The Effect of Closing TVA Nuclear Plants on Infant Health.

[NNadir]

I hadn't noticed, but Nature started a new Journal called Nature Energy. The parent journal is, of course, one of the world's most important scientific journals, and Google Scholar in fact rates it (in terms of h index) as the most prestigious journal.

No matter.

Having discovered the journal, and being interested in issues in Energy as they apply to climate change - which is getting worse, not better - I decided to leaf through some issues of this new journal.

I was pleased to find a paper on what I personally regard as the only acceptable form of centralized energy, nuclear energy.

The paper is here: Impacts of nuclear plant shutdown on coal-fired power generation and infant health in the Tennessee Valley in the 1980s (NATURE ENERGY 2, 17051 (2017))

Some excerpts from the text:

Nuclear accidents usually give rise to public backlash against nuclear energy. Three major accidents the 1979 Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown in the US, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union, and the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan have led to the discontinuation of nuclear programs in several countries. After the Fukushima disaster, for instance, German support for nuclear energy dropped by about 20 per cent1, and Germany permanently shut down eight of its seventeen reactors, pledging to complete the phase-out by 2022. In the US, Fukushima added pressure to the power industry. Facing cheap natural gas, stalled carbon emissions legislation, and growing safety concerns, they eventually announced the closure of six large nuclear power plants2. Although the media has discussed the public health consequences of potential exposure to radioactivity associated with nuclear accidents extensively, emissions and health costs prevented by nuclear power generation have been overlooked.

"...stalled carbon emission legislation..."

"...cheap natural gas..."

In reference to the latter, I would ask, "cheap for whom?" The people who are using it while we all wait for the make believe solar and wind miracle that has not come, is not come and will never come, or for all future generations who will live with the consequences of the absolute and total failure of so called "renewable energy" to actually work?

More from the paper's text:

The Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor partially melted down on 28 March 1979, near Middletown, Pennsylvania. Being the worst accident in US commercial nuclear power plant history, the accident crystallized anti-nuclear safety concerns among activists and the general public. Following the public backlash, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) intensified inspections in nuclear facilities, leading to new regulations and the shutdown of several nuclear plants around the nation in the 1980s, including Browns Ferry and Sequoyah in the TVA area in 1985. At Browns Ferry, NRC inspectors identified 652 violations bet ween 1981 and 1984, and the agency imposed $413,000 (1986 USD) in fines9_11. In July 1984, the NRC issued an order requiring TVA to implement its Regulatory Performance Improvement Program (RPIP) and provide periodic reports. In February 1985, reactor vessel water level instrumentation problems happened in Unit 3, leading TVA to cease operations in March 19 at all three Browns Ferry units to undertake programmatic improvements. By September 1985, the NRC found the RPIP to be ineffective and required another plan from TVA. The shutdown of Browns Ferry would last for many years, as shown by the timeline in Fig. 1.

The timeline shows that the Sequoyah Nuclear Plant shut in August of 1985 and restarted in November of 1988, the Browns Ferry Reactors shut in 1985 with Browns Ferry 2 restarting in 1991, Browns Ferry 3 restarting in 1995, and Browns Ferry 1 restarting in 2007.

Wow! This reads like an account written by that anti-nuke asshole Ed Lyman over at the Union of Concerned "Scientists."

Bad huh? 652 violations, this while the plant was operating! It's a wonder everyone in the Tennessee Valley wasn't killed, just like everyone in Japan was killed by Fukushima and everyone in Harrisburg PA died from Three Mile Island.

The author continues:

In this study, I exploit the shutdown of nuclear facilities in the TVA after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 to estimate its direct impact on coal-fired power generation, particle pollution as measured by total suspended particulate (TSP), and infant health as captured by birth weight, a health indicator that has high predictive power for later-life outcomes. In fact, low birth weight infants experience severe health and developmental diffculties that can impose large costs on society14. It has a negative e ect on IQ, height and earnings15, and an inverse relationship with adult mortality particularly cardiovascular mortality16.Using econometricmethods with plant-level monthly electricity generation data, county-level TSP concentration, and birth-level data, I find three key results.

Three key results:

First, the shutdown of nuclear facilities in the TVA in the 1980s led to a shift in electricity generation towards coal-fired power plants. The substitution between nuclear and coal seems to be one to one, that is, each megawatt-hour not produced by nuclear power plants because of the shutdown appears to have been generated by coal-powered plants. Second, air pollution increased substantially in counties where coal-fired plants were producing large shares of the electricity originally generated by the nuclear facilities. The additional coal burning triggered by the nuclear shutdown led to an increase in TSP concentration by around 10 _gm?3, which is equivalent to reversing the gains observed after two years of the implementation of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970 17. Third, and last, infant health may have deteriorated in places experiencing higher levels of air pollution induced by the nuclear shutdown. In fact, average birth weight in the most affected areas decreased considerably. The decline was approximately 134 g, or 5.4 per cent, which is large even when we rescale it by the change in TSP concentration.

Thank goodness the Tennessee Valley had people like Ed Lyman to protect its citizens from healthy full weight babies who would grow up to be intelligent, tall, human beings with a low incidence of heart disease and a normal life span.

The paper speaks for itself, but it is worth noting that the author kind of shrugs and says, more or less, "Well, we could always replace nuclear plants with natural gas."

Seven million people die each year from air pollution according to a paper I often reference from Lancet, which is by the way #4 on the Google Scholar list of the world's most prestigious scientific journals.

A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)

These papers speak for themselves, or should speak for themselves were it not for the fact that we on the left are only a little less willing to lie to ourselves than our opponents on the left.

Oh, and maybe you've been hearing that coal is dead because solar and wind energy are so wonderful. This too is a lie, a lie on a Trumpian scale.

If you don't think so, I consider it my duty to direct you to the EIA web page containing a graph of all electric power sources in the United States.

EIA ELECTRICITY DATA BROWSER

The graph is interactive, you can highlight the line associated with any form of energy by moving your cursor over the caption at the bottom for each form of energy.

After 50 years of cheering by people who hate nuclear energy because they are incompetent to understand a damned thing about it - but who are perfectly fine with dangerous natural gas because in their useless imaginations they regard it as "transitional" - the solar and wind industry combined can't even produce a fraction of the energy provided by nuclear energy using reactors mostly built 30 years ago by a generation of engineers this country can no longer match. To separate the (light blue) solar line from the x-axis, you may need a magnifying glass, and wind and hydroelectric are about tied for second closest to zero.

The fastest growing form of electrical energy generation in the United States, for anyone who can read a graph, is natural gas. The solar, wind, and hydroelectric industries are trivial in comparison to dangerous natural gas, and are in fact still trivial compared to coal.

The brown line is coal and it is more or less tied with dangerous natural gas for the #1 spot for fuels for electricity, after having been the chief supply of American electricity from the dawn of the 21st century up until 2015, when the surge in dangerous natural gas use - a crime against all future generations - began to surge.

By the way, there are no "Fossil Fuel Free" groups, few "Fossil Free" activists here at DU, except maybe me, even though we have had lots of "nuclear free" activists at DU, and of course a "nuclear free" group, not that I know all that much about them anymore after years of expressing my low opinion of their education and knowledge, since I've been liberally utilizing the wonderful "ignore" button here to address the worst and least educated of these people.

And if we care about the future, no, we can't always replace nuclear with natural gas. To do so, given the climate impact of this fuel, not to mention the permanent, irreversible damage to the subsurface structures through which much of water flows, is, again, a crime against all future generations, a crime more odious than low birth rates, short life spans, and impaired intellects. It is a crime that all future generations will not even have the resources to address, as we have selfishly determined to leave them with nothing.

It is difficult to think. It takes work. But, if you care about the future, and I personally regard this as an ethical imperative, it is your responsibility to do it.

Tomorrow's Friday. Enjoy it.

[sharedvalues]

1. Tail risk. Worst case too bad for nuclear to survive

Nuke power is great, I agree. It's a cheap and clean way to generate power, 99.999% of the time.

It's the 0.001% and really the 0.00001% of the time that is the problem. With very low probability Fukushima happens, costing billions in cleanup, destroying the plant, forcing local evaluations, and polluting local water and soil.

With VERY VERY low probability Chernobyl or a terrorist nuke or worse happens. But those costs blow up the expected value. Effectively the variance does not exist, so cost calculations are highly uncertain.

Like it or not, we're headed on a freight train to solar, batteries, and renewables.

Fusion isn't happening, nor are sodium reactors, and probably very few 4th gen fission.

[NNadir]

3. We are NOT on a freight train to solar, bateries and renewables.

The EIA graph shows that they haven't worked, aren't working, and won't work.

The EIA graph linked in the OP shows that.

We are on a freight train to disaster.

We spent two trillion dollars on this planet in the last ten years on solar and wind, with the result that the rate of decomposition of the atmosphere has increased to the highest level ever.

I am sick and tired of people raising "Chernobyl and Fukushima." This is selective attention, which people do whenever nuclear energy is mentioned.

How many trillions' or "quaddrillions" will it take to clean up the planetary atmosphere?.

What is the cost of seven million deaths per year?

What is the cost of destabilized weather patterns?

The fact is that fossil fuels don't need an accident to kill people. They kill people when they operate normally.

Nuclear power plants need not be perfect, they need not be risk free to be vastly superior to all other alternatives. They only need to be superior to all other alternatives, which they clearly are.

Have a nice weekend.

[BootinUp]

11. Dude or Dudette, we just elected Trump

How the f are we as a nation going to make good scientifically based decisions on power? Just forget about it. Have a nice weekend and life if possible.

[Mopar151]

2. From a blue-collar perspective.

The TVA plants are going to significantly outperform most civilian nukes for a simple reason. The people who built the new Watts Bar plant, and others like it, are The All-Star team! How do I know this? Because I have friends working there, and that's the kind of people they are! The industry's contraction since the heyday of the drunks, incompetents, and vastly overconfident managers that built shitbox nukes like Vt. Yankee and Seabrook ( yes, I knew plenty of them) has washed out the losers.
It's still a test of carachter, too, especially on an engineering level. My engineer BIL is working on modifying and " hopping up" several reactors in the Southeast, and he gets plenty of pressure from the manager level to get it done yesterday. He'll do it right or walk - and that is what the industry has always needed. But when the industry was much bigger, there were plenty of engineers with young families and big morgtages that did'nt dare to make a peep.

[NNadir]

4. Vt. Yankee, which was shut by fear and ignorance, and Seabrook, saved lives.

The United States built more than 100 nuclear reactors in 20 years while providing the lowest cost electricity in the world.

The number of people killed by them is zero.

Nuclear energy is the only form of energy which is required to address the imagination of people who fear it because they don't know anything about it.

An engineer who builds a gas plant or a coal plant is building a machine that will kill people whenever it operates normally. No imagination is required.

Until Vermont Yankee was shut by appeals to fear and ignorance, Vermont was the only state in the Union that did not depend on dumping dangerous fossil fuel waste directly into the atmosphere.

It was a crime to shut that reactor. It, like every other reactor in this country saved lives.

[Mopar151]

5. VT Yankee closed on its design closing date.

Thanks to the malfeasance of Entergy.

[NNadir]

6. Not really. Anti-nuke stupidity, particularly over a few atoms of tritium had a lot to do...

...with it.

I am very familiar with what happened at Vermont Yankee, a crime, since I have a nice internet friend, Meredith Angwin, who fought like hell to save the reactor and thus save lives.

(It was less tritium than is in a self illuminating wrist watch.)

Top 5 Best Watches With Tritium Technology – The Buying Guide

You know what energy related technology kills the most people in Vermont?

Air pollution from burning wood.

The health effects of burning wood are enormous, and in fact, half of the seven million lives lost to air pollution every damn year on this planet derive from burning biomass.

The number of deaths from "less than a wrist watch" worth of tritium around Vermont Yankee is surely zero.

The reactor was built in a time when this country had respect for scientists and engineers and not when people who know nothing about science and engineering treated science and engineering with contempt based on idiotic appeals from other people who don't know anything about science and engineering.

Because of the high quality of these historical engineers, the performance of the reactor easily exceeded its design life, which was set somewhat arbitrarily based on a safety margin that was clearly too strict and too excessive, given that the plant saved lives.

You are ignoring the fact that Entergy had an added expense of fighting public idiocy.

They don't give a shit one way or the other. They're about money, and nothing else. They decided that it was easier, and maybe cheaper, to build gas plants that kill people when they operate normally because nobody gives a shit about gas plants even though there are zero gas plants on this planet that are required to meet the same safety requirements that nuclear plants are required to meet.

These standards are:

Proving that no by products of their operations ever escape anywhere for centuries at any time whether in the imagination or reality of the general public.

That all external costs be borne internally.

That the energy be close to "too cheap to meter" (I often hear this very, very, very stupid reference to a remark made by right wing syndic in the 1950's who was not an engineer or a scientist, and who, in fact, hated scientists as much as a modern anti-nuke, Robert Strauss played a prominent role in the crime of censuring Robert Oppenheimer.)

(I'd be interested to find out if there is any form of energy that is "too cheap to meter." )

That the plants continuously needed to face public scrutiny and criticism - very stupid and ignorant scrutiny and criticism - no matter how well they perform.

Having to address every single specious piece of crap objection raised by anyone no matter how ignorant it is...

...and so on.

Having more than half a century of experience with the interactions of neutrons and materials, there is enough information to design reactors that would easily last close to a century, each one built a gift from one generation to several generations afterwards, just as the Oyster Creek nuclear reactor near where I live was a gift to my generation and my sons' generation.

But that's not what we're doing. What we're doing is whining and raising picayune scare mongering to a crescendo to the point that we will leave future generations with no resources to clean up the consequences of our sybaritic spiral into an orgy of ignorance.

And that's where we are, especially in this country, as demonstrated by the Republican party - and frankly, anti-nukes on the left - spiraling into an orgy of ignorance.

[lintuka]

12. Bitter truth

Last edited Thu Dec 28, 2017, 01:03 PM - Edit history (1)

This is increasing day by day, but we behave like we don't know anything. The tritium technology Best Tritium Watch 2018 – Top 5 Brightest tritium watch review is also telling this.

[populistdriven]

15. World's 1st meltdown proof pebble-bed reactor will be completed by April 2018...

in China. Then they plan to start selling them! Our own democratic gov't run by Trump (& courtesy of Putin) is cutting academic innovation & shifting energy investment to fossil fuels.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-China-plans-further-high-temperature-reactor-innovation-1909171.html

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600757/china-could-have-a-meltdown-proof-nuclear-reactor-next-year/

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Fuel-loading-starts-at-Chinese-demonstration-HTGR-0704175.html

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/04/china-has-started-loading-pebble-bed-fuel-into-new-reactor-which-will-begin-operation-later-this-year.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor

[Mopar151]

7. Yes, really.

Collapsing cooling structure, a dismissive attitude to VT regulattors, and avarice regarding the decomissioning fund played a major role

[NNadir]

8. I have a dismissive attitude toward VT regulators. I'd be interested to finding out when they...

have a major role in decommissioning the waste dump the planetary atmosphere has become, but so far, no interest whatsoever on their part.

Let me know when they have a major interest in decommissioning the fracking fields on the Reading Prong.

And let me know if they have a plan for decommissioning all that rickety crap they allowed to trash Vermont's mountains with roadways, this crap:



Lowell Mountains wind project: The great divider

Lindholm is the Rutland County member of the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Board, and he works for Vermonters for a Clean Environment, a group that staunchly opposes ridgeline wind developments in Vermont. Lindholm says he began hunting moose in the Lowell Mountains seven years ago.

“Right now, moose are suffering; they can’t stand temperatures above 50 degrees,” he said. “They would sit on these mountains in the wet areas, but they won’t be doing that anymore.”

Lindholm’s biggest gripe is the amount of blasting that GMP did to level off the ridgeline. He has property in Lempster, N.H., home to a 24-mW wind project, and he said they didn’t blast rock in the same manner.

Justin Lindholm, the Rutland County member of the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Board who works for the advocacy group Vermonters for a Clean Environment, points to a spot where he used to see moose before Green Mountain Power built the controversial wind project on the Lowell Mountains ridgeline. Lindholm was on a GMP-hosted tour of the turbine site on July 3, 2013.

Justin Lindholm, Rutland County member of the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Board who works for Vermonters for a Clean Environment, points to a spot where he used to see moose before Green Mountain Power built the controversial wind project on the Lowell Mountains ridgeline.

“It’s nowhere near as rugged where they had to blast this much,” he said. “They can do a lot better job of picking their sites. Their siting is no good.”

Note that it would take thousands of these monstrosities to equal the continuous power output that Vermont Yankee reliably generated for years, until specious ignorance lead the plant to shut.

Another avenue by which people pay selective attention to the nuclear industry, thus killing people because there are no forms of energy as safe as nuclear, is the big bad "decommissioning" scam.

It's the only case in which energy systems are required to pay attention to future generations, with the result that future generations will be screwed by dangerous fantasies that this generation held, that so called "renewable energy" would work.

It didn't work. It's not working. It won't work. The failure is written clearly in the atmosphere: The Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory

The nuclear industry is half a century old. It is the only industry whose shut infrastructure hasn't killed anyone.

Let me know when you - or the Vermont regulators who I hold in contempt for their role in killing people - can show that the number of people killed by the existence of the nuclear plant, operating or shut, equals the number of deaths from air pollution in Vermont.

[NNadir]

10. You need to get the "waste" off the planet!?!

Why?

Seven million people die from air pollution each year, as noted in the OP.

Let me repeat, once again, the link not to some dumb ass Wikipedia page, but from the 4th most prestigious scientific journal according to Google scholar:

A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)

Now, one needs to go to a good scientific library perhaps to access this paper, but every time I hear this bullshit about so called "nuclear waste" I invite correspondents to do so to see if anywhere in that document, a comprehensive evaluation of all human risk and associated mortality, to show where "exposure to nuclear waste" registers.

How is that you're so concerned about what you call "nuclear waste?"

Can you identify in the last more than half a century of commercial nuclear operations where so called "nuclear waste" has killed anyone in this country? How about as many people as will die from the next 48 hours from air pollution? That would be about 40,000 people.

The Fukushima disaster has demonstrated that people carry on endlessly, horrifically given the death toll from not using nuclear power, about their idiotic fears that someone someday might die from radiation at Fukushima while paying zero attention to the 20,000 people who were killed by seawater from the tsunami.

Anyone carrying on about radiation from Fukushima is paying very dangerous and very deadly selective attention, since this kind of ignorance kills people, a point made not on some Wikipedia page but in a paper I often cite from one of the world's most prominent climate scientists in one of the world's leading scientific environmental journals.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

Nuclear energy saves lives, and it follows that anti-nuke fear and ignorance kills people.

The anti-nuke idiot Ed Lyman calculated that Fukushima might over 30 or 40 years result in 1000 people losing some life span. That's, um, equal to about about 90 minutes of air pollution deaths.

Now you come here to propose using rockets to launch nuclear fuels because you read the half-life of I-129 on Wikipedia?

Do you have even the remotest concept of the physics and chemistry of rocketry? What is rocket fuel made of? Jelly beans? Flowers?

What for instance do you know about ammonium perchlorate?

I have more than 600,000 scientific papers in my files, according to by back up service, Carbonite, collected over 30 years, a fair fraction of them related to the chemistry and physics of nuclear fuels.

I have convinced myself that these are some of the most valuable materials on this planet.

Now, I personally agree with the decision to transmute neptunium into plutonium-238 to power the Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto missions that relied on them. This is not launching so called "nuclear waste" into outer space. This is utilizing the vast potential of nuclear materials to do good.

But it would be asinine to do anything with used nuclear fuels but to use them.

By the way, I personally know, pretty much by memory, the half-lives of most of the major actinides through californium and most of the major fission products.

I'm distinctly unimpressed with recitations of them, since I understand the chemistry of pretty much every damned constituent of nuclear fuel.

A long time ago, and far away, I wrote about the fact that for many years, I-129 was dumped directly into the environment just like dangerous fossil fuel waste, more than 30 billion tons a year is dumped directly into the into the environment.

Radioactive Isotopes from French Commercial Nuclear Fuel Found In Mississippi River.

I don't recall the exact argument I wrote all those years ago, but it went something like this possibly: It would cost billions of dollars to not release I-129 in the French nuclear reprocessing plants, and for billions of dollars, save at most a single life. By contrast, by spending the same amount of money building sewage treatment plants for the more than one billion people who lack access to any kind of improved septic facility, we might save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Which is more important, satisfying the paranoia of people who hate nuclear energy but know nothing at all about it, or saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of lives lost every year because people are too cheap, too lazy and too stupid to care about fecal waste?

You do realize, don't you, that many thousands of people have deliberately eaten I-131, vastly more radioactive the I-129, for medical treatment?

I'm easily disgusted these days by fear and ignorance, which more and more rules the world.

I need to expand my "ignore list" once again.

Welcome to it.

[fleabiscuit]

13. What sector of our economy is the largest user of energy?

Perhaps that is the most logical place to start.

[NNadir]

14. This data has long been accumulated by the EIA. It may be found at this link...

Last edited Sat Dec 16, 2017, 10:33 AM - Edit history (1)

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec2_3.pdf

The unit is, unfortunately, "Trillion BTU" which may be converted to another unfortunate unit, the "Quad" by dividing by 1000.

The SI unit is the exajoule, (EJ) which can be obtained by multiplying "trillion BTU" by approximately 1055.

The US, in round numbers, uses about 100 exajoules per year consistently. Between 30-40% of primary energy is generally utilized (as primary energy) to generate electricity.

Current US electricity generation is responsible for a little under 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, down from 2.5 billion tons in 2007.

2 billion tons for electricity in the United States just for electricity represents about 5.5% of the 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide the world dumps as a whole. The population of the United States is generally believed to represent about 4.3% of the world population.

This may appear as good news but it isn't, since the reduction comes entirely from the substitution of dangerous natural gas for dangerous coal. The use of dangerous natural gas is a crime against all future generations, since when the gas runs out - and it will - the stupidity and ignorance of this generation will leave future generations dependent on coal.

Worldwide the dent made in coal consumption is trivial, so trivial as to be meaningless. In the United States, however, their is a (temporary) surfeit of gas.

There is no reason whatsoever to burn any dangerous fossil fuel for any reason, of course, in terms of what is technically feasible.

But technical feasibility is not the same as wisdom.

A wise and ethical culture - not the one we live in - would be engaged in providing for the future by training nuclear engineers, building nuclear infrastructure and supporting the development of high temperature systems for the conversion of carbon dioxide into reduced forms as materials and fuel storage.

But again, we do not live in a wise and ethical culture. Future generations will regard ours with extreme contempt, and be totally justified in doing so.

Have a nice weekend.