A Mechanistic Review of Carcinogenic, Mutagenic, Cardiotoxic Air Pollution Particulates.

[NNadir]

The article I will cite here is relatively new, although the problem has been well known for centuries (see below.)

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T2G-4PFDDVN-1&_user=1082852&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F2007&_alid=1330088069&_rdoc=21&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_cdi=4918&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=75&_acct=C000051401&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1082852&md5=172f4ddf5c1e844ed33a505be1a8278b">Mutation Research/Reviews in Mutation Research Volume 636, Issues 1-3, November-December 2007, Pages 95-133.

How long have these problems been known?

Well lets take a gander at the introduction to the paper:

Combustion products of coal (soot and tars) were the first recognized chemical carcinogens. The earliest discovery that coal soot caused cancer in human chimney sweeps was reported Percival Pott in 1775 followed by studies in animals in the 1920s and the discovery of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), e.g., benzopyrene (BaP), in the 1930s <1>. In the early 1970s, advances in the identification and evaluation of carcinogens resulted in the initiation of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that conducted research and international assessment programs to identify and evaluate the carcinogenic risks to humans from chemicals and complex human exposure mixtures <2>, <3>, <4>, <5>, <6>, <7>, <8> and <9>. The development of new methods and approaches to more efficiently identify potential carcinogens <10>, <11> and <12> in complex mixtures through the use of a bacterial mutagenesis bioassay <10> combined with bioassay-directed fractionation and chemical characterization was applied to complex combustion source emissions and air pollution <11> and <12>. Using this approach, the identification of mutagens in particles from diesel exhaust and urban air, not only confirmed the contribution of PAH to mutagenic activity, but also led to the discovery of highly mutagenic nitroarenes (e.g., nitro-PAH and nitro-lactones) in diesel and urban air particles <11>, <12> and <13>. The IARC Monograph program has evaluated the carcinogenic risk of chemicals to humans, including the carcinogenicity of PAH <2>, <3> and <7> and nitro-PAH <6> (http://monographs.iarc.fr). The third monograph evaluated the cancer risk of PAH and heterocyclic compounds <2> found in coal-tars and other combustion products. Later, monographs in this series have evaluated air pollution combustion emissions and related complex mixtures of PAH and polycyclic aromatic compounds (PAC) <3>, <4>, <5> and <6>, aluminum and coke production industries <4>, coal-tars and soot <5>, diesel and gasoline engine exhausts and nitro-PAH <6>. The two most recent evaluations are summarized in Lancet Oncology, included PAH <7> and household solid fuel combustion (coal and biomass) and high-temperature frying <8>. The IARC Monograph program has evaluated a wide range of combustion emissions includes industrial sources <4> and <5>, motor vehicles <6>, and residential combustion sources such as cooking emissions and indoor heating sources <8>, and tobacco smoke <9>...

Biomass and coal in the same sentance?

You don't say?

...The mutagenicity and carcinogenicity of airborne combustion particles was initially attributed primarily to PAH <1>, <2>, <3> and <4>. More recently, it was discovered that a wider range of polycyclic aromatic compounds found in combustion emissions and air pollution are both mutagenic and carcinogenic. These compounds include substituted aromatic hydrocarbons such as nitroarenes (e.g., nitro-PAH) <6>, <11> and <12> and nitro-PAH lactones (e.g., nitropyrene lactones, nitrophenanthrene lactones, and 3-nitrobenzanthrone) found in ambient air and diesel particles <13> and <31>. One of these compounds, 3-nitrobenzanthrone, an unusually potent mutagen in the Ames bacterial mutagenesis assay, recently has been reported to induce tumors in rodents <32> and <33> E. Nagy, M. Zeisig, K. Kawamura, Y. Hisamatsu, A. Sugeta, S. Adachi and L. Moller, DNA adduct and tumor formations in rats after intratracheal administration of the urban air pollutant 3-nitrobenzanthrone, Carcinogenesis 26 (10) (2005), pp. 1821–1828. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus (31)<33>. The primary source of polycyclic aromatic compounds in air pollution is from combustion of fossil fuels (e.g., coal, oil, gasoline and diesel fuel), vegetative matter (e.g., wood, tobacco, paper products, and biomass)

You may not believe this, but I swear it's true: There are people - not very well informed people, not very bright people - who want to represent that biomass burning is something we should expand widely.

I guess they don't read papers like this one and couldn't care less about the contents of such papers.

2.4.1. Wood smoke, forest fires, and agricultural burning
The pyrolysis products of lignin, cellulose, and other polysaccharides are a major component of the emissions from wood burning, forest fires, and other biomass burning <110>. A review of the pyrolysis products and organic tracers for smoke from incomplete combustion of biomass includes levoglucosan from cellulose and methoxyphenols from lignin. The oxygenated organic compounds, such as the semi-volatile and reactive methoxyphenols derived from lignin constitute up to 30% of the carbonaceous particle mass <110> and serve as specific tracers of biomass combustion of specific plant classes <111> and wood smoke pollution <112> and <113>. Levoglucosan is a stable and unique cellulose combustion product thereby making it a useful and unique tracer for wood and other cellulose combustion in biomass burning and atmospheric particles <114>, <115> and <116>. A micro-analytical method has recently been developed for the measurement of levoglucosan in air pollution and human exposure monitoring and source apportionment studies <115>. Ambient source characterization of fireplace emissions <117> and winter source apportionment studies have used organic compounds as molecular source markers in chemical mass balance models in a winter air pollution studies across the United States <118> and <119>. In these studies, all of the levoglucosan and pimaric acid were attributed to wood combustion. The pimaric acid is a naturally occurring diterpenoid carboxylic acid (resin acid). It is found in high concentrations in softwoods and released to the air during burning, rather than forming as a combustion product. For many years, soil corrected potassium was used as a tracer for woodsmoke and has been validated using carbon dating methods <120> and <121>. In a recent source apportionment study of airborne fine particles (PM2.5) in Seattle, arsenic was highly correlated with the wood smoke component of ambient fine particles <69>. It appears that even occasional use of some chromated copper arsenate <122> treated wood burned in fireplaces, woodstoves, or trash may be sufficient for arsenic to serve as a source tracer for wood smoke.

Vegetative combustion products, including wood, also emit mutagenic and carcinogenic PAH <123> and <124> as do nearly all sources of incomplete combustion <2>, <3> and <7>. Residential combustion of wood has been estimated to be the largest source of PAH in Sweden and the US based on estimated emissions countrywide <105> C.-E. Bostrom, P. Gerde, A. Hanberg, B. Jernstrom, C. Johansson, T. Kyrklund, A. Rannug, M. Tornqvist, K. Victorin and R. Westerholm, Cancer risk assessment, indicators, and guidelines for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the ambient air, Environ. Health Perspect. 119 (2002), pp. 451–489.<105>.

The largest source of PAH's in Sweden and the USA?

You don't say? I wonder if it's um, worse than usual in Maine?

By the way, I have in my files a paper that gives description of the use of specific combustion products of various kinds of wood, and traces them to the species of wood that is burned. It is now possible to differentiate the nature of specific pollutants by source, including those generated by combusting wood.

It is also possible to screen specific elements from sources to identify their mutagenic, carcinogenic and cardiotoxic properties.

4.1. Exposure biomarkers
Air pollution exposure biomarkers initially ranged from measurements of air pollutants (e.g., lead) in body fluids (e.g., blood, urine) to measures of exhaled pollutants or their metabolites in breath or body fluids. As this field has advanced, more complex combustion pollutants are now measured in human samples. For example, PAH and nitroaromatic air pollutants are known to react with protein and DNA to form both macromolecular adducts that can now be measured in blood or tissue samples of human populations. Many organic species, such as PAH, form conjugated products (e.g., glucuronides) that serve as a measure of dose to the target molecules and may have longer half-lives than urinary metabolites (e.g., hydroxylated PAH).

Exposure biomarkers provide a key tool to relate health outcomes to individual personal exposures and to provide measures of confounding exposures. Human exposures to environmental chemicals have been routinely analyzed in blood and urine samples as part of the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) <234>. New studies are underway to develop biomonitoring methods and protocols for application to the National Children's Study <235>. This U.S. study of children's health plans to use biomonitoring throughout the life stages. The NHANES ongoing surveys use a stratified, multistage, probability-cluster design to select a representative sample of the population. Recent advances in the analytical measurements of environmental chemicals or their metabolites in whole blood, serum, or urine has increased the reporting of chemical exposures from 27 to 116 chemicals. Requirements and issues considered for application of biomarkers to exposure assessment through the life stages of children as they mature are reviewed by Barr et al. <235> for a large U.S. National Children's Study.

Have a swell evening. Try not to think too much about any of this.

[jpak]

1. Who uses an inefficient smokey particulate-spewing fireplace in their yuppie upscale NJ neighborhood

who?

:rofl:

[Fledermaus]

2. Same old BS you always post, Wood burns cleaner than coal.

Coal plants use biomass to reduce their emissions.

As usual, you are compairing a modern power plant to a campfire.

Energy In; Energy Out

How much fuel does the McNeil Station use?
The amount of wood used depends on the operating conditions of the plant. To run McNeil at full load, approximately 76 tons of whole-tree chips are consumed per hour. That amounts to about 30 cords per hour (there are about 2.5 tons of chips per cord of green wood). When the plant is operating at full load on gas, it uses 550,000 cubic feet of gas per hour.

How much electricity is produced?
At full load, the plant can generate 50 megawatts (MW) of electricity. This is enough power to run 500,000 100-watt light bulbs or nearly enough electricity for Burlington—Vermont's largest city. By comparison, the McNeil Station is only one-tenth the size of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station, which generates 528 megawatts.

Will emissions from the Station pollute the atmosphere?
The McNeil Station is equipped with a series of air quality control devices that limit the particulate stack emissions to one-tenth the level allowed by Vermont State regulation. McNeil's emissions are one one-hundredth of the allowable Federal level. The only visible emission from the plant is water vapor during the cooler months of the year.


Water and Ashes

Where does McNeil's water come from?
There are four wells located approximately 4,000 feet north of the station. The output of any one well is enough to replace water losses at the plant. Most water losses occur in the cooling tower by evaporation.

What happens to "waste" water?
Water removed from the McNeil Station is monitored for pH, temperature, flow and metals. It is treated to maintain a balanced pH, allowed to cool to a temperature that will not adversely affect aquatic life and then pumped to the Winooski River (located about 1,000 feet east of the plant). Except for dissolved mineral salts, the regulated discharge of waste water going to the Winooski River is comparable in quality to the water drawn from station wells.

What is done with the ashes?

Wood ash, the end-product of burning wood fuel, is temporarily placed on site in a landing area. BED works with a private contractor who transports the ash and markets it as a soil conditioner for pH control and a source of potash and potassium. McNeil ash is approved as a soil conditioner for organic crops. The heavier portion of the ash (bottom ash) is used as a base for building roads or an additive for manufactured topsoil.

Wood harvesting

Are all harvests clearcut operations?
No. Clearcutting of woodlands is limited to areas that need to establish a new crop of trees. It may also be used in some instances to improve wildlife habitat. In these cases, the size of the area cleared is limited to a maximum of 25 acres. Land clearing practices are used in cases where the land is converted to other uses such as development, agriculture or tree planting.

One of BED's foresters monitors each harvest operation to see that wood is harvested properly. The station's chip suppliers are required to conduct their harvesting activities in accordance with strict standards to protect the environment.

How much does wood fuel cost?
Wood chip costs usually depend on such factors as the distance from the point of delivery, the type of material (such as bark, sawmill residue or whole-tree chips), demand by other markets and how the wood fuel is transported. Chips delivered directly to the station by truck are less expensive than those delivered to our Swanton site and shipped in by railcar. The range of prices is typically between $18 to $30 per delivered ton.

How is the wood inventory controlled?
The station has a wood procurement and storage plan that provides control of our wood on site. The wood chip piles are limited in size and are monitored to ensure they do not reach the early stages of decomposition. The wood fuel is consumed on a first-in, first-out basis to control the age of the material.

Does the McNeil Station use other fuel sources?
The Burlington Electric Commission accepted a proposal from Vermont Gas Systems in 1989 to supply gas to the McNeil Generating Station on an interruptible basis between May and November of each year. In October 1989, the capability to burn natural gas was added to the McNeil Station.

While wood remains the plant's primary fuel, the addition of gas allows McNeil to operate more frequently, making it more economical. The gas installation was completed by McNeil personnel on schedule and $200,000 under budget. McNeil employees received a tremendous amount of training by doing the installation. More than 2,000 feet of piping was purchased, installed, supported, welded, cleaned and tested, and 4 1/2 miles of wiring was installed and inspected. The final outcome was a well-operating system: plant efficiency at full load on gas is 15% better than when firing wood. The Station can also use fuel oil or any combination of wood, gas or oil for fuel.

https://www.burlingtonelectric.com/page.php?pid=75&name=mcneil

[NNadir]

4. Really? I guess a link to a wood burning company beats the shit out of the medical journal Lancet

Oncology.

Basically, if one looks, one finds readily that the anti-nuke cults couldn't care how people die, how many of them die, or whether less could have suffered, as long as the science they know nothing about, but hate anyway, is suppressed.

The article referenced here is not written by a polluter to justify his or her right to pollute. It's a paper published in a scientific journal, a review article with hundreds of links to scientific papers.

Your link by contrast is the words of a pollution greenwasher citing a polluter.

Have a nice scientifically oblivious toxic particle evening.

[Fledermaus]

6. Actually, the answer is in your OP and I think you know it.

Vegetative combustion products, including wood, also emit mutagenic and carcinogenic PAH <123> and <124> as do nearly all sources of incomplete combustion

What do you think happens when incomplete combustion is eliminated?

[Fledermaus]

3. Wood burns cleaner than coal.

Co-firing of coal and biomass fuel blends
M. Sami, K. Annamalai*, M. Wooldridge1
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A & M University, College Station, TX 77843-3123, USA
Received 4 August 1999; accepted 6 June 2000

Conclusions
Coal and biomass fuels are quite different in composition.
Co-firing biomass fuels with coal has the capability to
reduce both NOx and SOx levels from existing pulverizedcoal
fired power plants. In addition, overall CO2 emissions

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mswool/publications/cofire_prog_official_reprint.pdf

[kestrel91316]

5. You are such a bore. You need a class in Remedial Social Skills.

[NNadir]

7. And who would be giving these courses that YOU recommend?

If I decline your recommendation there may be a , um, "pot, meet kettle," element.

I'm not looking to charm people, especially people for whom I have never pretended to have a shred of a fragment of a modicum of respect.

I note that our personal strong mutual dislike for one another has nothing to do with whether burning wood kills people.

That's a scientific fact, covered in thousands of papers in the scientific literature.

Have a nice selective attention day.

[kristopher]

8. Why do the disciples of the the Church of Uranium try to discredit Amory Lovins?

Lovins has successfully dedicated his life to improving our environmental footprint when it comes to energy usage. As can be seen in the OP he works with corporations seeking to find ways to energy efficiency in their operations. Jared Diamond also believes that solutions to our current problems are best pursued by finding the incentives within the market that move corporations to act in ways that are positive environmentally rather than negative.

Lovins became prominent in the 70s with a thesis that looked at the cultural and social impacts of centralized thermal generation such as coal and nuclear power. His work (link below) is blamed by members of those who worship at the Throne of Uranus for the lack of support ended the first Bandwagon market for building of nuclear power plants in the 70s.



Now that the Church of Uranium is trying exploit climate change to achieve a Revival they are again focused on Lovins.
This is the link to download his 77 Foreign Policy paper: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E77-01_EnergyStrategyRoadNotTaken

And these are for two of his more recent writing:

http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E08-01_NuclearIllusion


http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly


This a a selection from another of his open access writings on nuclear power. It is followed by an analysis by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson of the available and workable solutions to climate change, energy security and air pollution mortality. It shows that independent of Lovins' perspective on distributed generation vs central thermal generation, nuclear power is still a third rate choice for meeting our AGW, energy security and air pollution mortality needs.

Public discussions of nuclear power, and a surprising number of articles in peer-reviewed
journals, are increasingly based on four notions unfounded in fact or logic: that

1. variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little
or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
2. those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more
than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
3. all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
4. nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to
protect the climate.

For specificity, this review of these four notions focuses on the nuclear chapter of Stewart
Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, which encapsulates similar views widely expressed
and cross-cited by organizations and individuals advocating expansion of nuclear power. It’s
therefore timely to subject them to closer scrutiny than they have received in most public media.

This review relies chiefly on five papers, which I gave Brand over the past few years but on
which he has been unwilling to engage in substantive discussion. They document6 why
expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed
renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever
more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection. That’s
because—the empirical cost and installation data show—new nuclear power is so costly and
slow that, based on empirical U.S. market data, it will save about 2–20 times less carbon per
dollar, and about 20–40 times less carbon per year, than investing instead in the market
winners—efficient use of electricity and what The Economist calls “micropower,”...


The “baseload” myth

Brand rejects the most important and successful renewable sources of electricity for one key
reason stated on p. 80 and p. 101. On p. 80, he quotes novelist and author Gwyneth Cravens’s
definition of “baseload” power as “the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock,
rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of
customers.”21 (Thus it describes a pattern of aggregated customer demand.) Two sentences
later, he asserts: “So far comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and
nuclear.” Two paragraphs later, he explains this dramatic leap from a description of demand to a
restriction of supply: “Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they
are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some sort of massive
energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain
supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants.”

That widely heard claim is fallacious. The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable
power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistic-
al attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any
desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid
couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example,
in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2%
without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%). Worldwide through 2008,
nuclear units were unexpectedly unable to produce 6.4% of their energy output.26 This inherent
intermittency of nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants requires many different plants to back
each other up through the grid. This has been utility operators’ strategy for reliable supply
throughout the industry’s history. Every utility operator knows that power plants provide energy
to the grid, which serves load. The simplistic mental model of one plant serving one load is valid
only on a very small desert island. The standard remedy for failed plants is other interconnected
plants that are working—not “some sort of massive energy storage devised.”

Modern solar and wind power are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear plants; their
technical failure rates are typically around 1–2%. However, they are also variable resources
because their output depends on local weather, forecastable days in advance with fair accuracy
and an hour ahead with impressive precision. But their inherent variability can be managed by
proper resource choice, siting, and operation. Weather affects different renewable resources
differently; for example, storms are good for small hydro and often for windpower, while flat
calm weather is bad for them but good for solar power. Weather is also different in different
places: across a few hundred miles, windpower is scarcely correlated, so weather risks can be
diversified. A Stanford study found that properly interconnecting at least ten windfarms can
enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. Similarly, within
each of the three power pools from Texas to the Canadian border, combining uncorrelated
windfarm sites can reduce required wind capacity by more than half for the same firm output,
thereby yielding fewer needed turbines, far fewer zero-output hours, and easier integration.

A broader assessment of reliability tends not to favor nuclear power. Of all 132 U.S. nuclear
plants built—just over half of the 253 originally ordered—21% were permanently and
prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems. Another 27% have completely failed for a
year or more at least once. The surviving U.S. nuclear plants have lately averaged ~90% of their
full-load full-time potential—a major improvement31 for which the industry deserves much
credit—but they are still not fully dependable. Even reliably-running nuclear plants must shut
down, on average, for ~39 days every ~17 months for refueling and maintenance. Unexpected
failures occur too, shutting down upwards of a billion watts in milliseconds, often for weeks to
months. Solar cells and windpower don’t fail so ungracefully.

Power plants can fail for reasons other than mechanical breakdown, and those reasons can affect
many plants at once. As France and Japan have learned to their cost, heavily nuclear-dependent
regions are particularly at risk because drought, earthquake, a serious safety problem, or a
terrorist incident could close many plants simultaneously. And nuclear power plants have a
unique further disadvantage: for neutron-physics reasons, they can’t quickly restart after an
emergency shutdown, such as occurs automatically in a grid power failure...

From Amory Lovins
Four Nuclear Myths: A Commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on Similar Writings

Journal or Magazine Article, 2009

Available for download: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-09_FourNuclearMyths

Some nuclear-power advocates claim that wind and solar power can’t provide much if any reliable power because they’re not “baseload,” that they use too much land, that all energy options including new nuclear build are needed to combat climate change, and that nuclear power’s economics don’t matter because climate change will force governments to dictate energy choices and pay for whatever is necessary. None of these claims can withstand analytic scrutiny.

Abstract here: http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Full article for download here: http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/revsolglobwarmairpol.htm


Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c

Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

Abstract
This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

[NNadir]

9. Lovins has devoted his life to greenwashing dangerous fossil fuels.

He is not an environmentalist since, um, action speak louder than words. The list of people wh

We'll just add t


All the chanting in the world will not make Lovins a scientist, and all the ignorance in the world will not make Lovins' cult have anything to do with science.

As for the dumb remarks about uranium, the study of the naturally occurring element is the science of men like Fermi, Bethe, Seaborg, and Ghiorso and women like Curie and Meitner.

The fact that anti-nukes consider the science of these people, 4 of whom have elements in the periodic table named after them, says volumes, to be a cult while chanting the same stuff over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over speaks volumes. Have a nice Hail Mary kind of day.