If ever a headline deserved to be changed from the original statement on HN, it's this one. Not only is it linkbait, it's also a lie.
Even the footnote introduced by the publisher admits the headline is, at best, misleading. Sure, it's true, in a trivial sense, that nuclear waste when stored in a manner that effectively shields it from emitting radiation into the surrounding environment emits less radiation into the surrounding environment than a relatively benign substance emitted indiscriminately into the surrounding environment. If the article were trying to claim that coal dust in itself was particularly harmful that might still be an interesting comparison. But as it is, for those of us that know that properly-functioning nuclear plants don't pump nuclear waste into the surrounding atmosphere but do create storage hazards, it's about as insulting to the intelligence as a headline claiming that shandy[1] is more likely to cause alcohol poisoning than absinthe[2]
I think the level of density/concentration is an issue hardly ever discussed. But at the end of the day concentration is the only thing that counts. If you can successfully lower the radioactive concentration below the natural radiation, things are actually pretty safe. If you store nuclear waste in a salt deposit, usually a lot of ground water gets into the deposit. (Asse II is an extreme case) It gets contaminated and the question is: is the water much more radioactive than the water elsewhere? If not, it is actually relatively safe to live in proximity and do farming. According to this article it might be even safer than doing farming near a coal plant.
Actually another thing hardly ever discussed outside of Physics courses is the difference between solid radioactive objects and radioactive gas. The latter is actually a much more dangerous than the former. Not only because solid objects are easier to handle. The lungs are much more sensitive to radioactivity. Moreover gas particles can land on food, thus also getting directly into the body. Once "harmless" radioactive particles are inside the body, they radiate from within...
In Southern Germany there are areas with a lot of mountains. There people often have the radioactive gas Radon in problematic concentrations in the cellars. It is emitted by stones and when breathed cancerous and one of the top reasons for lung cancer. (Besides smoking)
Radon is a serious issue everywhere, not just Germany, and not just near mountains. Testing and mitigating radon in homes is one of the easiest and least expensive ways to reduce cancer risks.
The EPA has a good guide on radon and homes [1]. Even if you do not have a radon detector, it's very inexpensive to get periodic tests done (you can do them at home with a test kit). IIRC they are around $15-20 retail, although some fire departments or cities may provide them for free.
The only way to be sure your home does not have a radon issue is to test it yourself.
When I last looked at it, and this was long ago, '80s I think, radon appeared to only be a serious danger to smokers; the original studies were of uranium miners, who of course smoked a lot back then.
Which, given that "X and smoking is very bad" is true for a host of things, suggests to me the focus on radon might be misplaced.
As for your general starting point, I sure wish more would use the toxicologist's maxim "The dose makes the poison" vs. the clearly bogus linear no-threshold model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
Heck, even the banana equivalent dose (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose) would be more fruitful, you might say ^_^. Most of that is from potassium-40 in it, and Edward Teller had a favorite statistic based on sleeping with two other people based on the dosage you'd get from that isotope in them.
And that also addresses to an extent your inhalation/injection concern. We live in a sea of radioactivity, from isotopes inside us to cosmic rays which also flip DRAM bits. Anyone petrified of radioactive threats should never be told about the consequences of normal altitude commercial jet flying, unless they're planning on making a career of it.
And if something only cause lung cancer is smokers, then it really sounds like they didn't control for smoking in the radon studies--which I believe is exactly what happened.
Yes, in practice (ignoring disasters), coal plants release more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear plants. But that doesn't change the fact that the original title of the article, and the article itself, are phrased in a wildly misleading way. It suggests that the coal ash is more radioactive than the actual nuclear waste itself, and that's totally not true.
It's abusing the English language with misleading hysteria of how "more radioactive" term is defined.
On net volume of radioactive material released on a yearly basis: coal wins, by far. But it's diffused over a much larger area, and not as large of an immediate threat.
On potential for concentrated localized release: nuclear wins.
I've worked in this industry for a consulting shop in the US. There's a world of difference between diffused emissions that never reach significant levels and concentrations of radioactive material that have to potential to cause grave regional problems (Fukushima).
This title is better but still makes the error of assuming the linked story relates to nuclear waste. It doesn't, but instead compares the environmental radioactivity surrounding both types of power plants.
"Coal-fired plants emit more radiation in their immediate environment than their nuclear equivalents".
There.
I once tried to find other facts that could support this dumb-ass title, and I was unable to. Coal mining produces a tiny tiny amount of radioactive contamination, and the amount of radiation in fly ash seems to dwarf the amount of radioactive stuff we lose in the nature because of accidents and nuclear waste storage and that kind of stuff.
Even if you state that premise as "coal power has some radioactive waste issues", it's still a lie.
Not to mention the damage all of this does to the environment. The amount of square footage required to be destroyed for wind-farms and solar arrays (at any scale) is undenialy an ecological disaster, not to mention the duplication of power-transfer infrastructure required to geographically disparate generation stations into major human cities.
[If you need citations for this, try hiking/walking through one of the many wind-farms in the SoCal Desert. Particulalry, the 2012 generation windfarms in th Mojave which are ~double the scale of earlier generations. Then imaging living next to something like this on a global scale. see also> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-th...]
Why would any square footage need to be destroyed? Have we run out of rooftops or deserts? And why do we never hear these arguments when it's about roads or more polluting plants and factories? If we're going to use space, we'd better us it for something that solves a problem than makes it worse.
Why would any square footage need to be destroyed? Have we run out of rooftops or deserts?
What on earth makes you think you are entitled to deface a desert landscape? Go take a look at the 395 corridor and look at what happened to owens valley. What do you think allows people to live in LA? Who the hell is polluting CA and driving 2-3 hours a day in their cars? Same people who destroyed the eastern escarpment. It's amusing listening to so-called "environmentalists" spew out such ignorance.
So it's okay to deface the entire rest of the country, but the desert is sacred? Or is your solution to abandon society, decimate the population, and go back to the caves?
There are good and bad ways to handle this. More pollution is a bad way, more solar is a good way. Nothing is 100% perfect, but continuing down a bad road because a significant improvement doesn't instantly solve all the world's problems, is downright stupid.
No, the people who defaced LA and Defaced the Owens valley now want to deface the Mojave. What is downright stupid is not doing the math on how you connect the dots.
One nit on LA: it was suffering from photochemical smog (I think that's the term) when white men arrived. Local geography and climate + lots of reactive hydrocarbons released by vegetation as a byproduct of photosynthesis.
Reagan wasn't off his rocker when he mentioned the contribution of trees to "pollution", and it's ironic that the easiest way for a lot of cities to meet EPA smog limits (which use an insane measure, not tolerating more than a few days per year of high levels of ozone) would be to cut down a lot of trees.
Heh, any worries the EPA would harass my home town were "solved" by an EF5 tornado in 2011....
Creosote is a form of ground cover, colloquially know as "scrub-brush".
Like many plants, it has active organic chemistry and was one used for medicinal and industrial uses. While creosote has been linked to naturally occuring compounds that "makes smog worse", to equate "chopping down trees" to managing "emissions" is pretty loose logic.
The relationship of man-made pollutants to smog is that the latter are not uniformly benign; local topography weather, and fora combine industrial air-borne pollution more problematic in some areas (LA) than others (eg SF).
In theory, if we paved over LA we could reduce the dust and the creosote and maybe reduce "smog", but again this is not environmentalism, but rather geo-engineering.
The cost isn't the problem (well, it's a problem, obviously, but it's not the main problem). Take a look at this chapter: http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_203.shtml. The issue is the sheer size of the installations required to provide energy for a modern country. As he says in the book - to provide renewable energy for a country, you need country-sized installations to do so. In his examples, to provide energy for the UK you'd need installations approximately the size of Wales, if I remember correctly.
If you haven't read the book you really should do - it's truly excellent. He's not anti-solar or anti-renewable, in case you got that idea, but he forces the reader to be realistic about what switching to clean sources actually entails.
No, I didn't tell you that, although I suspect that for most of the world it's the only realistic short-term option. What I told you is that you should read that book, because it's an extremely interesting and balanced view on alternative energy, from someone who actually knows what he's talking about. He doesn't push a particular agenda or lead the reader to any particular conclusions, he just lays out what the implications of the various options are.
For example, for solar or wind to play a significant part in the UK's energy requirements would require the aforementioned country-sized installations. Do you think that the British people would be willing to accept 10% of the area of the country being totally dedicated to energy generation? How would they decide which 10% it should be? Do you think that they would accept tidal generators along the entirety of the coast of the UK? That's the order of magnitude that is required.
Additionally, since renewable resources tend to be variable, you need a storage mechanism. You either need a lot of hills to pump water up, or you need your entire population to be using electric cars and to have smart chargers that allow the grid to draw back from when required. Are these things possible? Absolutely they are. However MacKay leaves the reader to ponder how likely they are to happen in our current political environment, and I shall do the same.
Thanks for downvoting me every step of the way, or whoever that was.
If the costs are going down, it probably also means the panels are getting more efficient. Probably don't need to plaster Wales with solar panels. But in England it seems you wouldn't predominantly use primarily solar anyways, unless it got really good, so your example is kind of irrelevant. Wind and water-based renewable would work better.
I didn't downvote you. Did you read the chapter I linked to? I'm guessing not, because it contains answers to your implied questions. In particular, how England might use solar and the fact that the argument above applies equally to wind. I also gave an example from the book for tidal energy. If you took the time to read the book you'd learn that solar panels are actually not that far off their absolute theoretical efficiency, so we're never going to get another order of magnitude from them, or anything like it.
Basically, from here on in I'm just going to be regurgitating arguments from a book that apparently you don't care to read, so I'm just going to leave it there. If you're really interested and not just trolling, the answers are in there.
You're not being downvoted because your views are unpopular. You're being downvoted because your comments in this thread at least are basically content-free, and full of unsubstantiated assertions. You've refused to even look at the resource I provided, and have preferred to argue that things ...probably also mean... and the like with no evidence of any kind. You've attributed things to me that I didn't say. You've also repeatedly failed to address the fact that the main issues facing alternative energies are not technical, but political and social, and those haven't changed in the last 5 years nor are they likely to any time soon.
Basically, it seems like you're more interested in shouting from a soapbox than having any sort of argument, and HN frowns on that.
You don't think that renewable costs per watt plummeting towards coal/nat.gas. price is a significant part of the decision making? Politics get overridden by price at some point. You've failed to acknowledge that maybe a book on renewables from 5 years ago, focusing primarily on the technical side, might have some problems when so much has changed since that time.
My assertions aren't unsubstantiated, I linked to the them in my initial response.
Also, not all nuclear reactors must be of the currently most common (obsolete) design. We should invest more in MSR reactors that could generate power from the waste BWRs and PWRs leave.
Thorium, while no panacea, also should have a larger role in power generation.
The technologies you mentioned are not ready for prime time. A strong political push for nuclear power now will simply result in more of what you consider obsolete designs.
Meanwhile, renewable energy, already quite cheap, will continue to improve by leaps and bounds. Wasting a ton of money on nuclear now would slow the pace of this progress.
But since renewables are getting cheaper every year, market forces will probably make the proper choice anyways, unless lobbying gets out of hand.
Absolutely. To me, fighting over whether coal or nuclear is worse, is like fighting over whether Hitler or Stalin was worse. We need to get rid of both, although coal is definitely a lot more urgent.
that article is from 2007. Nowadays everyone knows NPP are the worst technology human has invented and doesnt knows how to use and decomission. See whats happening at fukushima, its killing the pacific ocean. And making a lot of seals sick in california. If you heard about it you know the details. And its only the begining because man made radiation does not go away, it stays and its bleeding radiatiation as i type.. that means years from now, it will be more acumulated.
Cesium is a fission product that emits radiation. Has a half life of 30yrs and when you consume it, you body thinks its Potassium because of similarities in structure. Therefore accumulates on the muscles, specially the heart and emits radiation on closeby cells.
Strontium, another fission product that emits radiation is similar to Calcium. Once consumed is transfered into the bones.
Sites like enenews.com can tell better news about NPP.
No, I saw it on reddit, and though it might be HN worthy, despite the bad headline. I'm not sure how meaningful the dose of radiation is, but the comparison it super interesting.
Ignore the "waste" element of the title and understand that they're saying that if you're living in the shadow of a nuclear power plant, and everything operates ideally, you'll undergo less radiation than near a coal plant. Which is quite reasonable.
Yet the waste of nuclear plant isn't the harmless water vapours coming out of cooling towers -- which is what this article bizarrely focuses on -- but instead the used fuel that will need to be contained and managed for tens of thousands of years. Further the fear of the nuclear industry isn't ideal situations, which is manageable, but situations like Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi: The "super promise 100x never going to happen triple safeguard" sort. A single major incident suddenly undoes much of that good many times over.
Well, civilian reactor "waste" is potentially very valuable stuff, but we're rather stupid in our approach towards it. And the "tens of thousands of years" is grossly overstated, at least if you apply the metric that after 600 years it'll be no more radioactive than the ore from which it was mined.
The Chernobyl RBMK design is criminal, and literally so in the US, where Edward Teller made sure reactors with positive void coefficients were outlawed (one reason we don't do CANDU, although the proposed Advanced CANDU reactor addresses this). The Japanese demonstrated long before Fukushima Daiichi that they don't have a nuclear safety culture at the level they should be allowed to run serious reactors, and that incident prompted me to look at boiling water reactor designs for the first time, and I don't like them at all.
Yeah, the above is in danger of the No True Scotsman fallacy, but we have heck of a lot of counter experiences, including the pressurized water reactor worst case incident at Three Mile Island which harmed no one and was never in serious danger of doing so.
As for what you poise as a bizarre focus, every coal plant in the world is pumping out a lot of nasty stuff, they're inherently dirty, and totally cleaning them up is not in the cards. As in, right now, every day one is running, it's potentially doing harm....
And the "tens of thousands of years" is grossly overstated, at least if you apply the metric that after 600 years it'll be no more radioactive than the ore from which it was mined.
EDIT: Some have penalized me under the notion that hga's "apples and oranges" comment was a retort (despite the fact that the chart also has concentrated uranium near the bottom). It is not. HGA is apparently unaware that uranium tailings are effectively worse than uranium ore, containing 85%+ or the original radioactivity of the ore, but concentrated and exposed. If you had the choice between holding a handful of uranium ore or uranium tailings, you'd do better to choose the former.
There are a lot of grossly misleading claims from the pro-nuclear lobby, one of which is that if you only count the product of fission (and not the actinides), and you compare it against post-processed yellow-cake, it's all the same.
In no universe is it equivalent to naturally existing uranium after 600 years.
every coal plant in the world is pumping out a lot of nasty stuff, they're inherently dirty
But despite the ridiculous lead-in to the linked article (no, the common notions of nuclear power does not come from the Simpsons), everyone knows that coal is dirty. Most areas are phasing it out (here in Ontario we have effectively eliminated coal power, from it comprising 25% of our power not too many years ago). Is nuclear power the best alternative? That's dubious, not only because of "exceptional" events that yield enormous ecological damage, the waste product that we just push to future generations, and economics that seldom make sense over the life of the project.
Bzzzt: Apples and Oranges, I'm talking about the original ore, that chart uses ore tailings, which are certainly not benign (I grew up in an area where mass quantities of lead and zinc were mined until the end of WWII), but they're very much not the same thing. Especially if the refining process also seperates some of the nastier things you'll find along with the uranium.
Find some references with the ore and perhaps we can have a discussion.
'"exceptional" events that yield enormous ecological damage'
Which would total Chernobyl, which I've already pointed out a direction of some of its many problems.
Even the footnote introduced by the publisher admits the headline is, at best, misleading. Sure, it's true, in a trivial sense, that nuclear waste when stored in a manner that effectively shields it from emitting radiation into the surrounding environment emits less radiation into the surrounding environment than a relatively benign substance emitted indiscriminately into the surrounding environment. If the article were trying to claim that coal dust in itself was particularly harmful that might still be an interesting comparison. But as it is, for those of us that know that properly-functioning nuclear plants don't pump nuclear waste into the surrounding atmosphere but do create storage hazards, it's about as insulting to the intelligence as a headline claiming that shandy[1] is more likely to cause alcohol poisoning than absinthe[2]
[1]ingested [2]not ingested.