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WHO: Air Pollution 'Killed 7 Million People' In 2012
dryriver sends word of new figures from the World Health Organization that estimate around 7 million people died in 2012 as a result of their exposure to air pollution. "In particular, the new data reveal a stronger link between both indoor and outdoor air pollution exposure and cardiovascular diseases, such as strokes and ischaemic heart disease, as well as between air pollution and cancer. This is in addition to air pollution’s role in the development of respiratory diseases, including acute respiratory infections and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases." The Organization says the bulk of the deaths occurred in South-East Asia and the Western Pacific Regions (PDF), with indoor air pollution causing more deaths than outdoor pollution in those areas, largely due to the use of coal, wood, and biomass stoves for cooking.
That would be true if the number of people of each age was the same. But there are many more children than elderly, since the population is still rising.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
This is a meaningless statistic. Serious medical researchers report this in person-years lost, not in meaningless "millions of deaths". To illustrate, let's suppose those 57 million people were infirm and about to die, but pollution hastened their demise by one second. Then this is not a big deal. Personally I would happily shorten my life for exactly one second in exchange for the conveniences of modern life. On the other hand if these people had their lives substantially shortened then this is a veritable tragedy.
However such misleading headline doesn't surprise me: the UN is a master of over-hyped sky-is-falling chicken-little statistics.
A true nuclear reactor wouldn't cause any pollution.
No sig today...
"Smug" is the filthy cloud you see around a Toyota Prius.
No sig today...
Every power source is really solar power (well, fission was enables by a different star, but still). Everything is "envirnmentally damaging, to some extent.
The problem here isn't some hand-wavy abstraction, the problem is people burning wood and coal indoors (plus the very existence of toxic city - eesh, burning dumped electronic waste to recover the metals). It's the same problem that caused "pea soup fogs" and killed enough people in London ~100 years ago to cause the first air quality-related laws.
Fission isn't great, sure, but it's problems really are minor compared to burning coal or wood - but then, it's not going to help the very low-tech regions having these problems. Natural gas, OTOH, burns clean, and there's certainly no shortage of it, but it's hard to transport. Solar thermal is low tech and works, but it's capital-intensive for impoverished regions (still, it would make a nice charity endeavor) and a crappy choice for heating at night.
There aren't any easy answers, because anything you do requires infrastructure. And there are places in the world more developed than you'd think where running miles of copper wires for power distribution is just too impractical to keep in place.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Pretty poor attempt at sarcasm, given it only reveals your ignorance to the number of radiation and cancer deaths from Chernobyl. Nuclear power is indeed one of the fatally polluting energy generation methods.
Bull.
The numbers around chernobyl are thrown around with much hysteria, but lets look at some actual facts. WHO estimates the estimated death toll for Chernobyl might hit 4000, and noted:
As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre...
If we do a bit of calculation based on the Bq radiation estimates from Wikipedia, the hardest hit region of the hardest hit country (Belarus) could have gotten radiation around 1480+ Bq of Cs-137 over an area of 2000 km^2. According to a Bq-to-Sv calculator, if we do 1cm distance from a 1480Bq Cs-137 source times 8765 hours (per year), you end up with a rate of Living in this 45km x 45km area would net you a whopping 9 mSv / year.
Fatal doses tend to be ~4.5 Sv. Worrysome annual dosages tend to be around 50mSv. 9mSv is like getting a CT scan once a year-- and this is if you're in the worst hit 2000km^2 of the worst hit country. In reality, the extra dosage you would have gotten from Chernobyl is just not that high.
Now compare Nuclear with hydroelectric which has killed hundreds of thousands of people in single incidents, or coal which year after year has mining accidents on its record (not to mention the pollution), and it looks pretty good. Not as good safety-wise as perhaps wind / solar, but its also a heck of a lot cheaper and a LOT more scalable.
There are potential issues and things to worry about with nuclear. Safety is not one,
OH PLEASE insulate me from this madness.
Yes insulation... we need more of it.
Lots more of it.
Dense living + acoustic insulation lets you sleep in quiet while your neighbors party
yet be able to walk to most markets. Dense living can save on many energy fronts
and not impact the environment by a sprawl out on farm land.
Hot or cold thermal thermal insulation is undersold for locations that need heating and cooling.
Windows are so bad thermally that it makes sense to replace most with insulated
wall and with a small camera invite view of the outside in. LED TV with an aero-gel
backlight for some locations.
Review your local building codes. Remove penalties for improvement and
demand better total insulation packages for homes and businesses.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Fusion isn't. Well sure, it's basically the same mechanism as solar power at it's source, but done far more efficiently without spewing the vast majority of the energy across interstellar space. And if we'd just stop cutting the research funding we'd probably have it by now - we're still pretty much on track for the initial "20 years to harnessed fusion" estimates, as measured in anticipated research dollars. We've just kept cutting the research budget so that what, 40+ years later?, we're still 20 years from reaching the funding goals projected to be reached 20+ years ago.
Fission could be handled decently, but so long as we subsidize new ore mining by not requiring timely reprocessing of spent fuel into fresh fuel and short-lived waste it can only be an ugly hack with horribly dangerous byproducts. We also need to eliminate the cost incentive for operating unsafe nuclear plants. Sealed modular reactors have the potential to change things, but aside from legally requiring all plant managers and CEOs to commit seppuku in the case of an environment-contaminating disaster I don't see any other possibility for promoting safe fission reactors.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Fusion would change everything, no doubt, but you can't really blame the lack of progress (only) on cutting budgets. The "always 20 years out" is as much about the fact that "20 years out" is the same as "no useful progress" as anything else. But there is, after all, a quite powerful fusion reaction going on overhead, and I suspect that the problems with harnessing that will be solved much faster. Mostly we just need a dense, safe battery, and progress on that is evident yearly.
As far as fission fuel reprocessing, we're just ultra-paranoid about nuclear proliferation. From an energy perspective it's quite silly, but as any veteran engineer knows: sometimes the non-engineering factors do need to determine outcomes.
As far as safety - I think we can make reactors fairly tolerant of operator abuse, if we can at least avoid really stupid shortcuts when the thing is built (no Chernobyl-style reactors). For all that Fukushima is a mess, it's still pretty trivial compared to the natural disaster that caused it. Three Mile Island was about as much operator error as it's possible to make, and still the failure mode just wasn't that bad. Modern designs are far safer than either - safer I suspect than a refinery/chemical plant.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
First off I agree that considering CO2 at the expense of all other pollutants is folly. However...
There's *lots* of evidence that the global climate periodically shifts dramatically due in large part to instabilities in the carbon cycle - i.e. planet starts to cool, ice sheets spread, CO2 gets locked into the permafrost,etc. in a self-accelerating cycle until we reach a full-on ice age. Or alternately planet starts to warm, permafrost thaws releasing more CO2 into the air until eventually the ice sheets melt entirely. It's more complicated than that, but there's basically zero scientific debate that if something destabilizes the global climate badly enough we slide to the opposite extreme. The positive-feedback link between the ecological carbon cycle and global climate is firmly established, it's happened many times in observable history, and the combination of atmospheric CO2 levels and variations in solar irradiance, along with a few other minor contributors, pretty much explain all global climate shifts in the bast half-million years, though they're mostly all preceded by one or more major trigger events that destabilize things. And the fact that we're currently in an interglacial period within an ice age is equally firmly established.
The only question remaining is exactly how big a change in global climate is required to act as a trigger event to set the planet on a long-term warming cycle. Human CO2 emissions are vanishingly small compared to the environmental emissions that will be released if we cross the tipping point, but reaching the tipping point only seems to require, at most, a few degrees of temperature change to send us sliding to the opposite extreme. The question that remains unanswered is whether human CO2 emissions are causing sufficient warming to be a trigger event in their own right, and the evidence is strongly suggestive that it is. Depending on the assumptions made we may be able to have another century of warming before crossing the threshold, or we may already have done so.
So yeah, CO2 emissions are a big deal. Disregarding humans I'd be tempted to say lets just keep toxins out of the environment, and let things follow their course. But humans introduce two major problems:
1) Over the last few tens of thousands of years we seem to be responsible for one of the larger extinctions in our planets history - this on top of the extinctions due to being in an ice age - interglacial period or not. Adding a sudden dramatic climate shift - potentially faster than any in the geologic record, could be devastating to an already severely damaged biosphere.
2) We're unlikely to go quietly - if things get ugly I fully expect most every human on the planet to do anything and everything necessary to ensure their own survival, and/or ensure that nobody else profits from their death. Pollution will be a non-issue if weighed against survival, and WWIII could make things far uglier for millenia to come. In other words if we cross the tipping point I suspect we'll start emitting toxic pollution at rates to dwarf those seen before the environmental movement got started - to avoid long term hideous pollution rates we need to avoid crossing the tipping point.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Take a look at this graph: Nuclear Electricity Production. It's quite easy to spot 1986 on this graph (Chernobyl). That's where the trend of acceleration in nuclear power growth has reversed into deceleration. No such reversal has occured in demand for electric power, of course. The shortfall has been largely picked up by coal.
The number of people that have been killed by air pollution from coal as an indirect result of the nuclear stagnation after the Chernobyl accident is well into the millions.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.