The Trump Administration's push to bring make more coal power is bad news not only for climate change, but also maybe for human health. Edson Severnini, an economics and public policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon, just published the results of a unique case study about what happens to communities located around new or ramped-up coal power plants. In short, pregnant women there give birth to babies with a lower birth weight on average, and consequently less of a shot at a healthy life. Severnini's research was published today in the journal Nature Energy.

Severnini's study is brilliant in its simplicity. In 1979, after the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, a federal planning agency called the Tennessee Valley Authority closed down two nuclear power plants. The agency then made up for the lost juice with electricity generated entirely by coal-fired plants. These new plants opened up in Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

Severnini merely followed the aftermath of this nuclear-to-coal switch by looking at the data. He compared information about how much electricity was produced by each coal plant, the air pollution levels in surrounding towns and cities, and medical data on newborn babies born in the areas where coal-fired power generation had increased. What he found was stunning.

Near the new coal plants, the average weight of each newborn baby "declined by 5.4 percent... and these declines were unique to the places most impacted by pollution," explains Michael Shellenberger, an independent environmental policy expert at the Breakthrough Institute, in an essay published alongside Severnini's research paper. On average, babies born in these regions pouted by the coal plants weighed more than one-fourth of a pound less.

You may be wondering whether a small drop in average birth weight is that big a deal. According to Shellenberger, it's a huge deal.

"Studies have found that a reduction in birth weight as small as 5.4% can result in a lower intelligence quotient and lower income, as well as higher rates of illness, stunted growth, and [brain] developmental problems," writes Shellenberger. Even ignoring other issues that are often linked to an increase in coal plants, such as lung cancer rates, the lowered birth weight of babies is nothing short of a public health calamity.

Severnini argues that this research is all the more reason not just to move to renewable energy sources like wind and solar, but to readopt nuclear power generation as quickly as possible. Although incidents like the Three Mile Island accident or the Fukushima nuclear accident in March 2011 "generated deep public anxiety and uncertainty about the future of nuclear energy, writes Severnini in his study, "nuclear plants produce virtually no greenhouse gas emissions or air pollutants during power generation."

We also have the technology to entirely eliminate coal power plants with nuclear ones right now—and have for quite a while. This is in contrast to renewable energy sources like wind and solar, which would not currently be able to replace the juice we'd lose from entirely excising coal from our national grid.

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