Nuclear Energy Prevents Air Pollution and Saves Lives
The panic following the catastrophic meltdown of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in April 1986 resulted in nearly 400 fewer new nuclear power plants being built than had been projected. Fewer clean nuclear power plants led to increased air pollution from fossil fuel–fired plants. That extra air pollution killed far more people than the meltdown, by several orders of magnitude. This is the preliminary conclusion of a recent National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study by three applied economists.
The researchers found that new nuclear plant construction flatlined immediately after Chernobyl. Had previous trends continued, the study indicates that the United States would have built more than 170 new reactors by now. In the late 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission anticipated that 1,000 mostly fast breeder reactors would supply 70 percent of America’s electricity by 2000. Sadly, only 20 percent of U.S. electricity is currently generated by nuclear plants, chiefly old-fashioned light-water reactors that were built decades ago.
While estimates vary, studies agree that air pollution has caused great harm to human health. Max Roser at Our World in Data reviewed information from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) on global air pollution mortality estimates. WHO and IHME report that between 4.2 million and 4.5 million people die prematurely from exposure to outdoor air pollution annually. A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) calculated that 3.6 million people prematurely die as a result of air pollution from burning fossil fuels. The PNAS study estimated that the 194,000 annual premature deaths in the U.S. resulting from fos
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