Coal plants have killed a minimum of 500k people over the past 20 years[1]. It's not an accident in that case, it's known and planned for (or at least easily predicted enough that it should have been).
But when a few hundred people, or really just 0 people[2] die in one place at one time, people lose their minds.
I tried to do the math once to figure out if Japan would have been better off building a coal power plant instead of Fukushima, the nuclear plant that had the worst disaster in any western country. It was a surprisingly tough question.
Those studies of coal plant deaths are basically only counting people who died in mining disasters or were killed while operating the power plant. If you add in climate change effects, air pollution including radiation from flyash, and groundwater pollution the figure is almost certainly much worse; but also very hard to calculate with any certainty.
First off - plenty of people are against coal plants for health reasons in addition to the environmental reasons. There is nobody cheering coal and blocking nuclear (and please don't bring up the Germany decommissioning of nuclear plants and keeping open coal plants because it doesn't speak to what I just said). Secondly, Three Mile Island represents the path to a possible outcome. Just because disaster was averted doesn't mean that the thinking about safety shouldn't be focused on the worst case scenario instead of the one that actually happened.
I’m not the person you responded to, but have an honest question here since we are specifically talking about NIMBYism: How much less of NIMBY is there against coal power plants? For example are there examples of people rejecting NPP in their vicinity while accepting CPP?
The worse impacts of coal plants disproportionately impact disadvantaged communities that don't have the resources to be effective NIMBYs.
Coal also has a much wider low-level impact: for instance, it's not safe to consume more than small amounts of fish from the great lakes because of mercury levels, largely due to coal power plants.
Germany has been closing tons of nuclear power plants because of protests. They've recently also moved an entire town and a highway to make space for digging up more coal.
I'm not really answering your question, but it does seem like nuclear NIMBYs are more effective than other ones.
They get a fairer run than nuclear - it is conceivable that a coal plant gets built and is allowed to run. However I imagine the US followed the same broad trends as everyone else in the 90s and started restricting infrastructure construction for environmental reasons so it is probably quite challenging to get a plant built.
There is a reason all the growth is happening in Asia. Their focus is on improving their wealth and material standard of living.
How is that a valid comparison though? Fighting against a coal plant makes sense, fighting against a nuclear plant doesn't - that's the key difference.
The context of the discussion is Not In My Backyard-protests and blocking of plants. Are the people protesting one in their “backyard” not protesting the other?
It's only PM2.5 deaths because those are un-debatable.
Far more will die due to other kinds of pollution it emits, and an unknowable number will die due to the effects of climate change caused by CO2 emissions.
Well, not coal plants but emissions. I guess those nymbis would also be against having all that pollution concentrated in their back yard.
My point is that it is not insane. Maybe selfish. Not willing to have risks with potential catastrophic results near your home is the most normal thing.
And with nuclear, the probability is very low, as with planes. Yet it happens. All the time. Our generation went through three once in a lifetime crisis in the last two decades.
It's insane because killing people is the modus operandi of fossil fuel power - and I'm not even talking about climate change. People often die on oil fields and in mines, toxic waste from coal plants leaches into our water supply, and ash enters our air and causes asthma and heart problems. Coal alone has killed about 460,000 Americans in the 21st century: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/23/coal-pow...
Nobody died at Fukushima (from the nuclear incident that is, 10000 died because of the Tsunami)
Hundreds of people died at Chernobyl.
Those are all the major accidents at production nuclear power plant that have ever occured. There are no others.
There is just one that was deadly, and it is about as representative of the safety of nuclear power as flying in a 1920s' plane compared to a state of the art Airbus.
That's still pretty much a freak incident and insignificant compared to the direct damage (i.e. even if we exclude CO2) burning fossil fuels (especially coal is causing)
Accidents will happen daily. Those accidents are extremely well controlled. You are providing an excellent example by jumping to that insane NIMBY conclusion. I think MS can successfully bulldozer these extremely weak arguments about catastrophic accidents better than I could. Stay tuned.
