Comparison of Public Health Risks from Routine Operation of Energy Systems

摘要

Based on the results of the ExtcrnE Project we have compared the public health risks from the routine operation of energy systems, in terms of YOLL (years of life lost). Generally the loss of life expectancy per kWh of electricity is much higher for fossil fuels than for modern nuclear plants and for most renewables, and among fossil fuels it is much higher for coal than for gas. However, for each energy source there is much variation between different installations of a given energy source; for example, the emission of harmful pollutants from coal power plants built after January 2000 will be an order of magnitude lower than typical emissions from existing plants in the USA and EU during the nineties. The health effects of PV (photovoltaics) and wind arise from the production of the materials rather than during operation of the plant. Among the renewables only biomass combustion entails relatively large health risks, due to the emission of PM, SO2 and NOx. The health risks from the routine operation of the nuclear fuel chain are very small, even though they have been summed over a time horizon of 100,000 years. Since the meaning of risks imposed over thousands of years is difficult to comprehend, we illustrate them by considering a scenario where the entire electricity of the world for 100 years is produced by nuclear: the incremental collective dose is only one percent of the cosmic radiation background. Even though the uncertainties are large (the numbers could be about 4 times smaller or larger [10]), they have relatively little effect on the comparison between energy systems, except for nuclear, because they affect the impacts of the air pollutants in more or less the same way.