The explosion of liquefied gas (LPG) tanks on the outskirts of Mexico City, exacting a death toll that may reach 500, reminds us of two things.
First, all energy is dangerous: the only fuel that is perfectly safe is incombustible. But not all forms of energy are equally dangerous.
Second, even if the Mexico tragedy had not been overshadowed by the disaster in India (see simultaneously published Feb 84 issue), it is a safe bet that the tragedy would soon have been forgotten
¾as quickly as the other gas disasters were forgotten, though at least one of them exacted a toll comparable to, and possibly exceeding, that of the Mexico disaster (it happened in the USA¾have you ever heard of it?).This shows once again that people do not fear what is dangerous, but what they do not understand. The victims in Mexico were burned, torn apart, crushed, or killed by flying debris. Horrible, but people understand what happened, so life goes on. It is not as if the deaths were caused by something as mysterious as radioactivity, the "unseen killer" that "has no smell or color." (What's the smell of flying debris?) Yet from what we now know about meltdowns and similar accidents, it is quite unthinkable that a nuclear catastrophe could exact a death toll as high as that in the Mexican explosion
¾even if the stored energy were larger (see below). Ignorance kills.The reason why natural gas (itself far safer than coal, oil or hydro in overall deaths per unit energy consumed) is more dangerous than nuclear has little to do with man-made gadgets, but is a natural consequence of two simple factors:
First, gas is less concentrated
¾several million times less energy per unit volume); and it is easier to safeguard a few cubic feet of radioactive core (whose energy flow has to be kept going) than many millions of cubic feet of gas (whose energy has to be prevented from being released).Second, an explosion releases the energy in a matter of seconds; a nuclear disaster with reactor (not weapons) grade uranium or plutonium would give at least hours, but more probably days and weeks in which to take countermeasures in the small area threatened by it.
Liquid Natural Gas (LNG - methane, liquefied by low temperature), liquefied petroleum gas (LPG - butane, liquefied by high pressure), and plain natural gas all have a history of disasters
¾as do, of course, all forms of energy.The US disaster alluded to above took place in New London, Texas, on March 18, 1937. The local school was heated by cheap "raw" or "wet" gas formed as a waste product in a nearby oil refinery, and a spark or match set off one of the leaking radiators in the school. There were 413 dead, mostly students, including all but one of the 92-member graduating class.
On 20 October 1944, 125 people were killed after the explosion of a liquid gas storage facility in Cleveland, Ohio.
On 11 July 1978, a tank truck carrying propylene gas crashed into a seaside campsite near Tarragona, Spain, killing 145 holidaymakers.
Before the Mexico tragedy, these were, to my knowledge,the three worst of a long list involving fuel gas only
¾the record of chemical explosions in general is far more appalling (4,000 in a gunpowder explosion, Rhodes, Greece, 1856; 1,600 in a TNT explosion in Halifax, N.S., 1917; etc.)
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Vol. 12, No. 5
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 12, No. 5 Date: November 29, 2004 01:30 PM Title: "Need us!"
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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