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An Unexpected Relationship Between Nuclear Power and Low Birth Weight (arstechnica.com)
Applehu Akbar writes: Ars Technica reports on a Carnegie-Mellon study of an unexpected side effect of the slowdown in nuclear plant construction after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. The pollution associated with replacing the power in places where nuclear plants were delayed or canceled has resulted in significantly lower birth weights for children born in the region. The impact on birth weight starts at 97g less in the second quarter after a nuclear shutdown and goes to 146g for in the third quarter, and of similar magnitude thereafter. Though the steady shift in recent years from coal to natural gas has probably slowed this trend down (no update to the study has been announced) because gas pollutes less, Trump's policy of bringing back coal may mean that micro-babies are back in fashion. Here's an excerpt from Ars Technica's report: "[Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of economics and public policy Edson Severnini] looked at the closure of the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama in 1985 as well as the Sequoyah plant in Tennessee, which was closed from 1985 to 1988. The closure of the two plants corresponded to increased coal burning at nearby coal plants -- in 1985, TVA noted in its annual report that coal plants had 'extraordinary performance' due to the shut down of the nuclear plants. He also gathered birth-weight data from the National Centre for Health Statistics (NCHS) and found that babies born in regions with the biggest increase in coal burning had lower birth weights than babies born in other nearby areas. Looking at data from 1983 to 1985, before the nuclear plant shut down, also showed that the largest change in birth weight occurred after the shutdown."
As it makes it sound like nuclear is causing low birth weights, when it is *coal* causing low birth weights.
The alternative, click bait headline.
"...Trump's policy of bringing back coal may mean that micro-babies are back in fashion."
Politics aside for a moment, this kind of wording makes me wonder how the fuck humans ever succeeded in procreating before nuclear power was invented, as if incubators were some kind of fashion trend.
Yes, perhaps we should get back to the "healthy" standard of macro babies, especially with c-sections being all the rage in the spring lineup for 2017...
Yeah, I know you WANT to blame the environmentalists, it's basically a trigger for you, but who do you think has the real power in the world?
Rich, powerful, oligarchs, or a bunch of bearded hippies?
Of course, Russia was going to fail to build any plants anyway, the collapse of the Soviet Union set them back decades, but the US had no interest in eliminating the pollution tax. Rich guys can buy air filters for their homes anyway.
Power too cheap to meter? Who were they kidding, don't tell me you actually believed that!
Low Birth Weight might be better than moving an entire county because of a "spill" or "accident"
Avoiding certain cancers...is a tough job when playing with radioactive earth.
Wind Turbines kill birds, Oil pipelines cause a mess, I must confess...what's up with dat?
The article suggests that radiation from burning coal is responsible, though I'd like to know what factors have been controlled for. It is plausible. For example, tobacco contains polonium, and that is one of the reasons cigarette smoke is so toxic.
Coal is much more labor intensive, especially in the 70s and 80s.
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This story has a fake title, it's as if it was posted by mdsolar...
An Unexpected Relationship Between Nuclear Power and Low Birth Weight
- the title.
The actual findings: shutting down of nuclear power plants is correlated with lower birth weight.
You can't handle the truth.
to this. Kinda terrifying, actually.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It wasn't environmentalists. It wasn't oligarchs in the boardroom. It was the increasingly litigious nature of the world, which allows anything new to be put on hold for 30 years of expensive safety reviews and lawsuits from every imaginably involved and involved party. Coal got grandfathered in, if coal were new tech it would've been sued into oblivion for the radiation releases and all the other environmental damage.
This space intentionally left blank
BeauHD and whoever edited this piece are idiots! can't they read what they wrote!
brain dead title. brain dead editor!
Not all liberals are against nuclear power, and given that coal seems to be the conservative sweetheart at the moment it doesn't make much sense to blame liberals for this.
All of that said, there's really only one remaining reason to build a nuclear plant today rather than put up wind or solar power. And that's water desalination. It needs lots of power to work. Other than that, centralized power generation is dumb when it can be decentralized without high cost or poor environmental impact, and when solar and wind end up being less expensive than their nuclear equivalent and power storage seems to be becoming practical.
Bruce Perens.
It was the increasingly litigious nature of the world
The lawyers may have sent nuclear to the graveyard, but it was the frackers that nailed the coffin shut.
Nuclear is dead in America, at least for our lifetime.
Almost all of the energy related articles on Ars are heavily biased and intentionally deceptive. (slashdot too, since BeauHD/mdsolar) This one article and most of the comments are actually quite out of place, excepting a certain compulsive liar who buries anything nuclear on Ars in mountains of bullshit. I have to wonder if Megan Geuss is going to have a job tomorrow.
Again, here is the actual title of the article that the "editor" butchered:
Nuclear power policy in the ’80s caused low birth weights after coal stepped in
Researcher says a more measured approach to nuclear fears may have produced better outcomes.
"Micro babies.." Talk about junk science. So the normal healthy baby weight range is 2500g to 4000g http://kidshealth.org/en/paren... . The natural variation range is 1500g, and they managed to find a statistical variation of LESS THAN 7% where the natural variation of healthy babies is 38% and some nitwit calls it micro babies caused by coal. Talk about complete lack of proportion or basic knowledge of the facts...
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
You must know, that burning coal also releases radioactive stuff + the micro particles (soot) cause cancer.
And all this is done during the NORMAL activity of a coal plant.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Dead in Japan, Dead in Germany, Dead in the UK, Dead in China, Dead in the USA, what's left, Iran and North Korea?
Its so dead in China they only have 21 new ones under construction. Plus the new one in the UK under construction with plans for more. Plus the rest under construction in Europe (Germany is slowly going over to renewables though).
The extra limbs when nuclear plant was operating accounted for increased birth weight.
If we had invested as much time, money and energy developing renewables as we did with coal and nuclear we would be in a much better position today. Coal was cheap and nuclear had other applications though.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Number of nuclear power stations in the world:
350+
https://www.nei.org/Knowledge-...
Number that have caused any significant amount of evacuation:
Chernobyl (human ignorance), Fukushima (tsunami + earthqauke), Three Mile (human error).
That's less than 1%.
If you're worried, site them off-shore or out of the way. They don't need to be near any large centres of population at all. And the US has one of the largest areas of land occupied by the fewest people in the world (comparable to the Faroe Islands).
The main health hazard is attached to the gaseous waste products. They contain not only carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide (both highly toxic) but also a number of carcinogenic compounds such as phenanthrene and others. To discharge these into the air is impossible. It would cause the tolerance level to be exceeded for several miles around the reactor.
It is therefore necessary to collect the gaseous waste in suitable containers, pending chemical detoxification. Alternatively, the waste might be mixed with hydrogen and filled into large balloons which are subsequently released.
Don't bury the lead editors.
I'll raise you one twiggy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The Fukushima disaster was precipitated by the earthquake and tsunami, but it was cost-cutting measures that really are to blame. Human error is really to blame in all of these.
Those "renewables" of yours are just a very, very inefficient way of scraping nuclear energy; it just happens that the reactor is 8 light minutes away. And the harvesting causes massive deaths of wildlife (constantly) or even humans (accidents). Compare how many more powers of magnitude of fatalities a single incident at Banqiao had than all deaths due to nuclear power together.
Now think what would happen if even a fraction of money put into the renewables drive went into fusion research...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Meanwhile, a vastly greater amount of land has been evacuated for hydro power. Not only left uninhabitable for humans, but all native plant and animal life as well. .
That's less than 1%.
Exactly! Depending on if you look at plant failures or reactor failures it's about 0.7-1.0%, which is terrible! We wouldn't put up with a 1% catastrophic failure rate for aircraft or cars, because the consequences are so potentially severe, and are orders of magnitude worse for nuclear.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
When the nuclear plant shut down, was the facility razed and a massive coal-fired plant constructed, OR was there an increase in coal-fired generation somewhere else in the state? If coal caused the low birth weights, wouldn't it's impact be near the coal-fired generator, not the shuttered nuclear plant?
I strongly suspect the low birth weight after the nuclear plant shutdown may have more to do with a reduction in prenatal care due to the loss of well-paying jobs with generous healthcare benefits.
It would be interesting to know about any impact to low birth weights around the coal-fired generators, not the shuttered nuclear facility.
Ken
You make them so regularly and so unknowingly, you even have a sig about it. Sad!
Wind power causes "massive" deaths of wildlife and humans? Really? In fact, even high estimates of wildlife killed by wind are only comparable to nuclear plants, and way below coal. In fact wind and solar can actually improve things for wildlife, by allowing land to be profitable without being hostile to them like intensive farming or dumping a large power station on it can be.
Odd you would mention Banqaio too. It wasn't built to generate power, that was just something they added because it would be crazy not to, and only you are suggesting we build more inadvisable dams for that purpose. It's like suggesting someone get drunk and go for a drive just to listen to the radio - it's not what is being suggested.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And yet, more people have died in Ted Kennedy's car than in civilian nuclear power accidents in the USA.
Note that qualifier "civilian". Three people died while doing maintenance on a military reactor due to release of radiation when one of the three did something really stupid. Noone outside the room was harmed in any way.
Now, if we include Chernobyl and Fukushima, we're talking more deaths than in Ted Kennedy's car. But we're talking fewer deaths (so far) than died in auto accidents in the USA in 1901! And about three orders of magnitude fewer than died in traffic accidents in the USA in 2016.
Note, by the by, that if worst case projections hold true, Chernobyl will result in about 1/8th the deaths that traffic accidents produced in 2016. And over the years since Chernobyl, traffic accidents in the USA have produced about two orders of magnitude more deaths than Chernobyl's worst case is expected to be.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
That's less than 1%.
Exactly! Depending on if you look at plant failures or reactor failures it's about 0.7-1.0%, which is terrible! We wouldn't put up with a 1% catastrophic failure rate for aircraft or cars, because the consequences are so potentially severe, and are orders of magnitude worse for nuclear.
Actually it is much lower when looking at an annual rate because this is over a 60 year span of time. Additionally, there have been zero accidents with newer designs (designs created after TMI), and all of the accidents that had happened would not have occurred with the latest (gen 3+) designs.
Why isn't it possible today? If class action suit was possible against Big Tobacco, after centuries of use, why isn't it possible to sue Big Coal? All you need is connection between damage you suffered and their actions.
I salute you! Your analytical mind was not swayed away by apparent controversy.
I can't find anything this side of the paywall that says that they controlled for economic factors that lead to or were caused by the shutdown of these plants. Ordinarily poor economic conditions is the prime cause of low birth weights.
i want nuclear to win out on its actual merits. Save the coal for distributed micro-energy needs.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Avoiding certain cancers...is a tough job when playing with radioactive earth.
Avoiding certain cancers is a tough job when walking outside, drilling a hole in the wall in and old house, removing stains from floors, serving a guy in a bar, or just generally being more than 50 years old.
I'll go into more detail later, but right now I really need a cigarette.
Now think what would happen if even a fraction of money put into the renewables drive went into fusion research...
We'd have Fusion in 30 years, just like they said when the Fission reactors in the study were shut down 30 years ago.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
So fish aren't animals?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
This explains why he wants to bring back coal- He couldn't hold his normal size babies in his tiny hands! All he wants is to be able to hold his babies without dropping them repeatedly, like his parents did to him.
I am really hoping they controlled for poverty. It seems to make a lot of sense, not even including pollution, that worse results across the board would follow after a big fancy high paying business shuts down in a one business town.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Finally an answer for the obesity epidemic.
They aren't native to the dry land that preceded the reservoir. Work on your reading comprehension.
The likelihood of failure goes down with each subsequent generation as the known failure modes are all gradually accounted for.
The failure modes at Fukushima were all well known and the plant operator was even warned about them, but decided to do nothing for commercial reasons.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Anadromous fish don't do well when you dam up their spawning beds.Fish that need free flowing, cold water, also don;t much care for hydroelectric impoundments.
And then the tradeoff of forest for water.
Hydro is never without environmental cost. We've figured that out, thankfully, just in time for wild Salmo Salar to be commercially fished into oblivion, for farmed communities to infiltrate wild ones and disrupt migratory instincts, and sport fishermen to watch as all efforts end with classification as an endangers species, one without a constituency able to influence policy and save the species.
Hydro electric power has been as damaging as nuclear, in different and somewhat recoverable ways. But not without cost.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Well said. Reactor designs have always been influenced by weapons design.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Deaths due to automobile use are not the metric you want to use. By one report, there were 124 deaths and 275 injuries due to the GM ignition switch problem alone. So far, there are credible reports that no deaths are attributed to the Fukushima accidents. though that is a tough example given the Japanese government and Tepco's previous failure to be entirely forthcoming. Chernobyl is an entirely different matter, But still pales compared to GM ignition switch deaths.
It's not a fair comparison, of course, since automobiles are prolific. Even lesser known issues, like GM airbags, cause unnecessary deaths. And there are other automobile design defects that have claimed lives.
Airliner safety is probably similarly not a favorable comparison to nuclear safety. And of course military submarine reactor accidents aren't unknown.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Lifetime chance of dying in a transportation accident is 1 in 600.
What's the lifetime chance of someone dying if their energy source comes from a nearby nuclear power plant?
In the US, there's maybe been a handful of expected deaths from the LNT model for accidental releases such as TMI, while nuclear provides 20% of our electricity (say 60 million people). Can a handful of deaths over the past decade be claimed by airlines? By automobile manufacturers?
In Japan, with Fukushima, the radiation exposure to the general population was pretty low that it's not going to be statistically meaningful. But we're told the civilians in the worst radiation fallout areas may have been exposed to radiation levels that will increase their risk of fatal cancer by 1/500. Roughly similar to the lifetime risk of automobile accident, but only affecting those nearest to the plant.
Are you really claiming that there has been no construction accidents while building nuclear plants? No accidents while mining uranium for nuclear plants? And not one of those cancer cases amongst former uranium miners was caused by the mining, whether radiation, exposure to the toxic crap they use to extract the uranium from the ore or simply heavy metal poisoning?
Mining is dangerous, the good thing with nuclear is less mining, construction is dangerous, good thing with nuclear (I believe) is less construction with nuclear.
But to claim zero deaths from nuclear is just being dishonest and once caught lying, it's easy to discount all other claims.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
"It was the increasingly litigious nature of the world, which allows anything new to be put on hold for 30 years of expensive safety reviews and lawsuits from every imaginably involved and involved party."
I think this only applies to things that need a public permit, like natural gas/oil pipelines, transmission lines, power plants, etc. Environmentalists haven't been effective in slowing down nanoparticles being distributed everywhere with no prior health screening, nor very effective with slowing down GMO foods (in the US at least).
China and the UK are both admitting their planned construction is behind schedule, they're cutting back on further expansion, Westinghouse just declared Bankruptcy for a reason, all the dreams of mutant mice and cyborg men came to naught.
France and Finland, delays. Ukraine? Hah. Switzerland is phasing its out.
Better luck praying for the FUSION breakthrough.
tumors are heavy!
love is just extroverted narcissism
Note that it's not a "nuclear power" accident if someone falls off a building that will, someday, have a nuclear reactor in it.
As to the mining of uranium, you prolly don't want to go there - coal mining deaths are, again, orders of magnitude more common than deaths from mining uranium, if only because we use megatons of coal, but only tons of uranium....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It's not coal/gas/other power plants causing low birth weights.
Lack of gamma rays from nuclear power plants is preventing new Hulk-sized babies.
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Right, an ignition switch issue that results in catastrophic failure modes much less than 1% of the time results in a forced fixed.
People died due to Fukushima. Not from the emissions directly, but from the evacuation and subsequent exile from their former homes. Recently, the first claim for Fukushima related cancer was decided in the plaintiff's favour.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Depending on your metric, Fukushima had a failure 'rate' much less than 1%. Of course catastrophic failure of a nuclear plant containment and control has predictably and largely certain disastrous results for the nearby population (and beyond), so these failures are indeed notable.
But the ignition switch in your car twisting to the 'off' position is, by itself, not a catatrophicfailure. The impact, of course can range from 'woops, that's weird' and turning the switch back on, to failing to negotiate a turn, slowing into the path of another vehicle at any speed, or finding yourself some other situation that risks death or injury. The switch thing is no biggie. The impact is, for the car driver and any passwengers, and surrounding vehicles and their contents, potentially disastrous results.
The switch? A $90 part in this example, not such a big deal, but the impact is huge. And it doesn't have to fail even 1% of the time, unless you're engaging in a CBA and want to quantify the value of saved lives. A similar CBA to nuclear plant siting, design, operation, and decommissioning. A difference in magnitude is most notable.
If you're offended that ignition switches get fixed but nuclear plant protections don't, first consider you're close to discounting the impact in human lives for these minimal automobile problems. Second, consider also that you miss the difference between the U.S. government and Japanese government roles and responses to various nuclear plant issues. Look up the Maine Yankee plant.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Its so dead in China they only have 21 new ones under construction. Plus the new one in the UK under construction with plans for more. Plus the rest under construction in Europe (Germany is slowly going over to renewables though).
That explains it. So THAT is why we want to dirty our relations with the EU!
Those "renewables" of yours are just a very, very inefficient way of scraping nuclear energy; it just happens that the reactor is 8 light minutes away. ...
But we don't have control over it. Nothing good can ever come from something we don't have complete control ov... oh, wait.
You must know, that burning coal also releases radioactive stuff + the micro particles (soot) cause cancer.
And all this is done during the NORMAL activity of a coal plant.
...and damn those volcanoes! All of those deadly gasses and soot that travel all around the planet! They'll be the death of us.
The Fukushima disaster was precipitated by the earthquake and tsunami, but it was cost-cutting measures that really are to blame. Human error is really to blame in all of these.
Amen, and people tend to forget that lessons are learned from errors/mistakes. That's HOW WE LEARN.
It's quite disappointing to our intelligence as a species that we act like others - stop progressing in an area where we are learning about all of the faults and weaknesses so they won't occur again. Why? Because we're scared that they will. It always seems best to "back out" at the best time to innovate and progress.
Note that it's not a "nuclear power" accident if someone falls off a building that will, someday, have a nuclear reactor in it.
No, it counts when the building is constructed to have a nuclear reactor in it. That is a valid concern, and easily addressable.
Certainly as related to automobile designs are to a car driven off a poorly marked dock.
As to the mining of uranium, you prolly don't want to go there - coal mining deaths are, again, orders of magnitude more common than deaths from mining uranium, if only because we use megatons of coal, but only tons of uranium....
The real question is why you don't want to go there. Nobody here is defending Coal, that's the business of the Trump, not us here.
Stop being so pointlessly evasive.
"Every year in Spain alone — according to research by the conservation group SEO/Birdlife — between 6 and 18 million birds and bats are killed by wind farms. They kill roughly twice as many bats as birds. This breaks down as approximately 110–330 birds per turbine per year and 200–670 bats per year"
"Some studies in the US have put the death toll as high as 70 bats per installed megawatt per year: with 40,000 MW of turbines currently installed in the US and Canada. This would give an annual death toll of up to three -million"
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/01/wind-farms-vs-wildlife/
Nuclear doesn't kill millions of bats and birds annually. Wind power does. Coal sucks for other reasons.
I thought anti nuclear activists said all that clean nearly pollution free nuclear power would be replaced by sunshine and wind power?
They were planning to build another hundred, but after Fukushima they were cancelled. Now they are just finishing the ones that were already started. No more in the pipeline.
The UK is getting one new one. It's the most expensive object on earth, the operator is guaranteed well above market rate for the lifetime of the plant, and even then we had to get a French/Chinese coalition to build it after no one else thought it was viable. No other new plants are being built, and the French company building this one is surviving on government welfare.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What does that have to do with nuclear power?
idiot
So let me guess the writer of this article is both anti-nuclear and completely clueless. I'm not sure someone could write a more misleading headline if they tried.
Yet it is a solar powered accident if someone falls of a roof, likewise with wind. And when a flood control dam that also generated electricty fails, it's a hydro power failure.
As for mining, the early uranium mining was quite deadly as there was no worries about the radioactivity nor the shit that was used to extract the uranium, as well as the fact that often it was only Navajo that were dieing, it wasn't a big deal . I understand things have improved, much like how coal has moved to open pit mining, which is also much safer.
As I said, the big advantage is that little mining and construction needs to be done with nuclear relative to coal, but it is not 100% safe, nothing is, especially with the bean counters in charge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I thought
no you didn't