A Germany without coal would have been better
The loss of nuclear will cause avoidable deaths and we shouldn't celebrate it.
Arpit Gupta’s tweeted recently that without the purposeful off lining of nuclear energy, Germany could now be a country with no reliance on coal power.
https://twitter.com/arpitrage/status/1647606600864083969
On the one hand, Germany has reduced coal reliance significantly over the last thirty years, which is great. On the other hand, this nuclear reduction, which is being celebrated by many as an environmental victory, has an enormous cost to human life, because it’s required Germany to continue to burn coal.
Coal Plants Cause People to Die Early
It’s generally well-understood that coal plants are “bad for the environment.” Coal plants are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, coal ash residue contains things like arsenic, mercury, and lead (which if you recall is really bad) that can make their way into water sources and aquatic ecosystems, and coal combustion also releases harmful pollutants like sulfur dioxide and particulate matter into the air.
It’s this last point we’ll focus on here, because we can measure the effects of these pollutants at scale, as research from 2020 shows.
A paper in Nature Sustainability showed that
Between 2005 and 2016 in the continental United States, decommissioning of a coal-fired unit was associated with reduced nearby pollution concentrations and subsequent reductions in mortality…In total during this period, the shutdown of coal-fired units saved an estimated 22,563 lives.
That’s Because Air Pollution Kills People
Coal Plants cause air pollution, and air pollution kills people. It is really straight forward, and a ton of research supports it. Here are a few recent pieces that measure the effects:
"We estimate that air pollution reduces the mean life expectancy in Europe by about 2.2 years with an annual, attributable per capita mortality rate in Europe of 133/100 000 per year." due to long-term exposure to air pollution, particularly fine particulate matter. (Lelieveld et al., "Cardiovascular disease burden from ambient air pollution in Europe reassessed using novel hazard ratio functions," The Lancet Planetary Health, 2019)
"Ambient PM2·5 was the fifth-ranking mortality risk factor in 2015. Exposure to PM2·5 caused 4·2 million (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 3·7 million to 4·8 million) deaths and 103·1 million (90·8 million 115·1 million) disability-adjusted life-years. (Cohen et al., "Estimates and 25-year trends of the global burden of disease attributable to ambient air pollution: an analysis of data from the Global Burden of Diseases Study 2015," The Lancet, 2020)
"In a case-crossover study of more than 22 million deaths, each 10-μg/m3 daily increase in fine particulate matter and 10–parts-per-billion daily increase in warm-season ozone exposures were associated with a statistically significant increase of 1.42 and 0.66 deaths per 1 million persons at risk per day, respectively." (Di et al., "Association of Short-term Exposure to Air Pollution With Mortality in Older Adults," Environmental Health Perspectives, 2018)
Air pollution increases the risk for virtually every major killer of people. It just makes bad situations worse.
As Alec Stapp points out, fossil fuels, and especially coal, are much more deadly than other forms of energy. And you can hardly see nuclear.
https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1647372716050186240?s=20
Coal also leaks more radioactive waste than Nuclear energy
You might think, “sure, coal is dirty, but at least it isn’t radioactive.” But you would be wrong. Coal ash contains small (a few parts per million) amounts of radioactive uranium and thorium. Since coal plants burn millions of tons of coal annually, this adds up: ”every such station creates fly ash containing around 5-10 tonnes of uranium and thorium each year.”
Renewables are growing in Germany, especially wind. But it’s hard to see the shutdown of facilities that are producing green, safe electricity as anything other than a loss. Coal plant pollution kills on the order of thousands of Germans a year, and potentially thousands more across Europe.
“Whether countries are part of the EU or not, coal pollution recognises no borders.”
By phasing out coal, Germany could avoid 1,860 premature domestic deaths and nearly 2,500 more abroad.
The countries suffering the highest toll of premature deaths from foreign and domestic emissions are Germany, the UK (2,100), Poland (1,860), Italy (1,610), and France (1,380).
Only 50 premature deaths in France in 2013 could be traced to domestic coal-fired plants. The remaining 1,330 were cross-border, the majority from German plants.
France made major investments in Nuclear, and preserves its own citizens’ lives as a result, but it still sees more than 1,300 deaths from other countries’ coal. All of Europe would be living longer had Germany made different decisions 15 years ago, and more Europeans will die from this decision.