5 ms·

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 shu

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
    Pretty remarkable growth in PV! I do remember that Germany already had quite a bit of wind generators in the early 2000s, yet they seemed to have generated around the same amount of energy as the PV capacity of today. And that's been mostly build during this decade. What's missing from this graph, however, are imports. I believe Germany imports quite a bit of nuclear power from France and coal power from Poland.
    - hannob 10y ago
      > I believe Germany imports quite a bit of nuclear power from France and coal power from Poland. No, that is totally wrong. While in an open net and marked there are always small exports and imports going on, overall Germany is an electricity exporter and imports are very small overall and not very relevant.
      - davrosthedalek 10y ago
        There is another form of import which is much harder to judge. Germany imports a lot of stuff from e.g. China, so in some sense the energy production should offset what energy is used in other countries for the imported stuff.
        hannob 10y ago
        That is true, but it's true for all countries. And it's a major failure of practically all existing climate and environmental regulations that they don't take this into account.
      - Maakuth 10y ago
        That might be true for net flows, but it seems that German production does not meet demand at nights very often, as per these statistics: https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm . I do think that situation will get worse with increased PV installations, as they don't produce during nights. Grid storage is going to be needed. Of course it's an open market and the German expensive production such as gas turbines will not produce if cheaper power can be imported.
- hannob 10y ago
  > but my understanding was that the closing of nuclear plants post-Fukushima was covered by coal. There was a minor uptick in coal usage for a few years, however even that wasn't necessary, but due to bad policy (gas plants were standing still at the same time). By now coal usage is going down again. There were a couple of new constructions of coal plants, but all of them were started before the nuclear phaseout. And by now most of their operators recognize that their investments were failures and will probably never pay out. It isn't all ideal in Germany, but overall it's going into the right direction (and the success of solar in many countries these days wouldn't have been possible without the early investments in Germany that brought the prices down).
  - vidarh 10y ago
    And without the decommissioning, vast amounts of money spent on the decommissioning could have been spent on renewables to replace coal instead, and far less coal would have still been necessary in order to compensate for the decommissioned capacity. It also meant less capacity available for export to countries whose fallback is fossil fuels from elsewhere. The German decommissioning alone is likely to have been a far greater public health disaster than all nuclear incidents in human history combined many times over.
xroche 10y ago
> Germany they were replaced by renewables This is unfortunately inaccurate (http://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/report-germany-suffers-more-coal-linked-deaths-than-rest-of-eu/ http://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/report...), and Germany is one of the country where coal is the deadliest in Europe, thanks to anti-nuclear campaign from the green party.
- legulere 10y ago
  The only point where the article brings coal into connection with the nuclear power shutdown is wrong: > Germany buys cheap coal-fired energy from Poland to pick up the slack left by the abandonment of nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster. Germany is a net electricity exporter. > Germany is one of the country where coal is the deadliest in Europe PM pollution is lower than average in the EU for one: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/graph.do?tab=graph&plugin=1&pcode=tsdph370&language=en&toolbox=data http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/graph.do?tab=graph&plugin=1...
  - throwanem 10y ago
    It's quite possible to import energy and still be a net exporter. As far as I can tell, Germany does both, although I would like to see a source for the grandparent comment's claim.
- mtgx 10y ago
  I think there was a post on HN about a year ago saying that Germany has a weird law or policy that says it can only produce renewable power for internal use, and for export it uses coal. I think this is only a political issue, because no one wants to tackle it when elections are this year. Otherwise, the phasing-out of coal in Europe is looking pretty good, I'd say - they're looking to close the most polluting plants in Europe by 2031: http://climateanalytics.org/files/coalphaseouteu-regulator.gif http://climateanalytics.org/files/coalphaseouteu-regulator.g...
Taniwha 10y ago
Yes they could equally say increased use of solar results in increased birth weights. Really the take away here is simply "coal is bad" - there's correlation between coal plants and lowered birth weights. Anything that supplants coal (nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, tidal, etc) will result in increased birth weights. Replacing them with coal will result in lowered birth weights. It's a bit weird their pushing nuclear this way right now, didn't Westinghouse just go belly up?
- ju-st 10y ago
  This is a recurrent topic on HN. Somebody posts an article about "coal is bad". Then somebody mentions that nuclear is safer/better than coal. A third person then claims Germany is evil because they are replacing nuclear with coal. The next person shows evidence that this is not the case. Then a discussion about energy imports & exports of Germany starts. Literally every fucking topic about renewables/nuclear/coal ends up with the same content.
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  Similar to the "EVs use coal powered electricity, therefore EVs are bad" argument. A weird distraction from the fundamental "Coal is bad, pretty much everything is better than coal, let's use much less coal" argument that you'd think everyone (but Trump) could agree on together.

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
  Pretty remarkable growth in PV! I do remember that Germany already had quite a bit of wind generators in the early 2000s, yet they seemed to have generated around the same amount of energy as the PV capacity of today. And that's been mostly build during this decade. What's missing from this graph, however, are imports. I believe Germany imports quite a bit of nuclear power from France and coal power from Poland.
  - hannob 10y ago
    > I believe Germany imports quite a bit of nuclear power from France and coal power from Poland. No, that is totally wrong. While in an open net and marked there are always small exports and imports going on, overall Germany is an electricity exporter and imports are very small overall and not very relevant.
    - davrosthedalek 10y ago
      There is another form of import which is much harder to judge. Germany imports a lot of stuff from e.g. China, so in some sense the energy production should offset what energy is used in other countries for the imported stuff.
      - hannob 10y ago
        That is true, but it's true for all countries. And it's a major failure of practically all existing climate and environmental regulations that they don't take this into account.
    - Maakuth 10y ago
      That might be true for net flows, but it seems that German production does not meet demand at nights very often, as per these statistics: https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm . I do think that situation will get worse with increased PV installations, as they don't produce during nights. Grid storage is going to be needed. Of course it's an open market and the German expensive production such as gas turbines will not produce if cheaper power can be imported.
hannob 10y ago
> but my understanding was that the closing of nuclear plants post-Fukushima was covered by coal. There was a minor uptick in coal usage for a few years, however even that wasn't necessary, but due to bad policy (gas plants were standing still at the same time). By now coal usage is going down again. There were a couple of new constructions of coal plants, but all of them were started before the nuclear phaseout. And by now most of their operators recognize that their investments were failures and will probably never pay out. It isn't all ideal in Germany, but overall it's going into the right direction (and the success of solar in many countries these days wouldn't have been possible without the early investments in Germany that brought the prices down).
- vidarh 10y ago
  And without the decommissioning, vast amounts of money spent on the decommissioning could have been spent on renewables to replace coal instead, and far less coal would have still been necessary in order to compensate for the decommissioned capacity. It also meant less capacity available for export to countries whose fallback is fossil fuels from elsewhere. The German decommissioning alone is likely to have been a far greater public health disaster than all nuclear incidents in human history combined many times over.

xroche 10y ago

> Germany they were replaced by renewables This is unfortunately inaccurate (http://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/report-germany-suffers-more-coal-linked-deaths-than-rest-of-eu/ http://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/report...), and Germany is one of the country where coal is the deadliest in Europe, thanks to anti-nuclear campaign from the green party.

legulere 10y ago
The only point where the article brings coal into connection with the nuclear power shutdown is wrong: > Germany buys cheap coal-fired energy from Poland to pick up the slack left by the abandonment of nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster. Germany is a net electricity exporter. > Germany is one of the country where coal is the deadliest in Europe PM pollution is lower than average in the EU for one: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/graph.do?tab=graph&plugin=1&pcode=tsdph370&language=en&toolbox=data http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/graph.do?tab=graph&plugin=1...
- throwanem 10y ago
  It's quite possible to import energy and still be a net exporter. As far as I can tell, Germany does both, although I would like to see a source for the grandparent comment's claim.
mtgx 10y ago
I think there was a post on HN about a year ago saying that Germany has a weird law or policy that says it can only produce renewable power for internal use, and for export it uses coal. I think this is only a political issue, because no one wants to tackle it when elections are this year. Otherwise, the phasing-out of coal in Europe is looking pretty good, I'd say - they're looking to close the most polluting plants in Europe by 2031: http://climateanalytics.org/files/coalphaseouteu-regulator.gif http://climateanalytics.org/files/coalphaseouteu-regulator.g...

Taniwha 10y ago

Yes they could equally say increased use of solar results in increased birth weights. Really the take away here is simply "coal is bad" - there's correlation between coal plants and lowered birth weights. Anything that supplants coal (nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, tidal, etc) will result in increased birth weights. Replacing them with coal will result in lowered birth weights. It's a bit weird their pushing nuclear this way right now, didn't Westinghouse just go belly up?

ju-st 10y ago
This is a recurrent topic on HN. Somebody posts an article about "coal is bad". Then somebody mentions that nuclear is safer/better than coal. A third person then claims Germany is evil because they are replacing nuclear with coal. The next person shows evidence that this is not the case. Then a discussion about energy imports & exports of Germany starts. Literally every fucking topic about renewables/nuclear/coal ends up with the same content.
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
Similar to the "EVs use coal powered electricity, therefore EVs are bad" argument. A weird distraction from the fundamental "Coal is bad, pretty much everything is better than coal, let's use much less coal" argument that you'd think everyone (but Trump) could agree on together.