Coal Plants More Radioactive than Nuclear Power Plants

left or right?

 

The last thing I want or will carry is a label.

 

my sympathies

 

No need.

 

And why do you "need" that? Is it because 200,000 to 64 proves just how wrong you are?

Fact: In 2005, in China alone, 5986 coal miners lost their lives.
Fact: In 2005, not one person anywhere in the world died from nuclear energy.

 

cant do it? its okay

 

Hopelessly delusional? We understand.

 

are you calling me names??

 

No. Just observing your behavior.

 

well be careful, its easy to step over the line

 

Especially when some troll comes along and tries to prod you into doing it.

 

there you go again. be careful

 

It's not just power plants. All those horrible spiral CFL bulbs the crazy greenies are pushing on everybody is responsible for all sorts of radioactive sludge being released.

The rare earth elements used to make the phosphors in both fluorescent tubes and CFLs are incredibly polluting to mine. It takes a large quantity of energy to separate these rare earth elements from their ore, and the ore contains radioactive material which is released in a hazardous soluble form during the processing. In fact, the US environmental protection agency shut down the largest rare earth mine in America, at Mountain Pass, California, because of repeated spills of radioactive waste water. Now America has just exported all this pollution to China, just like everything else. A Chinese government investigation revealed: "Excessive rare earth mining has resulted in landslides, clogged rivers, environmental pollution emergencies, and major accidents and disasters, causing great harm to people's safety and health."

http://www.popularmechanics.com/tec...-versus-chinas-rare-earths-dominance-14977835

 

I already replied and proved that deaths from burning coal far outweigh anything Chernobyl did or will ever do. I gave you links to scientific studies proving that coal is a gross polluter and puts more radiation in the environment. You are the one the brought up Chernobyl why not provide some stats?

 

It is all really a matter of perception. Basically coal burning dumps out more rads than chernobyl over time, whereas chernobyl dumped a fair amount in a very short amount of time. And because so much hit at one time we have the cancers and birth defects and host of other problems.

It seems that we are content to slowly kill ourselves with coal and live in fear of nuclear power because the soviets weren't careful enough to build a good and proper containment building.

Take Fukushima for example - how many people died from the radiation so far?

Forbes has a good read on it.

 

And that's another myth that deserves debunking. Those huge estimates of cancer deaths following radiation releases are based on the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) theory, which posits that the number of cancer deaths is linearly proportional to radiation dose (for which there is ample evidence), AND that there is no lower limit, below which there are no health effects from radiation (for which there is no evidence at all).

After Chernobyl, the Soviet government sent in 600,000 people to clean it up. Those people were called "liquidators." They needed that many because they put strict limits on the amount of radiation any one person could get. Their limit was 200 mSv per person, and although some people went over the limit (up to 250 mSv), most were exposed in the 100-200 mSv range. (For comparison, typical background dose in the US is 2 to 3 mSv per year, though there are some places in the world that get over 100 mSv per year. Radiation sickness begins at about 1500 mSv, and a dose of 8000 mSv is always fatal. There has never been any study that shows any human health risk at a dose below 100 mSv.)

It's been 25 years since Chernobyl, and those liquidators are among the most intensively studied people on earth. If LNT were true, we would be seeing thousands of excess cancer deaths among the liquidators by now. The actual number of excess cancer deaths among the Chernobyl liquidators is statistically indistinguishable from zero. This in fact may be one of the most important outcomes from Chernobyl: we now know that the LNT hypothesis is wrong.

No containment building in the second place, and an idiotic graphite-brick design in the first place.

Great article, thanks for the link.

 

Yes, in fact 1 million tons of coal will produce 4 tons of Thorium and 1 ton of Uranium. One kilogram of of U-235 can provide 80 terajoules which is as much energy as 3,000 tons of coal will provide but the U-235 emits negligible radiation into the environment.

 

Too bad they don't try to separate the radiant elements from the coal prior to burning it. Simply crush it to powder and sift it for a bit and you'd have what you wanted. Those could then be harvested and then run through a reactor. I am a big fan of power from thorium because it is a real pain in the butt to try to weaponize it. It would be easy to get pebble bed reactors filled with doing this.

Plus once that is done, you could still burn the coal. You'd get gobs more energy for a simple extra step.

 

I'm not sure how one would do this...These radioactive particles are almost as heavy as gold so, maybe they could run a sluce-box to gather it. But then you have run off and it would take energy to separate it out from the rest of the minerals.

Yes, in theory.

 

Pan it like you would for gold with sifters. I just looked it up, thorium, uranium, and plutonium are all heavier than gold as per the periodic table, if we are going by mass number anyways.

Let the sifter do its work for a time, then change out the pan in the bottom and start over, once you get enough, melt it down and make the ingots for thorium, plutonium, and uranium of their respective isotopes until you have enough to make fuel rods and such. Whether or not it would be cost effective I don't know. I suppose it would be worth looking in to.

Not crapping rads out in abundance while harnessing the power from them. Seems like a good trade to me. And the econazis should be all for it - less rads in the atmosphere.

 

Some (actually most) environmentalists have an irrational fear of nuclear power stations. This is probably because when things go wrong with a nuclear plant the effects are clear and visceral, while the effect of coal is not as in-your-face even though overall it does more damage.
This should not, however, stop us from taking all necessary precautions in terms of correct placement and safety features in plants. For example, the fukashima plant was placed in one of the worst places possible against most guidelines. The problem of what happens to nuclear material and plants in failed states is also concearning.

 

Thorium-fueled reactors are supposed to be much safer than uranium-powered ones, use far less material (1 metric ton of thorium gets as much bang as 200 metric tons of uranium, or 3.5 million metric tons of coal), produce waste that is toxic for a shorter period of time (300 years vs. uranium's tens of thousands of years), and is hard to weaponize. In fact, thorium can even feed off of toxic plutonium waste to produce energy. And because the biggest cost in nuclear power is safety, and thorium reactors can't melt down, they will eventually be much cheaper, too.
If a town of 1,000 bought a 1-megawatt thorium reactor for $250,000, using 20 kilograms of thorium a year with almost no oversight, every family could pay as little as $0.40 a year for all their electricity.
The U.S. has an estimated 440,000 metric tons, Australia and India have about 300,000 metric tons, and Canada has 100,000 metric tons. Until recently, U.S. and Australian mining companies threw it away as a useless byproduct. There is enough thorium to power the earth for about 1,000 years, versus an estimated 80 years' worth of uranium.

 

Regarding placement, the largest new nuclear power plant in India suffered a 8.0 magnitude earthquake. The plant shut down as it was designed to do and was up and running 3 days later. Three-Mile-Island (often used as a whipping boy by anti-Nukers) resulted in no contamination of the surrounding area whatsoever and no deaths of workers or members of the nearby community. The containment building did its job. However it was used by by the media to create sensationalist, fantasy doomsday scenarios.