3 ms·

> 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 i

> 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 ago
A lot of coal is strip-mined, which damages large amounts of land.
- buboard 7y ago
  It's not permanent though, the land is reclaimed after mining
  - evan_ 7y ago
    Oh they rebuild those mountains?
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  And 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 ago
    That 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.
    - saalweachter 7y ago
      Coal seam fires aren't particularly rare, and while they can occur "naturally", almost all of the thousand or so burning around the world at any given time (some for months, some for centuries) are explicitly linked to mining. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire
      - derefr 7y ago
        Sure, all the ones we know about today. It's a bit of an anthropic argument, though. We only know about the coal seams that have survived long enough for us to find them; and, almost universally, we've chosen to exploit the seams we've found. That leaves two questions unanswered: • What would the statistical yearly probability of a coal-seam fire be for seams we find, check up on, but never mine? (We know of a few seams in protected areas, but I don't think we know of enough to have any statistical power. Also, the natural catching-fire rate might be, say, one per thousand years, which would be a bit like the pitch-drop experiment in its requirements, yet would still mean that coal seams catch fire pretty much "as soon as" they reach the surface, in geological time.) • More interestingly: how many coal-seam fires have happened historically in the Earth's 4.2 billion years being around, that finished and burned out all the coal, and now there's just a cave there? Or ex-cave sedimentary layer, given that these caves tend to collapse? Can we tell when such a cave/layer was previously a coal seam? (I assume so, because soot, but can pressure-treated soot be differentiated from other kinds of naturally-occurring mineral striae?)
- XaspR8d 7y ago
  Hell, a lot of coal in Appalachia is extracted with mountaintop removal. They literally plow the tops of mountains into adjacent valleys.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
> Here the question is how to remove excess CO2 without destroying the rest of the planet. Nature already scrubs CO2 and actually thrives on the elevated amounts; reducing production means nature will have a chance to catch up. That is, assuming we've not already reached a catastrophic tipping point where e.g. algae (responsible for most CO2 sequestration) die from the heat and the CO2 sequestered in permafrost is released.
kbutler 7y ago
Coal and nuclear (and natural gas) are about the same land use area footprint (https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf graph on last page). Solar (3x), wind (5x), hydro (25x) are much higher land use. Note that resource extraction use is considered temporary (and in the US, companies are required to pay for restoration, per the link above). Wind uses a large area, but agricultural use can proceed at the same time. We currently have no viable CO2 removal technology. Nuclear power has no chance of destroying the planet (or even the biosphere).

rwmj 7y ago

A lot of coal is strip-mined, which damages large amounts of land.

buboard 7y ago
It's not permanent though, the land is reclaimed after mining
- evan_ 7y ago
  Oh they rebuild those mountains?
ryanmercer 7y ago
And 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 ago
  That 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.
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    Coal seam fires aren't particularly rare, and while they can occur "naturally", almost all of the thousand or so burning around the world at any given time (some for months, some for centuries) are explicitly linked to mining. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire
    - derefr 7y ago
      Sure, all the ones we know about today. It's a bit of an anthropic argument, though. We only know about the coal seams that have survived long enough for us to find them; and, almost universally, we've chosen to exploit the seams we've found. That leaves two questions unanswered: • What would the statistical yearly probability of a coal-seam fire be for seams we find, check up on, but never mine? (We know of a few seams in protected areas, but I don't think we know of enough to have any statistical power. Also, the natural catching-fire rate might be, say, one per thousand years, which would be a bit like the pitch-drop experiment in its requirements, yet would still mean that coal seams catch fire pretty much "as soon as" they reach the surface, in geological time.) • More interestingly: how many coal-seam fires have happened historically in the Earth's 4.2 billion years being around, that finished and burned out all the coal, and now there's just a cave there? Or ex-cave sedimentary layer, given that these caves tend to collapse? Can we tell when such a cave/layer was previously a coal seam? (I assume so, because soot, but can pressure-treated soot be differentiated from other kinds of naturally-occurring mineral striae?)
XaspR8d 7y ago
Hell, a lot of coal in Appalachia is extracted with mountaintop removal. They literally plow the tops of mountains into adjacent valleys.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago

> Here the question is how to remove excess CO2 without destroying the rest of the planet. Nature already scrubs CO2 and actually thrives on the elevated amounts; reducing production means nature will have a chance to catch up. That is, assuming we've not already reached a catastrophic tipping point where e.g. algae (responsible for most CO2 sequestration) die from the heat and the CO2 sequestered in permafrost is released.

kbutler 7y ago

Coal and nuclear (and natural gas) are about the same land use area footprint (https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf graph on last page). Solar (3x), wind (5x), hydro (25x) are much higher land use. Note that resource extraction use is considered temporary (and in the US, companies are required to pay for restoration, per the link above). Wind uses a large area, but agricultural use can proceed at the same time. We currently have no viable CO2 removal technology. Nuclear power has no chance of destroying the planet (or even the biosphere).