Re: OT: Nuclear Waste (Was Re-Marketing Ada)

From: Russ (18k11tm001_at_sneakemail.com)
Date: 11/19/03 

Date: 18 Nov 2003 21:36:58 -0800

"Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<_eydnYB-uYJw1yeiRVn-vg@comcast.com>...

> The other blatent lie is worse. Right now a significant amount of the
> radiation dose you receive every year comes from coal burning power
> plants! Huh? Yep. Burning coal releases a large amount of radioactive
> material into the environment. Some gases from things like radon gas
> otherwise trapped in the coal beds, and other solid radiation sources
> like potassium-40 that is in the fly ash, concentrated by plants in
> areas where the fly ash eventually settles and then found in the food
> supply. In other words, the amount of radioactivity released into the
> environment by the nuclear fuel cycle for a given nuclear plant is
> measured in milligrams per year. The radioactive material released by by
> a coal burning plant is measured in tons per year. (And yes, I know the
> difference between high-level and low-level nuclear wastes, and most of
> the radioactive material released when coal is burned is low-level. But
> the same holds with nuclear reactors--the high-level wastes are
> concentrated in the fuel rods, and most of the radiation sources
> released are low level.)

That's what is really amazing about this whole supposed "debate." I
can point out that the air pollution from coal-fired is four or five
orders of magnitude more dangerous than radioactive nuclear waste, but
that would be only part of the story. The simple fact is that, per
unit of energy produced, the radioactivity in the *coal* waste is
greater than the radioactivity in the *nuclear* waste. It's just more
concentrated in the nuclear waste -- but that's an advantage, because
that makes it much easier to manage. (Think of having trash
concentrated in cans rather than scattered all over the landscape.)

Yet people continue to fall for the old cliche' that "nuclear waste is
dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years." The sheer ignorance of
people who parrot this one has always amazed me. First of all,
chemical waste isn't dangerous for just "hundreds of thousands of
years," it is dangerous *forever*. It has an *infinite* halflife. A
long halflife means weak radioactive emissions. In fact, the toxicity
of long-lived radioisotopes is essentially chemical.

> Hmmm. Let me put it this way instead. There was an analysis done many
> years ago known as the Wash1400 report if I remember correctly. (Yep:
> http://stellar-one.com/nuclear/staff_reports/summary_WASH1400.htm) It
> analyzed the number of deaths to be expected from a "maximum credible"
> nuclear power plant accident that came very close to matching the Three
> Mile Island disaster a few years later. Total deaths from radiation
> released by the initial failure? Less than 100, how much less is
> irrelevant. Because the report correctly predicted that the deaths due
> to restarting older coal burning plants to replace the power lost when
> the reactor failed would be in the thousands--per year. And that is
> what happened at TMI.

That study and others have found that a nuclear meltdown would have to
occur every two weeks to equal the damage done by the *routine*
emissions from coal-fired power.

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