I've seen estimates in the US of 10-20,000 annually depending on the source. e.g. [2], [3].
As someone who lives in a city state so small that the coal-fired power stations are literally next door to housing, I too wish there was more attention given to this.
[1] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international...
[2] http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/coal-p...
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/study-air-pollution-cause...
PDF paper: http://lae.mit.edu/wordpress2/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/US-...
(Agreeing, needless to say)
Clearly, the public is more motivated by a move to solar, which actually appears safe whatever its real overall costs would be.
The problem is that while nuclear power may be potentially have the best cost-benefit of any power source, economics and human psychology seem to imply that nuclear power as it will appear is going to be visibly dangerous something human psychology finds less desirable than the poisonous and costly status quo (see evolutionary game theory etc).
Engineers ... love to solve logistical problems and push their solutions on humans, whether these solve the human's problems or not.
Honestly, I'm getting optimistic enough these days to think solar may be ramping up fast enough that we couldn't kill coal any faster with nuclear; by the time we built up our nuclear capacity significantly the solar would already be ready to replace it.
(Ignoring the fact that natural gas has already been stabbing coal furiously in the chest for several years now.)
Over what time horizon?
The problem with Nuclear Fission is that it leaves behind waste that is no longer be put to any constructive use but...
1) Must be stored securely for decades, since it can be used in dirty bombs. 2) Must be stored safely for centuries/millennia, since it can leak in the environment an make a large area unsuitable for human dwelling over time frames way longer than any (most) of our current institutions have been around (and thus there is no guarantee that knowledge about the risks will be preserved).
This pretty much rules out any private, for-profit entity. The risk of their owners realizing the commercial benefits upfront and then disbanding the corporation without assuming the cost of cleanup is simply too high for this to be even considered from the point of view of the public good.
I am willing to give governments the benefit of doubt concerning requirement #1. They already have to deal with this type of problems and have the know how to do it, but the legal framework must be defined very clearly to prevent some demagogue from abjuring of commitments taken 20 years ago in the name of some pie-in-the-sky scheme. For requirement #2, it is impossible to be certain. Changes of regime do happen, and it would be unwise to expect any particular government to stay around for more than a couple of centuries.
There is only one institution known to me to have a proven record of muddling through and even waxing during uncertain times, (more or less) committing to a mission over millennia. And you can add knowledge preservation over dark ages as the cherry on top of the cake. So I guess you can have your nuclear power plan, and enjoy a relative certainty that it will continue to be taken care of, for as long as it needs to be, if you are willing to let the Catholic Church manage and operate it.
Coal power plants kill ten times as many people every year when functioning as designed.
FWIW I once had dinner with an architect of one of the early nuclear plants. They had been lied to about the prospects of a solution to waste disposal and no longer considered it a sensible approach.
On the other hand, it's also easy to overstate the magnitude of a disaster. To the best of my knowledge, no one actually died of radiation exposure from the accident (and probably no one will at this point). There are expected to be a number of deaths (somewhere between 15 and 1100) from increased cancer rates in the larger population. I would hope these weren't included in the "one in a million" claim.
This is a great point. We've made so much progress in this area that "pollution" can seem like an abstraction. This is something we should be impressing upon our children, in a more serious way than stories about walking to school uphill in the snow both ways, etc.
I was two years old when this picture was taken in my home-town. I remember summer days in the following years that looked like this, with the brown air leaching colors from the sunlight itself.
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/documerica111611/s...
From here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/documerica-images...
It didn't compare to the Great Smog, of course, but for Americans, it's closer to home and of course also closer to the present.
Those images of Shanghai (and London 1952, and Beijing and Hong Kong and, occasionally, Singapore) are the real thing, looking like scenes from a forest fire but downtown in a major city.
You may be right, it may be a sepia print. I don't know that much about sepia. GIMP shows 26K unique colors, and plenty of information in all three layers when decomposed to HSV or LAB. I would have thought a sepia print would be closer to monochrome.
I can assure you the brown skies were real, and that there's not much "artificial" about the crowding of the smokestacks. I still live nearby; the difference between the air quality then and now is pronounced.
It's really an odd thing to do, to approach a stranger on the internet and suggest that their memories are false and any evidence that might support them is effectively fake. How does that go over at dinner parties?
As a photographer, there were some things that jumped out at me immediately about that photo, though. I commented on it and stand by those comments.
Since you apparently thought I was talking about you and not the spin techniques of The Atlantic--a faux pas I've probably committed at dinner parties--I should have prefaced my comments with, "I think you're right. That photo, on the other hand, ...."
That's a really narrow construction of what you said. I said "I remember brown skies just like this" and you suggested that 1) The color is fake 2) I might imagine that scene with blue skies 3) the Atlantic has an axe to grind and 4) other cities have "the real thing." What am I supposed to think?
The photos were part of an EPA project specifically conceived to "document subjects of environmental concern." There was editorial intent, certainly, but nobody at The Atlantic had anything to do with it. This is all explained on The Atlantic's page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCUMERICA
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/documerica-images...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/collections/...
I'm trying to find out if the photo is in color or not. Certainly most of the DOCUMERICA project was in color, certainly every other photo chosen for this Atlantic feature was color, and certainly the photographer seems to have worked almost entirely with color at the time:
http://research.archives.gov/search?expression=Aleksandrowic...
It would not surprise me, at this point, to learn that the photo was in color. I don't think there is anything artificial-looking about it, it matches my memories pretty well. Yes, it has a nearly monochromatic look to it, but some scenes are really like that. Unfortunately the National Archives record doesn't seem to indicate whether the photo was in color or not:
http://research.archives.gov/description/550175
Do you have any information about scans of sepia photos? How many unique colors might be expected? I have tried doing a color count on several old photos that I'm confident started as real sepia-tint, and found color counts in the 6K-13K range, significantly fewer than the 26K that appear in the Clark Avenue Bridge photo. But I don't think that's conclusive.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/06/...
(The Atlantic again!)
This qualifies as "the real thing". It's well-known local lore that local stonework was turned black by the soot. ("Black" is not an exaggeration.)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2478300/Pictu...
I was in Beijing last winter when the air pollution was nearing record highs, and every time I blew my nose after returning from being outside, it would be full of black mucus. That has to be a wakeup call.
In addition, when I returned to the states (Chicago), even the air around O'Hare Airport - probably one of the more polluted areas in the city - felt so clean to me!
Yes. The 2013 WHO report "Health Effects of Particulate Matter" [1] provides a reasonable summary.
Primary long term impacts are increased mortality from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and from lung cancer.
Recent findings indicate no real safe level, with increased mortality observed at even very low levels (as seen in "clean" developed cities).
[1] http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/189051/H...
Source: Open access journal article linked from the wikipedia page you cited ;) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1241116/pdf/ehp0...
Great smog of 1952 had a measured peak daily average of 1620 ug/m^3 of total suspended matter (TSM) [1].
Reported levels in Shanghai of up to 602.5 ug/m^3 PM2.5 (suspended particles < 2.5 microns).
We can convert from TSM to PM2.5 using ballpark conversion given by: PM10 = 0.6TSM [1; notes to table 3] PM2.5 = 0.75PM10 [2].
So according to these rough calculations the great smog of 1952 probably had a PM2.5 of about 700 ug/m^3, quite similar to the current Shanghai smog, and lower than levels regularly reported in other Chinese cities.
Open access sources: [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1240556/pdf/ehp1... (Table 3 reports total particulate during the great fog of 1620ug/m^3, and estimates PM10 as 60% of that number = 972)
[2] http://www.epd.gov.hk/epd/english/environmentinhk/air/guide_...
Certainly, when I was a kid, a trip into London was an adventure. You knew when you were near the centre of town because the buildings were all coal black.