This is sure to get some enviros in a tizzy.
From Chemical and Engineering News of the American Chemical Society:
Nuclear Power Prevents More Deaths Than It Causes
Climate Change: Study estimates that nuclear energy leads to substantially fewer pollution-related deaths and greenhouse gas emissions compared with fossil-fuel sources
Using nuclear power in place of fossil-fuel energy sources, such as coal, has prevented some 1.8 million air pollution-related deaths globally and could save millions of more lives in coming decades, concludes a study. The researchers also find that nuclear energy prevents emissions of huge quantities of greenhouse gases. These estimates help make the case that policymakers should continue to rely on and expand nuclear power in place of fossil fuels to mitigate climate change, the authors say (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es3051197).
In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, critics of nuclear power have questioned how heavily the world should rely on the energy source, due to possible risks it poses to the environment and human health.
“I was very disturbed by all the negative and in many cases unfounded hysteria regarding nuclear power after the Fukushima accident,” says report coauthor Pushker A. Kharecha, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York.
Working with Goddard’s James E. Hansen, Kharecha set out to explore the benefits of nuclear power. The pair specifically wanted to look at nuclear power’s advantages over fossil fuels in terms of reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
Kharecha was surprised to find no broad studies on preventable deaths that could be attributed to nuclear power’s pollution savings. But he did find data from a 2007 study on the average number of deaths per unit of energy generated with fossil fuels and nuclear power (Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61253-7). These estimates include deaths related to all aspects of each energy source from mining the necessary natural resources to power generation. For example, the data took into account chronic bronchitis among coal miners and air pollution-related conditions among the public, including lung cancer.
Read more here http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/04/Nuclear-Power-Prevents-Deaths-Causes.html
Prevented mortality and greenhouse gas emissions from historical and projected nuclear power
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As he has always said, I think.
BTW, does anyone know how many people have actually died from nuclear accidents? I know people from Chernobyl, for example, and they can’t put a high figure on it at all, around 80 in all (at a guess from them).
Are there any actual figures? Most people I talk to about it believe it to be thousands, but most people have no idea about the facts, and get their ‘ideas’ solely from the MSM. For example, none of them (not a single one, even those with strong views) have ever known anything about the ‘banana’ unit of radiation, ie the amount of additional radiation you are exposed to by eating a single banana, let alone how that relates to actual worker and emergency personnel levels of radiation.
My view is that I know very little, but almost everybody I talk to about it obviously knows much less.
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs) will, IMHO, be what powers the world’s future.
It’s really the only power source that seems to fulfill all the necessary requirements: proven technology (test LFTR at Oak Ridge Labs ran perfectly from 1964-69), safe, clean, reliable, efficient (can’t beat E=MC^2), cheap (theoretically costing $0.03/kWh), abundant (virtually inexhaustible supply of the stuff; it’s everywhere and in huge quantities), low plant construction cost (costs about the same as Natural Gas Power Plant to build), very scaleable, minimal nuclear waste (99% less than conventional solid fuel reactors), no special processing of Thorium 232 is required, etc.,
The ONLY thing holding this technology back is the lack of will from politicians to establish the regulation, standards and permit process to build these.
While the West continues to waste $100’s of Billions (if not $Trillions by now) on expensive/ low-energy density technologies like wind and solar, China has 700 PhD physicists working on building their first LFTR test reactor, which should be online in a few years.
Time is running out. If China is allowed to get a jump in implementing LFTR technology before the West gets it head out of the sand, then a gigantic second wave of production will flood to China to take advantage of the cheapest energy on the planet.
And so it goes….until it doesn’t….
It is really worrying when one discovers that one even slightly agrees with something that Hansen has said!
Jer0me says:
April 3, 2013 at 12:19 am
BTW, does anyone know how many people have actually died from nuclear accidents? I know people from Chernobyl, for example, and they can’t put a high figure on it at all, around 80 in all (at a guess from them).
There is a comprehensive report on Chernobyl here:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Safety-and-Security/Safety-of-Plants/Chernobyl-Accident/#.UVwCTZY0-So
Well worth reading on the health impacts, (or lack of), is here, with the numbers:
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/2006_articles/spring%202006/Chernobyl_Folly.pdf
The Real Chernobyl Folly by Zbigniew Jaworowski (former chairman of UNSCEAR)
Chernobyl related controls on sheep were only lifted in Wales and Cumbria last year – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17472698
About China’s nuclear power plans; 600 more reactors contributes significantly to their reactor-years or GWatt-years Pareto Distribution, which is to say that their accident becomes inevitable. Inexpert discussions of reactor safety is a bit like bicyclists mentioning p*nct*r*s, cyclists that go thousands of miles are reticent to brag knowing that all streaks end.
About LFTR; there is sufficient experience (some recent) with liquid metal/molten salt cooled reactors to obviate any hypothetical advantage of adding fluorine and thorium to the witches brew.
There is a plethora of inherently safe nuclear reactor designs, some are even advocated by experienced reactor engineers, how many have been built? Currently the demonstrated safest designs belong to the U.S. Navy, being light water PWR. They are not large, they are expensive and safe.
If it was easy then anyone could do it.
On the health effects of low level radiation exposure, the ‘nuclear shipyard worker study’ – NSWS – is the most thoroughly disappeared public document that I know. It tracked 70,000 shipyard workers program health to discover radiation hormesis.
Matanoski, G.M. (1991) Health effects of low-level radiation in shipyard workers final report, June 1991, DOE, DE-AC02-79, EV10095.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/54904454/Nuclear-Earth-Day-2011
The problem with Fukushima is that it is on the wrong side of Japan. On the west side it would not be facing the tsunamis generated by the subduction zone earthquakes to the east. Nothing wrong with nuclear power when correctly used.
dennisambler says:
April 3, 2013 at 3:38 am
…
thanks, I’ll have a read!
The difficulties in siting illustrates perfectly the failure of inductive inference in forecasting. Avoiding one Black Swan exposes the site to another. Better antifragile than robust, better robust than fragile.
Someone earlier, maybe in some other thread, made a crack about chaotic complexity reduced by empiricism. That is, I believe, oxymoronic. It is connecting the dots on a epistemological mapping that must be so dimensionally reduced as to be nonsense but for the narrow path of deduction..
Wow! Something Hansen and I both agree on!
Richard A Muller (Energy for Future Presidents) has always advocated nuclear. He also wrote the famous Wall Street Journal article “The Panic Over Fukushima”:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444772404577589270444059332.html
If the Linear Hypothesis is correct, all the radiation leaked from Fukushima will result in an additional 24 cancer deaths among the 360,000 people exposed. I’m not saying that 24 deaths is not a tragedy; it’s twice as many people as died in the Aurora, Colorado shooting. But these 24 deaths will be undetectable among the 72,000 cancer deaths normally expected in a group of this size.
Doug Huffman–
It seems you don’t quite understand how LFTRs work, so I’d suggest you visit the following site for some basic information on LFTRs for your edification:
http://energyfromthorium.com/
Petr Beckmann’s book, “The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear”, was written in 1977.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Health-Hazards-Going-Nuclear/dp/0911762175
FUKUSHIMA RADIATION
Fukushima Medical University is monitoring the radiation effects of the reactor leak.
Ultrasound thyroid screening of 94,975 participants from April 2012 to January 2013 found that 18.5% had thyroid disorder, with cysts greater than 3.1mm.
http://www.fmu.ac.jp/radiationhealth/results/media/10-2_ThyroidUE.pdf
By way of comparison, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists estimates that 20% of the US population may be hypothyroid.
http://thyroid.about.com/od/gettestedanddiagnosed/a/tshtestwars_2.htm
The AACE guesstimate of 20% is obviously a total thumb-suck. I couldn’t find any large-scale studies in other countries to compare with the Fukushima Medical University survey. It’s impossible to conclude if the Fukushima thyroid disorder rate is above normal and if so by how much. (It’s also impossible to conclude that there is no variation.)
IS NUCLEAR THE ANSWER?
A couple of years ago I was involved in the renewable energy bidding process initiated by NERSA, the National Energy Regulator of South Africa. My client was a major Japanese manufacturer of wind turbines.
Nuclear comes in at roughly four times the cost of coal-fired power. Wind and solar are over eight times as expensive.
I’m sure that other readers will quote alternative figures showing a much smaller cost premium for “clean” energy. I’ll stick to my figures because they don’t come from theoretical studies. They were generated by commercial enterprises that need at least to break even to stay in business.
This is hardly a secret. Hansen has been vocal about his endorsement of breeder and thorium reactors for years. From what I’ve read, this represents the majority position among climate scientists with physics background.
Steve Dekker says: April 3, 2013 at 9:05 am “Doug Huffman–
It seems you don’t quite understand how LFTRs work, so I’d suggest you visit the following site for some basic information on LFTRs for your edification:”
I can’t imagine what you found, particularly in what I wrote here, that indicated my understanding, or lack of understanding, of reactor workings. I directed a number of initial criticalities, assisted more and decommissioned still more reactor plants.
For you, here is a recent article, Thorium: Not a near-term commercial nuclear fuel (doi: 10.1177/0096340212459125 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists September/October 2012 vol. 68 no. 5 33-44 ).
Bigotry and prejudice are postgraduate certificates from the School of Hard Knocks. I am fully prejudiced against thorium Pi in the sky.
Oldfossil– LFTRs are by far much cheaper than solid fuel reactors because: thorium is much cheaper, thorium just has one natural isotope that doesn’t require any special processing, 99% of thorium is burned in LFTRs as opposed to just 0.5% in solid fuel reactors, there is 90% less nuclear waste with LFTRs compared to LWRs, LFTR’s nuclear waste have very short half lives, transuranics in LFTRs can be removed chemically during operation, construction costs are 1/10th of liquid fuel reactors, personnel/maintenance costs are much lower, etc.
LFTRs can produce electricity for about $0.02~0.03/kWh, making the cheapest form of energy production currently available.
Choose green energy and you will get nuclear energy. Whether nuclear energy is a good choice or not, the decision to choose green energy is a decision to choose nuclear energy. Because nuclear energy is by far the most economical green energy, the voter will choose nuclear energy. The belief in AGW is in the process of overcoming environmental opposition to nuclear energy.
@ur momisugly Dekker, at which LFTR plant was this production experience earned?
oldfossil says:
April 3, 2013 at 8:35 am
I discover that the Linear Hypothesis has been challenged.
Also known as the Linear No-Threshold Hypothesis (LNT), it assumes that radiation doses accumulate across whole populations.
A 25,000 milliSievert (mSv) dose of radiation is believed to create a 100% chance that you will get cancer. The LNT assumes that if 25,000 people each receive 1mSv radiation, this will induce one extra radiation death.
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2011/Fall-2011/Interview_Calabrese.pdf
Although Richard A Muller supported the LNT in his 2012 essay, “The Panic Over Fukushima,” and I think that Muller is pretty damn good, the LNT could be bad science.
Steve Dekker says:
April 3, 2013 at 11:31 am
Steve, please forgive me for appealing to the yukk-word “consensus,” but none of the articles I’ve read think that Lifters will be operational and uploading sparks to the grid before 2030.
If I may quibble with my senior; LNT establishes a dose-damage response from high dose bomb survivor studies that is assumed to be harmful right down to zero. Radiation hormesis is based on the observation that life and humans evolved in a radiation field.
The Matanoski study found a positive correlation between some levels of radiation exposure and general good health. My interest in it is as an extreme datum, with ~3 REM WBE occupational.
I wrote a paper on the subject of health effects of radiation for the NWMO, Canada, some years ago. I preceded the main subject with primers so that those who were interested could understand what it was about. It is long, and boring for those with little interest in the subject, but it covered all of the main detail, especially in the appendices, where the major studies are summarized.
The paper is here:
http://www.nwmo.ca/3.2
I don’t trust Hansen, first it was a coming ice age, then AGW, now go nuclear. I would like to know if nuclear reactors are any more safer than solar thermal, certainly more reliable, but as some posters have suggested – we in Australia would have to import nuclear technicians, and they don’t come cheap unless we import them from Japan or China. Or America, who will obviously have a financial interest to expand this industry and the safety we demand. Also in Australia our population is dispersed mainly around the coast line. But – a mixture of coal and nuclear might be the answer.