An Unexpected Relationship Between Nuclear Power and Low Birth Weight (arstechnica.com) 146
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."
Misleading Title (Score:5, Informative)
As it makes it sound like nuclear is causing low birth weights, when it is *coal* causing low birth weights.
Re: Misleading Title (Score:1)
Didn't read, but it sounds like coal is *correlated* with low birth weights.
Re: Misleading Title (Score:5, Informative)
Causation can be demonstrated through known biology involving pollution. Then timing isn't a coincidence. Learn more about observational studies - good ones are better than designed experiments because they use already available data.
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I would like to see the correlation of the use of coal and the trend toward boob food. Brest fed babies are just smaller.
Re: Misleading Title (Score:4, Informative)
Damn, BIRTH WEIGHT. I am a moron. Carry on ;)
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As it makes it sound like nuclear is causing low birth weights, when it is *coal* causing low birth weights.
It does not establish that coal is the cause, or at least not the only one. A nuclear shutdown presumably also leads to both job losses and fear, which may be factors.
I wouldn't expect job losses (Score:2)
Re:I wouldn't expect job losses (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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.
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 mea
Re:I wouldn't expect job losses (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Misleading Title (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, you'll run the correlation != causation trope while at the same time "presuming" extra conditions that have no proven relationship to anything.
Are you trying to suggest the average pregnant mother was so out of work they couldn't afford to eat or were, I dunno, afraid to?
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"A nuclear shutdown presumably also leads to both job losses and fear, which may be factors."
If this were a factor, we could then blame Hollywood for low birth weight.
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"A nuclear shutdown presumably also leads to both job losses and fear, which may be factors."
If this were a factor, we could then blame Hollywood for low birth weight.
We could certainly blame Hollywood for the increase in density between the ears of all Americans.
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Re: Misleading Title (Score:1)
Coal causing lower birth weights? Quite plausible given the pollutants. Interestingly, lower birth weight is often most evident in the (under)size of body extremities.
Put another way, by promoting coal, Trump delivers a population of people with small hands.
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It's so poorly written: I had to re-read the story just to be sure that they're actually claiming there's a relationship between low birth weight and the lack/removal of nuclear power. Do they not teach basic literacy skills at school any more?
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They had to, if the SJW realised they were saying nuclear is good, their funding for any future studies would have been cut.
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Seems like an odd thing for an SJW to say.
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It's not the title, it's the overly convoluted 'logic' used in the summary and quote.
WTF, why not just "pollution reduction of nuke plants causes drop in frequency of low birth rates." ?
Or even, "Pollution causes low birth rates. This study shows clean nuclear plants help prevent them."
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That's the joke
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That's the joke
The poster should be altered that they are 3 days late for a joke post. /humor
Nuclear Power Makes Your Baby Fat! (Score:4, Funny)
The alternative, click bait headline.
Re: Nuclear Power Makes Your Baby Fat! (Score:5, Funny)
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A nuclear plant in Alabama shut down, you won't believe what happened next!
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A nuclear plant in Alabama shut down, you won't believe what happened next!
Unemployment rates increased. It was the start of the butterfly effect that lead to the downfall of the world economy. Wait, how am I reading an article from 50 years in the future? *disappears*
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Increase your next babys birth weight with this one easy trick.
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Coal prevents obesity in young children
A study in Ohio shows that the increased use of renewable energy sources results in the increase in muscle size in newborns as well as lighter hair color. The study says it! What? /humor
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It was already a terrible, terrible clickbait headline.
Spurious correlation abuse of the worst kind.
Re: Nuclear Power Makes Your Baby Fat! (Score:5, Funny)
"Lose unsightly baby fat with this one simple trick! (Nuclear power companies hate it!)"
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"Lose unsightly baby fat with this one simple trick! (Nuclear power companies hate it!)"
You're in the wrong line of work if you're not a newscaster/editor!
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Using coal saves on the cost of shipping babies!
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Using coal saves on the cost of shipping babies!
That was absolutely horrible. I love it!
The fashion of micro-babies. (Score:3)
"...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...
Are you referring (Score:2)
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"Trump's policy of bringing back coal may mean that micro-babies are back in fashion."
Politics are never aside. The NeverTrumpers cannot abide their losses, and will never, ever suffer a moment's surrender. To their credit, they are committed. But they are a problem, and not any pat of a solution.
Worse, this infects every part of American life. The civil war has already begun. Will it be only what it is now, or will the opposition take every measure, and expand the violence already undertaken?
Sore losers a
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...Moln Labé. At least pronounce it properly.
Misspellings can often be a burden on pronunciation, unless your vocabulary includes frequent use of y'all...
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"Revolutionaries need only hope they will not be opposed. Moln Labé."
Sounds like a French revolution. Let 'em eat cake.
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"...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...
While the c-section rate ha ballooned beyond what is necessary (particularly in the US), what happened before was that a non-trivial number of mothers and babies died in child birth. We evolved to walk upright and a big brain more or less concurrently. It's a tough ask of our hips to allows us to walk upright and allow a baby with such a big head to pass through.
fake title (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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Whatever it is, women and children are affected the most.
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Yes really. Most likely because shutting down nuclear is also correlated with firing up fossil fuel plants.
brain dead idiot wrote the title (Score:3)
brain dead title. brain dead editor!
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Um, they don;t write it so they can read it. They write so that YOU can read it.
And your question, properly presented, might be "BeauHD and whoever edited this piece are idiots! I can't understand what they wrote!".
Or not. It's equally hard to understand what you wrote.
The real news, is that this is on Ars at all... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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Junk Science (Score:1)
"Micro babies.." Talk about junk science. So the normal healthy baby weight range is 2500g to 4000g http://kidshealth.org/en/paren... [kidshealth.org] . The natural variation range is 1500g, and they managed to find a statistical variation of LESS THAN 7% where the natural variation of healthy babies is 38% and some nitwit calls it micro babies caused by coal. Talk about complete lack of proportion or basic knowledge of the facts...
Re:Junk Science (Score:5, Informative)
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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An understanding of science. A relatively low UID. A correlation that has me pining for the Slashdot of old.
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I fully understand the statistics and considerations that you are citing, However, you need to take it out of the theoretical and apply it to the story if you want to have a relevant post. The post was specifically about "micro babies" which is pure bunk based on the statistical deviation that they saw. (Micro babies are those born from 20-25 weeks that weigh an average of around 500g). Further, it is a well documented fact that baring genetic deformity or maternal compromise (i.e. drug use, malnutrition
Otto Frisch had the answer (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Only one possibility considered? (Score:2)
When the nuclear plant shut down, was the facility razed and a massive coal-fired plant constructed, OR was there an increase in coal-fired generation somewhere else in the state? If coal caused the low birth weights, wouldn't it's impact be near the coal-fired generator, not the shuttered nuclear plant?
I strongly suspect the low birth weight after the nuclear plant shutdown may have more to do with a reduction in prenatal care due to the loss of well-paying jobs with generous healthcare benefits.
It would b
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"OR was there an increase in coal-fired generation somewhere else in the state?"
That's exactly what the article says: a nuclear shutdown causes the nearest mothballed coal plants to be restarted. Though grids can extend for great distances, the most efficient replacement power when a plant goes offline is from the vicinity.
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The vicinity can mean a lot of things. And just a few miles downwind can mean it has no effect on the pollution you or your baby are subject to.
At the same time, perhaps a uranium refinery or mining operation were upwind. And now everyone has cleaner air, but are also under crushing poverty. The only thing we can assume with any certainty is that shutting down a power plants makes the residents poorer.
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It would be interesting to know about any impact to low birth weights around the coal-fired generators, not the shuttered nuclear facility.
That's what they did.
Regional Economics? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't find anything this side of the paywall [nature.com] 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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Like pizza ovens
Poverty? (Score:2)
I am really hoping they controlled for poverty. It seems to make a lot of sense, not even including pollution, that worse results across the board would follow after a big fancy high paying business shuts down in a one business town.
Coal cures obesity? (Score:2)
Obvious (Score:2)
They have it backwards (Score:2)
It's not coal/gas/other power plants causing low birth weights.
Lack of gamma rays from nuclear power plants is preventing new Hulk-sized babies.
Re:Remember guys, nuclear was killed in the boardr (Score:5, Insightful)
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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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.
Re: Remember guys, nuclear was killed in the boar (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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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).
That explains it. So THAT is why we want to dirty our relations with the EU!
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They were planning to build another hundred, but after Fukushima they were cancelled. Now they are just finishing the ones that were already started. No more in the pipeline.
The UK is getting one new one. It's the most expensive object on earth, the operator is guaranteed well above market rate for the lifetime of the plant, and even then we had to get a French/Chinese coalition to build it after no one else thought it was viable. No other new plants are being built, and the French company building this one
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If we had invested as much time, money and energy developing renewables as we did with coal and nuclear we would be in a much better position today. Coal was cheap and nuclear had other applications though.
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Those "renewables" of yours are just a very, very inefficient way of scraping nuclear energy; it just happens that the reactor is 8 light minutes away. And the harvesting causes massive deaths of wildlife (constantly) or even humans (accidents). Compare how many more powers of magnitude of fatalities a single incident at Banqiao had than all deaths due to nuclear power together.
Now think what would happen if even a fraction of money put into the renewables drive went into fusion research...
Re:Remember guys, nuclear was killed in the boardr (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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"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
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Now think what would happen if even a fraction of money put into the renewables drive went into fusion research...
We'd have Fusion in 30 years, just like they said when the Fission reactors in the study were shut down 30 years ago.
Re:low birth rate better than cancer? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:low birth rate better than cancer? (Score:4, Informative)
Number of nuclear power stations in the world:
350+
https://www.nei.org/Knowledge-... [nei.org]
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).
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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.
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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.
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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. .
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So fish aren't animals?
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They aren't native to the dry land that preceded the reservoir. Work on your reading comprehension.
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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 end
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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.
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And yet, more people have died in Ted Kennedy's car than in civilian nuclear power accidents in the USA.
Note that qualifier "civilian". Three people died while doing maintenance on a military reactor due to release of radiation when one of the three did something really stupid. Noone outside the room was harmed in any way.
Now, if we include Chernobyl and Fukushima, we're talking more deaths than in Ted Kennedy's car. But we're
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Are you really claiming that there has been no construction accidents while building nuclear plants? No accidents while mining uranium for nuclear plants? And not one of those cancer cases amongst former uranium miners was caused by the mining, whether radiation, exposure to the toxic crap they use to extract the uranium from the ore or simply heavy metal poisoning?
Mining is dangerous, the good thing with nuclear is less mining, construction is dangerous, good thing with nuclear (I believe) is less construc
Re:low birth rate better than cancer? (Score:4, Insightful)
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....
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Yet it is a solar powered accident if someone falls of a roof, likewise with wind. And when a flood control dam that also generated electricty fails, it's a hydro power failure.
As for mining, the early uranium mining was quite deadly as there was no worries about the radioactivity nor the shit that was used to extract the uranium, as well as the fact that often it was only Navajo that were dieing, it wasn't a big deal . I understand things have improved, much like how coal has moved to open pit mining, whic
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The likelihood of failure goes down with each subsequent generation as the known failure modes are all gradually accounted for.
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The failure modes at Fukushima were all well known and the plant operator was even warned about them, but decided to do nothing for commercial reasons.
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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 [world-nuclear.org]. 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, [wikipedia.org]But still pales compared to GM ignition switch deaths.
It's not a fair comparison, of course, s
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Right, an ignition switch issue that results in catastrophic failure modes much less than 1% of the time results in a forced fixed.
People died due to Fukushima. Not from the emissions directly, but from the evacuation and subsequent exile from their former homes. Recently, the first claim for Fukushima related cancer was decided in the plaintiff's favour.
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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,
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Avoiding certain cancers...is a tough job when playing with radioactive earth.
Avoiding certain cancers is a tough job when walking outside, drilling a hole in the wall in and old house, removing stains from floors, serving a guy in a bar, or just generally being more than 50 years old.
I'll go into more detail later, but right now I really need a cigarette.
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I'll raise you one twiggy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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All of that said, there's really only one remaining reason to build a nuclear plant today rather than put up wind or solar power. And that's water desalination. It needs lots of power to work.
The thing about desalination is that it doesn't matter when you do it. The auto industry is talking a lot about making hydrogen with excess wind power, but you could as reasonably use it to make clean water. Indeed, it would be a lot more reasonable, because fuel sells suck and burning hydrogen in an ICE is dumb.
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"excess wind power"
Is this because the wind is in excess, or the power is in excess?
The wind of course is always going to be. Missing out on using it for power generation is an interesting way of describing it as 'excess'. Of course that's not what you meant.
But the electrical power generated being 'excess' would, in the example of being used for hydrogen extraction, merely be diverted from immediate use elsewhere or storage intended to provide electrical power at some other time to storage as hydrogen to b
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But the electrical power generated being 'excess' would, in the example of being used for hydrogen extraction, merely be diverted from immediate use elsewhere or storage intended to provide electrical power at some other time to storage as hydrogen to be used for a different sort of power. Still storage.
Making hydrogen is storage. Making clean water isn't storage, it's creating a product, except in the sense that you can discuss the energy it takes to produce anything, and how much energy it will eventually enable you to extract. But not every example is the same.
The issue, though, is efficiency. Making hydrogen via electrolysis is very inefficient. So is steam reformation of natural gas. Unless someone can demonstrate a way to make hydrogen 'production' more efficient, then it makes a lot more sense to sp
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"All of that said, there's really only one remaining reason to build a nuclear plant today rather than put up wind or solar power. "
Or if you want to smelt steel, which is why we have to do that in Asia today. Or if you want to have big cities. A 2000 sq ft house in suburban Arizona can power itself from PV cells on the roof, but what happens in a Seattle high-rise apartment building where each resident's share of the roof area is measured in square inches? What if you want your city to have a subway system
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"A 2000 sq ft house in suburban Arizona can power itself from PV cells on the roof"
Maybe, maybe not [solar-electric.com]. Probably not without centralized generation for the demand surges.
Note the thread I linked to goes off on tangents, offering examples from Long Beach and Florida. Add 20 degrees ambient, forego A/C in all ancillary areas, and size your A/C system conservatively (properly according to my A/C guy friend), and you mostly can. Huge investment in systems. What is the ROC/NPV of this? Not to mention the conversion
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Re: Mistitled, misdirected, and mistaken (Score:2)
The real problem at Three Mile Island was that it's problem occurred while the movie The China Syndrome was in movie theaters - the average person confuses the plot of the movie with what actually happened at Three Mile Island.