35 ms·

Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

170 points by bpodgursky 10y ago

Aloha 10y ago
While I don't doubt that coal pollution is harmful, I do have to wonder how much the study controlled for other conditions that could cause these changes (like economic factors). I can't help but wonder if this is confusing correlation with causation even if just a little.
xroche 10y ago
Closing nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal power plants is simply criminal. In Europe, coal pollution kills ~20,000 people each year (), nuclear never killed a single person, and no study could ever provide any mortality increase due to nuclear energy (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) To be clear: nuclear is not the perfect solution, is not a renewable energy, and will have to be replaced by something else in the future. But this is the least deadly energy, even safer than wind or solar power () () https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/12/european-coal-pollution-premature-deaths https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/12/european... () http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/06/update-of-death-per-terawatt-hour-by.html http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/06/update-of-death-per-ter...
- pdog 10y ago
  Fukushima has demonstrated that humans aren't great at controlling or predicting the real risk of nuclear. The fact is, even if no one dies from acute radiation poisoning, nuclear disasters are costly and devastating.
  - loeg 10y ago
    That can be mitigated in the US because the entire country doesn't run along a fault line. Not so Japan. Yes, don't build your nuclear reactor in western California.
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      The Fukushima reactor stood the earthquake without damage, and could have been easily designed to withstand the tsunami. It was not. How, you might say? Put the backup generators in waterproof bunkers, or simply on platforms high enough to keep them dry. It's not expensive or tricky, it's just that the failure mode did not occur to anyone in charge.
  - bpodgursky 10y ago
    Fukushima has demonstrated that relying on 60's technology and refusing to upgrade or invest because of political sensitivities exposes you to disasters 50 years down the line. It's like if everyone got afraid of airplanes in the 1980's and kept flying the same ones from the 60s through today because people were afraid to build new ones. Would you say air travel was unsafe, or that we made poor technology investments?
    - lispm 10y ago
      Now you understand a tiny part of the Energy business. 'Nuclear' is not only a technical problem, it is a financial problem. Old plants will be run until they collapse - unless a regulator keeps the companies from doing that. But then the regulator comes onto pressure, because there is huge amount of money/corruption involved to keep the plant online. Every single plant is a multi-billion dollar investment, jobs, surrounding industry, ... Tepco from Fukushima claimed until the day their plants were hit, that everything was totally safe. Politics supported them. Nobody was questioning them.
      - mpweiher 10y ago
        Yes, and despite the technical failings, the political failings and the corruption, the effects were comparatively benign.
        sfifs 10y ago
        Possibly to you sitting on the other side of the world. Not so for the thousands of people displaced who lost their homes and communities through no fault of their own and might be exposed to higher cancer rates in their lifetimes.
        mpweiher 10y ago
        Yes, the evacuation zone almost certainly should have been smaller, that's one of the perverse effects of the panic about nuclear, that the mitigation efforts tend to be overblown (not that they should be zero), and therefore the damage from the mitigation much worse than it needs to be. But you missed the word "comparatively". We have lots of human-/technology-induced deaths and injuries. We allow car traffic in our cities at speeds that kills and maims thousands, often children. These are completely avoidable, just lower speed limits to 5mph or less. The US allows more than ten thousand gun deaths every year, because "reasons". etc. etc. So yes, the effects were comparatively benign, compared to most of the technology we surround ourselves with, and certainly compared to all power-generating technologies we have (including solar). Not absolutely benign, though it would be interesting to compare the damage even of accidents like Fukushima to the benefits (in lives saved) of the electricity that was produced.
  - mpweiher 10y ago
    Dunno. The Tsunami killed upwards of 15000 people. I don't have figures, but I am sure that a good number of these were not killed by the wave directly, but by technical contraptions that failed, crushed them or what have you. One of these many technical contraptions that was damaged/destroyed by the Tsunami was the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Yet, so far not a single person has been killed as a result of that failure, and so far the predictions are that future deaths will be so low as to disappear into the statistical noise. (And these predictions tend to be on the high side: the WHO created reports every decade after Chernobyl, and each report massively revised those estimates downwards). Yet, all we ever hear about is Fukushima. Odd. That.
    - agroot12 10y ago
      There would be more deaths if Japan and Tepco would not pour billions of dollars into collecting as much waste as possible. The waste of Fukushima is still an unsolved problem that will eat many billions more (see https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/struggling-with-japans-nuclear-waste-six-years-after-disaster.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/struggling-...). In fact, even when your reactor does NOT explode, you still have to manage the waste for 10,000 to 1,000,000 years (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Long_term_management_of_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Long_term_manage...). The radioactive materials are not only deadly due to their radiation; most of them are also highly toxic. So even without a meltdown, you risk many lives in the future. Just because not many people have died yet does not make it a safe energy choice. Who in their right mind can guarantee safe storage of the waste for 10,000+ years?
      - 0xfeba 10y ago
        > So even without a meltdown, you risk many lives in the future. Just because not many people have died yet does not make it a safe energy choice. Even if that's true, compared to the certain deaths per year caused by coal it still wins out.
      - vidarh 10y ago
        You don't need to be able to guarantee safe storage for 10,000+ years. For starters most of it can be reprocessed and reused, resulting in less dangerous waste. But no matter how reckless you decide to be with it, the amounts are small enough that it'll be nothing compared to the devastation caused by coal.
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    We are still waiting for Fukushima nuclear event related deaths. The tsunami already killed 15000 people. Yeah, nuclear is super risky.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    1) Massive earthquake 2) Devastating tsunami 3) Crippling fire causing loss of power to all control circuitry. Even with all that, the number of direct radiation casualties was zero. There are about six workers who got more than a lifetime allowed dose of radiation. They may have an increased cancer risk. 1) How many do you suppose would have died had it been a hydroelectric dam of similar capacity? (hint: a lot more than six) 2) Just how safe does something have to be?
  - mizchief2 10y ago
    We can stop building nuke plants on fault lines right on the coast without abandoning nuclear energy.
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  In other words nuclear never killed anybody apart from the ones it killed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll#Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
  - blowski 10y ago
    I'm no expert on Chernobyl or power generation. But I think Chernobyl was the result of under-investment and poor management, whereas many of the deaths from coal are an unavoidable consequence of burning coal. Hence, you can say nuclear is safer as long as it's managed well.
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      Where is it managed well?
      - blowski 10y ago
        I have no idea. I don't even know if it is practically possible to manage well enough to guarantee zero disasters. But there are many nuclear plants around the world that have operated with no problems. As I said, I'm no expert.
        LoSboccacc 10y ago
        new design exist that in case of disaster self contains under most conditions, trouble is it's very hard to obtain certifications needed for operation today as opposed to decades ago, so we're mostly stuck with old designs.
      - ekianjo 10y ago
        by design already. all recent reactors have containment tanks to prevent radioactive leakage in a meltdown event.
      - cjrp 10y ago
        The UK seems pretty good at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Kingdom#Accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Ki...
- legulere 10y ago
  > (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) Wikipedia seems to give 4000 as an estimate on those exposed to the highest levels of radiation alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Cancer_projections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Cancer_proj... On the other hand coal, wind and solar never poisoned our food (wild boars in Germany thousands of km away still often are too radioactive to be eaten ). Coal, wind and solar never led to emergency evacuations. Coal, wind and solar cannot be used to make atomic bombs.
  - wbl 10y ago
    Really? Have you already forgotten about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly... If coal plants had the same radiation rules as nuclear plants, they couldn't run.
    - kogepathic 10y ago
      > If coal plants had the same radiation rules as nuclear plants, they couldn't run. I think you mean if nuclear plants had the same radiation output as coal plants, they would be required to shut down. Edit: thanks for the downvotes, I realise now that I'm basically stating the same thing as OP. Quite the double standard that coal plants are allowed to spew so much radiation when all other forms of power generation are held to a higher standard.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
        What @wbl wrote also makes sense. Nuclear power has a closed fuel cycle: what goes in comes out and is stored. There's no way we could hope to capture all the radioactive particles from a coal plant exhaust, not in the foreseeable future with any reasonable efficiency.
        kogepathic 10y ago
- Tomte 10y ago
  We still don't know how to handle spent fuel. So nuclear apologists are simply offering a calculation, where the biggest risk/liability has been left out, because "what number should we put in?". Also, I'm always fascinated of the "Chernobyl was unsafe, today reactors are safe" argument. The exact same line was fed to us when Chernobyl was state of the art. There are good reasons to think that it may indeed be so this time. But the nuclear industry has lost all trust and all right to demand anyone ever trusted them again.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    > Chernobyl argument Consider airliners. Airliners have been around for 80 years, and get substantially safer every decade. This is a statistical fact. Every crash is used as a learning experience and designs, procedures, and training is adjusted as a result. There's no reason to believe that such does not apply to nuclear power stations.
    - mpweiher 10y ago
      One of the biggest problems with nuclear is that we aren't building new plants.
      - douche 10y ago
        Outside of submarines and aircraft carriers, that is. We seem to have those pretty figured out. You'd think that nuclear propulsion would be a natural choice for the biggest of the enormous cargo container ships that are currently burning millions of gallons of dirty, dirty bunker fuel instead.
  - mpweiher 10y ago
    > We still don't know how to handle spent fuel. Actually we do, technically, and the amount is trivial (and can be reused, though that isn't currently being done). Spent fuel is a political problem. In fact, last time I checked even just the radiation from coal power plants is greater than from nuclear plants. > The exact same line was fed to us when Chernobyl was state of the art Chernobyl was never state of the art and western reactors, which are much safer, are also of a design derived from military designs, not optimized for safety. Also, the negative health effects of coal and other energy sources are so much worse than even Chernobyl that it isn't funny.
- kostyash 10y ago
  How sweet, the study that guardian refers returns 404: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/silentkillers/ http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/silentkillers/
  - The_Double 10y ago
    Working link: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/Campaign-reports/Climate-Reports/Silent-Killers/ http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/Camp...
    - Neliquat 10y ago
      Maybe avoid taking facts from a terrorist org.
- bhgraham 10y ago
  Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr) Coal – global average 100,000 (41% global electricity) Coal – China 170,000 (75% China’s electricity) Coal – U.S. 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity) Oil 36,000 (33% of energy, 8% of electricity) Natural Gas 4,000 (22% global electricity) Biofuel/Biomass 24,000 (21% global energy) Solar (rooftop) 440 (< 1% global electricity) Wind 150 (2% global electricity) Hydro – global average 1,400 (16% global electricity) Hydro – U.S. 5 (6% U.S. electricity) Nuclear – global average 90 (11% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush) Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity) https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#22fff54d709b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
  - wapz 10y ago
    How is the mortality rate of wind and hydro calculated? Is it from engineers being killed during maintenance/construction? It feels like those two would have a mortality rate or something similar to "a house."
    - ekianjo 10y ago
      Hydro means dams and dams can cause a number of accidents if they are not properly maintained.
      - vidarh 10y ago
        Specifically, hydro was the cause of the worst single power generation accident of all time: 171,000 dead when the Banqiao dam failed. Before anyone assumes that will never happen again: There are fears over multiple large dams, including Mosul, where a failure worst case could kill a million. If we're lucky Banqiao will be a one-off, but large dams are massive risk factors because they need ongoing maintanenance forever, and are often upstream of some of the densest populated areas. On top of that they're also ecological disasters.
- opo 10y ago
  >...To be clear: nuclear is not the perfect solution, is not a renewable energy, and will have to be replaced by something else in the future. While we may want to replace nuclear with a different power source in the future, there is enough uranium and thorium to last hundreds of thousands (or more likely millions) of years.
basicplus2 10y ago
Electrostatic precipitators fix the particulate problem very effectivly
- ageofwant 10y ago
  I worked at a massive coal plant years back as a student. Once spent a afternoon crawling through a ESP during maintenance. The dust made my hair feel like sand, weird gritty sticky eyeballs. Now this was before health and safety became fashionable. I recall tales of the poor bastard that they forgot about when they tested the plate voltage. The test failed: 64kv was 40kv for some reason, and kept arching, they were still tracing the issue when his wife phoned to ask where John was, he was a few hours late picking up his kid at kindergarten...
legulere 10y ago
A very weird way to study the outcome of coal air pollution. It seems like this is not really about air pollution but trying to push nuclear energy. Luckily shutting down nuclear plants does not necessarily mean turning on coal power (e.g. in Germany they were replaced by renewables). Some questions arise though: Which coal power air pollutant is to blame for the birth weight decrease. Which coal pollution mitigation techniques[1] (which are probably now more common) were used by the coal plants? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_pollution_mitigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_pollution_mitigation
- lemming 10y ago
  in Germany they were replaced by renewables Do you have a reference for this? Germany has a very aggressive (and highly commendable) plan to move to renewables, but my understanding was that the closing of nuclear plants post-Fukushima was covered by coal. Wikipedia seems to agree (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany): At the same time, Germany continues to rely heavily on coal power, with usage increasing to offset the phase-out of nuclear energy.
  - Maakuth 10y ago
    They really are adding renewable production at quite an aggressive pace: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... Myself I'd prefer they would use that extra production to phase out coal first before shutting down their NPPs.
  - legulere 10y ago
    This graphic shows it pretty well in my opinion: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Energiemix_Deutschland.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Energiem... Purple is nuclear energy. Dark green is biomass, light blue is wind power, yellow is solar power
    - Maakuth 10y ago
terminado 10y ago
...the difference in birth weights between the two time periods is roughly the difference in birth weights between a baby born to a mother with a disadvantaged background who received supplemental nutrition during pregnancy and a baby born to a similar mother who didn't get that help. I think a map correlating power plant pollution plume estimates with the reporting hospitals or physicians that provided infant data, and their areas served would be helpful in representing the relationship between these two events. Here seems to be an older version of the source, with power plant maps: http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/environ_2015/severnini_e8895.pdf http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/environ_2015/seve... Paywalled version: http://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy201751 http://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy201751 Infant vital statistics are drawn from county-level sources.
- johan_larson 10y ago
  I suspect the drop in infant birth weights is caused by the economic disruption of closing a major local employer, rather than by the increased pollution from the coal-fired power plants.
mirimir 10y ago
TVA nuclear vs TVA coal wasn't a binary choice. TVA coal was likely the least-expensive offset, but TVA could have purchased hydro or gas-turbine power. Also, I suspect that the coal plants used were among the oldest and most-polluting.
lyschoening 10y ago
This is research from the 1980s. It is undoubtedly correct, but it does not not apply to today. Today, renewables are competing favorably against coal and nuclear power on price, and they are improving rapidly still. It takes easily 15 years to plan and build a nuclear power plant, while a solar plant can be planned and built in months. The issue of what happens when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine can be addressed through larger HVDC grids with a good energy mix and through storage technology, which is also improving rapidly. Meanwhile, nuclear has its own issues with the elements nowadays. Nuclear relies on huge amounts of freshwater. I've heard of nuclear plants that need to shut down in the summers now because of drought. It will become harder and harder to find locations where they can be built. Finally, new fossil fuel plants built today are mostly gas, not coal. Gas also has its problems, but it has been a reasonable transition technology that is also losing ground now as energy storage technology is improving.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  The sun not shining at night can also be addressed with variable pricing. Electricity usage is elastic, and a lot of consumption patterns can be time-shifted. The idea that electricity should have a fixed rate 24/7 is obsolete.
- awjr 10y ago
  Is the sun not shining just a transmission problem? Have we been able to create ultra high voltage long range DC transmission systems?
  - LoSboccacc 10y ago
    electricity transmission powers aren't that trivial, even discounting the large saltwater ocean you'd have to cross to power the other side of the world (and the security implications for that infrastructure) it's more of a storage problem. you can get quite efficient batteries using pressure/gravity chambers, but not all places are apt to host them.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    Actually we have been able to create high voltage transmission lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
ASlave2Gravity 10y ago
An aside from the article: What are the best ways to get access to journals? Is there some sort of subscription program like Spotify / Netflix but for journals?
- istjohn 10y ago
  Free: http://libgen.io http://libgen.io
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
An irony I've noticed recently is fans of nuclear saying: "Coal is killing people, if you say anything bad about Nuclear then you are killing people" and then turning round and attacking other, non-coal alternatives like wind, solar or even natural gas. Initially I assumed these were actually coal supporters doing some devious concern trolling to delay the roll out of alternatives that are viable in the short term but I've come to accept that it's just another weird nerd-war like Emacs Vs Vi, except with deadlier real life consequences.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  While wind and solar are great and we need more, there is not enough of it unless major international cooperation for building huge plants in good locations is involved. (0) https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/
- opo 10y ago
  The world will need base load power for a long time. Yes, there is a lot of research into grid storage, but except for pumped hydro we are a long way away from that being a major component of the power system. (For example, Gates is investing in startups that are working on innovative nuclear plant designs and startups that are working on storage - maybe they all succeed, maybe none of them will.) NASA has estimated that using nuclear power has saved an estimated 1.8 million lives that would have been lost if the power has been replaced by fossil fuels: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-harmful-than-nuclear-power https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-... We are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time. When you compare nuclear, coal and natural gas, one of these three ways of generating electricity has much fewer health consequences than the others. Lives depend on having reliable, affordable electricity and as we transition the vehicle fleet to electric, we will need more electricity, not less.
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    That paper basically says "coal is bad" but again, kind of throws natural gas under the bus in a sneaky way. "almost certainly would have been supplied by fossil fuels instead (overwhelmingly coal)" So they've established, coal is really bad. That would be a really powerful argument for nuclear if people didn't already know that. How about running the numbers for nuclear plus as much natural gas as necessary to follow load, vs renewables plus natural gas? That seems like the real question. (Numbers here being cost, time, C02, health impacts, deaths etc. because deaths are acceptable if we could have saved enough money to save many more lives elsewhere).
mcone 10y ago
You don't need to convince me of the dangers of coal pollution. I grew up in Farmington, New Mexico with two massive coal-fired power plants right outside of town. But this article ignores the consequences, and apparently the very existence, of nuclear waste. This is a problem we'll be dealing with for tens of thousands of years. It's unlikely that today's pollution from coal-fired power plants will endanger the lives of people thousands of years from now, but you can bet your bacon that the pollution from nuclear power plants will.
- Neliquat 10y ago
  So where does coal pollution go in your mind that renders it inert and nonradioactive? Please re read your statement and look how dumb it is.
novalis78 10y ago
Can't wait for the results of Thorcon Power's first plant in Indonesia [1]. Too bad that they could not get past the regulatory innovation kill that's preventing the US from taking a lead on next generation nuclear power plants. [1]http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/first-walk-away-safe-molten-salt.html http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/first-walk-away-safe-mo...
mizchief2 10y ago
If you are serious about reducing C02 then you are serious about using nuclear power.

170 points by bpodgursky 10y ago

Aloha 10y ago

While I don't doubt that coal pollution is harmful, I do have to wonder how much the study controlled for other conditions that could cause these changes (like economic factors). I can't help but wonder if this is confusing correlation with causation even if just a little.

xroche 10y ago

Closing nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal power plants is simply criminal. In Europe, coal pollution kills ~20,000 people each year (), nuclear never killed a single person, and no study could ever provide any mortality increase due to nuclear energy (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) To be clear: nuclear is not the perfect solution, is not a renewable energy, and will have to be replaced by something else in the future. But this is the least deadly energy, even safer than wind or solar power () () https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/12/european-coal-pollution-premature-deaths https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/12/european... () http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/06/update-of-death-per-terawatt-hour-by.html http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/06/update-of-death-per-ter...

pdog 10y ago
Fukushima has demonstrated that humans aren't great at controlling or predicting the real risk of nuclear. The fact is, even if no one dies from acute radiation poisoning, nuclear disasters are costly and devastating.
- loeg 10y ago
  That can be mitigated in the US because the entire country doesn't run along a fault line. Not so Japan. Yes, don't build your nuclear reactor in western California.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    The Fukushima reactor stood the earthquake without damage, and could have been easily designed to withstand the tsunami. It was not. How, you might say? Put the backup generators in waterproof bunkers, or simply on platforms high enough to keep them dry. It's not expensive or tricky, it's just that the failure mode did not occur to anyone in charge.
- bpodgursky 10y ago
  Fukushima has demonstrated that relying on 60's technology and refusing to upgrade or invest because of political sensitivities exposes you to disasters 50 years down the line. It's like if everyone got afraid of airplanes in the 1980's and kept flying the same ones from the 60s through today because people were afraid to build new ones. Would you say air travel was unsafe, or that we made poor technology investments?
  - lispm 10y ago
    Now you understand a tiny part of the Energy business. 'Nuclear' is not only a technical problem, it is a financial problem. Old plants will be run until they collapse - unless a regulator keeps the companies from doing that. But then the regulator comes onto pressure, because there is huge amount of money/corruption involved to keep the plant online. Every single plant is a multi-billion dollar investment, jobs, surrounding industry, ... Tepco from Fukushima claimed until the day their plants were hit, that everything was totally safe. Politics supported them. Nobody was questioning them.
    - mpweiher 10y ago
      Yes, and despite the technical failings, the political failings and the corruption, the effects were comparatively benign.
      - sfifs 10y ago
        Possibly to you sitting on the other side of the world. Not so for the thousands of people displaced who lost their homes and communities through no fault of their own and might be exposed to higher cancer rates in their lifetimes.
        mpweiher 10y ago
        Yes, the evacuation zone almost certainly should have been smaller, that's one of the perverse effects of the panic about nuclear, that the mitigation efforts tend to be overblown (not that they should be zero), and therefore the damage from the mitigation much worse than it needs to be. But you missed the word "comparatively". We have lots of human-/technology-induced deaths and injuries. We allow car traffic in our cities at speeds that kills and maims thousands, often children. These are completely avoidable, just lower speed limits to 5mph or less. The US allows more than ten thousand gun deaths every year, because "reasons". etc. etc. So yes, the effects were comparatively benign, compared to most of the technology we surround ourselves with, and certainly compared to all power-generating technologies we have (including solar). Not absolutely benign, though it would be interesting to compare the damage even of accidents like Fukushima to the benefits (in lives saved) of the electricity that was produced.
- mpweiher 10y ago
  Dunno. The Tsunami killed upwards of 15000 people. I don't have figures, but I am sure that a good number of these were not killed by the wave directly, but by technical contraptions that failed, crushed them or what have you. One of these many technical contraptions that was damaged/destroyed by the Tsunami was the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Yet, so far not a single person has been killed as a result of that failure, and so far the predictions are that future deaths will be so low as to disappear into the statistical noise. (And these predictions tend to be on the high side: the WHO created reports every decade after Chernobyl, and each report massively revised those estimates downwards). Yet, all we ever hear about is Fukushima. Odd. That.
  - agroot12 10y ago
    There would be more deaths if Japan and Tepco would not pour billions of dollars into collecting as much waste as possible. The waste of Fukushima is still an unsolved problem that will eat many billions more (see https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/struggling-with-japans-nuclear-waste-six-years-after-disaster.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/struggling-...). In fact, even when your reactor does NOT explode, you still have to manage the waste for 10,000 to 1,000,000 years (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Long_term_management_of_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Long_term_manage...). The radioactive materials are not only deadly due to their radiation; most of them are also highly toxic. So even without a meltdown, you risk many lives in the future. Just because not many people have died yet does not make it a safe energy choice. Who in their right mind can guarantee safe storage of the waste for 10,000+ years?
    - 0xfeba 10y ago
      > So even without a meltdown, you risk many lives in the future. Just because not many people have died yet does not make it a safe energy choice. Even if that's true, compared to the certain deaths per year caused by coal it still wins out.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      You don't need to be able to guarantee safe storage for 10,000+ years. For starters most of it can be reprocessed and reused, resulting in less dangerous waste. But no matter how reckless you decide to be with it, the amounts are small enough that it'll be nothing compared to the devastation caused by coal.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  We are still waiting for Fukushima nuclear event related deaths. The tsunami already killed 15000 people. Yeah, nuclear is super risky.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  1) Massive earthquake 2) Devastating tsunami 3) Crippling fire causing loss of power to all control circuitry. Even with all that, the number of direct radiation casualties was zero. There are about six workers who got more than a lifetime allowed dose of radiation. They may have an increased cancer risk. 1) How many do you suppose would have died had it been a hydroelectric dam of similar capacity? (hint: a lot more than six) 2) Just how safe does something have to be?
- mizchief2 10y ago
  We can stop building nuke plants on fault lines right on the coast without abandoning nuclear energy.
tonyedgecombe 10y ago
In other words nuclear never killed anybody apart from the ones it killed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll#Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
- blowski 10y ago
  I'm no expert on Chernobyl or power generation. But I think Chernobyl was the result of under-investment and poor management, whereas many of the deaths from coal are an unavoidable consequence of burning coal. Hence, you can say nuclear is safer as long as it's managed well.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    Where is it managed well?
    - blowski 10y ago
      I have no idea. I don't even know if it is practically possible to manage well enough to guarantee zero disasters. But there are many nuclear plants around the world that have operated with no problems. As I said, I'm no expert.
      - LoSboccacc 10y ago
        new design exist that in case of disaster self contains under most conditions, trouble is it's very hard to obtain certifications needed for operation today as opposed to decades ago, so we're mostly stuck with old designs.
    - ekianjo 10y ago
      by design already. all recent reactors have containment tanks to prevent radioactive leakage in a meltdown event.
    - cjrp 10y ago
      The UK seems pretty good at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Kingdom#Accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Ki...
legulere 10y ago
> (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) Wikipedia seems to give 4000 as an estimate on those exposed to the highest levels of radiation alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Cancer_projections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Cancer_proj... On the other hand coal, wind and solar never poisoned our food (wild boars in Germany thousands of km away still often are too radioactive to be eaten ). Coal, wind and solar never led to emergency evacuations. Coal, wind and solar cannot be used to make atomic bombs.
- wbl 10y ago
  Really? Have you already forgotten about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly... If coal plants had the same radiation rules as nuclear plants, they couldn't run.
  - kogepathic 10y ago
    > If coal plants had the same radiation rules as nuclear plants, they couldn't run. I think you mean if nuclear plants had the same radiation output as coal plants, they would be required to shut down. Edit: thanks for the downvotes, I realise now that I'm basically stating the same thing as OP. Quite the double standard that coal plants are allowed to spew so much radiation when all other forms of power generation are held to a higher standard.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
      What @wbl wrote also makes sense. Nuclear power has a closed fuel cycle: what goes in comes out and is stored. There's no way we could hope to capture all the radioactive particles from a coal plant exhaust, not in the foreseeable future with any reasonable efficiency.
      - kogepathic 10y ago
Tomte 10y ago
We still don't know how to handle spent fuel. So nuclear apologists are simply offering a calculation, where the biggest risk/liability has been left out, because "what number should we put in?". Also, I'm always fascinated of the "Chernobyl was unsafe, today reactors are safe" argument. The exact same line was fed to us when Chernobyl was state of the art. There are good reasons to think that it may indeed be so this time. But the nuclear industry has lost all trust and all right to demand anyone ever trusted them again.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  > Chernobyl argument Consider airliners. Airliners have been around for 80 years, and get substantially safer every decade. This is a statistical fact. Every crash is used as a learning experience and designs, procedures, and training is adjusted as a result. There's no reason to believe that such does not apply to nuclear power stations.
  - mpweiher 10y ago
    One of the biggest problems with nuclear is that we aren't building new plants.
    - douche 10y ago
      Outside of submarines and aircraft carriers, that is. We seem to have those pretty figured out. You'd think that nuclear propulsion would be a natural choice for the biggest of the enormous cargo container ships that are currently burning millions of gallons of dirty, dirty bunker fuel instead.
- mpweiher 10y ago
  > We still don't know how to handle spent fuel. Actually we do, technically, and the amount is trivial (and can be reused, though that isn't currently being done). Spent fuel is a political problem. In fact, last time I checked even just the radiation from coal power plants is greater than from nuclear plants. > The exact same line was fed to us when Chernobyl was state of the art Chernobyl was never state of the art and western reactors, which are much safer, are also of a design derived from military designs, not optimized for safety. Also, the negative health effects of coal and other energy sources are so much worse than even Chernobyl that it isn't funny.
kostyash 10y ago
How sweet, the study that guardian refers returns 404: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/silentkillers/ http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/silentkillers/
- The_Double 10y ago
  Working link: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/Campaign-reports/Climate-Reports/Silent-Killers/ http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/Camp...
  - Neliquat 10y ago
    Maybe avoid taking facts from a terrorist org.
bhgraham 10y ago
Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr) Coal – global average 100,000 (41% global electricity) Coal – China 170,000 (75% China’s electricity) Coal – U.S. 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity) Oil 36,000 (33% of energy, 8% of electricity) Natural Gas 4,000 (22% global electricity) Biofuel/Biomass 24,000 (21% global energy) Solar (rooftop) 440 (< 1% global electricity) Wind 150 (2% global electricity) Hydro – global average 1,400 (16% global electricity) Hydro – U.S. 5 (6% U.S. electricity) Nuclear – global average 90 (11% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush) Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity) https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#22fff54d709b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
- wapz 10y ago
  How is the mortality rate of wind and hydro calculated? Is it from engineers being killed during maintenance/construction? It feels like those two would have a mortality rate or something similar to "a house."
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    Hydro means dams and dams can cause a number of accidents if they are not properly maintained.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      Specifically, hydro was the cause of the worst single power generation accident of all time: 171,000 dead when the Banqiao dam failed. Before anyone assumes that will never happen again: There are fears over multiple large dams, including Mosul, where a failure worst case could kill a million. If we're lucky Banqiao will be a one-off, but large dams are massive risk factors because they need ongoing maintanenance forever, and are often upstream of some of the densest populated areas. On top of that they're also ecological disasters.
opo 10y ago
>...To be clear: nuclear is not the perfect solution, is not a renewable energy, and will have to be replaced by something else in the future. While we may want to replace nuclear with a different power source in the future, there is enough uranium and thorium to last hundreds of thousands (or more likely millions) of years.

basicplus2 10y ago

Electrostatic precipitators fix the particulate problem very effectivly

ageofwant 10y ago
I worked at a massive coal plant years back as a student. Once spent a afternoon crawling through a ESP during maintenance. The dust made my hair feel like sand, weird gritty sticky eyeballs. Now this was before health and safety became fashionable. I recall tales of the poor bastard that they forgot about when they tested the plate voltage. The test failed: 64kv was 40kv for some reason, and kept arching, they were still tracing the issue when his wife phoned to ask where John was, he was a few hours late picking up his kid at kindergarten...

legulere 10y ago

A very weird way to study the outcome of coal air pollution. It seems like this is not really about air pollution but trying to push nuclear energy. Luckily shutting down nuclear plants does not necessarily mean turning on coal power (e.g. in Germany they were replaced by renewables). Some questions arise though: Which coal power air pollutant is to blame for the birth weight decrease. Which coal pollution mitigation techniques[1] (which are probably now more common) were used by the coal plants? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_pollution_mitigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_pollution_mitigation

lemming 10y ago
in Germany they were replaced by renewables Do you have a reference for this? Germany has a very aggressive (and highly commendable) plan to move to renewables, but my understanding was that the closing of nuclear plants post-Fukushima was covered by coal. Wikipedia seems to agree (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany): At the same time, Germany continues to rely heavily on coal power, with usage increasing to offset the phase-out of nuclear energy.
- Maakuth 10y ago
  They really are adding renewable production at quite an aggressive pace: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... Myself I'd prefer they would use that extra production to phase out coal first before shutting down their NPPs.
- legulere 10y ago
  This graphic shows it pretty well in my opinion: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Energiemix_Deutschland.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Energiem... Purple is nuclear energy. Dark green is biomass, light blue is wind power, yellow is solar power
  - Maakuth 10y ago

terminado 10y ago

...the difference in birth weights between the two time periods is roughly the difference in birth weights between a baby born to a mother with a disadvantaged background who received supplemental nutrition during pregnancy and a baby born to a similar mother who didn't get that help. I think a map correlating power plant pollution plume estimates with the reporting hospitals or physicians that provided infant data, and their areas served would be helpful in representing the relationship between these two events. Here seems to be an older version of the source, with power plant maps: http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/environ_2015/severnini_e8895.pdf http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/environ_2015/seve... Paywalled version: http://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy201751 http://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy201751 Infant vital statistics are drawn from county-level sources.

johan_larson 10y ago
I suspect the drop in infant birth weights is caused by the economic disruption of closing a major local employer, rather than by the increased pollution from the coal-fired power plants.

mirimir 10y ago

TVA nuclear vs TVA coal wasn't a binary choice. TVA coal was likely the least-expensive offset, but TVA could have purchased hydro or gas-turbine power. Also, I suspect that the coal plants used were among the oldest and most-polluting.

lyschoening 10y ago

This is research from the 1980s. It is undoubtedly correct, but it does not not apply to today. Today, renewables are competing favorably against coal and nuclear power on price, and they are improving rapidly still. It takes easily 15 years to plan and build a nuclear power plant, while a solar plant can be planned and built in months. The issue of what happens when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine can be addressed through larger HVDC grids with a good energy mix and through storage technology, which is also improving rapidly. Meanwhile, nuclear has its own issues with the elements nowadays. Nuclear relies on huge amounts of freshwater. I've heard of nuclear plants that need to shut down in the summers now because of drought. It will become harder and harder to find locations where they can be built. Finally, new fossil fuel plants built today are mostly gas, not coal. Gas also has its problems, but it has been a reasonable transition technology that is also losing ground now as energy storage technology is improving.

WalterBright 10y ago
The sun not shining at night can also be addressed with variable pricing. Electricity usage is elastic, and a lot of consumption patterns can be time-shifted. The idea that electricity should have a fixed rate 24/7 is obsolete.
awjr 10y ago
Is the sun not shining just a transmission problem? Have we been able to create ultra high voltage long range DC transmission systems?
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  electricity transmission powers aren't that trivial, even discounting the large saltwater ocean you'd have to cross to power the other side of the world (and the security implications for that infrastructure) it's more of a storage problem. you can get quite efficient batteries using pressure/gravity chambers, but not all places are apt to host them.
- adrianN 10y ago
  Actually we have been able to create high voltage transmission lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects

ASlave2Gravity 10y ago

An aside from the article: What are the best ways to get access to journals? Is there some sort of subscription program like Spotify / Netflix but for journals?

istjohn 10y ago
Free: http://libgen.io http://libgen.io

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

An irony I've noticed recently is fans of nuclear saying: "Coal is killing people, if you say anything bad about Nuclear then you are killing people" and then turning round and attacking other, non-coal alternatives like wind, solar or even natural gas. Initially I assumed these were actually coal supporters doing some devious concern trolling to delay the roll out of alternatives that are viable in the short term but I've come to accept that it's just another weird nerd-war like Emacs Vs Vi, except with deadlier real life consequences.

AstralStorm 10y ago
While wind and solar are great and we need more, there is not enough of it unless major international cooperation for building huge plants in good locations is involved. (0) https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/
opo 10y ago
The world will need base load power for a long time. Yes, there is a lot of research into grid storage, but except for pumped hydro we are a long way away from that being a major component of the power system. (For example, Gates is investing in startups that are working on innovative nuclear plant designs and startups that are working on storage - maybe they all succeed, maybe none of them will.) NASA has estimated that using nuclear power has saved an estimated 1.8 million lives that would have been lost if the power has been replaced by fossil fuels: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-harmful-than-nuclear-power https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-... We are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time. When you compare nuclear, coal and natural gas, one of these three ways of generating electricity has much fewer health consequences than the others. Lives depend on having reliable, affordable electricity and as we transition the vehicle fleet to electric, we will need more electricity, not less.
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  That paper basically says "coal is bad" but again, kind of throws natural gas under the bus in a sneaky way. "almost certainly would have been supplied by fossil fuels instead (overwhelmingly coal)" So they've established, coal is really bad. That would be a really powerful argument for nuclear if people didn't already know that. How about running the numbers for nuclear plus as much natural gas as necessary to follow load, vs renewables plus natural gas? That seems like the real question. (Numbers here being cost, time, C02, health impacts, deaths etc. because deaths are acceptable if we could have saved enough money to save many more lives elsewhere).

mcone 10y ago

You don't need to convince me of the dangers of coal pollution. I grew up in Farmington, New Mexico with two massive coal-fired power plants right outside of town. But this article ignores the consequences, and apparently the very existence, of nuclear waste. This is a problem we'll be dealing with for tens of thousands of years. It's unlikely that today's pollution from coal-fired power plants will endanger the lives of people thousands of years from now, but you can bet your bacon that the pollution from nuclear power plants will.

Neliquat 10y ago
So where does coal pollution go in your mind that renders it inert and nonradioactive? Please re read your statement and look how dumb it is.

novalis78 10y ago

Can't wait for the results of Thorcon Power's first plant in Indonesia [1]. Too bad that they could not get past the regulatory innovation kill that's preventing the US from taking a lead on next generation nuclear power plants. [1]http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/first-walk-away-safe-molten-salt.html http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/first-walk-away-safe-mo...

mizchief2 10y ago

If you are serious about reducing C02 then you are serious about using nuclear power.