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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

#111

Post by bildung »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #79
bootload wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> For a while, Solar was essentially "let's import energy from Asia in the form of pretty sand", but I think this has changed.

Considering the fact that efficient pv panels need less than 4% of their lifetime output for production (if in service 25 years (most panels last up to 40 years)), that must have been the late 70s or so.

You were probably remembering that 2010 study talking about the rapidly growing solar industry as a whole becoming net producers of energy, e.g. current industry energy input is now lower than current running PV output (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/pv-net-energy-04021...). But that doesn't say much about net energy production per panel over the panel's lifetime, e.g. if the PV industry would disappear this very moment, existing PV installations would still produce energy for decades.

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

#112

Post by vidarh »

agroot12 wrote: post #92
mpweiher wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno. The Tsunami killed upwards of 15000 people. I don't have figures, but I am sure that a good number of these were not killed by the wave directly, but by technical contraptions that failed, crushed them or what have you. One of these many technical contraptions that was damaged/destroyed by the Tsunami was the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Yet, so far not a single person has been killed as a result of…

There would be more deaths if Japan and Tepco would not pour billions of dollars into collecting as much waste as possible. The waste of Fukushima is still an unsolved problem that will eat many billions more (see https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/struggling-... ). In fact, even when your reactor does NOT explode, you still have to manage the waste for 10,000 to 1,000,000 years (see https://en.wikipedi…

You don't need to be able to guarantee safe storage for 10,000+ years. For starters most of it can be reprocessed and reused, resulting in less dangerous waste. But no matter how reckless you decide to be with it, the amounts are small enough that it'll be nothing compared to the devastation caused by coal.

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

#113

Post by vidarh »

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…

Large proportions of coal plants spew uranium particles into the atmosphere. That's the radioactivity I worry about.

> 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.

And yet the death toll of Chernobyl turned out to be a tiny fraction of what was feared, and a blib compared to the death tolls from coal and other types.

Two of the reactors kept being operated for years. That's how small of a problem it turned out to be.

> 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.

On the contrary they have demonstrated that the plants are safe enough that even in face of utter incompetency and criminal levels of negligence, nuclear disasters are manageable.

Unlike, say, collapsing damns, or coal plants that kill during normal operation.

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

#114

Post by glenneroo »

vidarh wrote: post #112
agroot12 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There would be more deaths if Japan and Tepco would not pour billions of dollars into collecting as much waste as possible. The waste of Fukushima is still an unsolved problem that will eat many billions more (see https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/struggling-... ). In fact, even when your reactor does NOT explode, you still have to manage the waste for 10,000 to 1,000,000 years (see https://en.wikipedi…

You don't need to be able to guarantee safe storage for 10,000+ years. For starters most of it can be reprocessed and reused, resulting in less dangerous waste. But no matter how reckless you decide to be with it, the amounts are small enough that it'll be nothing compared to the devastation caused by coal.

> For starters most of it can be reprocessed and reused...

Are any projects doing that or planning to? As far as I have read, it's still only a plausible theory but has yet to be implemented.

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

#116

Post by vidarh »

hannob wrote: post #50
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…

> 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…

And without the decommissioning, vast amounts of money spent on the decommissioning could have been spent on renewables to replace coal instead, and far less coal would have still been necessary in order to compensate for the decommissioned capacity.

It also meant less capacity available for export to countries whose fallback is fossil fuels from elsewhere.

The German decommissioning alone is likely to have been a far greater public health disaster than all nuclear incidents in human history combined many times over.

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

#117

Post by folli »

makomk wrote: post #101
folli wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Couldn't you use the same reasoning for Chernobyl? A requirement to build an electric power plant, sloppy construction, sloppy operation, resulting in a catastrophic accident.

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

#118

Post by vidarh »

glenneroo wrote: post #114
vidarh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to be able to guarantee safe storage for 10,000+ years. For starters most of it can be reprocessed and reused, resulting in less dangerous waste. But no matter how reckless you decide to be with it, the amounts are small enough that it'll be nothing compared to the devastation caused by coal.

> For starters most of it can be reprocessed and reused... Are any projects doing that or planning to? As far as I have read, it's still only a plausible theory but has yet to be implemented.

It has been done since the 70's [1]. It has been banned in the US since '76 due to proliferation concerns. There are certainly challenges, but most of those challenges are down to stupid choices that were made in the 60's. Newer plants will continue to bring down the cost of using reprocessed fuel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing

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

#119

Post by systoll »

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.

Coal produces about 2/3rds as much nuclear waste per unit power. [1](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/5077), [2](https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html).

We do little to even try to contain that waste, and aren't even thinking of how to 'get rid of it'. The effects of this radioactive waste are totally overshadowed by the 'conventional' pollution caused by coal.

Nuclear power compares pretty well to this.

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

#120

Post by jacobush »

throwanem wrote: post #72
jacobush wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can at best give you a circular (or spiral, given that generations pass) argument: nuclear has not demonstrated that it has a great appeal to current stock of humans.
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