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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

#121

Post by nnq »

vidarh wrote: post #113
Tomte wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> collapsing damns [...] kill during normal operation

Thank god I don't live anywhere near a dam designed to collapse as part of normal operation.

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

#122

Post by blowski »

vidarh wrote: post #109
davrosthedalek wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Over a period of 50 years, you can mismanage a couple of plants and still kill fewer people. But not the entire industry.

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

#123

Post by Symmetry »

wapz wrote: post #83
bhgraham wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr) Coal – global average 100,000 (41% global electricity) Coal – China 170,000 (75% China’s electricity) Coal – U.S. 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity) Oil 36,000 (33% of energy, 8% of electricity) Natural Gas 4,000 (22% global electricity) Biofuel/Biomass 24,000 (21% global energy) Solar (rooftop) 440 ( Wind 150 (2% global electricity) Hydro – global average 1,400 (16% glob…

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."

In addition to the factors unique to dam failure, large construction projects will statistically result in dead workmen - at least over multiple projects.

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

#124

Post by Symmetry »

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_...

If every single nuclear plant exploded like Fukushima a productive lifetime like Fukushima had did that would still be only an order of magnitude more deaths from nuclear than from coal.

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

#125

Post by jacobush »

ageofwant wrote: post #90
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.

And demonstrated maturity by burning coal that as part of normal predictable operations kills thousands a year? Humans' continous insistence on burning coal instead of thorium may well be our Fermi filter.

Of course not. Demonstrated even MORE immaturity by burning coal. Aliens discussing us: "are the earthlings burning coal for fuel? I thought you said they couldn't even handle nuclear fission?"

"Yes dear Sklaar, it's even worse than we thought. Can you believe where they put the exhaust? Straight into the atmosphere!"

And so it happened that Earth was put into another 1000 years of no-contact-policy at the latest board of review, kids...

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

#126

Post by ju-st »

Taniwha wrote: post #17
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…

Yes they could equally say increased use of solar results in increased birth weights. Really the take away here is simply "coal is bad" - there's correlation between coal plants and lowered birth weights. Anything that supplants coal (nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, tidal, etc) will result in increased birth weights. Replacing them with coal will result in lowered birth weights. It's a bit weird their pushing nuclear th…

This is a recurrent topic on HN. Somebody posts an article about "coal is bad". Then somebody mentions that nuclear is safer/better than coal. A third person then claims Germany is evil because they are replacing nuclear with coal. The next person shows evidence that this is not the case. Then a discussion about energy imports & exports of Germany starts.

Literally every fucking topic about renewables/nuclear/coal ends up with the same content.

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

#127

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Taniwha wrote: post #17
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…

Yes they could equally say increased use of solar results in increased birth weights. Really the take away here is simply "coal is bad" - there's correlation between coal plants and lowered birth weights. Anything that supplants coal (nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, tidal, etc) will result in increased birth weights. Replacing them with coal will result in lowered birth weights. It's a bit weird their pushing nuclear th…

Similar to the "EVs use coal powered electricity, therefore EVs are bad" argument. A weird distraction from the fundamental "Coal is bad, pretty much everything is better than coal, let's use much less coal" argument that you'd think everyone (but Trump) could agree on together.

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

#128

Post by AstralStorm »

jacobush wrote: post #120
throwanem wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It didn't because humans are not rational and bad press is highly overblown. Mostly because of link to weapons of mass destruction I suppose.

Nobody says anything about the health and ecological disaster that is coal and oil. People do not attribute mining deaths to it and are bad at linking long term chronic health effects to them.

A red herring of solar and wind is proposed that people haven't rejected due to outages thanks to the other technologies covering its major drawbacks.

Likewise hydro disasters are not covered as much as they should.

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

#129

Post by mcone »

You don't need to convince me of the dangers of coal pollution. I grew up in Farmington, New Mexico with two massive coal-fired power plants right outside of town.

But this article ignores the consequences, and apparently the very existence, of nuclear waste. This is a problem we'll be dealing with for tens of thousands of years.

It's unlikely that today's pollution from coal-fired power plants will endanger the lives of people thousands of years from now, but you can bet your bacon that the pollution from nuclear power plants will.

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

#130

Post by themaninthedark »

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…

In his posthumously published memoirs, Valeri Legasov, the First Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, revealed that the Institute's scientists had long known that the RBMK reactor had significant design flaws.[16][17] Legasov's death from suicide, apparently as a result of becoming bitterly disillusioned with the failure of the authorities to confront the flaws, caused shockwaves throughout the Soviet nuclear industry and the problems with the RBMK design were rapidly accepted.[18][19]

- Wikipedia

The design of the RBMK and the lack of criticism were due to political reasons. Similar to how today we can't update or replace reactors.

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