Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 193 posts

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

#41

Post by WalterBright »

lyschoening wrote: post #39

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 ca…

The sun not shining at night can also be addressed with variable pricing. Electricity usage is elastic, and a lot of consumption patterns can be time-shifted.

The idea that electricity should have a fixed rate 24/7 is obsolete.

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

#42

Post by WalterBright »

Tomte wrote: post #36
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 thi…

> Chernobyl argument

Consider airliners. Airliners have been around for 80 years, and get substantially safer every decade. This is a statistical fact. Every crash is used as a learning experience and designs, procedures, and training is adjusted as a result.

There's no reason to believe that such does not apply to nuclear power stations.

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

#43

Post by rimliu »

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.

Neither will it do that flying int nuclear plant.

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

#44

Post by WalterBright »

loeg wrote: post #16
pdog wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima has demonstrated that humans aren't great at controlling or predicting the real risk of nuclear. The fact is, even if no one dies from acute radiation poisoning, nuclear disasters are costly and devastating.

That can be mitigated in the US because the entire country doesn't run along a fault line. Not so Japan. Yes, don't build your nuclear reactor in western California.

The Fukushima reactor stood the earthquake without damage, and could have been easily designed to withstand the tsunami. It was not.

How, you might say? Put the backup generators in waterproof bunkers, or simply on platforms high enough to keep them dry.

It's not expensive or tricky, it's just that the failure mode did not occur to anyone in charge.

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

#45

Post by mirimir »

thro1111111 wrote: post #24
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It only kills in case of a serious incident. Incidents are rare. Coal pollution and deaths are guaranteed

That's not true. Coal pollution and deaths are guaranteed mainly by economic disincentives to using clean coal technologies. Even mercury and CO2 emissions could be captured. But then, that would likely make solar the clear choice.

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

#46

Post by awjr »

lyschoening wrote: post #39

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 ca…

Is the sun not shining just a transmission problem? Have we been able to create ultra high voltage long range DC transmission systems?

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

#47

Post by rimliu »

legulere wrote: post #35
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"Huge amount" which is not even considered a serious incident?

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

#48

Post by acqq »

pg314 wrote: post #31
foepys wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

WTC Twin Towers were also "built to withstand a plane crash." But obviously not those planes that have hit them:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1340225/Twin-towers-built-to...

And the initial design was 30 floors less.

The Fukushima plant had a wall to protect it from tsunami and the motors to keep the pumps working when there the electricity fails. The whole design however didn't cover that particular wave:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1388629/Japan-tsunam...

The tsunamis like that happened there "only once in a thousand years" so nobody (who made the executive decisions) expected that one.

Still there were the stone markers in Japan, many hundreds of years old, with the marking "Do not build your homes below this point!"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html

"As time passes, people inevitably forget."

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

#49

Post by mpweiher »

lyschoening wrote: post #39

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 ca…

> This is research from the 1980s

Nope, it is research from now, about an event in the 80s. These are long-term effects, so obviously there is a delay.

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

#50

Post by hannob »

lemming wrote: post #10
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…

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…

> but my understanding was that the closing of nuclear plants post-Fukushima was covered by coal.

There was a minor uptick in coal usage for a few years, however even that wasn't necessary, but due to bad policy (gas plants were standing still at the same time). By now coal usage is going down again.

There were a couple of new constructions of coal plants, but all of them were started before the nuclear phaseout. And by now most of their operators recognize that their investments were failures and will probably never pay out.

It isn't all ideal in Germany, but overall it's going into the right direction (and the success of solar in many countries these days wouldn't have been possible without the early investments in Germany that brought the prices down).

Post reply on HN