How Coal Kills | Hacker News Reader

How Coal Kills

scientificamerican.com

48 pointswlmsng51 comments

That was completely devoid of any useful numbers. Here's a nice, well researched chart that actually puts coal in a useful context compared to other ways of generating electricity.

http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml

The rest of that is well worth reading, too.

Unfortunately it doesn't give any links to sources. In particular, the number for oil is surprisingly high. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just curious about where and how the deaths are occurring.

Coal kills in three distinct ways:

1) Miners: This depends enormously on the country and the mining technology. The trend in North America is toward fewer and fewer miners underground. I've worked in a support industry for hard rock mining, and coal is fundamentally different in a lot of ways, but in hard rock the push is toward "zero entry" mining, where everything underground is teleoperated or simply autonomous.

2) Transport: Coal has to be moved via train and truck, and the average thermal coal plant requires a boxcar load every fifteen minutes. This is one of the things that makes nuclear so much safer: uranium has such high energy density that transportation deaths are very nearly zero. Mining deaths are lower too.

3) Pollution: This is where coal really falls down. It's full of heavy metals--lead, mercury, arsenic--and governed by standards that let coal plants release more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear plants. Particulates cause premature death due to respiratory disease. On the good side, they may be cutting global climate change by more than half (1 W/m2 cooling due to particulates vs 1.6 W/m2 warming due to CO2).

Oil in contrast seems like it ought to be relatively safe. Drilling, refining and pipeline transport rarely kill people. Rail transport--brought to you by people who hate pipelines but love cars and electricity but oppose nuclear, solar and windmills--is far more dangerous but it would be surprising if it was that much worse than coal.

Here are some alternative data with some discussion of different sources and studies: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... (coal and oil are both still pretty bad compared to nuclear, but we knew that anyway: nuclear is overwhelmingly the safest way to generate electricity, despite its likely preventable issues with economically catastrophic failure.)

I actually did the numbers a while ago and even the Fukushima plant which ended up exploding produced less deaths than the Next Big Futures numbers for world coal and landed in the middle of Sustainable Energy's numbers for European coal.

http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-vs...

Here [1] is the ExternE project homepage. The entire publication seems to have somewhere between 2000 and 5000 pages.

[1] http://www.externe.info/

I'm going nuclear over this page!

For an article titled "how coal kills", I must say I am not much more wiser from reading it. Is it only from specific impurities which are themselves toxic elements, or does the carbon play a role? Is it the size of the particles in coal smoke/ash, or is it the molecules? Do they interact to form something deadlier than the sum of the parts?

I know coal kill. What would be interesting to know is how.

I've heard east coast (US) coal is dirtier than west coast (US) coal, particularly in sulfides. The acid rain fix known as the Clean Air Act of 1990 was heavily lobbied by the east coast coal producers and bears some marks to show for it. Burning so called "Clean Coal" has to do with how much gross weight of sulfur you pull out of the coal, which makes sense for coal heavy in sulfides, but less so for west coast fuel. As it stands, to burn west coast coal in the US requires the addition of sulfides to the coal so it can then be pulled back out.

As for other impurities... there are a lot of radioactive crap in coal that is aerosolized during the combustion process. The most notable of these is uranium, which is carried away with the rest of the fly ash. There's a "shadow" around coal smoke stacks where such fly ash ends up accumulating. If it makes it into the water table or onto arable land that is used to grow crops, BAM, you've irradiated a small chunk of your population.

Depending on the source of the coal, there are various other heavy metals that can end up in your fly ash.

Coal contributes to most of the mercury pumped into our atmosphere, which is what's contaminating the fish, and more radiation than nuclear power.

Coal power also contributes more radiation to the atmosphere than nuclear power, or weapons ever did! It does this because of trace amounts of uranium and other radioactive elements which are in coal, released when burnt.

It seems unlikely we'll ever put a price on coal's impact on people's health (and therefore the cost of healthcare) and on the environment. But the very least we could do is cut the subsidies, and let it compete fairly against solar and other renewables. Eventually we'll chase it out of the market, because solar ill keep getting more cost-effective.

World-wide, in 2010, the IEA calculated that fossil fuel subsidies were $409 _billion_! http://www.iea.org/publications/worldenergyoutlook/resources...

Compete fairly against solar by eliminating coal's subsidies but not solar's?

> cut the subsidies, and let it compete fairly against solar and other renewables

Almost all those other industries have massive subsidies. Solar would have gone no where without the government the last 10 years.

Would you be willing to have a truly level playing field, where no energy technology was awarded subsidies?

A truly level playing field would mean internalizing all externalities. If that were possible, yes, that would be ideal, but as he just noted, it's really unlikely, partly because it's enormously complex.

That's actually just your definition of a level playing field, there is no 'true' level playing field. (Well, other than literal playing fields that are level)

Not only would that be very difficult to do, nuclear and coal have had decades of subsidies, giving them quite an unfair head-start.

In any case, by 2017 solar will be at grid parity in most of the US. By 2020 this won't even be a topic.

It doesn't seem possible for solar to make that much progress in that short a time.

It takes forever to get transmission capacity approved and built to areas where solar is really cost-effective and we still don't have grid-scale energy storage.

By grid parity, I meant people would be able to save money by installing it on their rooftops.

As for utility-scale, it's also smashing records, but that's a different discussion. $6c/kWh in UAE was a figure that surprised a lot of observers.

Regarding storage... solar coincides very well with peak A/C load, so the main use case doesn't require it.

I'm interested in the study of complex issues like these (more from a math point of view than a political one) - how to optimize for the right choice, given that each choice has a bunch of non-overlapping side effects.

But I don't really know where to get started. What could I google for?

"Economics" :-)

Seriously, this is precisely the problem that economics tries to solve, and it is evolving into a mature discipline with a reasonable level of empirical validity, but the way psychology has evolved in the past few decades.

There are several main policy-oriented disciplines:

1) sociology, which studies society as if economics didn't matter

2) economics, which studies society as if morality didn't matter

3) political science, which studies society as if neither economics nor morality matters

I'm caricaturing, of course, but the differences between the fields are due more to historical accident than anything else, and if you're interested in focusing on the math then economics is the place to be.

There is a lot of very interesting work being done in "heterodox" economics right now, particularly by people like Steve Keen, who is focused on relaxing the assumption that the economy is at all times in quasi-equilibrium, which is foundational to the neo-classical paradigm: http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/

Keen is interested in dynamical economic models, which necessarily require you include things like banks and money in the model (these drop out of equilibrium models, mostly.)

Why are press releases on hacker news? The 'article' is practically devoid of content.

I'll flip the question: Considering that coal has provided a very significant amount of the electrical power and heat for humans over the past 100 years, how many lives has coal saved? How much has it improved the human experience?

Put simply, a world without coal is a horrible world.

That's a moot point if there's another viable way to generate the same amount of power without trading lives in the process.

Slave labor also improved your life quite a bit, provided you were a slave owner. Thankfully we found an alternative.

Slavery, really? That's your analogy?

What's your viable way to replace coal today? Include explanations of how your replacement can be as reliable as coal, and how the developing world can afford these sources without sacrificing other government services.

Literally millions of people are being killed by coal, without any choice in the matter[1]. What analogy would you prefer to use for something as devastating as that?

Coal only seems affordable if the significant health and environmental costs are (incorrectly) assumed to be zero.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/12/china-coa... >Emissions from coal plants in China were responsible for a quarter of a million premature deaths in 2011 and are damaging the health of hundreds of thousands of Chinese children, according to a new study.

A study commissioned by Greenpeace. Yes, a very unbiased and honest source on these topics. Might as well list an NRA study on gun violence.

And read closer, please. The study claims to have found indicators pointing to shortened lives, not people being killed by coal, which is significantly different.

And, again: warmth and electricity and live to 65, or cold and darkness and live a little longer. And really, that wouldn't be the trade off, because electricity and warmth also lead to longer lives. So this study is meaningless and shows nothing at all.

Don't know where you have been, but coal use has decreased the past few years. Natural gas and renewables have already started to replace coal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_States...

That's just the US, where natural gas is plentiful and very cheap.

well, the article is exclusively about the US. If you are up for talking about other countries, let's discuss France's coal power

I have no doubt that 19th century London was better off with coal despite the horrific air pollution it caused. But the question before us is whether to continue using coal now that we are much richer and have many more options in terms of what technologies we have.

Well, temper that with a view of a world where coal was scarcer, more expensive. It would not have been used for so many purposes, we'd have been more efficient in our spoiling of the planet. Being as cheap as it was, led to a car for every garage, consumerism, inefficient insulation in houses for the first century etc.

You would prefer a world where only the rich can afford electricity and warmth? Because that's the world you describe.

Oh don't be a pedant. If coal were more expensive, it would be used for important things - not pissed away. That says little about rich vs poor.

I'm not being a pedant. Where does the inexpensive electricity come from? It is very much about rich and poor. And making electricity is a very important thing.

Coal is currently important, but not that important. As a finite resource it's also going to be gone in ~2 thousand years (big error bars on that though) which is a fairly short time period all things considered. For perspective let's ignore all non-renewables + wind and solar and just look at Hydropower.

Hydropower use reached a record 3,427 terawatt-hours, or about 16.1 percent of global electricity consumption. That on its own is enough to provide useful power to everyone sure we would not be using it for home heating but lighting, computers, and refrigeration would easily make the cut even if AC would be far too expensive for most people. aka, most people get a setback but not to the dark ages. Toss in just wind power and you could meet the world’s electricity needs at perhaps a 10-30% increase in electricity costs.

In the end there is a huge inertia in the current system; dropping coal in say 10 years would be possible, but ridiculously expensive. Dropping it over the next 100 might just happen without anyone noticing.

PS: Solar is really interesting as it's cheaper than coal in some areas, but inertia and changes in the supply curve are keeping their prices linked. We are heading to a supply shift so peak costs might actually start taking place at night.

The same could have once been said about Whale Oil.

The proper solution is to capture the externalities imposed by coal and force those who burn coal to pay the entire cost of burning it, including the cost of the emitted pollution. Then the solution will work itself out. If coal is indeed the best solution even with all the damage it causes, it will still be viable when these costs are captured. If other methods are better, then they will win out.

The problem is that right now we allow people to burn coal and vent the combustion products into the atmosphere while not paying for the massive costs this imposes on the general population.

That's nice in theory, but the problem is nobody has any idea how to quantify those externalities.

Sure they do. You won't be accurate to the penny, but quantifying this stuff can be done. Even getting to within an order of magnitude would be useful.

Not if you're basing taxes/charges on it. An order of magnitude?

What alternative are you proposing? All I see so far is basically, it's too hard so let's not even try.

Yeah, pretty much. If you're gonna do something like that you should first make sure you're not going to make life worse for people than the current system.

Why is that the default rather than, say, banning all coal burning until the danger can be quantified? If your position is that it's impossible to know the size of the impact, how do you choose one versus the other?

Personally, I think we should ban the burning of coal (unless the peak oil doomsday guys turn out to be right and we need it to keep society from collapsing). But it needs to be done over a relatively long time period so people have time to adjust.

I'm a libertarian-leaning guy, but charging for externalities has proven to be a mostly unworkable concept. How much is a human life worth? How much is a few years of a human life worth? How much should someone be compensated for a sickness with which they would not have otherwise been afflicted? Let's say we know coal burning doubles the risk of non-smoking-related lung cancer by 10%. When someone gets lung cancer, especially a smoker, how could you possibly determine the sum he's owed by a coal company? There's no way to prove they were even at fault. Should people be compensated for the risk of developing a problem they never actually develop?

And once you start down that road it doesn't end. Coal companies will (rightly) point out nearly every business generates uncompensated negative externalities. This morning I was awoken early by a trash collector. Shouldn't he be compensating me for the noise he's producing? Lack of sleep has a quantifiable negative impact on health. Shouldn't UPS be compensating me for the time I've spent waiting in traffic because one of their vans was double-parked?

You can charge for externalities without distributing them to the victims on a personal level.

You're right that precisely compensating a lung cancer victim is pretty much unworkable. But the statistics in aggregate are pretty clear, so you can collect that money as a tax without paying out precise compensation to each individual victim. This still produces the appropriate incentive to burn coal only when it's worth the full cost.

Your examples illustrate this principle. Your garbage collector probably has to pay a license fee, and has to obey noise regulations. UPS pays vast amounts of money for parking tickets. These could probably be calibrated better, but we don't just let these companies generate negative externalities at will.

^^^ FTW

Deleted comment

In any random set of data there will be 'clusters'. There's actually a pretty good chance a cluster will appear.

It's like a lottery, it's very likely someone will win it each week. Humans have an incredibly poor intuition about statistics.

Rather than talk about how it "seems like" a slim chance, you could actually calculate the odds and see just what the chances are.

And remember that if an event is one-in-a-million, it'll happen thousands of times in the world at large.

Most people die from heart disease or cancer. Why do you assume the chance is slim?

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