Buy an E-Z Pass

Source: U.S. Department of Transportation
Federal Highway Administration

Do you drive frequently on tollways? If so, you should buy an E-ZPass.

Why? Well, Lindsay Abrams reported an interesting health benefit involving E-Z Pass in the June 2013 Atlantic.

Exposure to pollution matters, too. One of the more inventive recent studies involves, of all things, E‑ZPass. The toll-collection system eased traffic on New Jersey and Pennsylvania highways, improving air quality, which seems to have in turn affected fetal health. Among pregnant women living within a mile or so of an E-ZPass toll plaza, premature births fell by 8.6 percent, and low birth weight, by 9.3 percent. [Emphasis in original.]

Abrams references Currie and Walker, “Traffic Congestion and Infant Health” (American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Jan. 2011).

The short Abrams piece cites a number of other studies involving maternal and fetal health. It turns out that nuclear fallout is bad for newborns, but you would have guessed that. The piece also references data suggesting that national tragedies (think 9/11) and war are also harmful to fetuses -- but so is famine. Indeed, even voluntary fasting during regular religious holidays seems to have unfortunate health consequences for babies.


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China and Green Energy Alternatives

While environmentalists are rightly very worried about the effects of mining and burning the world's remaining coal reserves, many are now just as concerned in the post-Fukushima world about the safety of nuclear energy. Prior to this year, nuclear power was increasingly viewed as the most feasible near-term alternative to coal-fired electricity.

It is well-known that China's vast coal reserves are of special concern to environmentalists. As the NYT reported two years ago, "China now uses more coal than the United States, Europe and Japan combined." China opens two or three new coal-fired plants every week! As for the nuclear alternative, China suspended nuclear construction plans after the Fukushima accidents in March. However, recent news reports suggest that China will resume its ambitious nuclear plans after it releases a new safety program in August.

Lucia Green-Weiskel, project manager of the climate change program at the Beijing-based Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation, thinks that China could use the current moment to slow its nuclear plans and invest more heavily in other "greener" energy technologies. After all, China is officially committed to finding sustainable solutions:

China passed into law its Twelfth Five Year Plan, which will serve as the country’s economic blueprint until 2015. The primary theme of the plan is sustainable development, with a high priority on securing nonfossil fuel energy sources. New policies include reducing carbon intensity by 17 percent by 2015. That means manufacturing entities would need to emit at least 17 percent less carbon in 2015 than they emitted in 2010 for the same amount of economic output. The plan also mandates ambitious energy-cutting targets, implementation of market mechanisms like cap and trade, and generation of 11.4 percent of total energy from nonfossil fuels by 2015, up from the current 8 percent. Pre-Fukushima, a sizable portion of that 11.4 percent was to come from nuclear sources. That target is being reconsidered.

I've previously noted that China is becoming a major player in "green" energy technology. It's a small bit of good news in a future that otherwise looks clouded by coal soot.

Green-Weiskel emphasizes the stakes in these decisions. A bold move by China would have profound global implications -- for the future of the technologies as well as for the environment:

it is possible that one consequence of the horrific meltdown in Japan will be China’s accelerated development of clean and safe energy. With its huge economy, driven by central planning and aggressive government investment, China is the only country building a green-technology industry on a scale that could bring down global prices of solar panels and wind turbines, making them affordable in the developing world. This should be a key part of the global strategy to keep emissions under 350 parts per million, the maximum threshold recommended by climate scientists. For this to happen, solar and wind energy must become cost-competitive not only with nuclear but with fossil fuels. Given China’s size and unique role as world manufacturer and exporter, it is fair to say that it is the best hope for giving solar and wind energy that boost.

Is China really the best hope for a sustainable future? If so, what does that imply about the prospects for such a future?

Inevitably, this discussion ties into old debates about democratic versus centralized decision-making about the environment. Does the world need green leadership with dictatorial authority?

Democratic states certainly seem more accountable to the costs of pollution -- and responsive to the wishes of their constituents. Like China, a number of democracies have suspended their nuclear plans in the wake of Fukushima. However, both Germany and Switzerland have announced that they intend to phase-out their reactors altogether. China's brief moratorium seems unlikely to lead to that kind of decision. A stronger declaration about a safe nuclear future seems far more likely. Thus, I remain skeptical that the future of environmentalism rests with leadership from non-democratic regimes.


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Nuclear nightmares with strange bedfellows

The Fukushima nuclear "event" in Japan has now been categorized as a Level 7 accident on the INES scale. The only other instance for this rating was the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Many engineers, however, do not believe the latest accident will be as devastating as Chernobyl because of the specific circumstances surrounding the different accidents. The BBC story I linked explains the rationale.

In any event, anti-nuclear analysts have been referencing Chernobyl a great deal in the past month -- and the implications of their arguments are disturbing.

Noted lefty climate skeptic Alexander Cockburn offers the most frightening summary:

In 2009 the New York Academy of Sciences published Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, a 327-page volume by three scientists, Alexey Yablokov and Vassily and Alexey Nesterenko. It is the definitive study to date.

In the summary of his chapter 'Mortality After the Chernobyl Catastrophe', Yablokov says flatly: "A detailed study reveals that 3.8–4.0 per cent of all deaths in the contaminated territories of Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2004 were caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe...

"Since 1990, mortality among the clean-up teams has exceeded the mortality rate in corresponding population groups. From 112,000 to 125,000 liquidators [members of clean-up crews] died before 2005 - that is, some 15 per cent of the 830,000 members of the Chernobyl clean-up teams.

"The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout."

Long-time anti-nuclear crusader, Dr. Helen Caldicott, has likewise referenced this report in her recent writings about the Japanese accident.

However, environmental journalist George Monbiot has been attacking Caldicott for sloppy use of scientific evidence -- including reference to the study cited also by Cockburn. He quotes other comprehensive studies and reviews of studies, including one completed by UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (Unscear), which he calls "the equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

Of the workers who tried to contain the emergency at Chernobyl, 134 suffered acute radiation syndrome; 28 died soon afterwards. Nineteen others died later, but generally not from diseases associated with radiation(6). The remaining 87 have suffered other complications, included four cases of solid cancer and two of leukaemia. In the rest of the population, there have been 6,848 cases of thyroid cancer among young children, arising “almost entirely” from the Soviet Union’s failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with iodine 131(7). Otherwise, “there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure.”(8) People living in the countries affected today “need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident.”(9)

Those parenthetical numbers in the text are citations to original sources, which I have included below.

Monbiot points to a published "devastating" review of the Yablokov, Nesterenko, and Nesterenko study, authored by Monty W. Charles of University of Birmingham. I cannot gain access to the full review, but Monbiot writes that

"the book achieves its figure by the remarkable method of assuming that all increased deaths from a wide range of diseases – including many which have no known association with radiation – were caused by the accident(15). There is no basis for this assumption, not least because screening in many countries improved dramatically after the disaster and, since 1986, there have been massive changes in the former eastern bloc. The study makes no attempt to correlate exposure to radiation with the incidence of disease(16).

Monbiot also says that the New York Academy of Sciences published the book without peer review, which is certainly odd if true.

I found the first page of the Charles review on-line, and it does note that the literature on Chernobyl includes a vast rage of findings about the harms. "This book," he writes, "covers the high cancer mortality tail of the distribution of predictions of health effects from Chernobyl." Moreover, Charles says that the range of findings makes it difficult even for scholars in the field to have a good feel for the evidence: "how can professional scientists—such as most readers of this review—arrive at an informed opinion on the radiation-related adverse health effects from the Chernobyl accident? The answer is with great difficulty!"

Monbiot does not quote from a somewhat more sympathetic review by Ian Fairlie of the same research published in the same issue of the journal. Nonetheless, even Fairlie finds some troubling flaws in the book's methodology:

However, one major difficulty in interpreting Chernobyl mortality studies is the large recent decrease in average male life spans in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine in all areas not just contaminated ones: this deserves more attention in eastern studies.

....Also greater efforts should be made in reconstructing doses (and resources be made available for this), and in estimating individual and collective doses and discussing their implications for both eastern and western Europe.

Based on the physical evidence he has reviewed, Fairlie has argued elsewhere that the deaths attributed to Chernobyl are significantly underestimated by many scientists. For example Fairlie and David Sumner found that "about 30,000 to 60,000 excess cancer deaths are predicted, 7 to 15 times greater than the figure of 4,000 in the IAEA press release."

Obviously, even 60,000 cancer deaths would be only a fraction of 900,000 as estimated by the Yablokov et al study.

I am not 100% sure what to make of this debate, but it does seem clear that official estimates of Chernobyl's effects may be on the low end of the continuum -- and that high end estimates may have some serious methodological flaws. An environmentalist like Monbiot seems to be dismissing radiation threats tied to the nuclear industry (at least in part out of concerns for global warming), while lefty writer Cockburn is extremely worried about nuclear radiation -- but is quite skeptical about global warming. In fact, he's a denialist who sees conspiracy.

Whatever the truth, I suspect that nuclear power will have a difficult time politically for the foreseeable future and it will thus not be a viable near-term solution to climate change.


Appendix: Monbiot's sources.

6. United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, 2011. Volume II, Annex D: Health effects due to radiation from the Chernobyl accident. This is the latest section of the 2008 report Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation: Report to the General Assembly. See Paragraph 2, page 1 and Figure VII and paragraph 63, page 14. http://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2008/Advance_copy_Annex_D_Chernobyl_Report.pdf

7. Para 33, page 8 and para 4, page one. As above.

8. Para 99, page 19. As above.

9. Para 100, page 19. As above.

15. MW Charles, 2010. Review of Chernobyl: consequences of the catastrophe for people and the environment. Radiation Protection Dosimetry (2010) 141(1): 101-104. doi: 10.1093/rpd/ncq185. http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/content/141/1/101.full

16. The authors announce that they reject this method in the introduction to the book. Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko and Alexey V. Nesterenko, as above, page 2

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A new NPT?

Somewhat quietly, the United States is trying to close a loophole in the Non-proliferation Treaty. The NPT allows states to pursue the nuclear fuel cycle for peaceful energy-related purposes -- including uranium enrichment.

Last weekend, in hopes of ending the need for enrichment, 11 nations joined the US, Russia, China, France and Japan in the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

Under the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, a limited number of countries including the U.S. and Russia would provide uranium fuel to other nations for powering reactors to generate electricity, and then retrieve the fuel for reprocessing. This would deprive those nations of their own nuclear fuel enrichment programs, which can be used to make atomic arms.

These are the latest 11 states to join the partnership: Australia, Bulgaria, Ghana, Hungary, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Ukraine.

Do you see any worrisome nuclear threshold states in that group?

Like the Proliferation Security Initiative, the GNEP is a US-led "coalition of the willing" that does not work like a traditional multilateral organization. New international organizations typically form only after a sizable group of states agree to the negotiated terms of a particular treaty.

With GNEP, the US can start offering selective incentives to every state that agrees to live by American rules.

If the GNEP promotes nuclear reprocessing, however, critics are going to point out that the partnership might actually promote nuclear proliferation.

Hmmm. If the program does not reduce proliferation, what would it do? Well, GNEP supporters fairly openly embrace nuclear energy.


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Iranian energy

Could Iran be telling the truth about the nature of its nuclear program? Could it really be for energy?

U.S. policymakers tend to discuss that program as if it must be a weapons program. Some time ago, I talked to a former intelligence official who was VERY skeptical about Iraq WMD back in 2002 but dismissed Iran's energy claim when I asked him about it.

However, Roger Stern, of the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins University recently investigated Iran's claims about energy and found they have some real credibility: "the oil export decline we project implies that Iran's claim to need nuclear power to preserve exports is genuine."

This is from his abstract:

Because Iran's government relies on monopoly proceeds from oil exports for most revenue, it could become politically vulnerable if exports decline. Here, we survey the political economy of Irani petroleum for evidence of this decline. We define Iran's export decline rate (edr) as its summed rates of depletion and domestic demand growth, which we find equals 10-12%. We estimate marginal cost per barrel for additions to Irani production capacity, from which we derive the "standstill" investment required to offset edr. We then compare the standstill investment to actual investment, which has been inadequate to offset edr. Even if a relatively optimistic schedule of future capacity addition is met, the ratio of 2011 to 2006 exports will be only 0.40-0.52. A more probable scenario is that, absent some change in Irani policy, this ratio will be 0.33-0.46 with exports declining to zero by 2014-2015.

Think seriously about that last line: "exports declining to zero by 2014-2015."

There's another important zero mentioned in the piece:

"Iran's petroleum investment climate therefore appears to have greatly deteriorated since 1998–2004, a period when investment was insufficient to offset the recent production decline (Fig. 2). Zero future foreign investment thus appears plausible."

The national Iranian Oil Company currently imports gasoline at the market price!

The political implications are interesting too:

The regime's dependence on export revenue suggests that it could need nuclear power as badly as it claims. Recent analyses by former National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) officials project that oil exports could go to zero within 12–19 years (5, 6). It therefore seems possible that Iran's claim to need nuclear power might be genuine, an indicator of distress from anticipated export revenue shortfalls. If so, the Irani regime may be more vulnerable than is presently understood.

...We believe scenario 2 is most probable. In this case, export extinction in 2014–2015 is preceded by a decline to 33–46% of 2006 exports by 2011. Notice, however, that export declines are substantial, even in the least likely, most optimistic scenario. Because government revenue could be sustained only by rising price in all scenarios, absent such a price rise political challenges might overwhelm the regime long before exports go to zero.

The full piece is available as html or pdf.

Hat tip: The April 2007 Atlantic Monthly.


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