5 ms·
> coal kills a lot more people than nuclear. There's so many problems with this statement I barely know where to begin. 1. Are we talking total or per kWH of
by cletus 7y ago
> coal kills a lot more people than nuclear.
There's so many problems with this statement I barely know where to begin.
1. Are we talking total or per kWH of generated power?
2. "Deaths" is a questionable measure. One should look at the environmental impact of digging up, processing (enriching in the case of nuclear), transporting and the storage of byproducts from processing (eg UrF6) as well as spent fuel.
3. Here's the important one: you need to look at failure modes. Coal plants pollute but they also do it very slowly and no coal plant has ever blown up to the point where it's made 1000 square miles of land uninhabitable for decades (to compare, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is 1000 square miles).
4. Coal vs nuclear is a straw man argument. Coal is terrible. Everyone knows this. Coal is becoming the power source for the developing world as it is naturally dying in the developed world, being replaced by renewables and fossil fuels that while not great, are at least better than coal (eg natural gas).
5. How many of the externalities of nuclear power aren't factored into the price? Like the cost of storage and clean ups. These seem to be borne by governments not the companies profiting from the power (of course, some nuclear power in some countries is state-owned and run; depending on the country I'm not sure if this is better or worse).
Personally I find the apologism on HN about nuclear to be disingenuous, exhausting and naive.
- empath75 7y agoIf every current nuclear reactor melted down, how much of earth would be uninhabitable?
- kbutler 7y ago1. per kWH. Nuclear is very, very safe. Global avg 90 deaths per trillion kwh, vs coal 100,000 deaths per trillion kwh. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#31d9a269709b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d... If you really want to be surprised, nuclear is even safer than solar https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull21-1/21104091117.pdf https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi... (Note that residential rooftop solar is crazy risky as well as inefficient - all those installers up on random roofs...) 2. Coal requires lots more fuel so lots more digging up and transportation, spent fuel is dissipated via atmosphere, as well as solid ash. 3. Concentrated harm vs dispersed harm. still coal. Note that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is great for wildlife - it is basically an environmental preserve, since humans (the largest impact on wildlife & environment) are largely excluded. 4. Focus on "nuclear vs CO2". If you're serious about global warming, nuclear is the only viable technology. 5. Storage and cleanups - there's a lot more for coal than you think. Coal byproducts are one of the largest industrial waste streams. https://www.epa.gov/coalash/frequent-questions-about-2015-coal-ash-disposal-rule https://www.epa.gov/coalash/frequent-questions-about-2015-co... Nuclear vs coal is like airplane crashes vs car crashes. Airplane accidents make the news because they are unusual and affect many people in a single incident, even though car crashes kill (and injure) far more people every year (per mile traveled). The fact that you know the names Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island (probably?) should help you realize how SAFE nuclear is - the exceptions become scare stories for decades.
- buboard 7y ago> per kWH. Nuclear is very, very safe Then again, per land area wasted , nuclear is 23 Km2 per year vs ... something tiny? Plus the comparison with coal only is unfair. > 4. Focus on "nuclear vs CO2". If you're serious about global warming, nuclear is the only viable technology. Here the question is how to remove excess CO2 without destroying the rest of the planet.
- rwmj 7y agoA lot of coal is strip-mined, which damages large amounts of land.
- buboard 7y agoIt's not permanent though, the land is reclaimed after mining
- evan_ 7y agoOh they rebuild those mountains?
- ryanmercer 7y agoAnd let us not forget about towns like Centralia which had to be abandoned (by nearly all residents) due to an underground coal fire that has now been burning for 57 years. https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years-ghost-town https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
- derefr 7y agoThat had nothing to do with coal mining, per se, though. The spark was set off in a hole in the ground made by previous mining, yes, but it was an entirely-untapped coal vein that caught fire, and basically anything could have caught it on fire if it was ever exposed to surface air. (A meteorite impact, or earthquake fissure, or sinkhole collapse, could have made a similar crater and exposed the coal vein, for example.) Centralia is more of a weird natural disaster. It's essentially a slow-motion, underground forest fire. And, like most forest fires, while usually a human with a match is the proximal cause, if the human wasn't there, nature would still have supplied a spark eventually.
- maxerickson 7y agoWhy do you think it is disingenuous?
- cletus 7y agoBecause this pro-nuclear punditry tends to involve a comparison to the worst of fossil fuels (and a fuel source that's in decline, at least in the developed world) and tends to present this as a binary choice.
- maxerickson 7y agoThat's fair. In the shorter term, I think it's true enough. Germany and Japan (both wealthy, highly developed nations) have both increased consumption of coal in order to move away from nuclear. I won't argue that's what they will do in the longer term though.
- svara 7y agoThat's not true for Germany, see my comment above. Germany has nearly completely replaced nuclear with renewables, and is now (slowly) phasing out coal. Coal has been mostly constant with a slight downward trend in the past 15 years.
- Gravey 7y agoI think you’ve made some valid points in your previous post, but I’m not sure I buy this as a valid argument. A quick google search tells me that 30.1% of US energy generation comes from coal [1] (at least in 2017), with 62.7% coming from fossil fuels overall. Unless you’re proposing switching to a ‘cleaner’ fossil fuel source, there’s only so much wind/solar/geothermal can contribute until we see major leaps in the available technologies. Until that time I will continue to view them as a supplemental power source, rather than a primary one. [1]https://toxmap.nlm.nih.gov/toxmap/faq/2009/08/how-much-of-the-us-electricity-generation-is-attributed-to-coal.html https://toxmap.nlm.nih.gov/toxmap/faq/2009/08/how-much-of-th...
- 7y ago
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago> 3. Here's the important one: you need to look at failure modes. Coal plants pollute but they also do it very slowly and no coal plant has ever blown up to the point where it's made 1000 square miles of land uninhabitable for decades (to compare, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is 1000 square miles). I'm afraid I can't find the article right now, so I don't have the exact statistics, but I have read that a large coal plant operating normally for 20 years releases more radioactive particles into the atmosphere than Chernobyl did. (There's a lot of trace radioactives in coal.) Nuclear plants that melted down catastrophically every 20 years, like clockwork, might still be safer than coal plants operating perfectly.
- Xylakant 7y agoWhat’s a radioactive particle? How does does that article account for the difference between plutonium, uranium, cesium, iodine and their substantial differences when it comes to their effect on the (human/animal) population. I’ll call any comparison on pure particle count bullshit. There’s no question that coal is a stupid way of generating electricity, but that doesn’t make the dangers of nuclear go away.
- derefr 7y ago> Failure modes Making 1000 square miles of land uninhabitable for decades doesn't kill people, though. (It doesn't even harm the land, in the long term; it's sort of a good thing, decades later, like letting farmland lay fallow.) With modern technology, as was employed at Fukushima, everyone was safely evacuated from the region and literally nobody died from radiation poisoning. Coal plants pollute globally very slowly. Coal plants pollute locally very quickly, and are capable under the right conditions of disasters just as bad as radiation fallout from our bad old nuclear plants. Have you heard of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London ? Killed 4000, poisoned 100,000 more. And that was just a regular day of the life of London's coal plants, combined with some bad weather. So the coal plants were just fine, and kept on going after that. Meaning that there were other days like that, both before and after (if not quite as bad.) It's like a nuclear power plant that can "melt down" at random, without harming itself, enabling it to keep "melting down" over and over! > Coal vs nuclear is a straw man argument. No; it's the real decision that developing countries (and rural areas of developed countries) are making every day: keep building coal plants, or replace some of them with nuclear plants? Nuclear is a viable consideration for these places in that it is a drop-in replacement for a coal plant that doesn't require any additional infrastructure to connect the plant to the mine+refinery: before, you were shipping rocks on a road to a plant; now you're still shipping rocks (well, pressed rock powder) on a road to a plant. You can even reuse the mining equipment you had from the coal mining! And, often, you have a head-start on the work, as (quoting Wikipedia): "Lignite deposits (soft brown coal) can contain significant uranium mineralization." Your coal mines have probably already excavated some, and now just have it laying around feeding no domestic industry! Meanwhile, oil or LNG requires building pipelines, different extraction equipment, etc. And affordable solar or wind—which inevitably means domestically produced solar or wind equipment—requires a whole electronics and materials industry, and is only workable in some countries to begin with. (The real third contender for these countries is hydro power. Doesn't require shipping anything to the plant! Much bigger civil engineering project, though, and each one is a one-off design that has its own devastating failure modes, which makes them possibly more scary to government buyers than nuclear power, where at least you can buy a cookie-cutter copy of a successful plant.) > depending on the country I'm not sure if [state-owned plants are] better or worse Usually far better, in that ultimately most externalities come back to bite a government (in the form of e.g. decreased GDP, and thus less taxable income), so they have far more of an incentive to clean up their act than an individual corporation does.
- throwaway5752 7y agoLet's also keep in mind we have yet to amortize 10,000 years of waste storage that we haven't figured out yet. Highly radioactive waste is literally sitting around in barrels and pools. I wonder what happens if a pandemic or some other disaster happens, and a spent fuel pool is unable to be cooled or refilled? Would that criticality event hit the water table? If it did, how would it disperse in the water table? How much of a given aquifer could a single plant render unpotable?
- likeliv 7y agoI don't know if nuclear waste is actually worse than the waste from a chemical factory. Any industry has its risks for the environment.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]