Radioactive steel

The nuc station was in Zion - north of Waukegan.

There was never a nuc station in Waukegan - that was a coal fired gen station owned by Commonwealth Edison. The outflow water went directly into Lake Michigan - I know because I caught steelhead and salmon right in that warm water discharge.

The Zion plant was closed in 1998 and is being dismantled. The on Lake Michigan are similarly being closed down.

 

When were in Attu in 2011, the alarms went off on our ship and rather that waiting for any further information - we departed within two hours. The tsunami was minimal at sea but it did cause damage in the Aleutians and SE Alaska and down the west coast.

We didn't wait for an explanation - we continued south to Mexico arriving 20 days later to the Port of Mazatlan. There we found major damage to the marinas, but none as bad as those in California.

 

One of the things you guys keep skipping over is that coal fired plants release a substantial amount of radiation on a daily basis. While nuclear plants in normal operation don't release any, but when they do release it could be substantially more. As an example...

Living 50 miles downwind of a coal fired plant results in an increase in daily radiation exposure of .3uSv/day.

While after the Fukishima release the extra daily radiation was equal to ~3.5uSv/day.

So while Fukishima may be more dangerous once it happened, it operated for 40 years without incident. Meaning for the people living there, they have recieved less total radiation because of the nuclear plant than had it been replaced by a coal fired plant.


Secondly there have been two nuclear accidents in the fifty odd years of nuclear power generation. When you compare their combined release of radiation to what is released on a daily basis by all the coal plants in the world there is no question nuclear power releases less nuclear waste than coal. It just does it all at once.

 

Its not the regular release that is the major problem, its the problem of scale of devastation both from accidents, and standard operational considerations.


Accidents - In the last fifty years, how many coal fired stations made thousands of acres of farmland and parkland uninhabitable for the next 300 years ?

Operational Costs - accumulating billions of dollars of future expense in future de-commissioning costs. At least coal fired stations are easy to scrap or refurbish.





" On March 6, 1987, California's Public Utilities Commission unanimously accepted an engineering firm's forecast that decommissioning Pacific Gas & Electric Company's Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant would cost $578.6 million (1985 dollars). Taking inflation into account, the proposed rate increase necessary to pay for the cost of shutting down the plant adds up to $1.6 billion over a 30-year period, or $53.2 million a year. Based on average monthly electric bills statewide, this rate increase will cost every PG&E customer between 35 to 37 cents a month.

It is unlikely that any large commercial reactors will be dismantled this century. Instead they will be fenced in and guarded, at an annual cost of approximately $1 million for each site.27"
http://www.nuclearpowerprocon.org/pop/decommission.htm

 

So it's better to poison everywhere and everyone a little than to poison one area a lot? Since most people left the are around the nuclear disasters until the clean up is done.

And most of the radiation of Fukushima was in the form of thorium that has a half life of 8 days, versus the 7 billion year half life if the uranium that coal releases. So over time the radiation from coal gets higher, while the radiation released from a nuclear accident degrades.

If coal plants had to operate under the same type of environmental regulations as nuclear plants in terms of nuclear release, there would be no coal plants.

 

If this is so then back round radiation levels which show spikes after nuclear tests and accidents should also have risen proportionally to coal utilization from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Dino

 

Dinoa,

What do you mean if it's true? There is plenty of information available, just do a google search for 'coal radiation'.

 

Thorium was never a problem. It's the strontium-90 and cesium-137 with a 28-30 yr half lives.

 

Yes, it seems to be the case

"How does thorium get into the environment?

Natural thorium is present in very small quantities in virtually all rock, soil, water, plants and animals. Where high concentrations occur in rock, thorium may be mined and refined, producing waste products such as mill tailings. If not properly controlled, wind and water can introduce the tailings into the wider environment"

"How can thorium affect people's health?

The principal concern from low to moderate level exposure to ionizing radiation is increased risk of cancer. Studies have shown that inhaling thorium dust causes an increased risk of developing lung cancer, and cancer of the pancreas. Bone cancer risk is also increased because thorium may be stored in bone."[/I

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclides/thorium.html#inbody

 

You should include the source of this information for clarification.

The terminology seems a bit strange.
eg.

increase in daily radiation exposure - in Sieverts, doesnt compute. Sieverts are the amount of radiation that is absorbed into the body, not an amount of "daily radiation exposure"

"effective dose, and committed dose. Quantities that are measured in sieverts represent the stochastic biological effects of ionizing radiation.

The sievert represents a measure of the biological effect, and should not be used to express the unmodified absorbed dose of radiation energy, which is a physical quantity measured in grays. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert

 

Here you go. There were other sources that contained similar information, but this has most of it.