You're right, of course, but the system doesn't regulate itself without moderation comments and unfortunately my job involves posting them. They're a necessary evil, in the same way that some medicines are toxic: one uses them when the alternative is worse.
If it helps at all, such comments are even more tedious to write than to read.
The coal industry needs to be shut down. The IPCC first convened three decades ago and yet batshit crazy denialist fuckers in Queensland are still proposing new coal mines to gift their mates billions of dollars in government subsidies and money laundering.
'orderly transition' is a complete lie. They've had 30 years of doing nothing.
Sorry for the strong language but your heavy handed moderation reads like shilling for the fossil fuel industry.
Empty comments saying nothing more than "yay side" or "boo side" are unsubstantive regardless of how good and right their cause might be. On HN, we're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity, which is definitely not served when people repeat talking points.
It's not possible to have a site both for curiosity and for battle. In battle, repetition is critical: you have to hammer the same points over and over until you win. That affects curiosity the way that
a tank battalion affects a park. Since we can't have both, we have to pick one; the one we pick here is curiosity. This implies nothing about any specific battle. It's simply the type of forum this is.
The whole idea that switching from coal to gas is bad for the environment because of methane emissions always smelt a bit dubious for exactly this reason: coal mining emits lots of methane.
This certainly gives a new twist to the story, but it doesn't change the fact that natural gas is no real solution and that the greenhouse gas emissions of natural gas have been underestimated in the past.
It's not that switching from coal to gas is bad for the environment. It's simply that both are bad and we need something else.
Solar and wind cant give us the power we need and its not cheaper because it will need backup from coal, oil, gas or nuclear. In fact the more wind and solar the more expensive it becomes exactly for this reason. Wind and solar provides less than 1% of our energy needs.
In many areas of the world, wind and solar have complementary power profiles.
Energy storage mechanisms are also being developed and scaled in a major way. Not just batteries. Geothermal energy stores, heated and pressurized water chambers, and moving water to a higher elevation to store potential energy are all viable options.
Ok walk a couple more years down the cost curve they are following, especially since battery tech is being heavily invested in for EVs and grid storage.
And if (or I should say when) grid storage becomes cheaper than peak power generators, then you still can save money shutting down the extra power plants.
It is also well-known coal power plants emit way more radiation than nuclear ones. And air pollution caused by coal burning (e.g. in Ulan Bator) is beyond any reason. The very fact people still burn coal in cities in the 21st century is mind-boggling.
> There's enough radiation released as a result of the activity of operating nuclear plants
"An operating nuclear power plant produces very small amounts of radioactive gases and liquids, as well as small amounts of direct radiation. If you lived within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant, you would receive an average radiation dose of about 0.01 millirem per year. To put this in perspective, the average person in the United States receives an exposure of 300 millirem per year from natural background sources of radiation."
I think they're referring to the radiation emitted because of nuclear plants, like nuclear accidents at Marcoule, Fukishima, Paks, etc, transport and waste disposal and so on.
The meme that coal plants emit more radioactivity than nuclear power plants originated with this Scientific American article [1] (linked somewhere else in this thread too). The article has the title "Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste". The comparison is obviously preposterous, nuclear waste is probably trillions of times more radioactive than coal ash. When SA realized the mistake they added an explanation just at the end of the article that states
"As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage." (emphasis mine)
By adding the qualification "shielded" the comparison becomes meaningless. Brazil nuts, bananas, beer, carrot juice and drinking water [2] all release more radiation than shielded nuclear waste.
Nowhere in the SA article they compare coal ash with Chernobyl of Fukushima.
Power reactors discharge a small amount of radioactive material into the environment under normal operating conditions. See figures 4.1 through 4.12 in the report. The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona [0] released 1844 curies of radionuclides in a year from gaseous, liquid, and particulate discharges. In SI units, that's 6.8 * 10^13 becquerels.
According to the World Nuclear Association, a kilogram of coal ash contains about 2000 becquerels of radioactive material [1]. In 2012, the United States coal fleet generated about 110 million tons of coal ash [2]. In 2012, the United States generated 1514 terawatt hours of electricity from coal [3]. That puts the coal ash radioactive burden to the environment at roughly 1.45 * 10^11 becquerels per TWh of electricity generated in coal plants.
The Palo Verde annual radioactive effluent discharge of 6.8 * 10^13 becquerels from an average of 32.3 TWh electricity generation [0] comes to 21 * 10^ 11 becquerels per TWh of electricity. Its radioactive discharge to the environment is significantly higher than the average discharged via coal ash to produce an equivalent amount of electricity.
However, before getting alarmed, see figure 2.1 in the NRC Radioactive Effluents report that I linked at the beginning of this post. Even though nuclear plant effluent adds more radiation to the environment than coal ash does, industrial sources of radiation (including nuclear plants) account for about 0.1% of general population radiation exposure. Natural background sources add up to about 50%. So the marginal danger of radioactive exposure from normally operating nuclear plants or coal ash dumps is very small.
People who say that coal plants emit more radiation than nuclear plants are not helping to counter "radiophobia." They are in fact attempting to exploit "radiophobia" to stir up fear over a very minor aspect of coal's environmental harms. (And coal really is an environmental disaster in many other ways.) Worse, people making this argument are not even correct about the underlying numbers. Many of them are just parroting a Scientific American article [4] which itself is a misleadingly garbled retelling of an actual research report [5] [6].
[6] Detailed examination of what the authors were actually reporting in "Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants" via my past comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14466887
Do we have data/studies on the health effect comparison of the radioactive portion of emitted coal ash and the typical emitted/discharged effluents of a nuclear power plant?
Eg. isn't the NPP discharge much more localized so it affects a lot less people? Or both kinds have some of this and some of that and the gases are carried well with the wind anyway?
Most of the NPP radionuclide discharge is in the form of highly mobile tritium and noble gas fission products. Since these radionuclides do not accumulate biologically, they rapidly dilute to levels that translate into very low human exposure.
Most of the discharge from coal plants modeled in "Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants" was from traces of radium discharged from the smoke stack along with other combustion products. Since radium behaves chemically like calcium, and is taken up into plants and the bones of people who eat those plants, it can have a much greater effect on human radiation exposure even though the coal plant discharging fewer curies of radioactive material to the environment.
A modern do-over of the 1978 study would need to take into account a few things:
- Smokestack emissions of radionuclides from coal have been incidentally reduced by other anti-pollution measures required on coal power plants in the US. Ash precipitators, SO2 scrubbing, and mercury scrubbing will all cut down somewhat on radium escaping via the smokestack. (None of this helps with coal's CO2 profile, but it does reduce other pollution hazards.)
- Operational changes have reduced how much effluent nuclear power plants discharge into the environment -- even if the plant was already built in the 1970s. It should use more recent effluent numbers like those in "Radioactive Effluents From Nuclear Power Plants: Annual Report 2008" rather than 1970s NPP effluent numbers.
- Locality of food production/consumption has decreased since 1978. The original study assumed that people ate food grown in the same region they live in, so that radioactive effluents from power plants affected local populations via the agricultural food chain. It will change if people living near a power plant in Maryland are eating foods mostly produced out-of-state.
The typical plant by itself just sits there producing heat, and it's well shielded so emits no radiation.
If we look at all the NPPs (so we factor in all the accidents) and average out then we get a higher number.
And if we look at a full lifecycle analysis (so from uranium oxide mining to plant building, to long-term nuclear waste storage, and/or reprocessing and whatnot), then we'll get an even higher number.
But all of that is quite meaningless, because the real question is health impact anyway.
> The very fact people still burn coal in cities in the 21st century is mind-boggling.
There are a lot of interesting things you could say about this.
A coal plant needs workers and it also needs good transportation links. (To bring the coal in.) It needs to support the workers. It needs to be hooked up to an electrical grid. So it's sort of a natural nexus for the development of a city. People who can live in some other city might prefer that, but there will be plenty of people for whom the Coal City is a natural choice. If cities naturally grow around coal plants, then it doesn't make sense to be surprised that there are cities with coal plants in them.
Taking the original comment in a totally different direction, this is an angle I don't think is discussed enough in relation to electric cars. We may not need to burn coal inside cities, but we burn oil all the time, so we can move around. This produces the same undesirable smog that coal does. There's a big fight over whether electric cars release more or less smog well-to-wheels than gasoline cars do. But I almost never see anyone asking whether, even if electric cars release more smog, it might not be better to have the smog all produced centrally at a power plant somewhere than widely distributed in the middle of concentrated residential areas.
There is no discussion if electric cars release “more smog than gasoline cars” just due to the fact that “smog” isn’t any specific substance. It’s a phenomenon that depends just as much on the wind direction as on air quality.
In less literal terms, there might be a debate about relative amounts of CO2. But that is mostly a debate that happens online instigated by ideological opponents of electrification. Electric cars use less energy even including production and even if the energy mix consists mostly of fossile fuels. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_aspects_of_the_e....
The advantages are even starker for other emissions such NOX or particulates: even without renewables and nuclear energy in the mix, electric cars need less energy because the efficiency of one large power plant is higher than thousands of engines. And that energy is generated with fewer emissions because, again, centralized generation allows more investment into clean technology.
Next we have natural gas, which doesn’t emit anything with an impact on your health (and is also somewhat better, although far from perfect, in its impact on climate).
There are plenty of wood stoves available these days with what are effectively catalytic converters. Wood stove particulate emission can be a lot lower than it used to.
Neither nuclear or coal is price competitive anyway with wind/solar or gas turbine, and they are falling behind with every successive year of developments in wind/solar
You mine orders of magnitude less uranium ore. It probably doesn't compare at all.
Also coal itself biogenic source of gas and probably surrounded/connected to other gas generating lithology. So when you expose a coal seam to the atmosphere it will naturally release some amount of gas depending on exact composition and cook time. I'm just guessing here, my experience is in oil and IIRC coal is typically way past the "oil window" but probably comfortably within the very generous gas window.
I suspect this is true, but the amount of material you need to turn over to get this uranium ore is tremendous. I wouldn't be surprised to learn it is roughly equal to coal mining.
There is a fairly detailed chapter in the excellent William T. Vollmann book _No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies_ where he describes in fine detail the process of mining and refining uranium - it is much more energy intensive than I imagined ...
Coal mining? Wouldn't have thought of that. Luckily the coal industry seems to be on a steep downslope already (much more so than the rest of fossil fuels).
Yep. There's a lot of methane trapped in coal seams, depending on the type of coal. The old miner's name for it is firedamp, and it killed or injured quite a few miners prior to modern equipment and safety measures. There's been a bit of a push to extract and use it in the US over the last few decades, but I think China pretty much just vents it to the atmosphere.
'In 2019, about 4,118 billion kilowatthours (kWh) (or about 4.12 trillion kWh) of electricity were generated at utility-scale electricity generation facilities in the United States.
1 About 63% of this electricity generation was from fossil fuels—coal, natural gas, petroleum, and other gases. About 20% was from nuclear energy, and about 18% was from renewable energy sources'.
> Over the next three years, renewables will add nearly 50,000-MW of new capacity and be more than a quarter of total, while gas, coal, oil, and nuclear will drop by 4,200-MW
> Moreover, if FERC’s data prove correct, then by the end of 2022, renewable sources will account for more than a quarter (25.16%) of the nation’s total available installed generating capacity while coal will drop to 18.63% and that of nuclear and oil will decrease to 8.29% and 2.95% respectively. Natural gas will increase its share — but only slightly – from 44.67% today to 44.78%.
Have you ever seen all the trees that get removed for large solar arrays? I have not seen any analysis of that aspect of solar farms. Our power company has recently torn down entire forests near me to create 'clean energy'.
I do not think coal is good but I worry about all the nasty chemicals used to produce PV panels.
Lots of trade-offs.
I have no doubt that even with those inconveniences, solar is still cleaner than fossil fuels. Research has proven out EROEI [1] (energy returned on energy invested). Wind also, and the blade disposal is a mostly solved problem at end of life.
Very cheap to pay to plant new trees somewhere else (about $1/tree, sometimes cheaper in bulk, but to be avoided when possible), and the containment of hazard waste from the PV manufacturing process can be managed. Not so much for the output of coal and natural gas generation.
Coal is dead, incredibly dead, natural gas is right behind it.
Most of the ones I've seen are in deserts, or repurposed scrub or highly marginal farmland. Nobody is talking about the forests because that's a very minor case. And that's before we get into rooftop solar.
Find me three solar farms in cleared forest areas.
The almost complete shutdown of the global economy due to Covid-19 is massively disrupting the roll-out of renewables. Factories have been shuttered, installations delayed, and who knows where the funding is going to come from now anyway. It's probably going to cost at least a year, maybe more.
The climate problem isn't entirely a coal problem, but coal is by far the single largest contributor. It's also quite replaceable. Phasing out coal remains the simplest, most straightforward mitigation. Once we do that we can tackle the other stuff.
We kind of have to do it all at the same time. It's pretty easy at this point to stop generating power from coal, but that doesn't do anything about ICE vehicles, or oil and gas used for heating.
And a lot of this stuff has long lead-times. If you manufacture an ICE car instead of an electric car, it's on the road for another 20 years. If you install a new oil furnace in a building, it too has a lifetime measured in decades.
Getting people to crush a three year old ICE car is not realistically going to happen, but why are we still making new ones?
I totally disagree. The all or nothing concept means nothing will be done. There will always be a single reason someone can come up with to not do something. Why let that one thing stop other advances?
I much prefer the accomplish a goal, move to the next goal concept. In the 70s, it would literally rain acid. Luckily, we realized that making a few small changes would have a drastic affect. The ozone layer was getting destroyed, and again we make a few small changes with great affect. The proof is there that incremental changes are worthwhile.
Is somebody suggesting that we stop replacing coal fired power plants because we could replace ICE cars with electric cars instead? The entire point is that we have to do both.
They don't both have to be in the same bill (though a carbon tax would do both), but they have to be done in parallel rather than sequentially because we don't have time to entirely solve one of them before starting any work on the others.
We shouldn't not do other things if we can. I was just arguing that coal is more than 50% of the problem and that getting rid of it is do-able. If we can phase out coal we're halfway there.
Electrification of transport is happening for multiple reasons: climate, high oil prices (they've fallen for now but they'll go back up), the maturing of modern EV tech, and the fact that IVs actually drive better and are lower maintenance.
The drive better part is no joke. It's just physics. I have an older 2013 Leaf, which is a wimpy EV, and it can out accelerate a lot of higher end cars if I want it to.
Is this based on reported emissions from oil/gas sites or actual emissions? Because there was a big report recently that showed that many gas and oil processing operations are routinely emitting far more methane than they claim, due to leaks and other faulty equipment.
Yes, the numbers for methane pollution in both coal and oil extraction are entirely untrustworthy, and a headline comparing them is just clickbait.
That said, methane emission associated with coal extraction is very large, and is another good reason (piled on the rest) to put an earlier stop to it.
Did either you or the parent read the article? It's explicitly based on a new scientific study attempting to use the areas where there is good data to get better estimates on the incidental methane releases than we've had before.
> The fossil-fuel industry is understood to be one of the biggest sources of atmospheric methane, primarily due to leaks from the production of oil and gas.
> However, a new paper published in the Journal of Cleaner Production suggests that coal mining may actually be a bigger contributor to levels of the greenhouse gas, with emissions set to grow considerably in the coming years.
Isn't coal and coal mining part of the fossil fuel industry?
Wording may not be ideal -- I read it as the TFA suggesting 'bigger contributor than previously estimated' rather than 'bigger contributor than fossil-fuel'.
I don't think TFA is trying to separate coal from fossil fuel industry.
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