Green power safer for workers than fossil fuels

Ewen Callaway, New Scientist 19 Aug 09;

As if helping to save the world from the worst effects of climate change were not enough, renewable energy may also curb workplace injuries and deaths.

That's because fossil fuels – as the term suggests – have to be dug or drained from underground, and mining is one of the deadliest of industries. Oil and gas extraction account for 100 deaths each year in the US alone, coal another 30, not to mention many more non-fatal injuries.

Carbon-sparing energy sources such as solar panels and windmills, on the other hand, are unlikely to take such a toll on the workers who build and maintain them, argues Steven Sumner, a physician at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. "Extracting the fuel, generating the power and distributing the power are more dangerous in fossil fuel energy than renewable energy."

That sounds like common sense, but there's little hard data on the health costs of producing green energy compared with extracting fossil fuels. One study, a 2005 European Union assessment of the external costs of different energies, found working with wind power was safer than working with coal or oil. And US Department of Energy researchers put solar's occupational health costs in the same ballpark as nuclear, though they ignored the potential for long-term harm from nuclear radiation and catastrophes such as meltdowns.

"We don't know very much," Sumner admits. But as green energy make up a ever-larger chunk of global power supplies, firmer data on workers' health should follow.
Beware biofuels

Vasilis Fthenakis, a photovoltaic researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, agrees that greener energies are generally safer to produce than fossil fuels. Increased demand should make that difference even starker, as renewable energy manufacturing become more efficient and automated. "The picture keeps improving because the technology keeps improving," he says.

Not all green energies are inherently safer for workers than fossil fuels, though. "Rates of injury in agriculture are high, therefore we suspect that biomass energy that comes from crop production is likely to have high risks," Sumner says.

Journal reference: Journal of the American Medical Association, vol 302, p 787