen account would appear to be a of the last method. I must consider that method to be hap hazard at best.

Now you complain that I did not read your Energy Policy paper, and this is true. But you failed to provide a link to it. I looked for your paper n the internet and was unable to access it. Thus your Energy Policy paper is a black box. You read things out from it and tell us that they are true, but I have no way checking on anything. All I have to go on is your Scitizen account. My critique then is of what you say in the Scitizen account, which I tried as best I could to make sense of.

In your Scitizen "Oppenion" peice, you state:
From 1907 to 2007, a new study finds that 279 major energy accidents in the coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear sectors have been responsible for $41 billion in damages and 182,156 deaths.

Now exactly what does that mean? Between 1918 and the end of the Soviet Union energy related accidents went not publicly reported in the Soviet Union. Accidents, however were reported in archives. In order to get an accurate picture of energy related accidents you have to go beyond what is published in the newspapers. You have to do archival research. Clearly your method falls short of providing an accurate picture of energy related accidents. You claim to have found accounts of records of 279 major energy related accidents between 1907 and 2007. I'll wager that if you visited the city of Austin, Texas and conducted research in the Libraries of the University of Texas you would find published records for more than 279 major energy related accidents in Texas between 1907 and 2007. I'll wager that if you visited the state Library and Archives and archives of various state agencies, you will find records of dozens and perhaps hundreds of major energy sector accidents that went unreported by the print media.

You state, "The study only counted documented cases of accident and failure; It had to occur between August, 1907 and August, 2007; It had to be verified by a published source; . . ." Well not all of them, probably at best only a small and unrepresenative sample of them. Had you acknowledged that in your Scitizen account, I would have little grounds to question your findings.

Now it is quite improbable that you have even an exhaustive and inclusive list of documented energy related accidents in the United States. Energy related accidents, which would meet your criteria are quite common in Texas. I recall witnessing a pipeline fire in North Dallas some 15 years ago. The fire was quite impressive, and occurred very close to an office building which was undoubtedly damaged by the heat. $50,000 worth of damage was done, I am sure. In 2005 a gas tanker tanker wrecked, exploded and burned in Dallas a freeway was shut down for hours, and the cost of the cleanup would have undoubtedly exceeded $50,000, In 2007 another tanker wrecked, exploded and burned on I-35 north of Dallas. Again the Interstate was shut down for hours, and an expensive clean up occurred. There have been fires at filling stations. Were I to try to make an exhaustive list, I could go on and on for weeks or even months working on it.

There are also accidents due to natural gas leaks, Houses and buildings have been blown up, people killed, The New London School explosion of 1937 was caused by a natural gas leak, and killed at least 300 people, mostly children. Coal train accidents are common, An accident involving a coal train caused $1,000.000 in damages at Cactus, Texas in 2006. Thus I can only conclude that "major" accidents are far more common than the numbers reported in your study.

This video shows a major natural gas related accident west of Fort Worth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQOiJ3Ne7j0

This video is from Houston:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AqFegOhJ18&feature=related

Your account of the 1975 Chinese dam disaster, ignores the fact that the Chines Authorities were warned that the larger Banqiao Dam was about to fail hours before the Shimantan Dam failed. Although the Shimantan Dam failure triggered the collapse of the Banqiao Dam, the real cause of the disaster, was a huge rain event, which the Chinese dams were not constructed to withstand.

Charles,

All you had to do was ask me for a copy of the study, and I would have provided it (and still will if you email me). My contact information is listed quite openly in the very same bio you cut and pasted from the Scitizen website onto your blog. The article, also, is in no way a black box. As I am sure you know, most academic articles are not freely available on the internet (although I wish they were), but they are available in thousands of libraries. Simply travel to any local university and I bet their library subscribes to the journal Energy Policy. Plus, most scholars and analysts I?ve met are very happy to distribute their research. It only takes a request, and perhaps a little time.

Now, almost all of the concerns you mention in your most recent response are discussed, quite transparently, in the article. Heck, the title of the study even has the words ?preliminary? in it for a reason. Naturally, I couldn?t just cut and paste the whole study onto Scitizen for length and copyright reasons, so I merely summarized it there.

The problem I have, one that I urge you to take very seriously, is when you attack the study (which you never read) by reading only a 1-page summary of it. I appreciate you making the clarification that you never read it now, but when you say ?I cannot imagine that a Sovacool article of such poor quality slipped past Energy Policy readers without some awareness of its failings? it sure sounds like you did?and, being rhetorically gifted, I am sure you knew that then.

I?m always up for fair and transparent discussions of energy policy, but those discussions have to be open, honest, and rigorous. This is why publishing a peer reviewed article is so challenging. If you, Charles, are more careful in the future and tone down the personal attacks, I bet you could present your own ideas and research in the academic literature. Publishing a journal article, however, is much different than scribbling down some sentences for a blog. If you take the time to do it, though, I would be the first to congratulate you?and would also take the time and effort to continue the debate there.

Benjamin

Benjamin, to a certain extent, having got your PhD, you are going through the school of hard knocks. You undertook to write a description of your study and post it on the Internet. Having participated in a number of internet debates on energy and climate debates, I am aware of how such descriptions, once posted in the Internet take on the life of their own. For example, your account should have contained in the body of the text the words preliminary and incomplete data set. That way your ass is covered, and no one will assume that your study reviews all of the major energy related accidents between 1907 and 2007.

Data summeries, such as the number of accidents, the number of deaths and the property loss should have also been qualified, and in many cases the limitations of your data would preclude even the appearance of a definitive conclusion. You discuss "182,156 energy-related deaths" without qualification, even though that number is based on a preliminary and incomplete data set. You make statements such as, "energy technologies have been responsible for the equivalent of a September 11, 2001 happening every 1.65 years, year after year." But if your data set is preliminary and incomplete, such statements are not legitimate inferences.

I have no disagreement with the purpose which you express in the last paragraph, which are laudable. I would, however, think that a literature review on previous attempts to study energy system failures would have served you better than constructing an incomplete data set. You have perhaps performed such a review, and if you have, some reference to it would serve as an indicator that you are not trying to reinvent the wheel.

Finally I want to comment on the academic custom of posting comments on off internet papers on web sites intended for the general public. I can understand that academic journals may want to recover some of their expenses from internet readers. But there is nothing in this practice that prevent scholars from writing extended accounts of their research for internet posting. That is one function of blogs. I am not an academic scholar, and I have little patience with the barriers academics erect to easy public access to their work. At one point I was willing to chase down papers published in obscure professional journals, with the consequence that I often had to visit the libraries of several universities in my search. You cannot play the game both ways. If you enter the Internet arena of public discourse, you need to play by Internet rules. If you refer to your research in discussions meant for a broad audience, you need to set out a publicly accessible account of your research even if that means that you have to write a second paper for the Internet.

Charles, posts on Scitizen, by their very nature, must be short and brief, typically no more than 1,000 words. They can never match the length or detail of other forums, including articles and blogs, and I don?t think it?s necessarily a good thing that they should. I view Scitizen as a place to post online what would have been an op-ed published in print. Op-eds have their own merits, but one of the most important is their brevity: to provide an important but always brief contribution to an ongoing discussion or debate.

In my Scitizen post about the Energy Policy study, I never once claimed (or even slightly gave the impression) that the op-ed was somehow equivalent to the study/article itself. In essence, the op-ed is entirely about the study. It summarizes its conclusions, talks about some of its methodology, and then provides the reference for those that want to learn more. It would be one thing if I wrote an op-ed making the claims made in the Scitizen post without referencing or referring to the study. But this op-ed let everyone know it was just a sample, and then directed them where to go for the real thing.

Moreover, talking specifically about the study?s estimate of 182,156 deaths, if anything this number is grossly underestimated. It?s incomplete by excluding accidents, meaning that an equivalent 9-11 probably happens much more frequently than 1.65 years. (Also, there is a brief literature review in the study as you suspected).

To your final concern, yes, scholars can and should use the internet to discuss the full merits of their research, but Scitizen cannot be that place, since it is limited to op-ed style pieces. In essence, we?ve kind of done that in our additional discussions?but much time and rancour could have been avoided if you read my study first, since it covered almost all of your concerns. Simply put, I ask that you take the Scitizen piece for what it is?and op-ed that talks about a study. There certainly must be a place for such things in both the internet and energy policy debates. If posting such a thing is not playing by your internet rules, I suppose I have to ask what those rules are, who set them, and what their value ultimately is.

Benjamin, If you only have a thousand words, you had best chose each one of them wisely.

Charles,

A good point. And if you read a short piece summarizing a study but not the study itself, refrain from attacking the latter.

Benjamin

You did a google search, added up some random numbers you found on some shady webpages and drew conclusions out of this? Congratulations, this really is representative research. Can I hire you?