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Nuclear Power Prevents More Deaths Than It Causes
MTorrice writes "NASA researchers have compared nuclear power to fossil fuel energy sources in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution-related deaths. Using nuclear power in place of coal and gas power has prevented some 1.8 million deaths globally over the past four decades and could save millions of more lives in coming decades, concludes their study. The pair also found that nuclear energy prevents emissions of huge quantities of greenhouse gases. These estimates help make the case that policymakers should continue to rely on and expand nuclear power in place of fossil fuels to mitigate climate change, the authors say."
Remind me again what we ARE worried about.
Blinky the three eyed fish?
Teh cancerz?
The oil companies not making record profits?
How about like the french. We reprocess what we can, and bury what we can't. Safe and Effective.
Definitely fewer than hydro I guess: check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Nuclear power has the lowest deaths per TWh of any form of energy -- and that includes things like Chernobyl and Fukushima, the latter of which had a curious focus given that far, far, far more people were injured, displaced, or killed by the actual tsunami as opposed to any radiation events, now or in the future.
Direct deaths from fossil fuel sources -- including even naturally occurring radiation from conventional fossil fuel energy sources -- far outstrip any deaths that have ever occurred, or even will occur with even the most extreme statistical projections, from any nuclear power source, including accidents. That's right: there are more deaths from "radiation" from the byproducts of fossil fuel sources than there are from nuclear power, including accidents and waste.
This is what we should be worried about:
"Outdoor air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China in 2010, nearly 40 percent of the global total, according to a new summary of data from a scientific study on leading causes of death worldwide. Figured another way, the researchers said, China's toll from pollution was the loss of 25 million healthy years of life from the population."
There is a reason China has 30 nuclear plants under construction, while the US just approved its first new plant in 30 years.
If you buy a car and it happens to come with a stereo, then the engine explodes and the wheels fall off you tend not to attribute the failure to the AM/FM radio.
Dam failures are due to the failure of the dams, which just happen to have a hydro plant includes as an added bonus. There has never been a failure of a dam built specifically for hydroelectric power, not least because you tend not to build big ones unless there is some other reason for them. The one major case of a hydro plant failure was IIRC in Russia and resulted in a few deaths when a turbine broke and was flung free.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Don't forget that every year the coal industry in the US pumps out more radioactive material than has ever been released from US nuclear power plants, even if you include the 3 mile island minor incident.
PV solar definitely creates more pollution per MWHr, wind would be site dependant but it's not like mining ore, smelting, etc all the pieces is pollution free plus it's not baseline and we're decades away from it being able to fill that role. Hydro is probably 80-90% tapped and we're actually tearing down hydro dams to try to help fish. Geothermal causes earthquakes and there aren't that many sites where it's economical.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Because it's the only other technology that supplies any appreciable percentage of global base load.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Hydro is abismal, it destroys millions of acres of land with flooding and disrupts the river ecosystem. Migratory freshwater fish all around the world are rapidly facing extinction because of hydro power.
Geothermal is not infinitely renewable, heat sources can be and are being depleted, and there is evidence that it can cause earthquakes.
Solar thermal is great if you have the right environment for it, but outside the southwest, nuclear is still the better option.
We need more nuclear and more solar power.
Not really a false dichotomy.
While there are numerous other sources of electrical power, the ONLY CURRENTLY AVAILABLE METHODS OF GETTING LARGE AMOUNTS OF BASELOAD POWER are fossil fuels and nuclear. Solar and wind MIGHT be able to scale up if we spend enough money improving the transmission infrastructure (which we are not). So, when talking about the big contributors, you have a limited number of options.
Now, I'm not so sanguine about TFA's answers. Having some researchers with an axe to grind (Climate Change) and having said researchers dig out some numbers of dubious quality, make a few entertaining assumptions and grind out some numbers doesn't exactly strike me as the most intellectual of ventures. In particular, the long term costs of nuclear waste storage have never been realistically modeled.
Big fission plants in the middle of nowhere might be answer - with the implicit assumption that if it starts glowing, you just put a big fence around it - but if you're going to go there, you need better transmission infrastructure and so you might as well do large scale wind / solar.....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I see this sort of propagandized research as a good reason for embracing James Hansen's coming departure from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA. While I agree with the main conclusion of the paper, that nuclear power has in general saved more lives than it has lost, I think he goes about it again in a haphazard fashion, heavily biased to nuclear power production.
For example, there is no breakdown of the data or consideration of alternative strategies. What's the break down of the various sources of deaths from fossil fuel burning? In particular, I was curious how many deaths he would attribute to elevated levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. As far as I can tell, it's not there in his research though I probably could figure it out eventually from a detailed analysis of his references.
Here's another big question. How effective would implementing other strategies, like pollution controls on coal power plants, be? If most of those lives can be saved merely by scrubbing coal power plant exhaust, then that's not a strong argument for nuclear power (and would become another propaganda element of the paper).
And once again, he exaggerates the risks of carbon dioxide emissions (in his "Implications" section).
I have no problem with Hansen putting out biased research. Just don't do it with public funds.
I believe you meant "fusion". Sunlight and wind don't have a ton of energy density per m^3. We will certainly still have a use for massive amounts of power in 50-100 years.
If we're playing this game, the only way solar and wind are "good" are that they have less of an environmental impact than coal, etc. They're not impact-free.
You can own a radio without a car; you cannot operate a hydro plant without a dam. Your analogy is flawed.
The inherent dangers and ecological drawbacks of dams are necessarily inherent to hydro-electric power stations.
Um well no, you do not need a damn dam to use hydro. It may be more effective to build a dam so you can store water. But if you remember way back in the early days of electric power, you know that AC DC battle between Tesla and Edison? Yeah, well Tesla built his hydro plant at Niagara Falls without a dam. You need fast flowing water to turn the turbines. Dams create this artificially by storing water behind the dam and using gravity to turn the turbines, in essence creating a waterfall that in turn turns the turbines. The water wheal is all you need to create "Hydro" electric energy.
http://www.teslasociety.com/exhibition.htm
Yes, and the AC was debunked by another commenter.
This is a very silly comparison. 1700 PBq of the Chernobyl release was in the form of I-131, which has a half-life of 8 days. Which means that 3 months after the disaster, it was effectively gone. Thousands more Pbq of Xenon-133 were released, but Xe133 has a half-life of 5 days. So after 2 months, that was effectively gone, 99.98% of it had decayed to stable cesium.
The only radioisotopes released from Chernobyl that are still exist in significant amounts, 26 years after the release, are Sr90 and Cs137, with half-lives of about 30 years. Total release of those isotopes was 100 Pbq. So about equal to the total radioactive release from burning coal for 100 years. But that stuff from burning coal? That's going to last for many thousands of years. (And that's just the radioactive release, the arsenic, mercury, etc? That stuff's forever.)
Meanwhile, 300,000 people a year die to air pollution. That beats Chernobyl's total by a factor of 75.
Since you asked:
Deaths per terawatt hour (from nextbigfuture.com )
Coal – world average: 161
Coal – China: 278
Coal – USA: 15
Oil: 36
Natural Gas: 4
Biofuel/Biomass: 12
Peat: 12
Solar: 0.44
Wind: 0.15
Hydro: 0.10
Nuclear: 0.04
"Lives ruined" is kinda hard to track... kinda ambiguous.
Cost: Nuclear is normally in the middle for costs (long term). Solar and wind are "cheaper" but take up more property... As for property damage, check out the documentary "Windfall" on Netflix. It is about some unhappy people who agreed to have a windfarm move into their neighborhoods. Biggest complaint is noise and "flicker" caused by turning blades.
Plus I question the environmental damage wind-farms can cause. We are pulling energy out of the wind. That energy is used to create currents and is part of the ecosystem... by altering this by large wind farms, could we potentially prevent moisture from moving from offshore in land? Cause a dustbowl?
As for Nuclear: I really see that as the future. New LFT reactors, for example has waste with a half-life of, 30 years I believe... and have low pressure (no explosions) and the reaction will destabilize itself (no melt down).
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
To clarify the above poster...
Things with a 'Short' half life...Decay away. They are not a long term issue (depending on decay products)
Things with half lives of a few years or decades are nasty - they last long enough and put out enough radiation to be a problem.
Things with a long half lives approach natural background radiation levels and don't really have a significant biological impact.
Treating something with a 250k year halflife as if it was a dangerous short-mid term radioactive is terribly expensive and has no benefit.
--- Mercutio was right.
The age of planes used as missiles lasted exactly one day.
The authors are Kharecha and Hansen. James Hansen is world famous for supplying warmists with NASA stamped ammo since the early 1980's
You can say a lot of things about Hansen but shilling for nukes is just not plausible. But hey, if you want to discredit one of the most credible AGW celebrities in the world go right ahead.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
So as nice as it would be to have more nuclear energy; the window of opportunity is gone.
China has 17 nuclear power reactors in operation, 28 under construction, and more about to start construction.
Chinese nuclear capacity will be 58 GWe by 2020, 200 GWe by 2030, and 400 GWe by 2050.
China has been able to close 71 GWe of small inefficient coal burning power plants since 2006, cutting annual coal consumption by about 82 million tonnes and annual carbon dioxide emissions by some 165 million tonnes.
Nuclear power could be a lot cleaner and less dangerous if we stopped using those old-fashioned bomb-making reactors, too.
No sig today...
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Moreover:
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Japanese LNG prices went up from ~$13/MBTU just before the Fukushima event to ~$18/MBTU in July 2012 (source) just before the 2 reactors restarted, and is at $16.66 today
Okay, let's go for some information from a non-cartoon propaganda source. First of all, India's experimental 500MWe reactor will definitely not be going online this year. It has exceeded the sales pitch for time and money by a factor of 2, and still counting:
The Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) is a 500MWe fast breeder nuclear reactor presently being constructed in Kalpakkam, India.[1] The Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) is responsible for the design of this reactor. As of 2007 the reactor was expected to begin functioning in 2010.[2] As of April 2011, it was expected to be commissioned in 2012.[3]As of July 2012, it was expected to begin operations in 2013. As of February 2013, it was expected to begin operations in September 2014.[4] Total costs, originally estimated at 3500 crore (35 billion) Rupees are now estimated at 5,677 crore (56 billion) Rs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_fast_breeder_reactor
Secondly, this reactor does NOT use a thorium fuel cycle. "It will make use of MOX fuel, a mixture of PuO2 and UO2." (same link above). Rather, what it does is OUTPUT processed thorium that can be used to jump-start a later, hypothetical, thorium-based reactor. In other words: The current project is just "Stage II" in India's 3-stage nuclear program, which has taken since the 1950's to even get to this point. Stage III is now hoped to be a reality maybe around 2050:
According to replies given in Q&A in the Indian Parliament on two separate occasions, 19 August 2010 and 21 March 2012, large scale thorium deployment is only to be expected "3 – 4 decades after the commercial operation of fast breeder reactors with short doubling time".[66][31] Full exploitation of India’s domestic thorium reserves will likely not occur until after the year 2050.[67]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%27s_three_stage_nuclear_power_programme#Stage_III_.E2.80.93_thorium_based_reactors
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Oh, it is not like uranium does not have to be mined, mind you. It just magically appears there in the fuel pellet state in the close proximity of the reactor.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
There are methods of reprocessing other than breeder reactors.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q450.html
"Before the discovery of insulin, uranium was used therapeutically for the treatment of diabetes with daily doses in the milligram or even greater range; no poisonings were reported."
Uranium is toxic in pretty much the same way as most other heavy metals, they are not great, but they certain are not _extremely_ toxic, another anti-nucelar lie to add to the list.
You so realise how much radioactivity coal burners spew out in to the atmosphere, and how carcinogenic their ash is, right?
Have a nice day.
All of this has been obvious to anyone with more than two brain cells not sold to some lobby group.
The reasons that nuclear is so disliked is not polution, it is danger. When a coal or gas plant blows up, tough luck for anyone inside. When a nuclear plant blows up, tough luck for everyone within many miles.
That, and the fact that we still don't know what to do with the radioactive waste.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org