12 Month German Carbon Intensity, 501 g CO2/kWh; An Estimate of the Associated Death Toll.
I was inspired to write this post based on an article in the ANS News, which answered the question for which I never actually took the time to answer, this question: "What was German nuclear capacity before its government decided to kill people by switching to coal?"
The article is here: Germany’s winter to wonder “What if . . . ?”
Before going into the data provided by the article, and excerpting it, and conducting "back of the envelope" calculations of the death toll associated with this decision, I'll post a bit I keep handy for discussions of this type that I have posted before in other contexts:
Anil Markandya, Paul Wilkinson, Electricity generation and health, The Lancet, Volume 370, Issue 9591, 2007, Pages 979-990.
Here's table 2: 
This publication comes from 2007, five years before the much discussed natural disaster that killed oodles of people, nearly 20,000 humans, with seawater building collapses, but is only of interest to the public because 3 nuclear reactors failed at Fukushima. (Nobody gives a rat's ass about seawater deaths, although from a climate perspective we're all working as hard as is possible to make sure that the seawater death toll rises.)
One might think that the 2007 data would be invalidated by radiation deaths from Fukushima, at least if one is a badly educated antinuke - there are no other kinds of antinukes - but one would be wrong.
As of 2022, radiation deaths among the most exposed people, plant workers, have yet to materialize: Comparison of mortality patterns after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant radiation disaster and during the COVID-19 pandemic, Motohiro Tsuboi et al 2022 J. Radiol. Prot. 42 031502
The article is open sourced, anyone can read it, but here's an excerpt pertinent to the point:
I added the bold. There may have been some radiological deaths, but they if there were, they were not so prevalent as to vary from statistical noise, in other words, they are vanishingly small. Thus I will rely on the 2007 Lancet publication for calculations, suspecting as I do that the power generation associated with powerplants used to power computers for people to obsess all over the internet over Fukushima actually killed more people than radiation in the event did. In my experience, few things generate more stupidity with respect to this climate disaster than the word "Fukushima."
Now let me excerpt the ANS "Nuclear News" article indicating how much nuclear capacity was mindlessly destroyed in service to German fear and ignorance.
Instead of drawing on just three pressurized water reactors offering 4,055 MWe this winter, Germany could have had 13 PWRs and seven boiling water reactors, with a total capacity of 22,985 MWe.
Here is a graphic from the article showing when and why German reactors of Western design were shut:
The following graphic comes from the Electricity Map for Germany, set to 12 month history, running from October 2021 to October 2022.
It shows that Germany's average continuous power from coal in this period was 21.2 GW, which translates as there are 24*365.25 = 8766 hours in a year to 185,839 GWh, or, carrying one insignificant figure, 185.8 TWh. Now we are almost ready to calculate the death toll associated with the German decision to switch from nuclear to coal based on fear and ignorance. But first we have to decide whether the Germans are burning lignite or hard coal.
German domestic coal is largely lignite, the most dangerous type of coal to burn, but in their decision, in effect, to fund Putin's war on Ukraine by buying dangerous natural gas and dangerous coal, they tended to buy hard coal from Russia. Presumably they have found other sources of coal to burn to kill people, but for the purposes of this back of the envelope calculation, I'll use the average death toll per TWh of lignite (32.6 deaths per TWh) and hard coal (24.5 deaths per TWh) which works out to 28.6 deaths per TWh.
This means that Germany's coal burning, estimated at 50% lignite, led to around 5,305 deaths this year.
If Germany had not chosen, as a result of fear and ignorance to shut its nuclear plants, which tend to operate at close to 100% capacity utilization, but let's assume 90% capacity utilization, it would have supplied 20.6 GW of average continuous power, translating to 181.3 TWh, again carrying one insignificant figure.
Using the Lancet figures, this would have resulted in less than 10 deaths.
To two significant figures, this means the German decision to shut its nuclear plants killed around 5300 people this year.
These figures do not include the deaths associated with climate change that Germany is working hard to make worse.
For comparison, French carbon intensity for the same period was 111 g CO2/kWh. This was despite the disastrous French decision to not maintain its once magnificent nuclear infrastructure so it could fund the dangerous and deadly "renewable energy is 'green'" fad, an internationally held nonsensical belief. Even so, using its operable nuclear infrastructure, in "percent talk" France's carbon intensity was 22% as bad as Germany's or put another way, again in "percent talk" 451% better than France.
The implications should be clear, even to someone as badly educated as, say, Bill McKibben, but somehow they aren't.
Have a happy New Year.
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