Well no, it's not, because the dam would have been built anyways to prevent flooding. You'd have gotten the dam and a nuclear reactor instead of just the dam.
I'm not talking about old dams, but about building new dams specifically for the purpose of providing renewable energy. Pumped storage is the cheapest way to store excess energy from wind/solar.
If we want to know the risk of doing that, we should get the largest sample size by counting all the dams.
Certainly. The issue is that the above table is weighted by TWh. If we just wanted risk/dam it would make sense, but that's not what the above table was measuring. A staggering amount of dams exist that don't generate electricity, so if I had to guess we'd be on average at around 1 death or less per dam.
Personally I think that the best solution is to switch to nuclear for all the baseload and then some and convert existing dams to pumped storage if necessary.
Good point. Only dams which generate electricity should be included, so deaths/TWh makes sense. (And if there are dams which generate less electricity than they could for their size, because generation was an afterthought, that should be accounted for too.)
