IAEA Reference Data Series 1/31. Despite this, it is by no means a complete list.

Such efforts can be accomplished largely with currently available low-carbon and carbon-free alternative energy sources like nuclear power and renewables, as well as energy efficiency improvements. Again, the reason the U.S. death toll is so low for nuclear is our strong Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). GEA, 2012: The top panel (a) shows results for the historical period in our study (1971-2009), with mean values (labeled) and ranges for the baseline historical scenario. C. A. Pope et al., Lung cancer, cardiopulmonary mortality, and long-term exposure to fine particulate air pollution. Coal-fired power plants have a dramatic effect on human health and the environment as well as total... [+] health care costs (courtesy of EERE).

Five of the 10 coal mining deaths this year have occurred in West Virginia, and two more in Kentucky. Kutscher, J.E. 3) — i.e., historical nuclear energy production has prevented the building of hundreds of large coal-fired power plants. Modern mining in the US results in approximately 30 deaths per year due to mine accidents. For over 25 years I have been a member of Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the NRDC, the Environmental Defense Fund and many others, as well as professional societies including the America Nuclear Society, the American Chemical Society, the Geological Society of America and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
J. Scott et al., The Clean Air Act at 35, Environmental Defense, New York, www.environmentaldefense.org. There just are not many nuclear plants. Markandya, A., and P. Wilkinson, 2007:

4). First, carbon capture and storage is an immature technology and is therefore unlikely to constrain the resulting GHG emissions in the necessary time frame. However, we emphasize that our results for both prevented mortality and prevented GHG emissions could be substantial underestimates. The three panels are ordered the same as in Fig. Worldwide, there are around 340 million occupational accidents and 160 million victims of work-related illnesses annually.

P. Bickel and R. Friedrich, Externalities of Energy, European Union Report EUR 21951, Luxembourg (2005). All Rights Reserved, This is a BETA experience. Technol., 44, 4050-4062, doi:10.1021/es903884a. Fatalities occurred before records were kept; descriptions of incidents and those involved were lost along with coal company records.

FSU15=15 countries of the Former Soviet Union and OECD=Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Sato, V. Masson-Delmotte, et al., 2013: Countries/regions are arranged in descending order of CO2 emissions in recent years. Electricity generation and health. The World Health Organization and other sources attribute about 1 million deaths/year to coal air pollution. Please address all inquiries about this research to NAS, Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use Committee on Health, Environmental, and Other External Costs and Benefits of Energy Production and Consumption; Nat. The reason the nuclear number is small is that nuclear produces so much electricity per unit. I have been a scientist in the field of the earth and environmental sciences for 33 years, specializing in geologic disposal of nuclear waste, energy-related research, planetary surface processes, radiobiology and shielding for space colonies, subsurface transport and environmental clean-up of heavy metals. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria. Third, potentially usable natural gas resources (especially unconventional ones like shale gas) are enormous, containing many hundreds to thousands of gigatonnes of carbon (based on ref. 7) — needs to be retained and significantly expanded in order to avoid or minimize the devastating impacts of unabated climate change and air pollution caused by fossil fuel burning. Names, dates, places, mines, and causes of death have been painstakingly compiled. The dozen or so U.S. deaths in nuclear over the last 60 years have mostly been in the weapons complex or are modeled from general LNT effects. 5).

http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/RDS1_31.pdf. Technol., 47, 4889-4895, doi:10.1021/es3051197. Human-caused climate change and air pollution remain major global-scale problems and are both due mostly to fossil fuel burning. 1). We calculate that this nuclear phaseout scenario leads to an average of 420,000-7 million deaths and 80-240 GtCO2-eq emissions globally (the high-end values reflect the all coal case; see Figs. PLOS One, submitted. By Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen — April 2013. China has experienced significant health care costs as a result of ramping up coal so rapidly over... [+] the last fifteen years.

Options for near-term phaseout of CO2 emissions from coal use in the United States.

I am a Trustee of the Herbert M. Parker Foundation, Adjunct at WSU, an Affiliate Scientist at LANL and consult on strategic planning for the DOE, EPA/State environmental agencies, and industry including companies that own nuclear, hydro, wind farms, large solar arrays, coal and gas plants. According to the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Academy of Science and many health studies over the last decade (NAS 2010), the adverse impacts on health become a significant effect for fossil fuel and biofuel/biomass sources (see especially Brian Wang for an excellent synopsis). We conclude that nuclear energy — despite posing several challenges, as do all energy sources (ref. A hundred-acre wetlands to be flooded by a new dam is worth more to the planet than a barren hundred-acre strip under a solar array in the Mojave (P. Bickel and R. Friedrich, 2005). These additional health costs begin to rival the total energy costs on an annual basis for the U.S. given that health care costs top $2.6 trillion, and electricity costs only exceed about $400 billion. You may opt-out by. Figure 1. Still, about 10,000 die from coal use in the U.S. each year, and another thousand from natural gas. Although it is difficult to assign a cost to these numbers, estimates have suggested a 10% increase in health care costs in countries where coal makes up a significant fraction of the energy mix, like the U.S. and Europe (NAS 2010; Cohen et al., 2005; Pope et al., 2002). Another way to describe this human health energy fee is that it costs about 2,000 lives per year to keep the lights on in Beijing but only about 200 lives to keep them on in New York. Our lungs just don’t like burnt carbonaceous particulates, whether from coal or wood or manure or pellets or cigarettes. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about nuclear, energy and the environment, the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) which established the 40 hour week, and Medicare in 1965, the last fifteen years. Error bars reflect the ranges for the fossil fuel mortality factors listed in Table 1 of our paper. Council, Wash., D.C. ISBN: 0-309-14641-0 (2010). Journal of the AMA, 287 (9): 1132-1141 (2002). Boden, T. A., G. Marland, R.J. Andres, 2012: Still, about 10,000 die from coal use in the U.S. each year, and another thousand from natural gas. The larger columns in panels (b) and (c) reflect the all-coal case and are labeled with their mean values, while the smaller columns reflect the all-gas case; values for the latter are not shown because they are all simply a factor of about 10 lower (reflecting the order-of-magnitude difference between the mortality factors for coal and gas).

Our findings also have important implications for large-scale "fuel switching" to natural gas from coal or from nuclear. Although natural gas burning emits less fatal pollutants and GHGs than coal burning, it is far deadlier than nuclear power, causing about 40 times more deaths per unit electric energy produced (ref. Ranges not shown but are a factor of ~4 higher and lower than the mean values. 15 deaths per TWh. Alabama, Montana and Pennsylvania each had one coal mining death. Wind and nuclear have the smallest carbon footprint with only 15 g emitted per kWhr, and that mainly from concrete production, construction, and mining of steel and uranium. Environ. Also, such fuel switching is practically guaranteed to worsen the climate problem for several reasons. Hansen, and E. Mazria, 2010: Everyone's heard of the carbon footprint of different energy sources, the largest footprint belonging to coal because every kWhr of energy produced emits about 900 grams of CO2. In the USA about 30,000 deaths/year from coal pollution from 2000 TWh. It is notable that the U.S. death rates for coal are so much lower than for China, strictly a result of regulation, particularly the Clean Air Act (Scott et al., 2005). Dr. Pushker Kharecha. Res. doi:10.3334/CDIAC/00001_V2012. 1, except that mean values for both the all coal and all gas cases are labeled.

The middle (b) and bottom (c) panels show results for the high-end and low-end projections, respectively, of nuclear power supply estimated by the IAEA (ref. Mean net deaths prevented annually by nuclear power between 1971-2009 for various countries/regions. 4. International Atomic Energy Agency, 2011:
1 and 3). Using historical electricity production data and mortality and emission factors from the peer-reviewed scientific literature, we found that despite the three major nuclear accidents the world has experienced, nuclear power prevented an average of over 1.8 million net deaths worldwide between 1971-2009 (see Fig. Hansen, J., P. Kharecha, Mki.

Figure 2. This database contains 2497 known Nova Scotia coal mining fatalities. Energy, Electricity and Nuclear Power Estimates for the Period up to 2050: 2011 Edition.

Mitigation efforts for both of these problems should be undertaken concurrently in order to maximize effectiveness. Carbon emissions and physical footprints are known as externalities and are those vague someone-has-to-pay-eventually kind of thing it's hard to put a value on. 5. For coal, oil and biomass, it is carbon particulates resulting from burning that cause upper respiratory distress, kind of a second-hand black lung.

This amounts to at least hundreds and more likely thousands of times more deaths than it caused. Tiananmen Square Source: NREL, Simon Tsuo, EY & Citi On The Importance Of Resilience And Innovation, Impact 50: Investors Seeking Profit — And Pushing For Change, Deep Geologic Nuclear Waste Disposal - No New Taxes. 7. This emissions range corresponds to 16-48% of the "allowable" cumulative CO2 emissions between 2012-2050 if the world chooses to aim for a target atmospheric CO2 concentration of 350 ppm by around the end of this century (ref.