Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to rationalization of energy use and to the introduction
of alternatives, and it has become increasingly counter-
productive. Illich (1974) calculated that after taking into
account the time needed to earn money for the purchase
of the car, fuel, maintenance, and insurance, the average
speed of U.S. car travel amounted to less than 8 km/h.
I recalculated the rate for the typical urban U.S. situa-
tion of the early 2000s and found the speed no higher
than 5 km/h. In some cities nearly permanent traffic
congestion has reduced driving speeds to levels not much
superior to those achieved before 1900 with horse-drawn
omnibuses and electric streetcars. Moreover, the enor-
mous energy losses (rolling efficiencies at best 5% of
initial crude oil input) mean that even cars with highly ef-
ficient catalytic converters are major contributors to local
and regional environmental degradation. Driving also
tops the list of all energy-related accidental death causes.
In 2003 the global total was 1.3 million fatalities and
about 40 million injuries, whose social and economic im-
pact is aggravated by the youth of the victims (Evans
2002).
The realm of energy-related mishaps and exposures is
immense, ranging from the frequent but mostly nonfatal
presence of Legionella bacteria in air-conditioning ducts
to such rare but potentially catastrophic events as fires in
refineries, failures of large dams, and releases of radiation
from nuclear power plants. In addition, there are many
grave consequences of terrorist attacks whose assess-
ments exemplify the challenge of appraising potential
risks purely on the basis of complex assumptions. For ex-
ample, increasing reliance on LNG shipments (fig. 12.6)
makes it impossible to ignore the risk of catastrophic
fires, above all, the uncontainable pool fires of the gas
on water (Havens 2003). A 5-min burn of a single
25,000-m
3
LNG tank (tankers usually carry five) would
release energy equivalent to about 10 Hiroshima bombs
(Fay 1980), but experimental spills have involved LNG
volumes 2 OM smaller (
<
50 m
3
).
Concerns about a terrorist attack on a nuclear facilities
increased after 9/11 (Chapin et al. 2002), as did worries
about exploding small nuclear devices in cities. An explo-
sion of a small nuclear device would have the greatest po-
tential impact if a bomb were placed in a float at a major
football game (Willrich and Taylor 1974); this would
produce a nearly 100% casualty rate among as many as
100,000 spectators, most of them men of productive
age. The Three Mile Island mishap in 1979 and the
Chernobyl accident in 1986 caused profound reappraisals
of the probabilities of risks posed by commercial nuclear
plants (Hohenemser 1988). During the late 1980s esti-
mates of the chances of core meltdown in a U.S. nuclear
power plant during a 20-year period differed by a factor
of 200 (Hively 1988), but the subsequent operating rec-
ord has shown no deterioration.
Assessments of lifelong, even intergenerational, health
consequences, are extremely difficult. As a result, some
conclusions put the risks of nuclear generation much
lower than the total health costs of coal-generated elec-
tricity, whereas others see the nuclear industry as an
intolerably risky enterprise. The long-term effects of air
pollution generated by large-scale coal combustion are
similarly unclear. Attempts to quantify the number of
premature deaths caused by emissions from a 1-GW
coal-fired power plant produced totals between 0.07
and 400,000 (Ricci and Molton 1986). Such a range is
clearly useless for rational decision making, and these
uncertainties must be kept in mind when reviewing nu-
merous calculations of energy-related mortality and mor-
bidity risks (Travis and Etnier 1982; IAEA 1984; Fremlin
1987; Sharma 1990).
