I'm afraid I can't find the article right now, so I don't have the exact statistics, but I have read that a large coal plant operating normally for 20 years releases more radioactive particles into the atmosphere than Chernobyl did. (There's a lot of trace radioactives in coal.) Nuclear plants that melted down catastrophically every 20 years, like clockwork, might still be safer than coal plants operating perfectly.
There’s no question that coal is a stupid way of generating electricity, but that doesn’t make the dangers of nuclear go away.
2. Coal requires lots more fuel so lots more digging up and transportation, spent fuel is dissipated via atmosphere, as well as solid ash.
3. Concentrated harm vs dispersed harm. still coal. Note that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is great for wildlife - it is basically an environmental preserve, since humans (the largest impact on wildlife & environment) are largely excluded.
4. Focus on "nuclear vs CO2". If you're serious about global warming, nuclear is the only viable technology.
5. Storage and cleanups - there's a lot more for coal than you think. Coal byproducts are one of the largest industrial waste streams. https://www.epa.gov/coalash/frequent-questions-about-2015-co...
Nuclear vs coal is like airplane crashes vs car crashes. Airplane accidents make the news because they are unusual and affect many people in a single incident, even though car crashes kill (and injure) far more people every year (per mile traveled).
The fact that you know the names Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island (probably?) should help you realize how SAFE nuclear is - the exceptions become scare stories for decades.
This is simply untrue. Overprovisioned renewables can get us to the point where the few times gas peakers are needed becomes negligible. This is the false "binary choice" that the other comment was pointing out.
The area of California is 105 million acres, so cover 1/4 of the area of California in wind farms.
Urban land in the US is about 70 million acres (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/major-land-uses/major...), so this would be another 3rd the amount of urban sprawl of all cities and towns in the country.
Solar is a little bit better - only 16,393,234 acres, or 1/6 of California, but you can't really do agriculture on that land like you could with wind farms.
And this is without overprovisioning or increasing electricity use to replace gasoline.
Do you consider either of those options viable? What overprovisioning factor are you going to shoot for?
I don't think it's just a binary choice: I think it's a blended choice, but you've got to have a heavy reliance on nuclear if you want to dramatically cut CO2 emissions.
Requiring far more investment.
Then again, per land area wasted , nuclear is 23 Km2 per year vs ... something tiny? Plus the comparison with coal only is unfair.
> 4. Focus on "nuclear vs CO2". If you're serious about global warming, nuclear is the only viable technology.
Here the question is how to remove excess CO2 without destroying the rest of the planet.
https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years...
Centralia is more of a weird natural disaster. It's essentially a slow-motion, underground forest fire. And, like most forest fires, while usually a human with a match is the proximal cause, if the human wasn't there, nature would still have supplied a spark eventually.
• What would the statistical yearly probability of a coal-seam fire be for seams we find, check up on, but never mine? (We know of a few seams in protected areas, but I don't think we know of enough to have any statistical power. Also, the natural catching-fire rate might be, say, one per thousand years, which would be a bit like the pitch-drop experiment in its requirements, yet would still mean that coal seams catch fire pretty much "as soon as" they reach the surface, in geological time.)
• More interestingly: how many coal-seam fires have happened historically in the Earth's 4.2 billion years being around, that finished and burned out all the coal, and now there's just a cave there? Or ex-cave sedimentary layer, given that these caves tend to collapse? Can we tell when such a cave/layer was previously a coal seam? (I assume so, because soot, but can pressure-treated soot be differentiated from other kinds of naturally-occurring mineral striae?)
Solar (3x), wind (5x), hydro (25x) are much higher land use.
Note that resource extraction use is considered temporary (and in the US, companies are required to pay for restoration, per the link above). Wind uses a large area, but agricultural use can proceed at the same time.
We currently have no viable CO2 removal technology. Nuclear power has no chance of destroying the planet (or even the biosphere).
Nature already scrubs CO2 and actually thrives on the elevated amounts; reducing production means nature will have a chance to catch up. That is, assuming we've not already reached a catastrophic tipping point where e.g. algae (responsible for most CO2 sequestration) die from the heat and the CO2 sequestered in permafrost is released.
Let's remove humans from Earth completely and all the environmental problems will be solved.
I tend to agree with your other arguments.
Making 1000 square miles of land uninhabitable for decades doesn't kill people, though. (It doesn't even harm the land, in the long term; it's sort of a good thing, decades later, like letting farmland lay fallow.) With modern technology, as was employed at Fukushima, everyone was safely evacuated from the region and literally nobody died from radiation poisoning.
Coal plants pollute globally very slowly. Coal plants pollute locally very quickly, and are capable under the right conditions of disasters just as bad as radiation fallout from our bad old nuclear plants. Have you heard of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London ? Killed 4000, poisoned 100,000 more. And that was just a regular day of the life of London's coal plants, combined with some bad weather. So the coal plants were just fine, and kept on going after that. Meaning that there were other days like that, both before and after (if not quite as bad.) It's like a nuclear power plant that can "melt down" at random, without harming itself, enabling it to keep "melting down" over and over!
> Coal vs nuclear is a straw man argument.
No; it's the real decision that developing countries (and rural areas of developed countries) are making every day: keep building coal plants, or replace some of them with nuclear plants?
Nuclear is a viable consideration for these places in that it is a drop-in replacement for a coal plant that doesn't require any additional infrastructure to connect the plant to the mine+refinery: before, you were shipping rocks on a road to a plant; now you're still shipping rocks (well, pressed rock powder) on a road to a plant. You can even reuse the mining equipment you had from the coal mining! And, often, you have a head-start on the work, as (quoting Wikipedia): "Lignite deposits (soft brown coal) can contain significant uranium mineralization." Your coal mines have probably already excavated some, and now just have it laying around feeding no domestic industry!
Meanwhile, oil or LNG requires building pipelines, different extraction equipment, etc. And affordable solar or wind—which inevitably means domestically produced solar or wind equipment—requires a whole electronics and materials industry, and is only workable in some countries to begin with.
(The real third contender for these countries is hydro power. Doesn't require shipping anything to the plant! Much bigger civil engineering project, though, and each one is a one-off design that has its own devastating failure modes, which makes them possibly more scary to government buyers than nuclear power, where at least you can buy a cookie-cutter copy of a successful plant.)
> depending on the country I'm not sure if [state-owned plants are] better or worse
Usually far better, in that ultimately most externalities come back to bite a government (in the form of e.g. decreased GDP, and thus less taxable income), so they have far more of an incentive to clean up their act than an individual corporation does.
A quick google search tells me that 30.1% of US energy generation comes from coal [1] (at least in 2017), with 62.7% coming from fossil fuels overall.
Unless you’re proposing switching to a ‘cleaner’ fossil fuel source, there’s only so much wind/solar/geothermal can contribute until we see major leaps in the available technologies. Until that time I will continue to view them as a supplemental power source, rather than a primary one.
[1]https://toxmap.nlm.nih.gov/toxmap/faq/2009/08/how-much-of-th...
If you look at Europe on the other hand coal is in rapid decline (9% decrease 2017-2018 for example[1]) with many countries now being coal free.
In the UK we measure coal free time in weeks now. I expect us to be coal free for good in only a couple of years.
In some countries this is a straight switch to renewables but but often I think it's a staged switch through natural gas.
1. https://sandbag.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/The-Europe...
But hey, German energy production looks awesome from an environmental perspective!
[0] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/153533/umfrag...
[1] https://i2.wp.com/adveco.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/EU-po...
In the shorter term, I think it's true enough. Germany and Japan (both wealthy, highly developed nations) have both increased consumption of coal in order to move away from nuclear. I won't argue that's what they will do in the longer term though.
There's so many problems with this statement I barely know where to begin.
1. Are we talking total or per kWH of generated power?
2. "Deaths" is a questionable measure. One should look at the environmental impact of digging up, processing (enriching in the case of nuclear), transporting and the storage of byproducts from processing (eg UrF6) as well as spent fuel.
3. Here's the important one: you need to look at failure modes. Coal plants pollute but they also do it very slowly and no coal plant has ever blown up to the point where it's made 1000 square miles of land uninhabitable for decades (to compare, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is 1000 square miles).
4. Coal vs nuclear is a straw man argument. Coal is terrible. Everyone knows this. Coal is becoming the power source for the developing world as it is naturally dying in the developed world, being replaced by renewables and fossil fuels that while not great, are at least better than coal (eg natural gas).
5. How many of the externalities of nuclear power aren't factored into the price? Like the cost of storage and clean ups. These seem to be borne by governments not the companies profiting from the power (of course, some nuclear power in some countries is state-owned and run; depending on the country I'm not sure if this is better or worse).
Personally I find the apologism on HN about nuclear to be disingenuous, exhausting and naive.