
How Coal Kills - wlmsng
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-coal-kills/
======
Symmetry
That was completely devoid of any useful numbers. Here's a nice, well
researched chart that actually puts coal in a useful context compared to other
ways of generating electricity.

[http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml](http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml)

The rest of that is well worth reading, too.

~~~
tjradcliffe
Unfortunately it doesn't give any links to sources. In particular, the number
for oil is surprisingly high. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just curious
about where and how the deaths are occurring.

Coal kills in three distinct ways:

1) Miners: This depends enormously on the country and the mining technology.
The trend in North America is toward fewer and fewer miners underground. I've
worked in a support industry for hard rock mining, and coal is fundamentally
different in a lot of ways, but in hard rock the push is toward "zero entry"
mining, where everything underground is teleoperated or simply autonomous.

2) Transport: Coal has to be moved via train and truck, and the average
thermal coal plant requires a boxcar load every fifteen minutes. This is one
of the things that makes nuclear so much safer: uranium has such high energy
density that transportation deaths are very nearly zero. Mining deaths are
lower too.

3) Pollution: This is where coal really falls down. It's full of heavy metals
--lead, mercury, arsenic--and governed by standards that let coal plants
release more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear plants.
Particulates cause premature death due to respiratory disease. On the good
side, they may be cutting global climate change by more than half (1 W/m __2
cooling due to particulates vs 1.6 W /m __2 warming due to CO2).

Oil in contrast seems like it ought to be relatively safe. Drilling, refining
and pipeline transport rarely kill people. Rail transport--brought to you by
people who hate pipelines but love cars and electricity but oppose nuclear,
solar and windmills--is far more dangerous but it would be surprising if it
was that much worse than coal.

Here are some alternative data with some discussion of different sources and
studies: [http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-
so...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html)
(coal and oil are both still pretty bad compared to nuclear, but we knew that
anyway: nuclear is overwhelmingly the safest way to generate electricity,
despite its likely preventable issues with economically catastrophic failure.)

~~~
Symmetry
I actually did the numbers a while ago and even the Fukushima plant which
ended up exploding produced less deaths than the Next Big Futures numbers for
world coal and landed in the middle of Sustainable Energy's numbers for
European coal.

[http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-
vs...](http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-vs-coal.html)

------
belorn
For an article titled "how coal kills", I must say I am not much more wiser
from reading it. Is it only from specific impurities which are themselves
toxic elements, or does the carbon play a role? Is it the size of the
particles in coal smoke/ash, or is it the molecules? Do they interact to form
something deadlier than the sum of the parts?

I know coal kill. What would be interesting to know is how.

~~~
nitid_name
I've heard east coast (US) coal is dirtier than west coast (US) coal,
particularly in sulfides. The acid rain fix known as the Clean Air Act of 1990
was heavily lobbied by the east coast coal producers and bears some marks to
show for it. Burning so called "Clean Coal" has to do with how much gross
weight of sulfur you pull out of the coal, which makes sense for coal heavy in
sulfides, but less so for west coast fuel. As it stands, to burn west coast
coal in the US requires the addition of sulfides to the coal so it can then be
pulled back out.

As for other impurities... there are a lot of radioactive crap in coal that is
aerosolized during the combustion process. The most notable of these is
uranium, which is carried away with the rest of the fly ash. There's a
"shadow" around coal smoke stacks where such fly ash ends up accumulating. If
it makes it into the water table or onto arable land that is used to grow
crops, BAM, you've irradiated a small chunk of your population.

Depending on the source of the coal, there are various other heavy metals that
can end up in your fly ash.

------
mavhc
Coal contributes to most of the mercury pumped into our atmosphere, which is
what's contaminating the fish, and more radiation than nuclear power.

~~~
Synaesthesia
Coal power also contributes more radiation to the atmosphere than nuclear
power, or weapons ever did! It does this because of trace amounts of uranium
and other radioactive elements which are in coal, released when burnt.

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higherpurpose
It seems unlikely we'll ever put a price on coal's impact on people's health
(and therefore the cost of healthcare) and on the environment. But the very
least we could do is _cut the subsidies_ , and let it compete fairly against
solar and other renewables. Eventually we'll chase it out of the market,
because solar ill keep getting more cost-effective.

~~~
jes
Would you be willing to have a truly level playing field, where no energy
technology was awarded subsidies?

~~~
lkbm
A truly level playing field would mean internalizing all externalities. If
that were possible, yes, that would be ideal, but as he just noted, it's
really unlikely, partly because it's enormously complex.

~~~
fleitz
That's actually just your definition of a level playing field, there is no
'true' level playing field. (Well, other than literal playing fields that are
level)

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Jolijn
I'm interested in the study of complex issues like these (more from a math
point of view than a political one) - how to optimize for the right choice,
given that each choice has a bunch of non-overlapping side effects.

But I don't really know where to get started. What could I google for?

~~~
tjradcliffe
"Economics" :-)

Seriously, this is precisely the problem that economics tries to solve, and it
is evolving into a mature discipline with a reasonable level of empirical
validity, but the way psychology has evolved in the past few decades.

There are several main policy-oriented disciplines:

1) sociology, which studies society as if economics didn't matter

2) economics, which studies society as if morality didn't matter

3) political science, which studies society as if neither economics nor
morality matters

I'm caricaturing, of course, but the differences between the fields are due
more to historical accident than anything else, and if you're interested in
focusing on the math then economics is the place to be.

There is a lot of very interesting work being done in "heterodox" economics
right now, particularly by people like Steve Keen, who is focused on relaxing
the assumption that the economy is at all times in quasi-equilibrium, which is
foundational to the neo-classical paradigm:
[http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/](http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/)

Keen is interested in dynamical economic models, which necessarily require you
include things like banks and money in the model (these drop out of
equilibrium models, mostly.)

------
fleitz
Why are press releases on hacker news? The 'article' is practically devoid of
content.

------
strictnein
I'll flip the question: Considering that coal has provided a very significant
amount of the electrical power and heat for humans over the past 100 years,
how many lives has coal saved? How much has it improved the human experience?

Put simply, a world without coal is a horrible world.

~~~
_broody
That's a moot point if there's another viable way to generate the same amount
of power without trading lives in the process.

Slave labor also improved your life quite a bit, provided you were a slave
owner. Thankfully we found an alternative.

~~~
strictnein
Slavery, really? That's your analogy?

What's your viable way to replace coal today? Include explanations of how your
replacement can be as reliable as coal, and how the developing world can
afford these sources without sacrificing other government services.

~~~
anon1385
Literally millions of people are being killed by coal, without any choice in
the matter[1]. What analogy would you prefer to use for something as
devastating as that?

Coal only seems affordable if the significant health and environmental costs
are (incorrectly) assumed to be zero.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/12/china-
coa...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/12/china-coal-
emissions-smog-deaths) >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.

~~~
strictnein
A study commissioned by Greenpeace. Yes, a very unbiased and honest source on
these topics. Might as well list an NRA study on gun violence.

And read closer, please. The study claims to have found indicators pointing to
shortened lives, not people being killed by coal, which is significantly
different.

And, again: warmth and electricity and live to 65, or cold and darkness and
live a little longer. And really, that wouldn't be the trade off, because
electricity and warmth also lead to longer lives. So this study is meaningless
and shows nothing at all.

