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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

A reasonable boundary on excess deaths can be identified by taking the number of cancers and adjust for pre-fukushima cancer rates.

There's no reason to under-estimate it - even with absolute worst case estimates based on past experience from Chernobyl etc., nuclear comes favourably out in terms of health effects / deaths per unit of energy.

The biggest harm that Fukushima might do would be to reduce investment in nuclear vs. more harmful power plants like coal (which incidentally releases more radioactive material every few years than every nuclear accident combined), or hydro (dam accidents have killed shocking numbers of people). Even rooftop solar (people fall off roofs, and since each installation on average produces so little, the numbers add up; larger purpose built solar installations are as far as I know far safer)

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Not all radioactive material is created equal. I would read an article about how dangerous the coal plant radioactive material if anyone knows of one.

Here [1]. Fly ash from coal plants tends to contain concentrated amounts of uranium and thorium. In countries with stringent enough regulation, the biggest problem is disposal of the fly ash - other place the problem also include substantial amounts being pumped into the atmosphere, and overall coal ends up killing a lot of people. Note that this is not just radiation but also heart attacks and respiratory problems.

E.g. here [2] are numbers claiming deaths from US coal fired plants alone (which are by no means the worst ones) kill 13,000 people in the US every year.

[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...

[2] http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plan...

>...A 1978 paper from Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimated that coal-fired power plants of that time may contribute a whole-body committed dose of 19 µSv/a to their immediate neighbours in a 500 m radius.[46] The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation's 1988 report estimated the committed dose 1 km away to be 20 µSv/a for older plants or 1 µSv/a for newer plants with improved fly ash capture, but was unable to confirm these numbers by test.

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

But really the radioactive emissions from coal plants (and the exposure through their unmonitored waste piles) is really an insignificant danger compared to the air pollution problems where tens of thousands of people are killed each year from burning coal. The mercury emissions are also helping to poison the oceans and the CO2 emissions are also a big cause of climate change.

Problem citing a 1978 paper on coal power plant emissions is the emissions controls that have been added over the last 40 years. And of course the ancient plants that have been closed down. Bonus, coal is going away and soon[1].

[1] We're fast reaching the tipping point where the global elites are getting scared of global warming.

>Problem citing a 1978 paper on coal power plant emissions is the emissions controls that have been added over the last 40 years. And of course the ancient plants that have been closed down.

The transuranic elements in coal will either by emitted through the stack or kept in unmonitored piles of waste which might leach not water supplies. The reason there likely isn't much research into doses from radiation from coal plants is that it is the very least of the problems with using coal as an energy source. The deaths from air pollution alone will be orders of magnitude greater than any possible deaths from radiation exposure.

>... Bonus, coal is going away and soon[1].

Well I guess that depends on how one defines "soon". Hopefully someday coal will be priced to cover its externalities since stopping the use of coal would literally save millions of lives. Unfortunately that hasn't happened yet - whether the use of coal ends soon enough to stop environmental catastrophe isn't clear yet. Currently coal provides about 40% of world power and it is actually still slowly increasing:

>...With government policies and incentives promoting the use of nonfossil energy sources in many countries, renewable energy is the world’s fastest-growing source of energy, at an average rate of 2.6%/year, while nuclear energy use increases by 2.3%/year, and natural gas use increases by 1.9%/year (Figure 1-5). Coal is the world’s slowest growing form of energy in the Reference case, at an average rate of 0.6%/year (compared with an average increase of 1.4%/year in total world energy demand).

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/world.cfm

Truth though is fly ash isn't really that much more radioactive than any common sample of soil (1 to 10X). And uranium and thorium aren't particularly problematic. Neither is particularly radioactive and bio-accumulation is nil. And there is no escaping them in any event.

As your link shows coal isn't growing very fast as a source of energy. Key thing about coal fired plants is the pay off time is long. Right now taking a 30 risk on a coal fired plant vs a 5 year risk on a natural gas plant, the choice is pretty obvious.

Coal going away soon, really depends on how freaked out governments and the people that control them get. My thought, they get freaked out none of our opinions will matter.

>Truth though is fly ash isn't really that much more radioactive than any common sample of soil (1 to 10X). And uranium and thorium aren't particularly problematic.

Radium is an issue here. But like I said, the air pollution from burning coal is orders of magnitude greater than the risk from radiation exposure from coal. The only interesting thing about this is that the anti-science crowd that is afraid of nuclear power doesn't realize that if the NRC regulated coal plants, they would immediately be shut down due to excessive releases of radiation.

>...As your link shows coal isn't growing very fast as a source of energy.

yes, but your original comment was: >... Bonus, coal is going away and soon[1].

Most people wouldn't consider a slowing of the growth rate to be "going away and soon". Hopefully they will be gone before they cause an environmental catastrophe.

>..R.ight now taking a 30 risk on a coal fired plant vs a 5 year risk on a natural gas plant, the choice is pretty obvious.

Replacing a horrible fossil fuel with a less bad fossil fuel is not a huge improvement when there are safer non CO2 emitting power sources - nuclear for base load power and solar/wind as intermittent power.

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