From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,60e2922351e0e780 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-11-18 08:38:07 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!small1.nntp.aus1.giganews.com!border3.nntp.aus1.giganews.com!intern1.nntp.aus1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!nntp.comcast.com!news.comcast.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 10:38:05 -0600 Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 11:38:04 -0500 From: "Robert I. Eachus" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: OT: Nuclear Waste (Was Re-Marketing Ada) References: <3FB0B57D.6070906@noplace.com> <3FB22125.1040807@noplace.com> <3FB3751D.5090809@noplace.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <_eydnYB-uYJw1yeiRVn-vg@comcast.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.34.214.193 X-Trace: sv3-oid2ISohQovF33HWt8szpMBDIIgg4LL+mANJOKigYVyPGcgpe2mqaVaMCnVkWdLyJ3GnNkQSMIrcoJg!XWWInky0xQhi3+2TNeknCk141rSYAsuo0OqihoLwoO9ZcgdCFZj5KVChb7rlaA== X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net X-DMCA-Complaints-To: dmca@comcast.net X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.1 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:2631 Date: 2003-11-18T11:38:04-05:00 List-Id: Russ wrote: > Studies have found that properly stored nuclear waste might kill one > person every century or so (I can't remember the exact figure off > hand, but it's several orders of magnitude less than the corresponding > figure for coal). There are two blatent lies the anti-nuclear activists keep telling about nuclear waste. The first is that a nuclear power plant produces ANY long term nuclear wastes. Yes, right now more plutonium 240 is produced than is used, but that is a side effect of worries about nuclear proliferation. Pu-240 is a nice, safe energy source for things like the Voyager spacecraft. Pu-239 can be used in bombs, and most commercial nuclear reactors are designed to burn up most of the Pu-239 produced during the normal fuel cycle. The Pu-240 that is used for "nuclear batteries" is produced as a side product of nuclear weapons production that wants the Pu-239 enough to separate it from the Pu-240. But net-net, a nuclear reactor takes naturally radioactive material, "burns" it and uses most of the radioactivity that would otherwise be released into the environment. There is a lot of uranium in granite, and New Hampshire is the Granite State. So people around here have problems with radon gas releaed from the normal decay of the Uranium in the granite seeping through rocks and accumulating in basements. But in a nuclear reactor the radon is intentionally trapped in the fuel rods, and the energy released when it does decay is turned into electricity. 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.) Now I could go through a very long and complex analysis which shows that burning coal reduces the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, and this tends to cancel out the radioactivity you receive from other radiation sources released by coal burning power plants. And as I pointed out above, the quantities compared to a similar analysis for the nuclear fuel cycle are ridiculous. 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. -- Robert I. Eachus 100% Ada, no bugs--the only way to create software.