http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/12/china-coa...
>Emissions from coal plants in China were responsible for a quarter of a million premature deaths in 2011 and are damaging the health of hundreds of thousands of Chinese children, according to a new study.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/12/european-...
>Air pollution from Europe's 300 largest coal power stations causes 22,300 premature deaths a year and costs companies and governments billions of pounds in disease treatment and lost working days, says a major study of the health impacts of burning coal to generate electricity.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/ipdf/10.1021/es3051197
He shows that since the invention of nuclear power, it has saved 1.8 million lives relative to the obvious alternatives. Since its invention, nuclear power has killed about 5000 people. That makes it about 360x safer than deployed alternatives and yet, somehow nuclear is the technology that must justify itself on safety grounds.
After Fukushima happened, I heard or read several times (without being able to quote, probably radio/TV) predictions that big nuclear accidents like Tshernobyl and Fukushima will get more frequent in the future, because (a) the reactors get older and (b) more reactors have been built in the mean time.
I hope that future will prove these predictions wrong, but somehow I feel that hoping is not enough. And incidents like these where security limits are relaxed [0], don't really reassure.
[0]: Quote from the article:
"EDF was granted permission by the regulator in the summer to relax its graphite weight-loss limit at the Dungeness reactor in Kent from 6.2% to 8% after it came close to breaching the original safety margin."
Nuclear disasters are much more furious in short periods of time, but I'm not sure that compressed in to a single number, that nuclear has been more harmful per-power-produced as fossil fuels. Maybe someone can properly refute or corroborate that statement.
But it feels like an airliner going down. The size of the tragedy is great which puts irrational fear of flying in to people's heads, when it's about the safest mode of travel that exists.