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by Symmetry
4135 days ago
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That was completely devoid of any useful numbers. Here's a nice, well researched chart that actually puts coal in a useful context compared to other ways of generating electricity. http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml The rest of that is well worth reading, too. |
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Coal kills in three distinct ways:
1) Miners: This depends enormously on the country and the mining technology. The trend in North America is toward fewer and fewer miners underground. I've worked in a support industry for hard rock mining, and coal is fundamentally different in a lot of ways, but in hard rock the push is toward "zero entry" mining, where everything underground is teleoperated or simply autonomous.
2) Transport: Coal has to be moved via train and truck, and the average thermal coal plant requires a boxcar load every fifteen minutes. This is one of the things that makes nuclear so much safer: uranium has such high energy density that transportation deaths are very nearly zero. Mining deaths are lower too.
3) Pollution: This is where coal really falls down. It's full of heavy metals--lead, mercury, arsenic--and governed by standards that let coal plants release more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear plants. Particulates cause premature death due to respiratory disease. On the good side, they may be cutting global climate change by more than half (1 W/m2 cooling due to particulates vs 1.6 W/m2 warming due to CO2).
Oil in contrast seems like it ought to be relatively safe. Drilling, refining and pipeline transport rarely kill people. Rail transport--brought to you by people who hate pipelines but love cars and electricity but oppose nuclear, solar and windmills--is far more dangerous but it would be surprising if it was that much worse than coal.
Here are some alternative data with some discussion of different sources and studies: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... (coal and oil are both still pretty bad compared to nuclear, but we knew that anyway: nuclear is overwhelmingly the safest way to generate electricity, despite its likely preventable issues with economically catastrophic failure.)