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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

> Our scenario of removing nuclear power results in compensation by coal, gas and oil, resulting in increases in PM2.5 and ozone that lead to an extra 5,200 annual mortalities.

They assume they'll be replaced with fossil fuels. So really the title should be "burning more fossil fuels will increase air pollution".

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Renewables are growing, but not at the rate people often assume. Natural gas is by far the fastest growing energy source in the US by total output.

Here's a chart of net energy generation in the US by source: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...

That was true for the first 15 or so years of this century, it's no longer true as Wind and Solar have caught up and have been neck and neck in added output.

The last couple of years are noisy (gas actually went down and coal bounced back up one year) but the long term trend is for wind and solar to continue to extend their lead.

edit: to be clear, because this is a little ambigous

> Natural gas is by far the fastest growing energy source in the US by total output.

Gas is still the biggest energy source for electricity in the US by far, but it's not the fastest growing by far. Definitely not in percentage terms but also recently, not in absolute change either.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...

Even so, replacing fission reactors (negligible air pollution) with a mix of wind, solar, and natural gas will still probably increase air pollution. Of course, there are arguments that this is an acceptable tradeoff for cost or safety reasons.

From the data you cited, between 2020 and 2022, in terms of thousand megawatthours per year:

Natural gas increased 62,675 from 1,626,790 to 1,689,465.

Wind increased 96,874 from 337,938 to 434,812.

Utility-scale Solar increased 56,399 from 89,199 to 145,598

And the deployment of solar seems to be rapidly picking up speed.

Why not just "increasing air pollution will increase air pollution"?

You can't just put solar or wind power generation anywhere you want, because solar needs sun and wind needs wind.

Yes, I know, it's a wild concept.

So, in order to shut down Nuclear, looks like the best alternative is to replace them with fossil fuels because there's no good alternative with renewables.

Because probably those nuclear plants are in places where the sun doesn't shine and wind doesn't blow?

Not unreasonable given that renewable capacity is already growing at breakneck speed. For example, Germany upped its use of coal recently as natural gas became less available after shutting down nuclear plants before their designed end of life.

With regulators looking to tip the scales against non-renewables for emissions reasons, there is a huge push on to rehabilitate nuclear as a pragmatic solution to the forecast storage and base load issues over the next 50 (ish) years while we build out renewables. Proponents say modern nuclear reactors are net-better than coal and opponents point to the tail risk. Personally, I am pro nuclear but I certainly see the opposing viewpoint. I think it’s a tricky issue because humans are wired for identification of harms like tigers or 3000 people suddenly dying in a catastrophe. It’s much harder to grasp tail risk harms like 5200 excess deaths from pollution and harder still to turn that into action.

Solar and wind will also increase death count.

It could very well increase the rate of casualties (with people falling off roofs when installing solar, for example) as well as fatality rate... though I'm not sure if that takes into account casualty/fatality rates for uranium mining, which is something I'm too unfamiliar with to make any quantitative staatements.

I'm not sure why this is downvoted, it's actually correct. Solar panels are quite often put on roofs of buildings, and falling off buildings causes deaths. Wind turbines are about a dangerous as you think they would be, and especially offshore ones can get iffy. Solar and wind are not really any worse overall than communication towers, etc, but they are still worse than nuclear, as nuclear requires many fewer installations.

Perhaps, but by an amount that is negligible when compared with fossil fuels:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

But not when compared to nuclear power (same source)

That's completely unfair, much of the content of the study is determining which sources would fill the gap. That's not an assumption.

If they calculate that the gap would be filled with mostly fossil when new generation is overwhelmingly renewable, and building new renewables is cheaper than running existing coal plants, then they've made a mistake.

Specifically, it looks like they're using the grid makeup as of 2015 to calculate what would be used if nuclear disappeared overnight.

Mathematically, taking nuclear generation that already exists offline while there still exist fossil fuel burning plants is increasing emissions. Any additional renewable capacity could have displaced coal and gas instead.

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