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This was recently an episode topic on the podcast 99% Invisible. It brought up a lot of interesting questions for me mostly about the systemic differences betwe

This was recently an episode topic on the podcast 99% Invisible. It brought up a lot of interesting questions for me mostly about the systemic differences between public and private operations and pros&cons on both. Plainly shown TVA has been abysmal after it was forced to operate as a profit motivated institution. Though it was still federally owned it received nearly total immunity from the mishaps it caused through sovereign immunity laws. What is the check on disasters like this happening again? Will more regulation prevent it? The EPA's regulations incentivized it to further endanger workers during the cleanup. It needs to either be fully privately owned (still regulated) or fully federally owned and funded. - https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/613-valley-so-low/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/613-valley-so-low/

jillesvangurp 2y ago
Coal plants being dirty, toxic, and generally not good for the health of nearby populations isn't exactly new information of course. But they were important for energy generation for a long time. That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated. Coal contains all sorts of stuff besides organic matter. When you burn it, the non organic stuff remains. It will typically contain metals, heavy metals, and other stuff that isn't good for you. That's also the reason coal smog isn't good for people. You don't want that stuff in your lungs. It's similarly bad as smoking is. The ash needs to go somewhere and the standard practice with a lot of coal plants has been to just dump it outside, try to contain it with some infrastructure, and not worry too much about it. Nobody really cared. Except now a lot of these plants are going out of business and the the toxic waste remains. And most of these plants needed cooling water so they tend to be close to water ways. So, there's that.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  How does domestic coal ash compare to this stuff? Do the higher temperatures and pressures in power station liberate more of the harmful stuff, or is it basically as bad? UK homes were commonly coal heated as late as the 1980s, a few still are. Its contribution to air pollution was well-understood, but this has got me wondering about ash exposure, as people would routinely handle the stuff with basically nothing in terms of protective gear.
  - jillesvangurp 2y ago
    More efficient burning means more the waste metals get concentrated in the ashes instead of in the smog. It has to go somewhere.
- wqaatwt 2y ago
  > That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated Yet nuclear despite inherently being much less harmful weren’t historically that well tolerated.
  - gambiting 2y ago
    Because people have a completely wrong impression of the scale of nuclear waste. In the Netherlands there is a museum inside their nuclear waste repository - you can literally walk right up to the barrels containing nuclear waste, it's open to the members of the public. https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preservation/ https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preserv... And I don't remember the exact number, but I'm sure I read somewhere that all of world's highly radioactive nuclear waste(spent fuel) could fit in several olympic swimming pools - while this coal power plant produced 1000 tonnes(!!!!) a day(!!!) of coal soot. The scale is just completely incomparable. But people look at Chernobyl or Fukishima and think that the exclusion zones created by those events are inherently a feature of nuclear power - when they are not.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Radioactive clouds and exclusion zones are inherent features of nuclear power the way that buffer overflows and remote code execution are inherent features of C.
      - wqaatwt 2y ago
        True, but if you add up Chernobyl, Fukushima and all other nuclear disasters per MHw generated coal is still many times more harmful and killed way more people. And of course Chernobyl couldn’t have happened in the US, France, Britain or any other country run by extremely incompetent halfwits.
      - troupo 2y ago
        ~500 000 people dead from dam failures, and we still build hydroelectric plants. Hiroshima is a city of 2 million people even though it was the epicenter of a nuclear explosion.
- myrmidon 2y ago
  > The ash needs to go somewhere and the standard practice with a lot of coal plants has been to just dump it outside, try to contain it with some infrastructure, and not worry too much about it. More precisely: The standard EPA recommended practice would have been to dump the dried fly ash in a lined landfill (to prevent poisoning groundwater). This is also what whas done in the cleanup. Allowing the disaster to occur was a clear case of insufficient regulations combined with the sort of cost-saving sloppiness that is to be expected from private companies. Those regulations were amended and risks at other potential disaster sites were mitigated (which cost billions), finishing in 2022. I'd like to note here that muntzing government regulations in a style that Musk advocates for ("you can always reinstate some regulations later if you run into problems") is not only irresponsible, but also impractical; it takes decades to implement regulatory changes and switching is very expensive.
  - try_the_bass 2y ago
    > is not only irresponsible, but also impractical; it takes decades to implement regulatory changes and switching is very expensive. But perhaps this latency is itself a problem that should be solved? I understand that there are good reasons for regulation to be a slow process, but it doesn't have to (and probably shouldn't!) take decades to iterate on. And if regulation could iterate faster, some of your objections to the approach go away, do they not? This would also come with the added benefit of reducing the efficacy of regulatory capture.
- wat10000 2y ago
  That's one reason the resulting pollution and waste is tolerated. Another big reason is that the harms are diffuse and often hard to see. If coal power plant operators had to actually pay for the harms they produce, coal would have started phasing out much earlier and faster.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

Coal plants being dirty, toxic, and generally not good for the health of nearby populations isn't exactly new information of course. But they were important for energy generation for a long time. That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated. Coal contains all sorts of stuff besides organic matter. When you burn it, the non organic stuff remains. It will typically contain metals, heavy metals, and other stuff that isn't good for you. That's also the reason coal smog isn't good for people. You don't want that stuff in your lungs. It's similarly bad as smoking is. The ash needs to go somewhere and the standard practice with a lot of coal plants has been to just dump it outside, try to contain it with some infrastructure, and not worry too much about it. Nobody really cared. Except now a lot of these plants are going out of business and the the toxic waste remains. And most of these plants needed cooling water so they tend to be close to water ways. So, there's that.

Earw0rm 2y ago
How does domestic coal ash compare to this stuff? Do the higher temperatures and pressures in power station liberate more of the harmful stuff, or is it basically as bad? UK homes were commonly coal heated as late as the 1980s, a few still are. Its contribution to air pollution was well-understood, but this has got me wondering about ash exposure, as people would routinely handle the stuff with basically nothing in terms of protective gear.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  More efficient burning means more the waste metals get concentrated in the ashes instead of in the smog. It has to go somewhere.
wqaatwt 2y ago
> That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated Yet nuclear despite inherently being much less harmful weren’t historically that well tolerated.
- gambiting 2y ago
  Because people have a completely wrong impression of the scale of nuclear waste. In the Netherlands there is a museum inside their nuclear waste repository - you can literally walk right up to the barrels containing nuclear waste, it's open to the members of the public. https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preservation/ https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preserv... And I don't remember the exact number, but I'm sure I read somewhere that all of world's highly radioactive nuclear waste(spent fuel) could fit in several olympic swimming pools - while this coal power plant produced 1000 tonnes(!!!!) a day(!!!) of coal soot. The scale is just completely incomparable. But people look at Chernobyl or Fukishima and think that the exclusion zones created by those events are inherently a feature of nuclear power - when they are not.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Radioactive clouds and exclusion zones are inherent features of nuclear power the way that buffer overflows and remote code execution are inherent features of C.
    - wqaatwt 2y ago
      True, but if you add up Chernobyl, Fukushima and all other nuclear disasters per MHw generated coal is still many times more harmful and killed way more people. And of course Chernobyl couldn’t have happened in the US, France, Britain or any other country run by extremely incompetent halfwits.
    - troupo 2y ago
      ~500 000 people dead from dam failures, and we still build hydroelectric plants. Hiroshima is a city of 2 million people even though it was the epicenter of a nuclear explosion.
myrmidon 2y ago
> The ash needs to go somewhere and the standard practice with a lot of coal plants has been to just dump it outside, try to contain it with some infrastructure, and not worry too much about it. More precisely: The standard EPA recommended practice would have been to dump the dried fly ash in a lined landfill (to prevent poisoning groundwater). This is also what whas done in the cleanup. Allowing the disaster to occur was a clear case of insufficient regulations combined with the sort of cost-saving sloppiness that is to be expected from private companies. Those regulations were amended and risks at other potential disaster sites were mitigated (which cost billions), finishing in 2022. I'd like to note here that muntzing government regulations in a style that Musk advocates for ("you can always reinstate some regulations later if you run into problems") is not only irresponsible, but also impractical; it takes decades to implement regulatory changes and switching is very expensive.
- try_the_bass 2y ago
  > is not only irresponsible, but also impractical; it takes decades to implement regulatory changes and switching is very expensive. But perhaps this latency is itself a problem that should be solved? I understand that there are good reasons for regulation to be a slow process, but it doesn't have to (and probably shouldn't!) take decades to iterate on. And if regulation could iterate faster, some of your objections to the approach go away, do they not? This would also come with the added benefit of reducing the efficacy of regulatory capture.
wat10000 2y ago
That's one reason the resulting pollution and waste is tolerated. Another big reason is that the harms are diffuse and often hard to see. If coal power plant operators had to actually pay for the harms they produce, coal would have started phasing out much earlier and faster.