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The Health Benefits of Wind and Solar Exceed the Cost of All Subsidies (arstechnica.com)
New submitter TheCoroner writes: A paper in Nature Energy suggests that the benefits we receive from moving to renewables like wind and solar that reduce air pollution exceed the cost of the subsidies required to make them competitive with traditional fossil fuels. Ars Technica reports: "Berkeley environmental engineer Dev Millstein and his colleagues estimate that between 3,000 and 12,700 premature deaths have been averted because of air quality benefits over the last decade or so, creating a total economic benefit between $30 billion and $113 billion. The benefits from wind work out to be more than 7 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is more than unsubsidized wind energy generally costs.
This study ambitiously tries to estimate the benefits from emissions that were avoided because of the increase in wind and solar energy from 2007 through 2015, and to do so for the whole of the U.S. Millstein and colleagues looked at carbon emissions, as well as sulphur dioxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter, all of which contribute to poor air quality. There are other factors that also need to be considered. A rise in renewables isn't the only thing that has been changing in the energy sector: fuel costs and regulation have also played a role. How much of the benefit can be attributed to wind and solar power, and how much to other changes? The researchers used models that track the benefits attributable to renewable power as a proportion of the total reduction in emissions.
This study ambitiously tries to estimate the benefits from emissions that were avoided because of the increase in wind and solar energy from 2007 through 2015, and to do so for the whole of the U.S. Millstein and colleagues looked at carbon emissions, as well as sulphur dioxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter, all of which contribute to poor air quality. There are other factors that also need to be considered. A rise in renewables isn't the only thing that has been changing in the energy sector: fuel costs and regulation have also played a role. How much of the benefit can be attributed to wind and solar power, and how much to other changes? The researchers used models that track the benefits attributable to renewable power as a proportion of the total reduction in emissions.
Science reporting often smells worse than the actual science it reports.
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The cost of Fukushima alone is 187 billion dollars US. Where's that factor into the tired "Nuclear power forever!" rhetoric? Or the fact that one of the only remaining power companies with nuclear ambitions in the US has gone bankrupt for cost overruns. Or the fact that solar power can still improve dramatically for cost, and should able to beat the, entirely theoretical, ROI on nuclear within a decade. While the new "safe" nuclear power plants won't be even theoretically ready until then; and would actually be up and running years after that. Not too mention all the hundreds of millions needed in R&D for them could easily be spent elsewhere.
"Nuclear!" is just a fantasy people with a bad case of Dunning-Kruger effect concerning energy utilities yell to make themselves feel superior.
they have pretty much confirmed circumcision causes ED, and non circumcised males have higher quality erections even when they get ED. so you got ED because your parents mutilated you, how does that feel?
so the logical move is to ban male genital mutilation but it's not happening in countries like the United States with pre world war 2 constitution that hardly stand for human rights.
http://www.trumpsweapon.com/
The so called Liquidators alone are more or less all dead:
At the peak of the cleanup, an estimated 600,000 workers were involved in tasks such as building waste repositories, water filtration systems, and the "sarcophagus" that entombs the rubble of Chernobyl
One advocacy group, the Chernobyl Union, says 90,000 of the 200,000 surviving liquidators have major long-term health problems.
http://news.nationalgeographic...
Sorry, no idea where you have your numbers from, but I saw several thousand dead bodies myself.
Keep in mind: the Liquidators where 17 - 19 year old recruits of the soviet army, they should be about 50 now, more than 2/3rds are dead.
And that does not even include the civil persons that died in the area around the plant.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
38 species of migratory birds are back on the endangered species list thanks to windmills. Windmills are also changing the patterns of prevailing winds and altering weather patterns. This is getting blamed on climate change, but you can't sit there with a straight face and honestly believe that windmills are not changing the prevailing winds.
The environmental impact of windmills is at least as large as the impact of combustion. They should be banned right along with ICEs and fossil fuel plants.
There's a conference concerning air quality held every couple of years called "Upwind-Downwind". A few years ago, somebody presented a paper at one of them that indicated a majority of people who wound up in an emergency ward with some kind of heart problem had been breathing air on or very close to a road within the previous few hours. It was really pretty amazing. And yes, they'd taken into account all the obvious stuff like "everybody lives near a road".
There's also been evidence from mobile air testing labs that levels of NOx and SOx skyrocket at heavily-used intersections during red lights. It's extremely localized...as in feet, not yards. I'll be really interested to see what happens to general public health when the internal combustion engine has been mostly replaced.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Let's step away from Chernobyl for a second and get back to the implicit question: is nuclear power "safe"?
I think that is "begging the question". Before we ask whether nuclear technology is safe, we need to know whether its the technology we have to be worrying about or the organizations that are using it that are the problem.
I think it's the organizations that are using the technology that are the danger. That's a bit like the way everyone thinks they're a better than average driver; they are, on their best days. And that's how we judge ourselves, by how we are when we're at our best. But when you're talking about safety, you have to judge yourself by how you are on a bad day.
Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were old reactor designs that would be considered unacceptable by modern standards. And yet, in both cases the catastrophic failure can ultimately be traced to failures in organizational decision-making. Chernobyl failed because of a safety test that was compromise by pressure to minimize power delivery disruptions that eventually put a reactor that was outside its normal operating envelope in the hands of an operations shift that didn't have the expertise to handle it. Fukushima's failure can be traced to TEPCO's failure to respond to the information that the tsunami statistics under which the plant was designed grossly underestimated a hundred year tsunami; all they had to do was to stage portable power generation equipment on the high ground surrounding the plant, but instead they raised the on-site backup generators by a few inches -- in effect they made a token response, which showed they got the message but didn't take it seriously.
Look around at the crappy, semi-competent or corrupt companies you have to deal with. In a world with only a few reactors, you have some chance of making sure none of the companies running them would be like those. In a world where nuclear reactors are ubiquitous, you have to design them so you'd be comfortable with companies like Comcast or Wells-Fargo running them.
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