Just a minor number compared to the, much more important, wealth generated for the share holders (/s just in case)
Yeah, but those deaths are just collateral. Think about how kids use a magnifying glass to burn ants. They’re doing it on purpose and are the real murderers. With that many deaths, we’ve surely killed a few kids who would have been murderous, so really, you’re welcome.
If the average American’s carbon footprint is 16t, then coal plants have saved at least 7.4MM tonnes of CO2 over the last two decades.
(Coal lobby pls DM for where to send the check)
Damn ultra doomer core
Sad how Nuclear Power plants are not worth it, due to short term vs. long term profits.
“Air pollution from coal is much more harmful than we thought, and we’ve been treating it like it’s just another air pollutant,” said the lead author, Lucas Henneman, an assistant professor in the Sid and Reva Dewberry department of civil, environmental and infrastructure engineering at George Mason University. “This type of evidence is important to policymakers like EPA [the US Environmental Protection Agency] as they identify cost-effective solutions for cleaning up the country’s air, like requiring emissions controls or encouraging renewables.”
The coal plants associated with most deaths were located east of the Mississippi River in industrialized states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where power stations were historically constructed close to population hubs. But every region had at least one plant linked to 600 deaths, while 10 were associated with more than 5,000 deaths across the study period.
About 85% of the total 460,000 coal plant-related deaths occurred between 1999 and 2007, an average of more than 43,000 deaths per year. The death toll declined drastically as plants closed or scrubbers – a type of sulphur filter – were installed to comply with new environmental rules. By 2020, the coal PM2.5 death toll had dropped 95%, to 1,600 people.
Why is profitability a large concern for building power plants? Nuclear power is extremely sensible if you account for societal impact.
I really hate that argument so much. Fighting climate change means we need to invest massive amounts of money in all kinds of infrastructure. Just replacing gas stations with EV charging ports will cost billions. No problem with that.
But bring up nuclear power and suddenly it’s about the cost and how it’s not profitable? Who cares? It’s reliable, flexible, safe and has a brilliant energy to emission ratio. It’s what we need right now. And no, it doesn’t matter it takes 15 to 20 years to build them … we’ll miss all the targets anyway.
The point is that there is no way to finance new nuclear power plants in the current financial framework.
I’m not a fan of the current financial framework, mind you, and as a person who took a number of nuclear engineering courses I have personal and professional reasons to want to see them built above the obvious practical considerations. But we literally can’t build any until we change the way we pay for stuff.
I kind of summarized the video below, please add on if I missed or if y’all have more information!
- Economies of Scale, Cost per Megawatt, most important metric in electricity market.
- Looking at Levelized Cost of Energy graphs, Nuclear not as cheap as the rest.
- Will a capitalist system fix a problem that was caused by capitalism.
- investing in Nuclear by gov’t is requried vs. companies
- expensive but Small Modular Reactor (SMR) Project may help compete in electricity market
The Uncertain Future of Nuclear Power [20:03 | Jul 22 2023 | Real Engineering]
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If energy becomes cheap, they lose money. If the stock market doesn’t see their profits rise every quarter, they will trade for less.
These major corps think of societal impact only in the monetary/cash flow sense and lobby heavily to support their position.
We’d need to adjust some rules, and educate more people on nuclear power
Massive upfront investment, NIMBY fuckheads, changing (bribed) regulatory framework constricting potentials, and if we crack fusion then the profitability never comes. Has been the issue for 70 years.
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Removed by mod
“By linking records of where Medicare beneficiaries lived and when they died, we found that risks due to PM2.5 from coal were more than double the risks related to PM2.5 from all sources,” said co-author Francesca Dominici, a professor of biostatistics, population and data science at the Harvard TC Chan school of public health." Dang!!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Cars, factories, fire smoke and electricity plants emit tiny toxic air pollutants known as fine particulate matter or PM2.5, which elevate the risk of an array of life-shortening medical conditions including asthma, heart disease, low birth weight and some cancers.
Previous studies quantifying the death toll from air pollution assumed all PM2.5 sources posed the same risk, and therefore probably underestimated the dangers of coal plants.
Government regulations save lives, according to the research, which is published in Science, as most deaths happened when environmental standards were weakest and PM2.5 levels from coal-fired power stations highest.
“This type of evidence is important to policymakers like EPA [the US Environmental Protection Agency] as they identify cost-effective solutions for cleaning up the country’s air, like requiring emissions controls or encouraging renewables.”
Henneman led a group of researchers who used publicly available data to track air pollution – and its health effects – from the 480 US coal power plants that operated at some point between 1999 and 2020.
The coal plants associated with most deaths were located east of the Mississippi River in industrialized states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where power stations were historically constructed close to population hubs.
The original article contains 602 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
We should definitely send them weapons
