The safest energy sources (for the environment and deaths at work)

This time we go green and, based on the data from Our world in Data, we want to show what are theoretically the energy sources that cause the least number of deaths.

Two centuries ago we discovered how to use fossil fuel energy to make our work more productive. It was the innovation that started the industrial revolution. Since then, the growing availability of cheap energy has been integral to the advances we have seen over the past few centuries. It has allowed work to become more productive and people in industrialized countries are much richer than their ancestors, they work much less and enjoy much better living conditions than ever. Access to energy is therefore one of the fundamental drivers of development. The United Nations rightly states that "energy is critical to nearly all of the major challenges and opportunities facing the world today."

But while fossil fuel energy has brought many benefits, unfortunately it also has major negative consequences. There are three main categories of negative consequences.

The first is air pollution: at least five million people die prematurely every year from air pollution

Fossil fuels and the burning of biomass – wood, manure and coal – are responsible for most of these deaths. Eliminating fossil fuels could reduce premature deaths from air pollution by about two-thirds. There are three to four million deaths a year. 2

The second is accidents. This includes accidents that occur in the extraction and extraction of fuels (coal, uranium, rare metals, oil and gas) and includes accidents that occur in the transportation of raw materials and infrastructure, in the construction of the power plant or in the their use.

The third is greenhouse gas emissions: fossil fuels are the main source of greenhouse gases, the main driver of climate change. In 2018, 87% of global CO2 emissions came from fossil fuels and industry.

Let's move on to see the overall graph. Recall that the term "Brown Coal" is what in Italian we define Lignite, the lowest quality coal that is still new to Germany.

Hey but nuclear is the form of energy that is causing very few deaths, despite Fukushima and Chernobyl. If 25 people die each year from coal, only 0.07 die from nuclear power.

Let us now divide the deaths on the basis of direct deaths, due to accidents at work, and indirect deaths, due to pollution and CO2.

The two figures go hand in hand, both for safety, both for CO2 emissions and for safety at work. The only inversion is in biomass-gas …

But there is a problem: giving up fossil sources takes years, even tens of years of investment. Building a nuclear power plant It takes at least 10 to 15 years. Stopping the fossil now means sending us back to the 18th century.

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The article The safest energy sources (for the environment and deaths at work) comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/le-fonti-energetiche-piu-sicure-per-ambiente-e-morti-sul-lavoro/ on Sat, 19 Jun 2021 19:39:34 +0000.