Heard from an EPA inspector once

Post #30,859 by drewk 3/5/02 12:31:33 PM Reply	Heard from an EPA inspector once Coal plants spew more radiation to everyone within a 10 mile radius than you get working anywhere in a modern nuclear plant. He looked into this after he tripped the meters on his way into a nuke plant after spending a morning inspecting a coal one. This was off the record, heard over dinner in a formerly-dead coal town in western Pennsylvania. It only qualifies as "formerly" because they now have a nuke plant. I can't be a Democrat because I like to spend the money I make. I can't be a Republican because I like to spend the money I make on drugs and whores.
Post #30,860 by wharris2 3/5/02 12:33:07 PM Reply	And these are old nuclear plant designs Where each demon is slain, more hate is raised, yet hate unchecked also multiplies. - L. E. Modesitt
Post #30,864 by ben_tilly 3/5/02 12:41:52 PM Reply	Oddly enough, that is also true :-) What does it are traces of various ores in the soot. That stuff does not, however, circulate in the carbon cycle, nor is it spewn in the same amounts by cars. The result is that all of the nice theory you hear about C14 dating doesn't really work for the last 50 years. (Insert opportunities for usual Creationist drivel.) Cheers, Ben "... I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything." --Richard Feynman
Post #31,005 by bbronson 3/6/02 9:50:46 AM Reply	I heard similar story from a nuke plant employee He spent the morning touring a coal plant owned by the same power company, then went to work at the nuke plant. He set off the radiation alarms going IN to the plant. Brian Bronson
Post #31,532 by Ric Locke 3/10/02 12:35:18 PM Reply	::chuckle:: This has been known for years. The biggest offender in that respect is the wonderful, EPA-approved low-sulfur coal from Wyoming, etc. You know, the stuff that comes from the same geological formations we used to get uranium from? The nice thing about nuclear waste is that there's so little of it, from a volume point of view -- without shielding [which I am NOT suggesting] you could transport all that's been generated in a couple of boxcars. Even counting the shielding and protection necessary for reasonably safe transport, it's a really minor problem from the logistics point of view; it's only the knee-jerk reactions of NIMBYs that makes it hard. Especially compared to the effluvia of coal-fired power plants. Go to a coal-fired power plant. Pick up a handful of the ash. The radiation content of that handful is roughly equal to that of a set of gloves used by a nuclear power plant worker to handle samples, and the isotopes are much longer lived. The ash gets spread on the ground. The gloves are "low level nuclear waste" and must be transported in sealed steel barrels with bloodthirsty warning flags on them, over the dead bodies of "environmentalists". (Of course they don't get transported at all; they're too dangerous to be allowed to pass through MY neighborhood!) Put it another way: Use a couple tons of fly ash as a concrete ingredient and make a road out of it (usual procedure, done every day). That couple of tons of power plant waste contains more radioactivity, with longer-lasting isotopes, than the emissions from the ::gasp choke:: NUCLEAR DISASTER at Three Mile Island. Regards, Ric
Post #31,545 by Ashton 3/10/02 5:03:07 PM Reply	Yeah.. here are some of the horrifying numbers [link\|http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html\|Megatons of bad shit] This from ORNL (Oak Ridge). "No Nukes" is such a wonderfully simplistic slogan - in a culture wherein nowadays only a small minority has any idea of F=MA, even tinier numbers might know what a Chart of the Nuclides might be.. and why they should care. And in 2001: 'trucks' (read: antiquated truck chasses with Expen$ive bodies bolted on) - surpassed 'auto' sales. Oh - and at profit margins previously unknown. Lincoln Navigator may be the single most profitable operation in all of Corporatedom (heard recently). Also - among the Heaviest; saw an Ad for it recently.. spinning do-nuts on some fragile tundra somewhere. Whether EPA or more realistic fuel ratings are posted, is irrelevant. [The Ads convinced me!] I Want It\ufffd joins Just Do It! .. as representative of the mindset of the average Murican non-voting consumer. Hell, The Wastemakers (book) must be ~ 30 years old by now. No doubt unread except by the washed. So no paeans to Sanity, efforts to edjacate the unwashed - appear to have any slightest effect. Add up enough Me-Me-Mes and you get: Us-Us-Us; it isn't much of a stretch to see Tom Lehrer's sententious sonnets about the er trends - come true as we watch. I could be wrong, but thus far I'm of the opinion that - language has been by now so thoroughly corrupted by Ad-speak, Corp-TLA-speak and Political bafflegab, that no honest information could ever get through the organized Interested-liars. ie If tomorrow there were a hard-sighting of an asteroid-let heading for Corporate Earth - and we could choose A) a crash-program of deflection OR B) have another year of 0% loans for new UAVs Well... Ashton Species-intolerant, I guess.. And we seem to be the Ferenghi.

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