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

101–110 of 193 posts

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

#101

Post by makomk »

folli wrote: post #21
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…

It's good that you don't mention hydroelectric energy, because based on your criteria this is the most dangerous way to produce electric power, killing 170,000 people in a single incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Except that Banqaio Dam was required anyway for flood control purposes, so the choice wasn't between killing 170,000 people and using some other form of power. All that not using hydroelectric power would've achieved is to ensure that nuclear proponents could no longer blame those deaths on hydroelectric power. Not only that, nuclear power didn't exist yet when it was built. Which is probably a good thing - Banqaiao Dam was build significantly under the specs recommended by its engineer for cost reasons, then operated unsafely; can you imagine what would happen if China built a nuclear power plant with the same approach?

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

#102

Post by kaybe »

rurban wrote: post #91
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_...

Nuclear killed a lot of people already and will for the next thousands of generations. There is still no proper prospect of how to get rid of that poison. That's not comparable to any other technology. That's why nuclear energy needs to demolished and banned.

Right now I feel that nuclear waste would be easier to handle than run-away greenhouse effect. Of course renewable is by far the best energy option in conjuction with using less.

But all things considered I have given up hope that that will actually work in time - thus, by all means, we should build as-safe-as-possible nuclear power plants for the transition and shut down all fossil-based versions immediately.

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

#103

Post by msvalkon »

rurban wrote: post #91
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_...

Nuclear killed a lot of people already and will for the next thousands of generations. There is still no proper prospect of how to get rid of that poison. That's not comparable to any other technology. That's why nuclear energy needs to demolished and banned.

Sounds like a terribly biased argument. Why would it kill for _thousands_ of generations?

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

#104

Post by mpweiher »

sfifs wrote: post #94
mpweiher wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and despite the technical failings, the political failings and the corruption, the effects were comparatively benign.

Possibly to you sitting on the other side of the world. Not so for the thousands of people displaced who lost their homes and communities through no fault of their own and might be exposed to higher cancer rates in their lifetimes.

Yes, the evacuation zone almost certainly should have been smaller, that's one of the perverse effects of the panic about nuclear, that the mitigation efforts tend to be overblown (not that they should be zero), and therefore the damage from the mitigation much worse than it needs to be.

But you missed the word "comparatively". We have lots of human-/technology-induced deaths and injuries. We allow car traffic in our cities at speeds that kills and maims thousands, often children. These are completely avoidable, just lower speed limits to 5mph or less. The US allows more than ten thousand gun deaths every year, because "reasons". etc. etc.

So yes, the effects were comparatively benign, compared to most of the technology we surround ourselves with, and certainly compared to all power-generating technologies we have (including solar). Not absolutely benign, though it would be interesting to compare the damage even of accidents like Fukushima to the benefits (in lives saved) of the electricity that was produced.

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

#105

Post by ageofwant »

basicplus2 wrote: post #4

Electrostatic precipitators fix the particulate problem very effectivly

I worked at a massive coal plant years back as a student. Once spent a afternoon crawling through a ESP during maintenance. The dust made my hair feel like sand, weird gritty sticky eyeballs.

Now this was before health and safety became fashionable. I recall tales of the poor bastard that they forgot about when they tested the plate voltage. The test failed: 64kv was 40kv for some reason, and kept arching, they were still tracing the issue when his wife phoned to ask where John was, he was a few hours late picking up his kid at kindergarten...

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

#106

Post by hannob »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #80
hannob wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That is true, but it's true for all countries. And it's a major failure of practically all existing climate and environmental regulations that they don't take this into account.

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

#107

Post by vidarh »

ekianjo wrote: post #84
wapz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the mortality rate of wind and hydro calculated? Is it from engineers being killed during maintenance/construction? It feels like those two would have a mortality rate or something similar to "a house."

Hydro means dams and dams can cause a number of accidents if they are not properly maintained.

Specifically, hydro was the cause of the worst single power generation accident of all time: 171,000 dead when the Banqiao dam failed.

Before anyone assumes that will never happen again: There are fears over multiple large dams, including Mosul, where a failure worst case could kill a million.

If we're lucky Banqiao will be a one-off, but large dams are massive risk factors because they need ongoing maintanenance forever, and are often upstream of some of the densest populated areas. On top of that they're also ecological disasters.

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

#108

Post by vidarh »

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_...

Those nuclear accidents are covered in those numbers. The deaths from nuclear have simply not been very high, and the amount of energy created is massive. The result is a very low mortality per unit of power.

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

#109

Post by vidarh »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #78
blowski wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, we've demonstrated that you can basically mismanage plants into meltdown, and even then nuclear still ends up killing fewer people.

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

#110

Post by vidarh »

rurban wrote: post #91
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_...

Nuclear killed a lot of people already and will for the next thousands of generations. There is still no proper prospect of how to get rid of that poison. That's not comparable to any other technology. That's why nuclear energy needs to demolished and banned.

We could take all the current nuclear waste, grind it up, and pump it into the atmosphere and there is still no reason to believe that it would lead to more than a blip in terms of mortality compared to coal.

In addition to the reductions in air quality that kills vast number of people from coal - multiple Chernobyls every year - coal plants also pump vast quantities of radioactive material like uranium particles into the air.

While nuclear waste would pump nastier stuff into the air, we know the consequences from Chernobyl: Most of it gets washed out and end up on the ground quickly. What doesn't tend to be less dangerous particulates like cesium isotopes.

I'm obviously not suggesting that we should, but that pretty much the worst possible scenarios you can think of would still end up killing fewer people than coal.

Post reply on HN