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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

#71

Post by LoSboccacc »

awjr wrote: post #46
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?

electricity transmission powers aren't that trivial, even discounting the large saltwater ocean you'd have to cross to power the other side of the world (and the security implications for that infrastructure)

it's more of a storage problem. you can get quite efficient batteries using pressure/gravity chambers, but not all places are apt to host them.

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

#72

Post by throwanem »

jacobush wrote: post #30
bpodgursky wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima has demonstrated that relying on 60's technology and refusing to upgrade or invest because of political sensitivities exposes you to disasters 50 years down the line. It's like if everyone got afraid of airplanes in the 1980's and kept flying the same ones from the 60s through today because people were afraid to build new ones. Would you say air travel was unsafe, or that we made poor technology investments…

Actually, none of what you said refutes the parent post, rather proves the point. Humans as a group have demonstrated a lack of maturity handling nuclear power.

A lack of maturity by what standard? When we say such things of an individual, we do so by comparison with other individuals. With whom do you compare our entire species?

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

#73

Post by throwanem »

kogepathic wrote: post #53
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What @wbl wrote also makes sense. Nuclear power has a closed fuel cycle: what goes in comes out and is stored. There's no way we could hope to capture all the radioactive particles from a coal plant exhaust, not in the foreseeable future with any reasonable efficiency.

> Nuclear power has a closed fuel cycle: what goes in comes out and is stored. Nowadays yes, but this wasn't always the case. The earliest Soviet reactors were open cycle and discharged directly into Lake Kyzyltash. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay

Lesson learned: Don't trust Stalin and Beria with a nuclear plant. Or anything else, of course, but fortunately for everyone both men are safely dead and their danger thus permanently curtailed.

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

#74

Post by adrianN »

blowski wrote: post #20
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_...

I'm no expert on Chernobyl or power generation. But I think Chernobyl was the result of under-investment and poor management, whereas many of the deaths from coal are an unavoidable consequence of burning coal. Hence, you can say nuclear is safer as long as it's managed well.

Chernobyl was the result of turning off all safety mechanisms and running the reactor outside of its design range to see what would happen.

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

#75

Post by throwanem »

legulere wrote: post #25
xroche wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The only point where the article brings coal into connection with the nuclear power shutdown is wrong: > Germany buys cheap coal-fired energy from Poland to pick up the slack left by the abandonment of nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster. Germany is a net electricity exporter. > Germany is one of the country where coal is the deadliest in Europe PM pollution is lower than average in the EU for one: http://ec.e…

It's quite possible to import energy and still be a net exporter. As far as I can tell, Germany does both, although I would like to see a source for the grandparent comment's claim.

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

#76

Post by adrianN »

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…

Throw the "spent" fuel in a breeder reactor, reduce it by >90%, store the rest (it's really not much, volume wise, and decays a lot faster after it's been through a breeder).

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

#77

Post by adrianN »

awjr wrote: post #46
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?

Actually we have been able to create high voltage transmission lines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects

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

#78

Post by davrosthedalek »

blowski wrote: post #20
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_...

I'm no expert on Chernobyl or power generation. But I think Chernobyl was the result of under-investment and poor management, whereas many of the deaths from coal are an unavoidable consequence of burning coal. Hence, you can say nuclear is safer as long as it's managed well.

Isn't the point that even with the current mixture of managment, it's safer? However, I don't know if these numbers include the long-term risk from storing/processing the spent fuel.

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

#79

Post by davrosthedalek »

bootload wrote: post #23
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…

"Coal," Don't mix coal... with wind and solar. Coal releases proportional amounts of carbon dioxide when used to generate power. On the other hand, wind and solar release fixed amounts of carbon dioxide (during construction and transport) then generate energy C02 free.

..except for maintenance. Does anybody have up-to-date numbers how long hydro/solar/wind have to run to recoup the energy used in production? For a while, Solar was essentially "let's import energy from Asia in the form of pretty sand", but I think this has changed.

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

#80

Post by davrosthedalek »

hannob wrote: post #60
Maakuth wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I believe Germany imports quite a bit of nuclear power from France and coal power from Poland. No, that is totally wrong. While in an open net and marked there are always small exports and imports going on, overall Germany is an electricity exporter and imports are very small overall and not very relevant.

There is another form of import which is much harder to judge. Germany imports a lot of stuff from e.g. China, so in some sense the energy production should offset what energy is used in other countries for the imported stuff.
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