Fossil fuel heating is _extremely_ polluting, and really costing the population months, up to years of their life.
But it's a silent killer, so let's dramatize fantasy nuclear accidents instead.
But it's a silent killer, so let's dramatize fantasy nuclear accidents instead.
If you're burning gas, you're burning it either at the perfect fuel/air ratio or maybe just a little lean. You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out.
If you're piling up coal in a stove you're getting all sorts of crap out of the chimney, including radioactive dust.
It's one of the reasons that cars have been fitted with catastrophic converters. These remove the CO and HC by reacting it with what little excess oxygen there is in the exhaust stream to turn it into carbon dioxide and water, and at the same time produce massive amounts of nitrogen oxides. It reduces the efficiency by quite a bit but that's okay because it's a tiny effect compared to turning a huge chunk of Africa into a toxic hellscape to mine the palladium and rhodium the catalyst uses.
We'd have incredibly clean cities if we ran vehicles on propane instead of petrol, and in the UK there was a big push to do this about 25-30 years ago. Obviously this got a lot of pushback from the banks and car manufacturers, because it wasn't selling people enough debt. Don't adapt your existing car to run on clean fuel that's mostly burnt as production waste! Sell your dirty polluting petrol car that only gets 38MPG and buy this nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel that gets an incredible 39MPG! And all at only 14.7% APR!
Profit before the environment, as always.
Thankfully many new cars are Chinese EVs and most people are installing solar panels, and it doesn't seem to be environmentally driven at all, just economics.
And we have a lot of traffic, regular traffic jams. The average age of a typical car is older than 10 years, according to government data. Most of them are used cars with 100k miles (or more) on them imported from western Europe or the US.
Still, the difference in particulates in summer vs winter is literally hundreds of times.
Nice one. Anyway three-way catalytic converters also convert NOx to N2 and O2. It would be quite bad if they wouldn't.
> You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out.
No, you still get small amounts of the bad (acutely toxic) stuff too. This point is important - whether it's home cooking on gas, gas heating or ICEs running on unicorn farts, there will still be byproducts from imperfect burning. The only real way out is to turn off the fire.
If you bring out the paper on how cooking with gas fills your house with toxic smoke and the only safe way to cook is an induction stove, I'll show you why it's utter bunk. The TL;DR of it though is that induction stoves emit far more combustion products than gas stoves, if you pick your operating conditions carefully.
You won't since it is our direct experience that replacing a gas stove with induction improved our breathing. But nice try.
How often do you cook in a completely sealed airtight box?
https://publications.tno.nl/publication/34641471/zD0Xiz/TNO-...
For the industrial scale fossil fuel furnaces this problem is solved already (they are obviously still bad because of their huge CO2 emissions but that's a different problem).
(Note: I specifically say for the local. I'm not talking about global CO2 levels here. That's a different topic.)