The 2008 coal ash disaster in Kingston, Tennessee
oxfordamerican.org
oxfordamerican.org
That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated. Coal contains all sorts of stuff besides organic matter. When you burn it, the non organic stuff remains. It will typically contain metals, heavy metals, and other stuff that isn't good for you. That's also the reason coal smog isn't good for people. You don't want that stuff in your lungs. It's similarly bad as smoking is.
The ash needs to go somewhere and the standard practice with a lot of coal plants has been to just dump it outside, try to contain it with some infrastructure, and not worry too much about it. Nobody really cared. Except now a lot of these plants are going out of business and the the toxic waste remains. And most of these plants needed cooling water so they tend to be close to water ways. So, there's that.
Do the higher temperatures and pressures in power station liberate more of the harmful stuff, or is it basically as bad?
UK homes were commonly coal heated as late as the 1980s, a few still are. Its contribution to air pollution was well-understood, but this has got me wondering about ash exposure, as people would routinely handle the stuff with basically nothing in terms of protective gear.
Yet nuclear despite inherently being much less harmful weren’t historically that well tolerated.
https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preserv...
And I don't remember the exact number, but I'm sure I read somewhere that all of world's highly radioactive nuclear waste(spent fuel) could fit in several olympic swimming pools - while this coal power plant produced 1000 tonnes(!!!!) a day(!!!) of coal soot. The scale is just completely incomparable. But people look at Chernobyl or Fukishima and think that the exclusion zones created by those events are inherently a feature of nuclear power - when they are not.
And of course Chernobyl couldn’t have happened in the US, France, Britain or any other country run by extremely incompetent halfwits.
Hiroshima is a city of 2 million people even though it was the epicenter of a nuclear explosion.
People don't die from flooding because of dams, people die from flooding despite dams. Deaths from flooding would not vanish (or even decrease) if we stopped using hydroelectricity/building dams.
Hiroshima was not significantly contaminated by radioactive material because the bomb dropped on it was not designed to do so (compare later speculative Cobalt-60 based designs), and the low amount of fissile material made incidental contamination a non-issue.
wat
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In August 1975, the Banqiao Dam and 61 others throughout Henan, China, collapsed following the landfall of Typhoon Nina.
The dam collapse created the third-deadliest flood in history which affected 12,000 km2 (3 million acres) with a total population of 10.15 million, including around 30 cities and counties, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 26,000 to 240,000.
The flood also caused the collapse of 5 million to 6.8 million houses
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This was literally caused by dam failures. And yet somehow we still build hydroelectric plants.
By your flawed logic we should've stopped building them years ago. Because multiple human deaths, destruction and ecological disaster are literally built into every single dam.
Just in 2018 the Oroville Dam failure caused the evacuation of 180 000 people. That's more people than were evacuated due to Fukushima.
That dam was built to prevent and mitigate damage during floods (besides producing electricity).
Was it built to insufficient specifications? Absolutely! But building less dams does NOT lead to less victims during flooding, because the flooding then just happens completely uncontrolled. Spoiler alert: "Just not build any dams" doesn't do shit against flooding if you get 1m of rainfall within a day, and the people just die from starvation/infectious diseases instead (which is the source of >50% of the victims in the Banqiao incident, too), possibly in even greater numbers, because you have flooding everywhere.
> Just in 2018 the Oroville Dam failure caused the evacuation of 180 000 people. That's more people than were evacuated due to Fukushima.
Are you suggesting that we would have to evacute less people during rain if we did not build dams? Because that is the critical flaw in your argument that I'm pointing out.
Please educate yourself on how hydroelectric dams are constructed.
And a large number of other dams are built not to prevent flooding, but to create water reservoirs and/or stem river flows.
> Are you suggesting that we would have to evacute less people during rain if we did not build dams?
In the absolute vast majority of hydroelectric dams, yes.
Following your logic, we should immediately stop because human deaths and devastation are built in to the dams
Are you suggesting that more people would have died had we replaced all coals plants with nuclear decades ago?
Because obviously the opposite is true.
Damns reduce the amount of people who drown during natural floods. Nuclear power reduces the amount of pollution and CO2 emissions (since people are just as likely to stop living in flood plains as accepting not having access to electricity)
Absolutely not, and I'm not sure what I said that made you assume that.
On that topic: I do believe that the economics for nuclear power are bad, will get worse comparatively and were never really good in the first place.
I think there is a good reason that basically only a single nation on the planet went "full nuclear" for electric power (France), which they achieved basically thanks to ignoring the cost and pushing it as strategical measure instead (=> energy indepencence, specifically from oil).
If everyone around them had went full nuclear the (economical) situation would be even worse (because everyone would compete for hydro/peak power and/or forced into operating plants in load-following mode).
In conclusion: I think massive nuclear buildout would have made a lot of sense to mitigate climate change 30 years ago (but that was not really a realistic option then), and jumping on that bandwagon is no longer worth it. Just going for wind, solar, batteries and improved grid connectivity simply makes more sense now almost everywhere in my view.
The floods are significantly worse because of the dams.
Water may naturally pool in areas but it doesn't pool to the degree necessary for hydropower which is why the dam is built. This causes 2 problems.
1) The construction of the dam will flood a ton of land upstream of the dam. If you've been to the beach you'll notice that the water doesn't need to go up or down very much for a ton of area to be flooded so in order to get that extra space.
2) You've now stored a ton of water upstream that will make any dam failure worse than a natural flood because you have all the rain from the rainstorm and the water stored before the rainstorm that's in the flood.
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However, I'm still pro-hydro because uh, electricity is nice and you can mitigate flood issues better than cancer.
No they are not.
Dams mitigate damage during floods because you have buffer capacity and control over outflow. Without dams, you get uncontrolled flooding every single time that there is a lot of rain. With dams, you only get uncontrolled flooding on dam failure, which tends to happen less often than... heavy rain.
> The construction of the dam will flood a ton of land upstream of the dam. If you've been to the beach you'll notice that the water doesn't need to go up or down very much for a ton of area to be flooded so in order to get that extra space.
Yes, large water reservoirs need large amounts of space. That is a completely different argument from flood risk, though, and those costs are negotiated on before the dam is even built.
They certainly do if there is a catastrophic failure in the dam itself.
Dam collapses due to human error are much, much more frequent than nuclear and much more deadly.
Nuclear plants, on the other hand, protect a negligible amount of lives during floods, because they make for impractical shelters :P
In my expeience, comparison in "lethality" between hydroelectricity and nuclear power are only ever made by people that are uninformed on flood management and/or want to push an agenda, and I wanted to provide a counterpoint to that.
And yet the largest human release of radioactive material in the environment comes from coal ash.
That seems unlikely to be causing any problems, especially without a source to gauge how political the studies are. We're talking populations that live close to the middle of nowhere, limited education, limited employment opportunities and questionable infrastructure. They're not going to get health and wellness outcomes as good as more urban populations.
This is a misleading take on heavy metal mining in general.
Mining is not primarily harmful to local environments because it leads to more of the harmful extracted material; it is harmful because ore concentration is often rather low, and the extraction process produces millions of tons of toxic mineral slurry (=> more harmful than the ore), which has to be disposed somewhere (and preferably not in groundwater, which is the cheapest place to get rid of it).
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that mining hazards are the showstopper for nuclear energy, but this ("harmful ore was already there before it is mined") is the wrong dismissal for that argument.
He didn't articulate what his problem with the situation was; it is a remarkably vague comment for an area that is extremely well understood. What exactly are these harms? Especially when considering that living remotely from a city is harmful to health outcomes they probably aren't particularly interesting.
Gathering the materials for solar panels is harmful and you don't see anyone seriously sitting down to have a whinge about it. Industrial society has costs. News at 11.
This might be slightly overstated, but uranium at ore concentrations of 0.1% and under is mined commercially right now. Safely disposing of toxic byproducts of Uranium ore extraction and -concentration is already non-trivial in sufficiently regulated industrialized nations, situation in Kazakhstan or Africa is very obviously worse (or are you actually arguing that the operators there are gonna restore groundwater quality, and dispose of toxic byproducts in a permanently safe way at their own cost?)
> What exactly are these harms?
Again. The harm comes primarily from groundwater contamination, which is very hard to prevent because you are basically pumping some leaching agent into the ground, which is alreay invariably gonna affect groundwater quality. Even if that did not, you then need to dump slurry/brine byproducts from extraction somewhere (and the next river is gonna be the cheapest place).
> Gathering the materials for solar panels is harmful and you don't see anyone seriously sitting down to have a whinge about it. Industrial society has costs. News at 11.
People whine about environmental impact of lithium/rare earth mining bascially every single time that electrification of vehicles comes up (or wind turbines), primarily to then make bad arguments in favor of fossil fuels...
Your mental picture of the process is a bit off: Uranium mining happens mostly by pumping a leaching agent (typically some acid) into the ground, and extracting it elsewhere via wells. This is very obviously not helpful for groundwater quality.
And you are not extracting just Uranium (or even other "desirable" heavy metals)-- most of the radioactivity (>80%) is in economically uninteresting decay products, and you just want/need to get rid of those.
I could say that humans breath out CO2 and therefore are significant contributors to global pollution. It is not a real answer unless an order of magnitude estimate is attached. You're just noting that generic heavy metals mining pollutes; which is true but with Uranium mining it turns out pretty quickly that the harms are the most minor of any energy production method because the volumes of material are so small.
I don't think the anti-nuclear crowd wants to do that because as soon as they do they're probably going to end up looking foolish. There are situations like our Kazakhstani friend in this thread bought up where the uranium production turns out to be a relatively small component of a much more significant industrial pollution picture. They don't paint a compelling picture for avoiding nuclear power though, and misleading statements like pointing out that mines leave most local material behind are what they have to fall back on.
What materials cause less damage than uranium in the extraction process? IN absolute terms there aren't many. Most materials we require orders of magnitude more of the stuff than we need tonnes of uranium.
When things like uranium are trapped in rocks they are typically immobile and not bioavailable. In most ground strata things things can be stabally held for millions of years. When humans mine the area we can cause what would take erosion millions of years in hours. For example blasting and mechanical splitting of rocks then loading them with equipment causes huge amounts of dust. Also in the process of exposing 'fresh' rock we cause sulfate materials to be exposed to water creating acids that mobilize metals.
It most definitely is causing problems, but you will not hear about it because: a) nobody gives a flying fuck about us, especially our own government, and b) very little research is being done because nobody important is interested in doing it.
Most of the money made by destroying our health and environment goes to Switzerland (i.e. Glencore), and they have no incentive to care about us.
I read one study by a grad student who managed to escape from here to a French university, and she used a scanning electron microscope to find very high levels of heavy metal pollution -- including uranium -- in tree leaves all around the plant. That's about it.
And here's a personal anecdote of what the reality is here: when I was in college, I was working for a few months with a group of researchers that were testing novel techniques of reducing particulate pollution from a local coal power plant. While we did see some positive results, the emission values (both before and after) were significantly higher than what is permitted by government emission standards, about 8-10 times as much. So we were "asked" (and complied -- you don't really say no to these things) to reduce numbers to acceptable levels and publish that. This makes for a pretty piss-poor study if you ask me, it's not really science.
edit: and here's this beauty at close range:
The only actual evidence you're proffering is that there is heavy metals pollution "all around" the processing plant. That isn't much to go on. What sort of distances are we talking about? What does "very high" mean?
I think this is the study; I read it as a proper full-length thesis, but it also seems to have been condensed into a short paper:
https://sci-hub.se/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...
I'll look around a bit more for the original.
I wouldn't choose to live there, I give you that. Not convinced it is relevant to nuclear power debate though. The studiers seem to be drawing attention to the toxicity of the lead-zinc plant.
This goes to the core of my complaint against the anti-nuclear people. I think ignoring the Ag, As, Ba. Be, Co, Cr, Sb & Zn - and all the other elements in the study - and myopically focusing on the U is really misunderstanding what an industrial district does. They are unhealthy places.
Nations like France and formerly Germany have or had pretty sensible situations when it came to nuclear power.
More precisely: The standard EPA recommended practice would have been to dump the dried fly ash in a lined landfill (to prevent poisoning groundwater). This is also what whas done in the cleanup.
Allowing the disaster to occur was a clear case of insufficient regulations combined with the sort of cost-saving sloppiness that is to be expected from private companies.
Those regulations were amended and risks at other potential disaster sites were mitigated (which cost billions), finishing in 2022.
I'd like to note here that muntzing government regulations in a style that Musk advocates for ("you can always reinstate some regulations later if you run into problems") is not only irresponsible, but also impractical; it takes decades to implement regulatory changes and switching is very expensive.
But perhaps this latency is itself a problem that should be solved? I understand that there are good reasons for regulation to be a slow process, but it doesn't have to (and probably shouldn't!) take decades to iterate on.
And if regulation could iterate faster, some of your objections to the approach go away, do they not? This would also come with the added benefit of reducing the efficacy of regulatory capture.
Thank you for sharing those articles.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43357447
"Prioritizing coal ash program to expedite state permit reviews and update coal ash regulations (CCR Rule)"
> How could this happen? Ansol wondered.
I wish it had dug into this. These sort of things don't just happen. There must be accountability, and journalists are who are supposed to start that process. This was clearly an environmental travesty of monumental proportions. How do we grapple with the fact this sort of thing is apparently just allowed to continue happening?
In 1966, something similar (although with a mining waste dump, instead of ash) happened in Aberfan, Wales (in the UK) with a more tragic outcome[1].
The question should be whether this occurred due to ignorance or ignoring the lessons of history, which rhymes if not repeats.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/nov/17/televis...
I couldn't find anything conclusive, but found this from 2015:
> Storage, whether in lagoons, silos or landfills, rather than re-use, is the default solution for coal ash management in most countries. The UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) estimates that, of the eight million tonnes of coal ash produced in the country each year, half is re-used, while over 300 million tonnes have been stored in lagoons or silos since the 1950s. [...] The American Coal Ash Association (ACAA) reports on US coal ash production and use each year. In 2013, 53 million tonnes of coal ash were generated, of which 23 million tonnes were re-used. Of the unused portion, the EPA says 36 per cent was stored in landfills, and 21 per cent in wet storage facilities. [...] Some countries are doing better, though: for example, the Netherlands recycles 100 per cent of its coal ash because landfill is not allowed in the country. In Germany, where around 10 million tonnes of coal ash are produced per year, around 97 per cent is re-used, with the rest stored only on a temporary basis. According to the European Coal Combustion Products Association (Ecoba), of the 48 million tonnes of coal ash produced in 15 EU countries in 2010 (the latest available figures), 13.8 million tonnes were re-used.
https://www.powerengineeringint.com/coal-fired/managing-coal...
The "re-use" is by processing it into materials which can be used for various construction and materials manufacturing processes. There's lots of other fascinating details about coal ash in there. Wikipedia is pretty good too:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_coal_slurry_sp...
At the time, the construction of new coal-fired power plants was a controversial topic in many locations in Germany. (Around 30 new coal power plants were planned at times. Some were stopped, but 10 of them were actually build, which is bad enough.) I also tried to raise awareness about this incident in Tennessee, trying to have a look at the environmental issues of coal on a more international level. But it didn't generate much interest.
> Another lawsuit was filed in Federal Court by 15 Beaver County, Pennsylvania residents and 36 West Virginia residents who accused FirstEnergy of contaminating groundwater and leaking hazardous waste, including arsenic, sulfates, sodium, calcium, magnesium and chloride[2] into local waterways and groundwater systems.