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Everything has downsides, and it has to be compared to the alternatives. In Finland's case, the realistic alternatives are burning coal or burning Russian gas.
by tuatoru 5y ago
Everything has downsides, and it has to be compared to the alternatives.
In Finland's case, the realistic alternatives are burning coal or burning Russian gas. (If the Finns dedicated a substantial chunk of their forests to this one generator, they could maybe use biomass.)
Coal kills two orders of magnitude more people per GWh than nuclear--and it does that when operating nominally, not when malfunctioning--and it produces three or four orders of magnitude more waste and more environmental harm from mining.
Russian gas has geopolitical/national security problems.
Biomass is a roundabout way of burning diesel fuel and gas, while degrading and eroding forest soils and polluting watersheds.
The number of new meltdowns per decade rounds to zero, to five significant figures.
- trulyme 5y ago> The number of new meltdowns per decade rounds to zero, to five significant figures. That's a weird metric (one meltdown is quite a catastrophe) and the calculation seems suspicious too. Between Chernobile and Fukushima I don't see how this could be correct. I do find your other points more convincing, though with some "citation needed" wrt. coal.
- woodruffw 5y agoI can't speak to the meltdown statistic, but for coal: just the burning alone is responsible for hundreds of thousands of premature deaths annually[1]. And that's before we consider the environmental and health risks of ash ponds[2], which can (and have caused) heavy metal pollution in nearby groundwater supply. The largest industrial spill in US history happened barely a decade ago, and was an ash pond[3]. Edit: I can personally recommend "The Buffalo Creek Disaster" (ISBN 9780394723433) as a writeup by a lawyer involved in a similar coal ash accident (one that directly killed over 100 people). [1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017936118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017936118 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_pond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_pond [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
- acidburnNSA 5y agoWHO has particulate air pollution from fossil and biofuel killing just about 8 million people per year (a Chernobyl of people (short + long term) every 7 hours). Add in that they also cause climate change and non-combustion sources like nuclear, wind, solar, hydro all look pretty darn awesome. https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution