10,000 US Deaths per Year from Coal Power Plants...?

According to this op-ed in the NY Times (March 23rd, 2011) that's what your local coal-fired power plant is doing to our country.  From the article: "From one perspective, nuclear power has been remarkably safe. The 1986 Chernobyl accident will ultimately kill about 10,000 people, mostly from cancer. Coal plants are much deadlier: the fine-particulate air pollution they produce kills about 10,000 people each year in the United States alone. "

This is so bogus and disingenuous that its hard to imagine anyone saying it much less printing it.

I guess the point of this comment is to make us all believe through magical thinking that nuclear power is safe and clean.  Death certificates list things like lung cancer and emphysema - not power plants - leaving magical thinking folks like the author of the article to make concrete and scientific causal connections between the two (not).

The poisonous radiation emitted from Fukushima or Chernobyl doesn't make a nice, nasty image like the one above to rally the troops.  You can't see radiation.  Its invisible, orderless and colorless.  But much more deadly.

(Perhaps I should have place a nice pastoral image from Fukushima there instead - a beautiful Japanese country side - totally uninhabitable for one hundred years due to man-made radiation.  But that wouldn't get your emotions up like the nasty smoke-belching coal stacks above.)

Recently Fukushima has been upgraded from a level 5 nuclear disaster to a level 7 - on par with Chernobyl.

Certainly there are some differences between the two accidents - primarily related to how the nuclear core of each plant failed.  In the case of Chernobyl the core of the reactor was made of graphite (carbon).  When the reactor overheated the graphite caught fire and burned for several days.  This burning created a cloud of nuclear smoke that wafted around the world.

In the case of Fukushima the cores are "largely intact" - whatever than means.  Since the reactors are largely made of metal (steel) they have not melted completely nor will they burn.  However it would appear that the pipes and infrastructure around the cores has largely failed leading to the leaking of highly radioactive water into the environment.  (This to my mind is a truly "fine" distinction.)

As I predicted here with my posts Japan and TEPCO are now conceding that the radioactive run-off is polluting fishing grounds important to Japan.

And meanwhile this clod at the NY Times seems to think that coal fired are just as dangerous.

But let's think about what he is really saying:

First let's imagine that particulate pollution from coal fired plants could actual be directly traced to specific deaths.  Of course it cannot be but through use of magical thinking the author merely has to claim that it is so.

There are hundreds if not a thousand or more coal plants in North America.  For sake of numbers lets just say 1,000.  That means each plant is killing 10 people according to the NY Times.

Now let's compare this to Chernobyl - which was predicted to kill 4,000 people or Fukushima which might kill 10,000.

The difference is that this high death rate is for one plant - not all the plants in North America.

Given that there are 100 nuclear plants in the country the proper number of potential deaths for comparison is 100 x 10,000 or 1,000,000 (one million).

The second point is that if people weren't burning coal for electricity they would instead be burning it for heat, or burning natural gas in their houses for heat, or burning wood or dung like they do in the rest of the world.  Would fewer people die in this kind of world?  No, more would die.  It would be like turning the clock back 100 years when life expectancy and quality of life were much lower than today.

None of this alternate burning would have the current EPA-required scrubbers to remove particulates from the combustion products.  Hence there would be a lot more supposed deaths.

If the local coal fired plant blows up, or a terrorist crashes a jet into it, or its struck by an earth quake, not much is going to happen more than a few hundred yards from the plant.

Using Fukushima as an example, the same type of event would likely render the plant and the surrounding 20 miles a "death zone".  Coal does not give your children cancer (well, if you apply magical thinking it might) unlike radiation which has a causal effect.

Very different indeed.

No, the real truth is that the world needs power - and its going to be made available one way or another.

We can all pretend that nuclear power is a better option because it does not generate green house gases or particulate pollution but I do not see how that is a fair comparison.

Centralizing the burning of coal or natural gas also centralizes the pollution generated as well as any cleanup required.

Countries like China are building both coal and nuclear plants - and we cannot stop them.