There is a ton of scientific studies out there. The world health organisation has a page about air-pollution you can take a look at to begin with: https://www.who.int/news-room/air-pollution
Thank you for the links.
They prove exactly what I said perfectly.
The first link shows that the
world health organisation thinks air pollution is one of the biggest health problems today. It's not a controversial fact so they probably don't feel they need to link everything. But it was not a particularly good website now that I look at it more carefully. It's not so hard to google and find better sources though, if you are really interested. Some quick googling right now led me to these:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-to-shift-away-from-coal-air-pollution-that-kills-thousands-every-year/https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fuels/coal-air-pollutionhttps://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-impactshttps://www.psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/coals-assault-on-human-health.pdfI can only assume if coal were such a terrible killer it would be a headline with the numbers for the 3rd world cooking.
If you cook with coal briquettes indoors at home it's obviously going to be worse than burning coal in a large coal power plant which can be more efficient and have proper chimneys and hopefully some filtering.
The second link again proves my point.
All ESTIMATES from various ( green biased) organisations that state something as irrefutable gospel but no explanation of how these ESTIMATES were calculated nor the source .
Did you read the right article? Let me link it again:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/He even provides a list of references for you. (for example: European Union Report EUR 21951; Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health; Nat. Res. Council, Wash., D.C.; Journal of the AMA; Environmental Defense Fund; WHO; Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute) Except for one none of those are from anything that can reasonably called "green biased". Do you think Forbes is "green biased" as well?
Energy Source | Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr) |
Coal – global average | 100,000 (41% global electricity) |
Coal – China | 170,000 (75% China’s electricity) |
Coal – U.S. | 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity) |
Oil | 36,000 (33% of energy, 8% of electricity) |
Natural Gas | 4,000 (22% global electricity) |
Biofuel/Biomass | 24,000 (21% global energy) |
Solar (rooftop) | 440 (< 1% global electricity) |
Wind | 150 (2% global electricity) |
Hydro – global average | 1,400 (16% global electricity) |
Hydro – U.S. | 5 (6% U.S. electricity) |
Nuclear – global average | 90 (11% global electricity w/Chern&Fukush) |
Nuclear – U.S. | 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity) |
Why are nuke deaths peanuts compared to coal power when we haven't even established a credible figure, just "estimates".
Chernobyl is the worst civilian nuclear accident. Now, after 30 years of scientific studies we have decent worst case estimates of the health impact. Lets take the higher figure of 30000 premature deaths. Lets say Fukushima is just as bad (by all accounts I've read so far Fukushima is much less severe though). That means a total of 60000. That is the total worst case number of deaths from civilian nuclear power
since nuclear power was invented. Global electricity production from coal was about 10000 TWh in 2016
according to Iea, so coal power kills roughly 1000000 people every year!
Because the level of radioactivity from, for example, Chernobyl is so low that it is basically impossible to measure any negative health effect at all on an individual level, except for a few people who lived closest to the power plant and the first responders. At Chernobyl, which is by far the worst civilian nuclear accident, only about 50 deaths can be linked directly to the accident. The rest is worst case estimated effects from the very low level radioactive pollution that was spread over a large area (and thus affect a lot of people).
It's similar with coal power plants, you can't tell if an individual died from air pollution from a certain coal power plant, but you can do epidemiological studies that show how air pollution affects human health and then look at the amount and type of air pollution from coal power plants and make estimates based on what we know.
If you look at the civilian nuclear energy industry as a whole, and calculate the average deaths per kWh produced, nuclear is even safer than solar power according to some:
Yep, there is always a way to spin numbers and statistics to say what you want.
How about we crunch the numbers for the cost of cleanup and the lives lost in doing so for coal plant accidents and Nuke accidents.
Lets give the Nuke side a head start and we'll just include Chernobyl, Fukishima and 3 Mile island. You can heap together all the accidents on record for coal.
This is a very interesting article comparing impacts and damage costs for coal and nuclear:
https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull41-1/41104991518.pdfWhen nuclear operates normally it does not generate any pollution at all, so zero deaths. Meanwhile, every year, coal power stations kill a million people at a steady pace.
If you want to include work related deaths from coal mining it will only look worse for coal.
Tobacco industry once said smoking was not harmful as well so forgive me if I just take things which logic and experience tell me is questionable with blind and unquestionable faith.
Indeed they did. Same way the fossil fuel industry now says global warming isn't real and that air pollution from coal power stations is not harmfull.