Greenhouse Gas and Health Benefits of Electric Vehicles on a Heavily Nuclearized Grid.

[NNadir]

The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Health and Climate Incentives for the Deployment of Cleaner On-Road Vehicle Technologies (Laura Minet, An Wang, and Marianne Hatzopoulou Environmental Science & Technology 2021 55 (10), 6602-6612)

Many people question how I can simultaneously be an opponent of the electric car fantasy while also being an advocate of nuclear energy. This is because most people - and many nuclear energy advocates do engage in the greenwashing of electric cars - think of nuclear energy primarily as a tool for generating electricity. A conservative is, of course, a person who believes that everything should remain as it is and has been and that nothing should be tried for the first time, and thus the belief that electricity is the only possible product of nuclear energy is a conservative idea, and thus, as the world environment rapidly deteriorates at an accelerating pace, this belief is a dangerous idea.

I insist that electric cars are not sustainable for the same reason that so called "renewable energy" is not sustainable, specifically because of the high mineral mass requirement. (The IEA recently published several reports on this issue, which is slowly leaching into a conscious reality for anyone who is paying attention, albeit this with the understanding that lying to oneself is much easier than paying attention, and thus paying attention is not widely practiced.)

Nevertheless I found the paper cited at the outset to be quite interesting, not because I approve of electric cars, but because it emphasizes the reason that, despite all the attention paid to Chernobyl and Fukushima by the easily misled, nuclear energy, overall, saves lives; to wit: By the prevention of air pollution.

An electric car running in a area powered by dangerous fossil fuels - I discussed a paper in this same journal on the subject of electric vehicles in China (where there are 100 million such vehicles, albeit mostly scooters) - is merely a device for generating more pollution while wasting energy.

This study however discusses the Toronto, Canada area. Before excerpting anything connected with other aspects of the paper, before even excerpting the paper's introduction, let me excerpt this text about the generation of electricity on the grid serving Toronto as of 2016.

Under scenarios S1 and S2, the production of the electricity fueling the EVs and BEBs follows the 2016 average grid mix of Ontario, which is 9% natural gas, 61% nuclear, 24% hydro, and 6% wind.(22)

Only 9% of the grid depends on dangerous fossil fuels, and that is probably connected with backup of the largely useless and environmentally unacceptable wind industry. (I'm not particularly fond of hydroelectricity either; I'm a free river kind of guy.)

An "EV" is of course, an electric car, a "BEB" is a "battery electric bus."

The graphic at the outset the paper, which is available merely by clicking on the link above, which will give the abstract lays it out in terms of lives saved from air pollution, which now is killing about 7 million people per year while people carry on about Fukushima.

Here it is:



The nuclear infrastructure in Canada is almost entirely CANDU reactors, heavy water reactors, designed to run on unenriched uranium, albeit at low burn-ups. The burn-ups of CANDUs could, in theory, be extremely high, were they fueled on a ternary mixture of plutonium, depleted (or natural) uranium and thorium, or by uranium recovered from so called "nuclear waste" and thorium, and other approaches, mostly being explored in India, which also relies on heavy water reactors for clean nuclear energy.

Although a CANDU is basically a device only useful for generating electricity, I am still very fond of this reactor type and I wish we had a lot of them in the US, but we don't. They can in theory run for a very long time on the uranium component of so called "nuclear waste" in a cycle known as the "DUPIC" cycle, with the added benefit of producing significant neptunium for anti-proliferation purposes.

Anyway.

From the introductory text of the paper:

In Canada, in 2017, the transportation sector was the second largest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions(1) and an important contributor to air pollutant emissions.(2) Since one-third of the Canadian population lives in close vicinity to major roads (i.e., within 250 m), air pollutant emissions from the transportation sector have considerable health impacts: several Canadian studies have associated increased exposure to air pollution with increased risks of cancers, circulatory and respiratory diseases, and mortality.(3?7)

Light- and heavy-duty vehicles and transit buses constitute the majority of the on-road vehicle fleet in Canada.(8) Different approaches can be adopted to tackle their impacts on population exposure and health. Traffic management strategies (TMSs), such as congestion pricing, low emission zones, truck/bus lanes, or transit improvement, can be implemented. However, the use of TMS for improving ambient air quality is not always efficient because they can be counterbalanced by indirect effects (e.g., increased traffic volumes induced by congestion mitigation strategies and traffic diversion to different areas as a result of tolling and restrictions).(9) Therefore, such initiatives should be complemented by tackling the emissions at the source through a replacement of the existing fleet by lower-emitting vehicles. For private passenger vehicles (i.e., cars and SUVs owned by private households) and transit buses, vehicle electrification is often seen as an opportunity to decrease GHG emissions, and since electric vehicles (EVs) and battery electric buses (BEBs) do not generate exhaust emissions, electrification has also been promoted to reduce traffic-related air pollution, especially in regions with relatively clean electricity production.(10?13) For commercial vehicles (i.e., light-duty and heavy-duty), Pan et al.(14) highlighted that eliminating high-emitting trucks would bring substantial improvements in population exposure and health.
There are only few studies comparing the co-benefits of GHG mitigation strategies targeting all three fleets of vehicles. In India, Dhar and Shukla(15) quantified the changes of air pollutant emissions resulting from different policies involving sustainable technologies, fuels, and logistics for private cars, transit buses, and commercial vehicles. However, they did not quantify the implications on air quality, population exposure, and health. In the U.K., Smith et al.(16) analyzed the co-benefits and conflicts associated with measures aiming for a reduction of the carbon budget of the country, but the strategies incorporated in the scenario studied were broad and encompassed measures that went beyond improvements of vehicle fleets.

In this study, we applied an integrated framework combining a traffic assignment model with an air quality model to evaluate the health implications of a series of transportation scenarios designed by a panel of sustainable transportation experts in the context of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA), the largest metropolitan area of Canada...

The methods utilized by the authors:

...After designing different study cases and transportation scenarios (2.1), we developed emission inventories for private passenger vehicles, transit buses, and commercial vehicles, which we then modified to reflect the transportation scenarios outlined (2.2). Then, we set up a chemical transport model (CTM) over the GTHA to quantify the air quality impacts under the study cases and scenarios (2.2). Finally, we estimated the exposure of the population and conducted an assessment of the health outcomes and social benefits associated with the scenarios (2.3)...

The scenarios:

...Scenario 1 (S1—100% EV) assumes an electrification of the private passenger vehicle fleet;

Scenario 2 (S2—100% BEB) assumes an electrification of the transit bus fleet;

Scenario 3 (S3—cleaner trucks) assumes that trucks older than 8 years have recently been renewed. The rationale behind this choice is that most scrappage programs are for vehicles of that age; few target trucks, but those for private passenger vehicles implemented in Europe are usually applicable for vehicles older than 8–10.(20,21)...

Some graphics describing their findings:



The caption:

Figure 1. Comparison of the NOx, BC, and fuel-cycle GHG emissions from private passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles, transit buses, and electricity for EVs and BEBs under the base case and the different scenarios for a typical weekday: (a) total daily emissions and (b) percent contribution of each mode.

The caption:

Figure 2. Comparison of the annual health outcomes associated with each vehicle category and each scenario (each outcome related to the three vehicle categories indicates a burden, while the outcomes related to the scenarios indicate benefits). The uncertainty bars represent the interquartile range resulting from the use of a range of odds ratios associated with each pollutant and health outcome (indicated in parentheses in the legend).

The caption:

Figure 3. Distribution by region of (a) the social costs and fuel-cycle GHG emissions associated with each vehicle category and (b) the social benefits and fuel-cycle GHG emission savings obtained under each scenario. These figures are based on average numbers of premature deaths extracted from the uncertainty analysis of the health outcome assessment.

The caption:

Figure 4. Spatial distribution of years of life saved per 100,000 capita under each scenario. These figures are based on the average number of years of life saved extracted from the uncertainty analysis of the health outcome assessment.

Discussing the lives saved (or in this case potentially saved) by nuclear energy is not as sexy as getting a wedgie in one's underwear worrying about critical zones in the wreckage of the Chernobyl reactor, but if we were serious - and we're not, as we hit 420 ppm of CO2 in the planetary atmosphere this year while literally Quixotically genuflecting endlessly at wind turbines - it would matter that overall, nuclear energy saves lives.

In the conclusion the authors, in a clear burst of honesty reflecting the (huge) caveat write this:

...Finally, GHG emissions do not account for upstream impacts from battery manufacturing. Ma et al.(56) estimated life-cycle GHG emissions of internal combustion engine vehicles and EVs to be about 38.1 and 54.5 g of CO2 equiv/km, respectively. Using these numbers, we estimated that GHG emission savings under the EV scenarios are decreased by about 8%.

To conclude, this analysis highlights the necessity to tackle the emissions from all categories of vehicles: private passenger vehicles because they are important sources of GHG emissions and responsible for substantial social costs related to air pollution exposure; commercial vehicles because they are responsible for more than half of the YLL and premature deaths attributed to traffic-related air pollution exposure in the GTHA; and transit buses because they are operating in densely populated areas and their emissions have therefore higher health impacts in proportion.

I have added the bold in the above excerpt.

I don't know if this will inspire anyone to light a candle in one of the many temples for worshipping Elon Musk. I have no use for the guy, but feel free to do so if so inspired by this interesting paper.

I hope you will have a pleasant and safe day tomorrow.

[Anon-C]

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