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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.
It does not establish that coal is the cause, or at least not the only one. A nuclear shutdown presumably also leads to both job losses and fear, which may be factors.
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.
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Wow, you'll run the correlation != causation trope while at the same time "presuming" extra conditions that have no proven relationship to anything.
Are you trying to suggest the average pregnant mother was so out of work they couldn't afford to eat or were, I dunno, afraid to?
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...
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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.
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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!
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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....
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