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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.
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.
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.
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.
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There are a number of things to unpack here.
To a statistician, "significant" means "very unlikely to have happened purely by chance", i.e. we are seeing a real difference, not sampling error. To a lay person, "significant" means "big enough to matter". You are arguing that this result is not significant in the second sense.
If there are non-linearities in a system, small shifts in the mean can have a large effect. For example, a town has natural temperature range between -20C and +45C. An increase in the mean of 2C is small compared to that range. However, the number of days per year hotter than 40C might easily triple with that +2C shift in the mean (due to the shape of the high temperature tail of the distribution), and if >40C is a threshold for causing major health problems, then the small shift has a large effect.
145g might be significant in this way: a 1355g baby might have much worse survival chance than a 1500g baby. (Further complicating things, although the mean might shift by 145g, the shape of the distribution might also change. The shift could affect low weight babies more or less strongly than normal weight babies.) I don't know enough about babies to know whether that 145g shift is important or not.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
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).
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).
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. .
"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.