Comment by kbutler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbutler | Hacker News Reader

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1. per kWH. Nuclear is very, very safe. Global avg 90 deaths per trillion kwh, vs coal 100,000 deaths per trillion kwh. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d... If you really want to be surprised, nuclear is even safer than solar https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi... (Note that residential rooftop solar is crazy risky as well as inefficient - all those installers up on random roofs...)

2. Coal requires lots more fuel so lots more digging up and transportation, spent fuel is dissipated via atmosphere, as well as solid ash.

3. Concentrated harm vs dispersed harm. still coal. Note that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is great for wildlife - it is basically an environmental preserve, since humans (the largest impact on wildlife & environment) are largely excluded.

4. Focus on "nuclear vs CO2". If you're serious about global warming, nuclear is the only viable technology.

5. Storage and cleanups - there's a lot more for coal than you think. Coal byproducts are one of the largest industrial waste streams. https://www.epa.gov/coalash/frequent-questions-about-2015-co...

Nuclear vs coal is like airplane crashes vs car crashes. Airplane accidents make the news because they are unusual and affect many people in a single incident, even though car crashes kill (and injure) far more people every year (per mile traveled).

The fact that you know the names Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island (probably?) should help you realize how SAFE nuclear is - the exceptions become scare stories for decades.

>If you're serious about global warming, nuclear is the only viable technology.

This is simply untrue. Overprovisioned renewables can get us to the point where the few times gas peakers are needed becomes negligible. This is the false "binary choice" that the other comment was pointing out.

"For the US to be powered exclusively by wind power it would require 26,619,401 acres of land, an area nearly equivalent to the state of Tennessee." https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf (wind farm size, not windmill size)

The area of California is 105 million acres, so cover 1/4 of the area of California in wind farms.

Urban land in the US is about 70 million acres (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/major-land-uses/major...), so this would be another 3rd the amount of urban sprawl of all cities and towns in the country.

Solar is a little bit better - only 16,393,234 acres, or 1/6 of California, but you can't really do agriculture on that land like you could with wind farms.

And this is without overprovisioning or increasing electricity use to replace gasoline.

Do you consider either of those options viable? What overprovisioning factor are you going to shoot for?

I don't think it's just a binary choice: I think it's a blended choice, but you've got to have a heavy reliance on nuclear if you want to dramatically cut CO2 emissions.

> Overprovisioned renewables

Requiring far more investment.

> per kWH. Nuclear is very, very safe

Then again, per land area wasted , nuclear is 23 Km2 per year vs ... something tiny? Plus the comparison with coal only is unfair.

> 4. Focus on "nuclear vs CO2". If you're serious about global warming, nuclear is the only viable technology.

Here the question is how to remove excess CO2 without destroying the rest of the planet.

A lot of coal is strip-mined, which damages large amounts of land.

And let us not forget about towns like Centralia which had to be abandoned (by nearly all residents) due to an underground coal fire that has now been burning for 57 years.

https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years...

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania

That had nothing to do with coal mining, per se, though. The spark was set off in a hole in the ground made by previous mining, yes, but it was an entirely-untapped coal vein that caught fire, and basically anything could have caught it on fire if it was ever exposed to surface air. (A meteorite impact, or earthquake fissure, or sinkhole collapse, could have made a similar crater and exposed the coal vein, for example.)

Centralia is more of a weird natural disaster. It's essentially a slow-motion, underground forest fire. And, like most forest fires, while usually a human with a match is the proximal cause, if the human wasn't there, nature would still have supplied a spark eventually.

Coal seam fires aren't particularly rare, and while they can occur "naturally", almost all of the thousand or so burning around the world at any given time (some for months, some for centuries) are explicitly linked to mining.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire

Sure, all the ones we know about today. It's a bit of an anthropic argument, though. We only know about the coal seams that have survived long enough for us to find them; and, almost universally, we've chosen to exploit the seams we've found. That leaves two questions unanswered:

• What would the statistical yearly probability of a coal-seam fire be for seams we find, check up on, but never mine? (We know of a few seams in protected areas, but I don't think we know of enough to have any statistical power. Also, the natural catching-fire rate might be, say, one per thousand years, which would be a bit like the pitch-drop experiment in its requirements, yet would still mean that coal seams catch fire pretty much "as soon as" they reach the surface, in geological time.)

• More interestingly: how many coal-seam fires have happened historically in the Earth's 4.2 billion years being around, that finished and burned out all the coal, and now there's just a cave there? Or ex-cave sedimentary layer, given that these caves tend to collapse? Can we tell when such a cave/layer was previously a coal seam? (I assume so, because soot, but can pressure-treated soot be differentiated from other kinds of naturally-occurring mineral striae?)

Hell, a lot of coal in Appalachia is extracted with mountaintop removal. They literally plow the tops of mountains into adjacent valleys.

It's not permanent though, the land is reclaimed after mining

Oh they rebuild those mountains?

Coal and nuclear (and natural gas) are about the same land use area footprint (https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf graph on last page).

Solar (3x), wind (5x), hydro (25x) are much higher land use.

Note that resource extraction use is considered temporary (and in the US, companies are required to pay for restoration, per the link above). Wind uses a large area, but agricultural use can proceed at the same time.

We currently have no viable CO2 removal technology. Nuclear power has no chance of destroying the planet (or even the biosphere).

> Here the question is how to remove excess CO2 without destroying the rest of the planet.

Nature already scrubs CO2 and actually thrives on the elevated amounts; reducing production means nature will have a chance to catch up. That is, assuming we've not already reached a catastrophic tipping point where e.g. algae (responsible for most CO2 sequestration) die from the heat and the CO2 sequestered in permafrost is released.

> Concentrated harm vs dispersed harm. still coal. Note that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is great for wildlife

Let's remove humans from Earth completely and all the environmental problems will be solved.

I tend to agree with your other arguments.

I think the point was just that it didn't leave that zone a barren inhospitable wasteland, not that we should count that as a plus.

You're not wrong; the best way to fight climate change is population decrease (and therefore consumption decrease), but that'll require some serious dystopian measures - population control (like China's strict child birth laws), inaction (do not help in case of natural disasters, famine), genocide, etc. And that's probably not a guarantee either.

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