From Rutgers University press room: The Energy Debate: Coal vs. Nuclear
Rutgers researcher finds factors other than global warming and potential for plant accidents figure into Americans’ preferences
As America struggles down the road toward a coherent energy policy that focuses on a higher degree of self-reliance, policymakers face numerous issues and realities. These include: the finite supply and environmental impact of fossil fuels, the feasibility and costs to implement a widespread switch to renewable energy sources, and the variables that lead to consumers’ preferences for particular types of power generation. They also need to find and employ tools to effectively communicate such a policy to a range of constituencies.
When it comes to traditional energy sources, coal, with its attendant air pollution and link to global warming, and nuclear power, with the potential for radiation-spewing accidents, such as befell Japan’s Fukushima’s Nuclear Power Plant, remain two of the most controversial.
Professor Michael Greenberg, who studies environmental health at Rutgers’ Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, and Heather Barnes Truelove, a postdoctoral fellow at the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment have researched consumers’ attitudes toward these two energy sources. Both are members of the Consortium for Risk, Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP). Their recent article in the journal Risk Analysis examines Americans’ risk beliefs and preferences for coal and nuclear energy, and finds factors other than global warming and the potential for nuclear power plant accidents figure into their choices.
Energy production from coal has been linked to air pollution and global warming.
The U.S. Department of Energy funded the 2009 landline telephone survey of 3,200 U.S. residents – 800 selected randomly and 2,400 who lived within six, 100-mile-radius regions containing many nuclear and coal-fueled electricity generating and waste management facilities. The study was to learn the association, if any, between some common risk beliefs about coal and nuclear energy and consumer preferences; if global warning and serious nuclear power plant accidents were the strongest risk beliefs associated with preferences; and the characteristics of “acknowledged risk-takers” who were aware of the sources’ shortcomings yet wanted to increase reliance on them. The response rate to the survey was 23.4 percent.The research followed an earlier survey by Greenberg that measured public preferences for various energy choices and their associations with respondent demographics and also trust, among other correlates. Due to widespread media coverage (and dramatized accounts) of global warming and the accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, it was expected these two factors would be the “signature risk beliefs” about coal and nuclear power, respectively.
In the second study, the researchers investigated five sets of characteristics for respondents: age; the role of cultural, social and political identity; the effects of values about the environment and trust; respondent location; and risk beliefs about coal and nuclear energy.
Results from the total sample showed that about 25 percent of participants wanted to increase reliance on coal and 66 percent preferred to decrease dependence on it. The analogous proportions were 48 percent and 46 percent, respectively, for nuclear. Belief that coal use causes global warming, as expected, was related to preferences for coal, but, for example, ecological degradation was a slightly stronger correlate of coal-related preferences than global warming. With regard to preference for use of nuclear energy, there was a strong correlation with the possibility of a nuclear plant accident, but other risk beliefs, such as about nuclear waste management, nuclear material transport and uranium mining had just as strong or stronger relationships with preference for increased reliance on nuclear energy.
About 30 percent of respondents favored increased reliance on nuclear energy, despite admitting the possibility of a serious accident. About 10 percent favored greater reliance on coal, while acknowledging the fossil fuel’s role in global warming. The strongest correlates of the two groups were socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity. The acknowledged nuclear risk-taker group was affluent, educated white males, and the coal group was relatively poor, less educated African-American and Latino females. The three consistent factors across both groups were older age, trust in those who manage energy facilities and the belief that energy facilities help the local economy.
The authors conclude their findings have a role to play in the formulation of a national energy policy because they show “one or two simple messages that attempt to persuade the public to change its preferences for or against specific energy sources are unlikely to succeed, especially if the public has a negative image of the source.” More important, regardless of the existence of subpopulations with specific views about energy sources, “The United States needs a clear and comprehensive energy strategy that addresses the energy life cycle, beginning with securing the energy and transporting it, then to producing and transmitting the energy, and managing the wastes.”
Do you want electricity or not? Do you want to live in a civilized world, or do you prefer living like most Africans do today? Well, I vote for having electricity, and living in a civilized world. And that means we must use coal and nuclear. Everything else is just bla..bla..bla…or socialist crap-take your pick.
‘}MikeEE says:
June 13, 2011 at 12:47 pm
R. de Haan says:
June 13, 2011 at 11:18 am
We can’t do without coal and we can’t do without nuclear.
Everything else is bla, bla, bla, bla…
That pretty much sums it up pretty nicely. One thing though…at some time in the future we will have to do without coal and the single serious choice we’ll have to replace it is nuclear. Everything else is bla, bla, bla…
MikeEE”
@MikeEE
If we stop winding the energy clock down pouring huge amounts of money in BS alternatives and take on our energy technology from a more realistic point of view our coal reserves will last long enough for us to come up with sound solutions that enable us to bring humanity through an ice age if necessary.
Coal will last for the next 500 years and so will oil and gas.
So I am not worried at all that we have sufficient time at our disposal to find some really good technologies.
I see our past development as a promise for the future.
We only have to whistle back the burreacrats and the wannabee totalitarians who just like the Rutgers people use any argument to shackle humanity and steel their energy resources.
Screw them all.
“Mark Wilson says:
June 13, 2011 at 1:02 pm
“As to hydro, in the US, almost all of the good sites are already being utilized. The biggest problem with expanding the use of hydro, is that the enviro’s are dead set against it.”
There are practical aspects to Hydro.
What to think of thick ice blocking the water feed of the turbine as was experienced in Norway and Sweden during the past two winters.
Then we have the problem of the water storage creating big lakes that flood entire cities forcing people to move and there is the risk of dam failure due to quakes, construction failures and floods.
In my humble opinion these risks are underestimated in a similar way as the nuclear risks are over estimated.
There’s no end to the screaming against nuclear power in certain european countries this year.
One of the arguments is that it is so unsafe to have nuclear power plants in rock solid europe, pointing at Fukushima, who stood up to its design, in Japan right on top of the rim of fire.
I, humbly wonder though, would they have screamed unsafe, about our apparently unsafe nuclear power plants here in fortress europa, if they, they being the crazed climate communist hippie parade, hadn’t made sure to ban, in big parts in some european countries and in full in other, even advanced civil nuclear power research and not merely banning the building of new power plants after the old ones was set to be decommissioned. There’s fair amount who are, and will be, running on over time now.
Essentially, how safe could europe’s nuclear power plants really have been today if “they” hadn’t made sure to ban safety research and safer, less wasteful, plants?
Hoser says:
June 13, 2011 at 1:18 pm
ShrNfr says:
June 13, 2011 at 12:53 pm
The earthquake and tsunami killed people in Japan. The reactors did not. Workers died from physical injury, not radiation. Two died from the tsunami, and 4 died when a truck hit them in a construction accident.
——————————————————
I think that was his point Hoser.
……. and they were organic bean sprouts too.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15151501,00.html
R.S.Brown says:
June 13, 2011 at 12:36 pm
“Once again, fusion seems to be an “unmentionable” potential power source. With less radioactive byproducts in both the fuel processing and spent fuel after use, and zero CO2 emissions, and NO ripping up of the landscape common to both, why is fusion not part of the
dialogue ?”
Because we simply don’t know yet if fusion on scale small enough to use in power plants is feasible. Maybe if ITER http://www.iter.org/ goes well, fusion will reasonably enter the dialog. But even then it will probably be several decades before serious fusion power plants come on line. And it would be naive to believe that there will not be problems. (My opinion: If ITER doesn’t work, the human race is going to be in serious trouble).
Will more money help? Maybe at some point. But I personally am skeptical Likely we’d end up with another wind power or ethanol fiasco bestowing large amounts of money on smarmy financial types, institutionalizing all the wrong incentives, and solving few if any problems.
I’m not aware of any deserving fusion technologies that are not being investigated from lack of funding. Are you?
AnonyMoose says:
June 13, 2011 at 11:25 am
“global warning”? I’ve been hearing a lot of that.
========================
Yeah, it’d be nice. These last couple of winters have been way too clod and spring is too late in coming. Our roses are just starting to bloom now. Still hasn’t really warmed up.
Rightly or wrongly Fukushima will likely be the last nail in the coffin of nuclear power. That leaves coal, which Obamster wants to make prohibitively expensive. Get ready for some shivering in the dark.
Make sure Obama does not get re-elected in 2012, if you want to stay warm.
Which is the most dangerous?
Deaths:
Fukushima nuclear plants: 0 (maybe 1)
BP Macondo blowout: 11
German beansprout e coli: 31
If more people were aware of the small effect of CO2 on warming then the results of this survey would be considerably different. It goes to show how poor science, advocate scientists and populist politicians have so distorted the facts that such surveys are useless as predictive tools. Not only useless but damaging as governments spend billions on non problems and create additional problems for no purpose. Ethanol and wind farms spring to mind.
Hopefully I can clear this up. I have some experience in this matter… There have been zero deaths from anything related to the reactors, and there have been zero people made ill from same. 2 people were exposed to a relatively* high dose at the time of the hydrogen explosions, but both workers are asymptomatic 3 months later and are expected to remain so. As has been mentioned, there have been a few deaths and injuries but none are attributable to radiation or the reactors themselves, nor anything used for their operation. I am including the entire population of Japan here, even those who were within the exclusion zone during and after the Tsunami. There have been zero nuclear casualties of any kind that can be attributed to radiation. If you were living outside of the plant gates — before or after the disaster — you were exponentially more likely to have been either injured or killed. That has been the case for decades now. I would suggest that nuclear power plants — even the old ones — are likely the safest places to be. QED. One guy said that no-one is willing to go to Fukushima Daiichi to clean up the mess. I will prove you wrong. I would go in a heartbeat! I know I would be in safe hands there. Besides, it would be fascinating as well as a privilege to be around such capable people while they calmly and effectively go about ending this incident — ending it in the face of having the world’s tin-foil hat brigades hopping around on their hind legs like frightened children.
* I say “relatively” as the safe limits set by most countries, particularly Japan, are ridiculously low. Many people have been exposed to much higher levels and have shown no ill effects. The scaremongering that has gone on for decades has led to absurdly low safe limits being set for workers and the public. So be it. Just another annoying and needlessly expensive hurdle that the safest industry on the planet is forced to clear — easily I might add.
R.S.Brown says: June 13, 2011 at 12:36 pm
More funding for fusion research, please.
Actually, I am hoping big government fusion research funding gets cut by 90%. if this is real: http://lenr-canr.org/News.htm we can start getting benefits from fusion reactors within a year. I first heard about Focardi and Rossi’s project by reading WUWT in January, and have been following it since then. I am a practicing engineer with a good background in the hard sciences and have an excellent baloney filter. I was following polywell and US Navy progress, but this is way ahead of the pack. As far as I can tell, this project is real and will be selling industrial scale fusion reactors within the year.
@TrueNorthist at June 13, 2011 at 5:10 pm
Even if what you wrote were true (and the cancers and radiation – induced deaths will not be apparent for many years, perhaps decades), nuclear is nuts. I wrote on this at some length (see link below). In summary, nuclear power is far too expensive at 30 to 35 cents per kWh, it is so hazardous that private insurance is not available for the plants, it is so expensive that government subsidies are required, it is so difficult to construct a plant that even the modern plants under construction are years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, it consumes precious water resources for cooling its deadly radioactive reactors, and it is not reliable as some proponents state. Furthermore, those reactors located at the shore of an ocean should be immediately shut down due to the danger of a giant tsunami, such as the 280-foot monster that swept over the Ryukyu Islands of Japan in 1971. As a case in point, the twin reactors at California’s San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) was designed to withstand a tiny tsunami of approximately 20 feet.
The proposed nuclear expansion project in Texas at the South Texas Nuclear Plant (near Victoria) has been cancelled due to the very high expected cost and few interested investors. At last, some sanity is prevailing in the world.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/reconsider-nuclear-power-is-it-ever.html
Um, danger of nuclear? I mean, can you name one person, or even NOT name one person but point to somewhere where it is shown that they were injured or killed, by the Japan’s Fukushima’s Nuclear Power Plant, “disaster”? This was about the worst possible disaster that could happen to that type of nuclear plant (Chernobyl type are only made in Russia or Cuba)), and I have not heard of ONE SINGLE PERSON seriously injured or killed by it.
As for the danger of disposing of nuclear wastes, the real danger is that those who know ways to safetly dispose of it, or turn it into usefull products or even into feul, are simply not allowed to do so due to invented fears by anti nuclear activists without any backing of wevidence except CAGW type scare tactics of inventing fanciful, unproven scenerios of something that might maybe happen someday. Because of this, much feul that could be used or disposed of with complete safty is not, but is sitting around at places like Japan’s Fukushima’s Nuclear Power Plant, where even there it has not injured or killed anyone at all. The danger is not the feul, the danger is the anti nuclear activists.
Currently, if you say that nuclear is dangerous, you are what is known as a “denier”, in this case, of reality.
Freezing to death in the dark, now that could get dangerous.
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…
For the last 50 years, we’ve been 3-5 years away from practical fusion reactors. Stop, already!!
If you repeat lies often enough people start to believe them.
I vote for both.
Hoser said,
“Laboratory esitmates that 5 tons of U and 13 tons of Th are released in burning coal. 5 % of ash is fly-ash, with a mean diameter of 6 to 10 µm. This is exactly the size that goes into the lungs and sticks. All the while these little glass spherules are making their way out of the lungs, they are bombarding the eplithelium with highly ionizing alpha particles. When alpha particles pass near DNA, double strand breaks and radical adducts are inevitable. The cancer risk may be much higher than for radon. ”
Odd thought, Radon222’s decay chain to Po214 with less than a 4 day half life is pretty nasty. Two alpha and two betas with about 10MeV total. U238 about 4MeV alpha with 4.5 billion year half life followed by three betas (about 1MeV each) to U234 with a 250000 year half life. Chance of cancer by U238 inhalation versus Rn222, about 1 in a billion. Radium and Radon are just as wicked as any reactor isotope you are likely to be exposed to except Iodine 131 because of its affinity for the thyroid.
I do agree with the smaller light water reactors. Much less chance of damaging the reactor core with LOC accident and much less chance of significant fallout. Storage of waste until generation IV is a big problem thanks to the EPA’s statistical incompetence.
Saturday, California got 18.3% of its electricity from Renewables (Wind, Solar, Biomass, Small Hydro, Geothermal.)
That doesn’t include Large Hydro, or Imported Wind, and Hydro.
http://www.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20110611_DailyRenewablesWatch.pdf
You’re further along than you realize.
Kum-
That’s wonderful!
Now look at the annual numbers, Or, better still (or worse, depending on what one is trying to show), let us know how much the renewables contibute to the peak demand hours.
Yesterday, per Calif. ISO, wind contributed about 1100 Mw-1500 Mw over the 1100 hrs -1700 hrs to the 31,000+ Mw peak and solar added a nice 100 Mw. About 5%.
Don K, Mike Wilson, Hoser;
Agreed, fusion from ITER is a dead end. But 5 yrs. from now I expect to see the mini-fusion DPF reactors now being developed by LPPhysics.com licensed for production world-wide. So much for the rolling “20/50/60 years in the future” wheeze.
Capital and power-output costs will be slashed by >90% compared to the CHEAPEST current tech.
And there is $0 government funding involved, which is a very good sign that it’s feasible.
Henry@Hoser
More that 300 people died at Chernobyl (sacrificially, for us) trying encapsulate the plant.
But they now find that it is still not safe enough there. It is cracking open again.
Ukraine does not have the money to come up with a proper solution to re-encapsulate in Chernobyl and is asking us (the world) for the money . Can you imagine that? (check that in Time magazine)
Japan is still busy counting what the solution for F. will cost. But it is likely to be a lot.
You want to carry on with nuclear?
Why don’t you fly there and help them encapsulate it?
You better go back to my initial post.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/13/rutgers-on-coal-vs-nuclear/#comment-679470
and look at the alternatives
doing something about those flooding rivers there in the USA and getting some power out of it,
at the same time, is that not a much better idea?
the claims of x tons of U and xx tons of T liberated in burning coal should be looked at with a definately jaundiced view.
if there was that much radio active stuff comming out of the stacks of the power plants we would be seeing the ususual suspects parading and ranting in front of the cameras and screaming about it at great length.
it would seem that if there was that much of the radio active elements comming out of the coal fires then we would be hearing cries of “ill gotten gains” from the power plants selling the stuff or better yet screaming about “proper disposal as radioactive waste”.
i have asked guys that do boiler repair work and they say that there is no evidence of radioactivesin the stacks. if they ask, people come out with counters and don’t find anything but background radiation levels.
oh you say that there are so many power plants that its spread really thinly that we have a hard time measuring it.
HMMMMMMMM. sounds like co2 sales all over again.
C
Chernobyl is the perennial excuse for not using Nuclear. Chernobyl was a badly designed, poorly built, reactor with minimal maintenance. The local engineers tried to do something that was dangerous and the advice at the time was DON’T. But they did.
Three Mile Island was a 60’s design. Current designs are 10 times safer.
Fukishima did as it was designed to do when the earthquake struck. It was the tsunami that was the problem. This was 3 times the height of the safety wall so swamped the cooling pumps. The rest is history.
Modern reactor designs use natural convection for cooling in the shut down condition. The Fukishima problem would not happen with these.
Nuclear power is safe. More workers have died in coal fired stations than nuclear.