4 ms·

The triumph of coal marketing

4 points by gm 16y ago

bluekeybox 16y ago
I consider myself a proponent of safe nuclear power, but this chart is borderline offensive with how it deals with the Chernobyl disaster: "there have been 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children, but that except for nine deaths, all of them have recovered." Yes, let's ignore birth defects, any long-term increased risk, hugely increased cancer prevalence, and the fact that some 2500-3000 square kilometers of land will be unavailable for any serious development for like a thousand of years. Out of the three people I knew who were relocated from the exclusion zone, one died from cancer nine years after the event, at 40 years of age. While this is anecdotal evidence on my part, most of the reports I have heard were similar.
- dalke 16y ago
  Generating these comparisons is hard, and talk of deaths on a small scale seems more offensive than talking about the many more, but more scattered people who die from air pollution and even radioactive consequences of burning coal. For example, some 5,700 square kilometers of land have been changed because of mountain removal mining, with "serious environmental impacts that mitigation practices cannot successfully address" says an article in _Science_ magazine. Wastes from coal production poison some waterways. How does one weigh, say, the present day cancers of the Navajo who worked as uranium miners in the 1950s against the more immediate diseases and disasters of the coal mine industries? I was told that 1/2 of the particulate matter in the air above Hawaii comes from volcanoes, and the rest come from coal burning in Asia. At that sort of global scale and with such loose coupling between cause and effect, it becomes hard to assign meaningful direct numbers.
  - bluekeybox 16y ago
    I agree with your assessment, and I do consider coal to be more environmentally damaging than nuclear, which is why I am a proponent of nuclear power as I mentioned. However I do not like articles that make artificially low estimates of the impact of Chernobyl in particular just because long-term impact is "hard" to measure. If it is hard to measure, doesn't mean you shouldn't take it into account -- give a rough estimate, say 50-5,000 people or 50-10,000 people, but then of course a rough estimate makes it harder to produce a nice chart to ogle at. Instead what you see is articles using the lowest bound straight as reported by the Soviet headquarters, which is just ridiculous. Now measuring cancer risk, even a long term one, while painstaking, is not exactly rocket science. There are multiple large-scale medical studies that do just that very effectively, it's just they tended not to focus on Chernobyl area for whatever reason, most likely due to funding.
    - dalke 16y ago
      I think the author brought that up to to the likely mentions of Chernobyl. I don't like his numbers though, for reasons similar to yours. The numbers are WHO numbers, and not from Soviet HQ, but the predictions by other groups are all over the map. The WHO one was before there could be solid population measurements, and I don't see evidence of newer data from anyone. One difficulty with the projection is that the author assumes that 4000 is the only number to consider regarding deaths with nuclear power. For roof installation he includes roofing accidents, but it does not include the (rather few) people who have died in industrial accidents with nuclear reactors. These are much fewer than 4,000 but he omits deaths due to mining accidents related to uranium extraction (only saying that it's less than coal) and neither does he use estimates for the deaths corresponding to steel and concrete production, like he does for wind power. To be fair, elsewhere his pages go into the differences in the amount of materials needed for each one, and I think the differences I pointed out above are small corrections to the gross numbers given.

4 points by gm 16y ago

I consider myself a proponent of safe nuclear power, but this chart is borderline offensive with how it deals with the Chernobyl disaster: "there have been 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children, but that except for nine deaths, all of them have recovered." Yes, let's ignore birth defects, any long-term increased risk, hugely increased cancer prevalence, and the fact that some 2500-3000 square kilometers of land will be unavailable for any serious development for like a thousand of years. Out of the three people I knew who were relocated from the exclusion zone, one died from cancer nine years after the event, at 40 years of age. While this is anecdotal evidence on my part, most of the reports I have heard were similar.

dalke 16y ago
Generating these comparisons is hard, and talk of deaths on a small scale seems more offensive than talking about the many more, but more scattered people who die from air pollution and even radioactive consequences of burning coal. For example, some 5,700 square kilometers of land have been changed because of mountain removal mining, with "serious environmental impacts that mitigation practices cannot successfully address" says an article in _Science_ magazine. Wastes from coal production poison some waterways. How does one weigh, say, the present day cancers of the Navajo who worked as uranium miners in the 1950s against the more immediate diseases and disasters of the coal mine industries? I was told that 1/2 of the particulate matter in the air above Hawaii comes from volcanoes, and the rest come from coal burning in Asia. At that sort of global scale and with such loose coupling between cause and effect, it becomes hard to assign meaningful direct numbers.
- bluekeybox 16y ago
  I agree with your assessment, and I do consider coal to be more environmentally damaging than nuclear, which is why I am a proponent of nuclear power as I mentioned. However I do not like articles that make artificially low estimates of the impact of Chernobyl in particular just because long-term impact is "hard" to measure. If it is hard to measure, doesn't mean you shouldn't take it into account -- give a rough estimate, say 50-5,000 people or 50-10,000 people, but then of course a rough estimate makes it harder to produce a nice chart to ogle at. Instead what you see is articles using the lowest bound straight as reported by the Soviet headquarters, which is just ridiculous. Now measuring cancer risk, even a long term one, while painstaking, is not exactly rocket science. There are multiple large-scale medical studies that do just that very effectively, it's just they tended not to focus on Chernobyl area for whatever reason, most likely due to funding.
  - dalke 16y ago
    I think the author brought that up to to the likely mentions of Chernobyl. I don't like his numbers though, for reasons similar to yours. The numbers are WHO numbers, and not from Soviet HQ, but the predictions by other groups are all over the map. The WHO one was before there could be solid population measurements, and I don't see evidence of newer data from anyone. One difficulty with the projection is that the author assumes that 4000 is the only number to consider regarding deaths with nuclear power. For roof installation he includes roofing accidents, but it does not include the (rather few) people who have died in industrial accidents with nuclear reactors. These are much fewer than 4,000 but he omits deaths due to mining accidents related to uranium extraction (only saying that it's less than coal) and neither does he use estimates for the deaths corresponding to steel and concrete production, like he does for wind power. To be fair, elsewhere his pages go into the differences in the amount of materials needed for each one, and I think the differences I pointed out above are small corrections to the gross numbers given.