Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights
reuters.com
reuters.com
To be clear: nuclear is not the perfect solution, is not a renewable energy, and will have to be replaced by something else in the future. But this is the least deadly energy, even safer than wind or solar power ()
() https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/12/european... () http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/06/update-of-death-per-ter...
How, you might say? Put the backup generators in waterproof bunkers, or simply on platforms high enough to keep them dry.
It's not expensive or tricky, it's just that the failure mode did not occur to anyone in charge.
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?
Tepco from Fukushima claimed until the day their plants were hit, that everything was totally safe. Politics supported them. Nobody was questioning them.
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.
The country lost most of their nuclear power plants in a single day. It takes years, if not decades to bring them back online - partly. 50 plants. Each worth, say, ten billion dollar (current worth and future earnings - just an estimate). That loss alone goes into the hundreds of billions. Additionally fuel had to be imported, other plants had to be built.
'Currently 42 reactors are operable and potentially able to restart, and 24 of these are in the process of restart approvals. The first two restarted in August and October 2015.' Six years after the earthquake/tsunami.
Only a few ten thousand people, maybe a hundred thousand, will work in Fukushima under extreme circumstances to keep the site stable and clean it up the site for the next five decades. Robots die regularly after a short time inside the reactors. Humans get a year worth radioactive exposure in a few hours. Where to get all the people needed to work there?
We have experience to dismantle functioning reactors. Here we have damaged reactors with damaged fuel...
Very little effects... I don't think so. The effects were much more severe than the industry thought. They were thinking that most of the reactors would operate again, by now.
World-wide reactor projects were seeing delays. Companies have a hard time to survive. All these are effects of a single earthquake/tsunami on the nuclear reactor industry. It's a huge financial catastrophe for the nuclear industry and the countries financing it.
There was no actual need to shut down the other plants, etc.
That's your personal opinion. I think it's naive, because you had actually no idea in what state the other reactors were.
The OFFICIAL REGULATION AUTHORITIES for nuclear safety in Japan had a different opinion. Some plants had damages, were shutdown because of the earthquake, every plant needed inspections and every plant needed full safety reviews. That it takes so long to bring some of the reactors back shows that there are lots of doubts about their safety and the industry will need to do more than just say 'there was no need to shut them down' - nobody believes that.
Here you can find a good overview what the authorities are doing and when reactors might be restarted - if at all:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro...
Japan sits on a seismic very active region and severe earthquakes and tsunamis happen. It's only logical after such damage to question the whole safety architecture. Are the spend fuel pools in similar unfortunate positions? Are they full, too? What happens at complete loss of outside electricity? Are the reactors able to safely shutdown then, unlike Fukushima? Can the spent fuel pools be cooled? Are there instruments in the reactor able to survive massive damage in an earth quake? There are many many questions which have not been asked for a decade, because the consequences would have been costly upgrades and even the shutdown of reactors - for example those sitting near fault lines.
Given that the nuclear industry in Japan is corrupt and runs very old reactors with severe design mistakes, I think it is only justified to shut down the industry for a full review. That would also include the whole network of politicians, research, industry, utilities, ...
Citation needed.
I could not find anything supporting that claim in the article you linked to. In fact, there is an article saying the regulator refused to shut down a plant [1]
"Despite attempts by politicians in Tokyo to persuade them to do so, provincial governors and local communities won’t allow them to restart."[2]
"Utilities were unable immediately to restart them due to public opposition."[3]
Also, the regulator that called for tougher standards was a new regulator, politicians having replaced the old one. So very clearly a political move.
So as I wrote, the shutdowns were largely political (or in some cases, routine shutdowns for maintenance happened and the reactors were then not allowed to restart for political reasons. Same difference).
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/18/japan-earthquakes...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/for-japan-...
[3] http://www.treehugger.com/energy-policy/japan-shuts-down-its...
The old regulator: 'The Nuclear & Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) granted a 10-year licence extension for Fukushima Daiichi 1 in February 2011, after technical review and some modifications in 2010.'
In March 2011, a month later, the reactor was destroyed incl. a fuel meltdown. It will take decades to clean up the mess. It wasn't even this reactor alone, units 2,3 and 4 were also damaged. Units 5 and 6 are given up in 2013.
Yeah, it was definitely a political move to replace the old regulator. The regulator was corrupt, incompetent, without power, ... The experts have failed. They had granted a ten year life extension to a reactor, which only days later was destroyed in a large scale accident.
It took a political move to replace them. Fully justified.
Don't read the torygraph or treehugger. Read the updates from the World Nuclear Association:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro...
> The regulator was corrupt, incompetent, without power, .
And that was a legal decision? A technical decision? Oh wait, no! It was a political decision. Made by politicians.
> It took a political move to replace them.
Exactly. So why are you scoffing at me saying that it was a political move?
> Fully justified.
That's your (political) evaluation of that decision. Hmm...last I checked you scoffed at me for my evaluation.
You keep citing that article, but it proves my point.
"However, following the Fukushima accident, in October 2011 the government sought to greatly reduce the role of nuclear power."
Political decision.
Anyway, you still haven't provided any citations to prove your point, and haven't refuted my quotes that clearly show (a) that shutdowns were often routine maintenance (every 13 months) and (b) that blocking startup was frequently due to local political opposition.
So in essence, you have an opinion and not much else.
I'm not sure where you live, but in the country where I live energy policy is done by elected politicians, not by unelected technocrats.
It's their job. That's why we elect them.
The decision to replace the old regulatory body was made because the old regulatory body failed. Technically. Practically. In every single way. A nuclear reactor which they just granted a 10 year lifetime extension blew up days later and was a total wreck then. A multi-billion-dollar-wreck. Who would have left these people in office?
> Political decision.
You say that in a negative way. Every decision done is political. You live in a fairy tale world if you think unelected technocrats should make the decisions. The job of a politician is to make decisions based on all kinds of influences: technical, economical, social, ... That's exactly their job. If a technology (here nuclear) is not safe, costly, has no acceptance, etc, ... then this technology has to be reduced/removed and has to be replaced by safer technologies.
Politicians decided to invest into nuclear and set up the market, the regulatory bodies, the financing, etc. for it. They can also decide to reduce or completely abandon nuclear - if the voters demand that. That's why we have them.
Energy policy is political. Energy policy decisions are finally made by politicians we can elect. Not by TEPCO, Toshiba, ... There are huge amounts of money involved, paid by the tax payer (there is no other insurance of a nuclear power plant, the tax payer pays this show: the taxpayer finances the research, the infrastructure, the financing of the plants, and it keeps bankrupt companies like TEPCO from collapsing by pouring more money into them) and by electricity consumers. No nuclear power plant would exist without political decisions, public money, and a distorted market. It's no wonder nuclear especially grows in authoritarian states like Russia and China. There unelected technocrats make the decisions in combination with authoritarian politicians.
> quotes that clearly show (a) that shutdowns were often routine maintenance (every 13 months) and (b) that blocking startup was frequently due to local political opposition.
You still have not read the overview of the World Nuclear Association. Japan had literally to invest many billions to upgrade their reactor fleet. Old ones which weren't economic to upgrade were closed. Dangerous ones, for example sitting on top of fault lines, are not being opened again.
A few days later it was a multi-billion-dollar wreck.
Not at 'end of life' obviously does not mean 'safe to operate'. 'end of life' is also not a fixed date. Once the initial 'end of life' date comes, the owner will see how to get a life extension. Fukushima Daiichi 1 had an inspection, some upgrades, got the life extension. Following month this was one of most costly decisions ever made in industry.
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.
"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...
In fact, it was Fukushima that turned me around on nuclear. I always thought that the risks were just too great, that if you weren't perfect there would be disasters of unimaginable proportions. And humans just aren't perfect.
I was wrong. Well, not on the last bit :-)
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 that failure, and so far the predictions are that future deaths will be so low as to disappear into the statistical noise. (And these predictions tend to be on the high side: the WHO created reports every decade after Chernobyl, and each report massively revised those estimates downwards).
Yet, all we ever hear about is Fukushima.
Odd. That.
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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Long_term_manage...). The radioactive materials are not only deadly due to their radiation; most of them are also highly toxic.
So even without a meltdown, you risk many lives in the future. Just because not many people have died yet does not make it a safe energy choice. Who in their right mind can guarantee safe storage of the waste for 10,000+ years?
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.
Even if that's true, compared to the certain deaths per year caused by coal it still wins out.
(a) Citation needed.
(b) How many more deaths?
(c) Sure, it's good that we clean these things up. There would be more deaths from cars, airplanes, trains or just about anything if we didn't do something about it.
From the NYTimes article:
"400 tons of water a day"
Sounds bad, right? Except when you compare it to a coal plant, which produces about 350 tons of ash (which is more radioactive) and >500 tons of toxic sludge per day in normal operation.
Oh, and just how bad is that water?
"The authorities are debating whether it might be acceptable, given the relatively low radioactive levels in the water, to dilute the contaminated water and then dump it into the ocean."
And of course that is "low" under the current rules, which follow the linear extrapolation ("no safe dosage") assumption that is almost certainly wrong, and tend to be extremely conservative even within that framework.
"200,400 Cubic Meters of Radioactive Rubble"
Again, there is no context given. For water, 1 cubic meter is exactly 1 ton. Concrete is 2.4 tons per cubic meter, but it isn't clear how dense the rubble is. I am guessing significantly less dense than non-rubble concrete. But let's assume this is about 500 Kilotons of rubble, how does that compare?
"Reports indicate that some coastal areas generated as much as 4.35 million metric tons of waste each from the disaster,"[1] (that's the Tsunami, not the meltdown)
So that's about 10 times that amount, from each of several/many(?) sites. How radioactive is the Fukushima rubble? The New York Times article doesn't say, but the one I found (which also mentions 500 Kilotons) says that they measured "133 Bq/kg, well below the limit of 8000 Bq/kq". So 80 times below the limit, and the limits are conservative, so they are just processing it with the "normal" rubble from elsewhere.
How much is 133 Bq/kg? Well, the Potassium inside the human body means that humans produce around 40-60 Bq/kg[2], or a total 4000 Bq per person. Coffee is 1000 Bq/kg. Coal ash is 2000 Bq/kg. 1 household smoke detector with Americanium is 30000 Bq (not per kg, per unit).[2] Bananas are 31 Bq/g, so significantly more radioactive![2], with a single typical Banana of 175g being equivalent to 40 kilos of that rubble. So the rubble is not really all that radioactive and not all that scary.
And so on and so on...
Anyway, I fully understand where you are coming from. Nuclear is scary and the reporting is so incredibly one-sided and innumerate that it is hard to believe just how slanted it is. It certainly took me a while, because I wasn't suspicious, if anything I suspected the media were under-reporting. They aren't.
[1] http://www.naturalnews.com/033949_radioactivity_Fukushima.ht...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
[3] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-...
2) Devastating tsunami
3) Crippling fire causing loss of power to all control circuitry.
Even with all that, the number of direct radiation casualties was zero. There are about six workers who got more than a lifetime allowed dose of radiation. They may have an increased cancer risk.
1) How many do you suppose would have died had it been a hydroelectric dam of similar capacity? (hint: a lot more than six)
2) Just how safe does something have to be?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
But there are many nuclear plants around the world that have operated with no problems. As I said, I'm no expert.
50 years of operation of hundreds of plants. We could have had a repeat of all of the accidents every year and it would still be one of the safest alternatives.
Heck, we could have Chernobyl every year, and even based on the current worst case estimates of reduced life expectancy and counting every one of them as a death, we'd still not compensate for 1 Banqiao failure, or more than 1-2 years worth of coal.
But we're not having a Chernobyl every year. What we are having is vast numbers of preventable deaths due to other types of power generation.
We're talking millions dead over the last 50 years due to other types of plants.
Specifically - "we could have Chernobyl every year ... we'd still not compensate for more than 1-2 years worth of coal"
If you look at what medicine deemed as safe, the limits were reduced every couple of years.
Chernobyl was extremely poorly engineered, Soviet Union style. Its major flaw was no containment vessel.
Even then, it took real effort to make it fail, and it was all totally unnecessary. It was probably the worst testing-related disaster in history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_co...
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Coal_mining_disasters
Carbon capture and storage technologies also lead to 50..91% increased electricity costs.
http://www.ekopolitan.com/climate/ccs-five-reports-realistic...
Clean coal and clean fission are arguably about as likely, and would be about as expensive.
Why bother, when you have solar?
Because solar is intermittent, and isn't practical at all in many parts of the world. The true environmental impact of nuclear is also arguably less, since solar requires a lot of space per watt produced by comparison.
Next-gen nuclear reactor designs from Thorcon Power, Terrestrial and others are very near to perfectly safe, and also produce much less long-term nuclear waste than current designs. There will be an ongoing need for clean, high-density electricity sources.
The solution to that is simple, use less power at night. I.e. don't make so much aluminum when there is no sun or wind. We could decide as a society to trade a few percent of our wealth for using much less coal and nuclear if we wanted (and if our society were organized in a rational fashion).
Also: don't heat with electricty, but use e.g. solar thermal or geothermal power.
Efficiency is great and should be encouraged. We still need increasing amounts of reliable, plentiful and cheap energy going forward. You may be willing to accept a diminishing standard of living, most are not.
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.
A long half-life means that the material is less radioactive. By definition.
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.
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.
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
The worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown. The amounts generated are small and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
As a comparison, how does coal waste compare to that?
"Coal ash – the waste material left after coal is burned – contains arsenic, mercury, lead, and over a dozen other heavy metals, many of them toxic."
http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/code-black/coal-as...
"The study found that levels of radioactivity in the ash were up to five times higher than in normal soil," https://phys.org/news/2015-09-radioactive-contaminants-coal-...
How much coal waste is produced per year? Is it small enough to deal with easily?
"According to the American Coal Ash Association's Coal Combustion Product Production & Use Survey Report, nearly 130 million tons of coal ash was generated in 2014."
https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics#03
Has any of the general public been killed though coal waste disasters? Lots of times:
http://www.catawbariverkeeper.org/issues/coal-ash-1/coal-ash...
NASA has estimated that using nuclear power has saved an estimated 1.8 million lives that would have been lost if the power has been replaced by fossil fuels: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...
(And yes, I know the people who oppose nuclear power usually will say they don't like coal and natural gas either, but we are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time. One of these three ways of generating electricity has much fewer health consequences than the other.)
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 radioactive to be eaten ). Coal, wind and solar never led to emergency evacuations. Coal, wind and solar cannot be used to make atomic bombs.
If coal plants had the same radiation rules as nuclear plants, they couldn't run.
I think you mean if nuclear plants had the same radiation output as coal plants, they would be required to shut down.
Edit: thanks for the downvotes, I realise now that I'm basically stating the same thing as OP.
Quite the double standard that coal plants are allowed to spew so much radiation when all other forms of power generation are held to a higher standard.
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.
Nowadays yes, but this wasn't always the case. The earliest Soviet reactors were open cycle and discharged directly into Lake Kyzyltash. [0]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1340225/Twin-towers-built-to...
And the initial design was 30 floors less.
The Fukushima plant had a wall to protect it from tsunami and the motors to keep the pumps working when there the electricity fails. The whole design however didn't cover that particular wave:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1388629/Japan-tsunam...
The tsunamis like that happened there "only once in a thousand years" so nobody (who made the executive decisions) expected that one.
Still there were the stone markers in Japan, many hundreds of years old, with the marking "Do not build your homes below this point!"
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html
"As time passes, people inevitably forget."
Burning coal for electricity generation has released in to the environment more radiation, heavy metals, and other pollutants than civil nuclear power could ever hope to.
It is fairly common that huge amounts get released. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascó_Nuclear_Power_Plant
How about Fukushima and Chernobyl. Do you have numbers to back up your claim?
However, you raise a good point with the Fukushima and Chernobyl examples. It's not hard to imagine that if we had, globally, built nuclear power plants as enthusiastically as we have coal power plants, there would likely have been a lot more serious incidents. It's a sobering thought for my usually rose-tinted view of nuclear.
While I could probably have found a more dramatic reference, this one[1] is a bit more calm saying that the risks of adverse health affects from radiation exposure from coal vs nuclear are, in both cases, very slim. It would seem, then, that coal would have other negative health affects before the radiation exposure aspect became a problem. You have to live extraordinarily close to either a coal or nuclear plant to have higher than background radiation exposure from either, under normal operating conditions.
1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
Another thing I like to point out is how much of a wildlife haven Chernobyl is compared to any moderate city. The fear that keeps the humans away, has transformed a "safe" dump into a paradise.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro...
:(
fearmongering works wonder against an uneducated population.
Ah the irony! It is the environmentalists themselves who are directly to blame for the situation we find ourselves in now. We could have relatively-carbon-free electricity today if they had supported nuclear power.
But, putting my tin-foil hat on for a minute, I am lead to believe that the anti-nuclear movement is actually perpetuated by the fossil-fuel industry. Or maybe my B12 dependant psychosis is playing up again.
Now I'm not sure what to do. At this point in time I believe drawing penises on the ballot paper provides the best value.
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.
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.
Good point. Q. Would the amount of energy generated by a solar/wind system outstrip energy used to maintain?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_in_fish#Origins_of_mer...
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 this time. But the nuclear industry has lost all trust and all right to demand anyone ever trusted them again.
Consider airliners. Airliners have been around for 80 years, and get substantially safer every decade. This is a statistical fact. Every crash is used as a learning experience and designs, procedures, and training is adjusted as a result.
There's no reason to believe that such does not apply to nuclear power stations.
You'd think that nuclear propulsion would be a natural choice for the biggest of the enormous cargo container ships that are currently burning millions of gallons of dirty, dirty bunker fuel instead.
Actually we do, technically, and the amount is trivial (and can be reused, though that isn't currently being done). Spent fuel is a political problem. In fact, last time I checked even just the radiation from coal power plants is greater than from nuclear plants.
> The exact same line was fed to us when Chernobyl was state of the art
Chernobyl was never state of the art and western reactors, which are much safer, are also of a design derived from military designs, not optimized for safety. Also, the negative health effects of coal and other energy sources are so much worse than even Chernobyl that it isn't funny.
Right. Chernobyl-style designs were rejected at a very early stage in the West.
That is being pretty charitable. A plant like Chernobyl would have been illegal to build in any other country.
Yes we do, we can reprocess most of it and then just store what's left - which is such a small amount it could just be buried and essentially forgotten about.
You blame the nuclear industry, I blame my own party, the Greens, and their relentless demonising of the one thing that could have reversed doubling of atmospheric CO2, and I forgot how many times sea C02 levels. And you and your anti-nuclear agitpop is pulling us further into this mess. Please educate yourself and stop being part of the problem.
> 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.
Thank god I don't live anywhere near a dam designed to collapse as part of normal operation.
- 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.
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 (< 1% global electricity)
Wind 150 (2% global electricity)
Hydro – global average 1,400 (16% global electricity)
Hydro – U.S. 5 (6% U.S. electricity)
Nuclear – global average 90 (11% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush)
Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
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.
While we may want to replace nuclear with a different power source in the future, there is enough uranium and thorium to last hundreds of thousands (or more likely millions) of years.
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 can be addressed through larger HVDC grids with a good energy mix and through storage technology, which is also improving rapidly. Meanwhile, nuclear has its own issues with the elements nowadays. Nuclear relies on huge amounts of freshwater. I've heard of nuclear plants that need to shut down in the summers now because of drought. It will become harder and harder to find locations where they can be built.
Finally, new fossil fuel plants built today are mostly gas, not coal. Gas also has its problems, but it has been a reasonable transition technology that is also losing ground now as energy storage technology is improving.
The idea that electricity should have a fixed rate 24/7 is obsolete.
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.
Nope, it is research from now, about an event in the 80s. These are long-term effects, so obviously there is a delay.
Yes, it emphatically is semantics. Semantics: the meaning of things, particularly words. That's important.
You probably meant "nit-picking", and I would suggest it was you who was engaging in nit-picking (though incorrectly) that this is outdated/irrelevant because it is from the past. So I see your incorrect nit-pick and raise you a correct nit-pick.
> I am arguing that...
Yes you are. Arguing, that is. And back then, you probably would have argued that shutting down that nuclear plant would have been a boon to health, because "evil/bad nuclear".
The thing is that this article is not about arguing about what you believe will/should happen, however strongly you believe that, but about what actually did happen.
> no longer automatically means more coal pollution.
It wasn't automatic back then either, just as it isn't automatic now. However, then and now the actual replacement is largely with coal, no matter what your preferences might be.
Germany: missing nuclear largely replaced with "new coal"
http://www.theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/328841/wh...
Japan: an industry savior? (The coal industry, mind you)
https://www.worldcoal.com/special-reports/13052015/japan-coa...
So your "arguments" don't hold water. Reality is different from what you think it should be.
Quibbling over semantics.
> Yes you are. Arguing, that is. And back then, you probably would have argued that shutting down that nuclear plant would have been a boon to health, because "evil/bad nuclear".
You're not only nit-picking over semantics, you're also making incorrect assumptions.
> Germany: missing nuclear largely replaced with "new coal" > http://www.theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/328841/wh....
A 2014 article with projections for 2013 based on the author's own calculations on a site run by a mysterious owner with no credentials. The projections were completely wrong, by the way, as you can see here: https://www.energy-charts.de/power_inst.htm
> Japan: an industry savior? (The coal industry, mind you) > https://www.worldcoal.com/special-reports/13052015/japan-coa....
Another shady source. I give you that if you shut down all reactors in a country with a large proportion of nuclear energy generation you will still be in a conundrum. Still, Japan made up for the gap almost entirely with natural gas, not coal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/03/11/japan...
"In 2000, Japan's coal demand was only slightly bigger than LNG consumption, around 60 million tonnes a year versus some 55 million tonnes for LNG, but gas use has now stalled while coal imports have nearly doubled since then."
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-japan-energy-demand-idUKKCN...
Also, the numbers for Germany are for "installed capacity", not for actual production.
If you look at actual production, "Braunkohle" went from 146 in 2010 (pre-Fukushima) to 160 in 2012 (post).
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/156695/umfrag...
But please keep believing what you believe.
Some questions arise though: Which coal power air pollutant is to blame for the birth weight decrease. Which coal pollution mitigation techniques[1] (which are probably now more common) were used by the coal plants?
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 increasing to offset the phase-out of nuclear energy.
Myself I'd prefer they would use that extra production to phase out coal first before shutting down their NPPs.
Purple is nuclear energy. Dark green is biomass, light blue is wind power, yellow is solar power
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.
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.
Of course it's an open market and the German expensive production such as gas turbines will not produce if cheaper power can be imported.
No wonder. They have PV on almost every roof. Most of them have the south facing part fully covered as well.
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 by now most of their operators recognize that their investments were failures and will probably never pay out.
It isn't all ideal in Germany, but overall it's going into the right direction (and the success of solar in many countries these days wouldn't have been possible without the early investments in Germany that brought the prices down).
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.
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.
> 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.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/graph.do?tab=graph&plugin=1...
Otherwise, the phasing-out of coal in Europe is looking pretty good, I'd say - they're looking to close the most polluting plants in Europe by 2031:
http://climateanalytics.org/files/coalphaseouteu-regulator.g...
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 this way right now, didn't Westinghouse just go belly up?
Literally every fucking topic about renewables/nuclear/coal ends up with the same content.
...the difference in birth weights between the two time
periods is roughly the difference in birth weights between
a baby born to a mother with a disadvantaged background
who received supplemental nutrition during pregnancy and a
baby born to a similar mother who didn't get that help.
Here seems to be an older version of the source, with power plant maps:
http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/environ_2015/seve...
Paywalled version:
http://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy201751
Infant vital statistics are drawn from county-level sources.
I can't help but wonder if this is confusing correlation with causation even if just a little.
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.
[1]http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/first-walk-away-safe-mo...
Initially I assumed these were actually coal supporters doing some devious concern trolling to delay the roll out of alternatives that are viable in the short term but I've come to accept that it's just another weird nerd-war like Emacs Vs Vi, except with deadlier real life consequences.
NASA has estimated that using nuclear power has saved an estimated 1.8 million lives that would have been lost if the power has been replaced by fossil fuels: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...
We are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time. When you compare nuclear, coal and natural gas, one of these three ways of generating electricity has much fewer health consequences than the others. Lives depend on having reliable, affordable electricity and as we transition the vehicle fleet to electric, we will need more electricity, not less.
"almost certainly would have been supplied by fossil fuels instead (overwhelmingly coal)"
So they've established, coal is really bad. That would be a really powerful argument for nuclear if people didn't already know that. How about running the numbers for nuclear plus as much natural gas as necessary to follow load, vs renewables plus natural gas? That seems like the real question. (Numbers here being cost, time, C02, health impacts, deaths etc. because deaths are acceptable if we could have saved enough money to save many more lives elsewhere).
Yes some people know that, but obviously many people don't or politicians wouldn't shut down all their nuclear power plants while continuing to run coal. Burning coal when there are alternatives is a danger not just to the thousands who will die that year, but to future generations who have to deal with the CO2.
>...How about running the numbers for nuclear plus as much natural gas as necessary to follow load, vs renewables plus natural gas? That seems like the real question. (Numbers here being cost, time, C02, health impacts, deaths etc. because deaths are acceptable if we could have saved enough money to save many more lives elsewhere).
Solar/wind have such low capacity factors that without grid storage at best they can be used as a supplement to a load following base load power source. The people who are afraid of nuclear power suggest to use natural gas as the base load. The CO2 from burning natural gas is less than coal and it doesn't emit mercury or the other particulates and doesn't have a waste issue like coal does. Unfortunately for those who care about climate change, there are inevitable methane releases from fracking and from distribution of natural gas and those are now known to be worse than previously thought:
>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25.
https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-wa...
The death rate from natural gas accidents is also much higher than from nuclear energy. There is no defense in depth or a slow progression of accident - one unexpected spark and natural gas is an explosive.
In the San Bruno natural gas explosion 8 members of the general public died and eyewitnesses reported the initial blast "had a wall of fire more than 1,000 feet high". Can you imagine the media coverage if this had been a nuclear accident?? Just because the media finds such stories uninteresting, doesn't mean we should ignore these deaths - that was 8 more people that died in Fukushima. No one can claim that natural gas is safer than nuclear power and unfortunately using natural gas may be as bad for the climate as burning coal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion
From a previous comment someone made, here are the death totals for generating power:
Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr)
Coal – U.S. 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity)
Natural Gas 4,000 (22% global electricity)
Solar (rooftop) 440 (< 1% global electricity)
Wind 150 (2% global electricity)
Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity)
While the death rate for solar farms should be much less than rooftop and the price of solar cells continues to drop, the costs for land do not:
>...To build the equivalent of a 1,000-Mw nuclear plant, a solar park would require 11,000 acres of PV solar panels and a wind farm would need 50,000 acres of wind turbines. By contrast, Diablo Canyon is able to produce twice as much power (2300 Mw) in a footprint of approximately 545 acres.
https://www.pge.com/includes/docs/pdfs/shared/edusafety/syst...
The usual response I have heard is to say that we should put all the solar farms in the southwest and rebuild our grid system to handle have the power source thousands of miles away. Unclear how many billions of dollars this would cost (and how feasible this could ever be and the terrorist potential of having so many people dependent on such long distance power lines) but this cost should be added to the cost of solar if this is what people think should be done.
And as far as using natural gas to be the base load for solar/wind, nuclear in France is load following, there isn't a reason it can't be in other places.
It's not the capacity factors of solar and wind that make them not able to follow flexible demand. Just like it's not the capacity factor of nuclear that also makes it unable to follow flexible demand.
Is it really just because it's a lower number than the alternatives, people just latch onto that and won't let go?
Some nuclear plants have some level of load following capability (though the cost are fixed so this can be less economic than a nuclear plant that runs 100%) but still not enough to precisely match demand, so what are you going to fill the rest in with? You've just explained how natural gas is horrible and causes explosions so I guess it won't be that.
"Base load" is another weird chimera, but that's not what I was suggesting natural gas be used for except in the short term to help phase out coal as quickly as possible. It has a medium term role in rapidly responding to demand to fill the gaps and has a similar potential role in a nuclear dominated grid. France appears to use natural gas and hydro in this role, both of which are regularly demonised by nuclear fans, which seems a bit self-contradictory to me.
Of course people are interested in the capacity factor of any power source - a utility planner would be crazy not to take that into consideration. In an interview, Bill Gates pointed out a real world implications of this: "..It’s kind of ironic: Germany, by installing so much rooftop solar, has it that both their coal plants and their rooftop solar are available in the summer, and the price of power during the day actually goes negative—they pay people to take it. Then at night the only source is the coal, and because the energy companies have to recover their capital costs, they either raise the price because they’re not getting any return for the day, or they slowly go bankrupt." He adds that clean energy advocates: "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."
>…You've just explained how natural gas is horrible and causes explosions so I guess it won't be that.
That comes off as a rather flippant comment. Are you saying that you think natural gas is safer and has less effects on the climate than nuclear power or are you trying to say that the safety and the effects on climate change by using natural gas don't matter?
>…France appears to use natural gas and hydro in this role, both of which are regularly demonised by nuclear fans, which seems a bit self-contradictory to me.
I haven't noticed anyone here "demonizing" hydro or natural gas - please give an example of someone spreading false information.
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...