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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.
Coal prevents obesity in young children
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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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.
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.
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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).
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.
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"Lose unsightly baby fat with this one simple trick! (Nuclear power companies hate it!)"
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