

The triumph of coal marketing - gm
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-of-coal-marketing.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

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bluekeybox
I consider myself a proponent of safe nuclear power, but this chart is
borderline offensive with how it deals with the Chernobyl disaster:

"there have been 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children, but that
except for nine deaths, all of them have recovered."

Yes, let's ignore birth defects, any long-term increased risk, hugely
increased cancer prevalence, and the fact that some 2500-3000 square
kilometers of land will be unavailable for any serious development for like a
thousand of years. Out of the three people I knew who were relocated from the
exclusion zone, one died from cancer nine years after the event, at 40 years
of age. While this is anecdotal evidence on my part, most of the reports I
have heard were similar.

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dalke
Generating these comparisons is hard, and talk of deaths on a small scale
seems more offensive than talking about the many more, but more scattered
people who die from air pollution and even radioactive consequences of burning
coal.

For example, some 5,700 square kilometers of land have been changed because of
mountain removal mining, with "serious environmental impacts that mitigation
practices cannot successfully address" says an article in _Science_ magazine.
Wastes from coal production poison some waterways.

How does one weigh, say, the present day cancers of the Navajo who worked as
uranium miners in the 1950s against the more immediate diseases and disasters
of the coal mine industries?

I was told that 1/2 of the particulate matter in the air above Hawaii comes
from volcanoes, and the rest come from coal burning in Asia. At that sort of
global scale and with such loose coupling between cause and effect, it becomes
hard to assign meaningful direct numbers.

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bluekeybox
I agree with your assessment, and I do consider coal to be more
environmentally damaging than nuclear, which is why I am a proponent of
nuclear power as I mentioned. However I do not like articles that make
artificially low estimates of the impact of Chernobyl in particular just
because long-term impact is "hard" to measure. If it is hard to measure,
doesn't mean you shouldn't take it into account -- give a rough estimate, say
50-5,000 people or 50-10,000 people, but then of course a rough estimate makes
it harder to produce a nice chart to ogle at. Instead what you see is articles
using the lowest bound straight as reported by the Soviet headquarters, which
is just ridiculous.

Now measuring cancer risk, even a long term one, while painstaking, is not
exactly rocket science. There are multiple large-scale medical studies that do
just that very effectively, it's just they tended not to focus on Chernobyl
area for whatever reason, most likely due to funding.

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dalke
I think the author brought that up to to the likely mentions of Chernobyl. I
don't like his numbers though, for reasons similar to yours. The numbers are
WHO numbers, and not from Soviet HQ, but the predictions by other groups are
all over the map. The WHO one was before there could be solid population
measurements, and I don't see evidence of newer data from anyone.

One difficulty with the projection is that the author assumes that 4000 is the
only number to consider regarding deaths with nuclear power. For roof
installation he includes roofing accidents, but it does not include the
(rather few) people who have died in industrial accidents with nuclear
reactors. These are much fewer than 4,000 but he omits deaths due to mining
accidents related to uranium extraction (only saying that it's less than coal)
and neither does he use estimates for the deaths corresponding to steel and
concrete production, like he does for wind power.

To be fair, elsewhere his pages go into the differences in the amount of
materials needed for each one, and I think the differences I pointed out above
are small corrections to the gross numbers given.

