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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...
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.
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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BeauHD and whoever edited this piece are idiots! can't they read what they wrote!
brain dead title. brain dead editor!
If I learned anything from the Simpsons it's that nuclear workers eat donuts. The nuclear shutdown would naturally have led to job loss in the donut sector. Now that I think about it, pregnant women not being able to get their donut fix could result in lower birth rates. So maybe the nuclear shutdown really was the cause of the lower birth weights.
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.
If I learned anything from the Simpsons it's that nuclear workers eat donuts. The nuclear shutdown would naturally have led to job loss in the donut sector. Now that I think about it, pregnant women not being able to get their donut fix could result in lower birth rates. So maybe the nuclear shutdown really was the cause of the lower birth weights.
Your analysis overlooked beer, which you should *never* do. According to your same source they also drink a lot of beer. Fewer beer swilling nuclear workers means fewer babies born addicted to beer, that means fewer beer bellied babies.
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.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
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.
But beer goggles (male and female versions) allow a larger group women to get pregnant through enhanced attractiveness of the other sex so we should see a birth rate increase around nuclear facilities
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
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).
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.
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.
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
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
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)
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
"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.