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Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

reuters.com

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Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#31

Post by pg314 »

foepys wrote: post #12
legulere wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) Wikipedia seems to give 4000 as an estimate on those exposed to the highest levels of radiation alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Cancer_proj... On the other hand coal, wind and solar never poisoned our food (wild boars in Germany thousands of km away still often are too…

Also if a terrorist flys a plane into a coal plant they will not make hundreds of km² uninhabitable.

At least some nuclear power plants where designed to withstand a plane crash. E.g. the one in Doel (Belgium) [1] (dutch link).

[1] http://fanc.fgov.be/GED/00000000/2900/2954.pdf

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#32

Post by whiskers08xmt »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #8
xroche wrote: post #3

Closing nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal power plants is simply criminal. In Europe, coal pollution kills ~20,000 people each year ( ), nuclear never killed a single person, and no study could ever provide any mortality increase due to nuclear energy (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) To be clear: nuclear is no…

In other words nuclear never killed anybody apart from the ones it killed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

I think the important difference is killing people when running as intended, versus killing people when disasters occur. In a way, a Nulcear power plant is similar to dam; when the dam breaks, it's a serious disaster, but as long as it runs as intended, humans aren't really at risk.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#33

Post by folli »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #8
xroche wrote: post #3

Closing nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal power plants is simply criminal. In Europe, coal pollution kills ~20,000 people each year ( ), nuclear never killed a single person, and no study could ever provide any mortality increase due to nuclear energy (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) To be clear: nuclear is no…

In other words nuclear never killed anybody apart from the ones it killed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

Based on this list, even the summed death toll of these incidences is still massively lower than the single worst incident involving hydroelectricity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#34

Post by mtgx »

xroche wrote: post #14
legulere wrote: post #5

A very weird way to study the outcome of coal air pollution. It seems like this is not really about air pollution but trying to push nuclear energy. Luckily shutting down nuclear plants does not necessarily mean turning on coal power (e.g. in Germany they were replaced by renewables). Some questions arise though: Which coal power air pollutant is to blame for the birth weight decrease. Which coal pollution mitigation…

> Germany they were replaced by renewables This is unfortunately inaccurate ( http://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/report... ), and Germany is one of the country where coal is the deadliest in Europe, thanks to anti-nuclear campaign from the green party.

I think there was a post on HN about a year ago saying that Germany has a weird law or policy that says it can only produce renewable power for internal use, and for export it uses coal. I think this is only a political issue, because no one wants to tackle it when elections are this year.

Otherwise, the phasing-out of coal in Europe is looking pretty good, I'd say - they're looking to close the most polluting plants in Europe by 2031:

http://climateanalytics.org/files/coalphaseouteu-regulator.g...

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#35

Post by legulere »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #22
legulere wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) Wikipedia seems to give 4000 as an estimate on those exposed to the highest levels of radiation alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Cancer_proj... On the other hand coal, wind and solar never poisoned our food (wild boars in Germany thousands of km away still often are too…

This is incredibly myopic. Burning coal for electricity generation has released in to the environment more radiation, heavy metals, and other pollutants than civil nuclear power could ever hope to.

Nuclear plants in normal use release less radionuclides into the environment than coal. But is this still the case with malfunction?

It is fairly common that huge amounts get released. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascó_Nuclear_Power_Plant

How about Fukushima and Chernobyl. Do you have numbers to back up your claim?

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#36

Post by Tomte »

xroche wrote: post #3

Closing nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal power plants is simply criminal. In Europe, coal pollution kills ~20,000 people each year ( ), nuclear never killed a single person, and no study could ever provide any mortality increase due to nuclear energy (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) To be clear: nuclear is no…

We still don't know how to handle spent fuel.

So nuclear apologists are simply offering a calculation, where the biggest risk/liability has been left out, because "what number should we put in?".

Also, I'm always fascinated of the "Chernobyl was unsafe, today reactors are safe" argument. The exact same line was fed to us when Chernobyl was state of the art.

There are good reasons to think that it may indeed be so this time. But the nuclear industry has lost all trust and all right to demand anyone ever trusted them again.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#37

Post by Maakuth »

legulere wrote: post #27
lemming wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in Germany they were replaced by renewables Do you have a reference for this? Germany has a very aggressive (and highly commendable) plan to move to renewables, but my understanding was that the closing of nuclear plants post-Fukushima was covered by coal. Wikipedia seems to agree ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany ): At the same time, Germany continues to rely heavily on coal power, with usage…

This graphic shows it pretty well in my opinion: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Energiem... Purple is nuclear energy. Dark green is biomass, light blue is wind power, yellow is solar power

Pretty remarkable growth in PV! I do remember that Germany already had quite a bit of wind generators in the early 2000s, yet they seemed to have generated around the same amount of energy as the PV capacity of today. And that's been mostly build during this decade.

What's missing from this graph, however, are imports. I believe Germany imports quite a bit of nuclear power from France and coal power from Poland.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#39

Post by lyschoening »

This is research from the 1980s. It is undoubtedly correct, but it does not not apply to today.

Today, renewables are competing favorably against coal and nuclear power on price, and they are improving rapidly still. It takes easily 15 years to plan and build a nuclear power plant, while a solar plant can be planned and built in months.

The issue of what happens when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine can be addressed through larger HVDC grids with a good energy mix and through storage technology, which is also improving rapidly. Meanwhile, nuclear has its own issues with the elements nowadays. Nuclear relies on huge amounts of freshwater. I've heard of nuclear plants that need to shut down in the summers now because of drought. It will become harder and harder to find locations where they can be built.

Finally, new fossil fuel plants built today are mostly gas, not coal. Gas also has its problems, but it has been a reasonable transition technology that is also losing ground now as energy storage technology is improving.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#40

Post by kostyash »

xroche wrote: post #3

Closing nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal power plants is simply criminal. In Europe, coal pollution kills ~20,000 people each year ( ), nuclear never killed a single person, and no study could ever provide any mortality increase due to nuclear energy (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) To be clear: nuclear is no…

How sweet, the study that guardian refers returns 404: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/silentkillers/
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