The uncounted cost
What a life is worth
Deaths per terawatt-hour tell you how dangerous each source is. They do not tell you what that danger is worth against the electricity bill, or against a price on carbon. To ask that, you have to attach a dollar figure to a statistical death — and regulators already do.
The cost the price leaves out
The market charges for fuel, for building the plant, for keeping it running. It never charges for the death toll — the mining and drilling accidents, and far larger, the air pollution that shortens lives downwind. A mortality price and a carbon price are the same kind of object: both take a harm the market ignores, put a number on it, and let you see what it would cost.
That number is the value of a statistical life (VSL): what preventing one death is treated as worth. US Health and Human Services publishes a range for it — not a single figure.
US HHS ASPE, Standard Values for Regulatory Analysis, 2026 (value of a statistical life) (2026). Constant 2025 dollars. Source.
Mortality cost per megawatt-hour
Value of a statistical life
What society treats one prevented death as worth. Presets are HHS's published range.
Each source's death rate valued at $14 per MWh of exposure — i.e. its deaths per TWh priced at the value of a statistical life you chose above. The band is the death-rate uncertainty; choosing a different life-value is a second range on top.
counted (accident) cost · modeled (pollution / radiation) cost
The bill vs the uncounted cost
Market price is Lazard's levelized cost of electricity — what you pay to make the power. Mortality cost is what its death toll is worth at the life-value above. Where the last column exceeds one, the uncounted cost is larger than the bill.
| Source | Deaths / TWh | Mortality cost / MWh | Market price / MWh | Uncounted vs bill |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coal | 24.6 | $347 | $118 | 2.9× |
| Oil | 18.4 | $259 | — | — |
| Biomass | 4.6 | $65 | — | — |
| Gas | 2.8 | $39 | $78 | 0.5× |
| Hydro | 1.3 | $18 | — | — |
| Wind | 0.04 | $0.56 | $50 | 0.01× |
| Nuclear | 0.03 | $0.42 | $215 | <0.01× |
| Solar | 0.02 | $0.28 | $46 | <0.01× |
Oil, hydro, and biomass show no market price because Lazard 2026 publishes no comparable figure for them; their mortality cost still appears. All figures use central estimates.
A moral choice, not a technical one
US regulators already attach a dollar figure to a statistical death. HHS's 2026 guidance publishes a range — low, central, and high — not a single number. These are shown as published values, never as an endorsement of any one of them. The choice among them is a moral and political one this site does not make for you.
Read the band, twice
Every figure here carries two ranges, not one. The first is scientific: how deadly each source is, reported low to high because the underlying epidemiology is genuinely uncertain. The second is the life-value itself, which HHS publishes as a range. A priced mortality cost inherits both. The honest read is the width of those bands, not any single midpoint — and the site never lets you rank nuclear, wind, and solar apart, because their ranges overlap.
Questions people ask
Isn’t putting a dollar value on a life wrong?
A price gets set either way. Every time a society declines to spend without limit on safety — a speed limit, a hospital budget, a workplace rule — it has already priced a statistical life implicitly. This page only makes that number explicit and lets you move it. It is not the price of any particular person’s life, and the site does not tell you which value is right.
Whose number is this?
The presets are the range US Health and Human Services publishes for regulatory analysis. It comes from what people are actually observed to pay to avoid small risks — wage premiums for dangerous work, spending on safety equipment — scaled up to one statistical death. Different agencies and countries use different figures, which is why it is shown as a range.
Why is the mortality cost sometimes larger than the electricity price?
For coal and oil, most of the death toll is air-pollution mortality that the electricity market never charges for. At a central life-value, that uncounted cost per unit of energy can exceed the plant’s running cost. For nuclear, wind, and solar it is a rounding error next to the bill. That gap is the whole point of the comparison.
Does this discount future deaths?
No. A death prevented in 2050 is weighted the same as one prevented today. Discounting future harm is a common and contested choice in cost-benefit analysis; this page does not make it, so the figures are undiscounted.
See it on a whole grid: build a mix and read its mortality cost → or compare the eight sources.