Nuclear Power

WellCookedFetus...
Both you and Carnuth are absolutely wrong.

Nuclear power generation EMITS INTO THE ENVIRONMENT ~vastly~ more curies of radiative materials than does coal.

Simply having both of you emphatically state that it does not, does not somehow make a falsehood true.

 

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WellCooked provided a source. Can you?

 

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http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

morningsideqld,

A curie is a measure of the rate of decay of atoms, not the amount of radiation (which is measured in rads) so I’m not sure what your saying when you say: “Nuclear power generation EMITS INTO THE ENVIRONMENT ~vastly~ more curies of radioactive materials than does coal.” I mean what are you talking about??? Are you talking about direct radiation form the reactors because water pools, sever meters of concert and steel do a very good job of absorbing that radiation.

Are you saying that a Nuclear power plant releases radioactive waste? Because government regulations and storage systems make sure that all the waste is stored not released.

 

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On a somewhat related note:
During the summer a couple years back, 3 of my friends worked at a nuclear power plant on co-op. We had those radiation badges that change colors when exposed to radioactivity. If kept inside they wouldn't change... but if you walked outside for lunch on a sunny day they'd change.

 

Isn't all that radiation shielding great!, even protects you from natural background radiation! Radiation levels under .05 rads a year is considered by some in the medical world to be unhealthy since the natural cellular repair mechanism seem to shut down at these low levels. Normal exposure for a person is .2-.4 rads a year. Exposures below 65 rads a year has no detected medical side effects.

 

The Facts

WellCookedFetus wrote:
"A curie is a measure of the rate of decay of atoms, not the amount of radiation (which is measured in rads) so I’m not sure what your saying when you (morningsideqld) say: “Nuclear power generation EMITS INTO THE ENVIRONMENT ~vastly~ more curies of radioactive materials than does coal.” I mean what are you talking about???"

I will explain. First of all your use of RAD here is incorrect. RAD refers to amount of EXPOSURE to radiation, not to the amount of radiation. (Its from "Radiation Absorbed Dose")

The Curie as the (old) traditional unit of radioactivity. Please get it straight before you start slapping "???"s all over the place.

My use of the word "emits" is used as a form of word "emission" referring to airborne or waterborne radioactive materials released into the environment from a facility, NOT what is radiated from the reactor or waste pool.

Here is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission using the term in an identical fashion:

=======================================

Now that we have that straight....

You used as your source an essay from a employee of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Cutting away all the excess, this extract (about halfway thru the text) is the basis for the article's (erroneous) conclusions:

So we see that a single 1 gigawatt coal plant "releases" or "emits" 17,100 millicuries of radioactive material per year. (Of course the author rather obscurely mentions the fact that almost all of that is NOT emitted into the environment, but is instead trapped in the captured ash , exactly as nuclear power plant waste is retained on site. The whole last part of his article is how we can mine this stored material for reactor fuel)

He states that 154 coal plants "release" a total of 2,630,230 millicuries per year. Lets adjust that to equal the current 100 nuclear plants capacity, making it=

1,700,000 millicuries released per year by 100 coal plants.

Now how much radioactive material does a nuclear plant release to the environment?

I will draw from the "Official" source, which was prepared for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission by Brookhaven National Laboratory:
"Radioactive Materials Released from Nuclear Power Plants. Annual Report NUREG/CR-2907, BNL-NUREG-51581"

I will use the same block of data from it that was used in the
"Report of the President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island
Technical Staff Analysis Reports Summary
Nuclear Power Plant Airborne Releases 1970 - 1977"

I am listing the average yearly airborne environmental releases for 36 reactors: (units are in millicuries and some are combined numbers for a whole station)

Reactor: ------------------------ ----- Average Yearly
Arkansas 1 ----------------- 2,602,000
Big Rock Point 1 -------- 164,900,000
Browns Ferry 1, 2, 3 --- 50,362,500
Cooper Station ----------- 7,633,750
Dresden 1, 2, 3 ----------- 836,723,625
Humboldt Bay 3 --------- 349,500,000
Indian Point 2 ------------ 5,174,375
Lacrosse -------------------- 49,575,000
Millstone Point 1 ------- 390,000,000
Monticello ------------------ 290,786,875
Nine Mile Point 1 ------ - 398,261,000
Oconee 1, 2, 3 ------------ 15,412,500
Oyster Creek -------------- 330,810,625
Peach Bottom 2, 3 ----- 36,887,500
Pilgrim 1 --------------------- 179,500,000
Point Beach 1, 2 -------- 7,879,250
Quad Cities 1, 2 --------- 255,163,750
R. E. Ginna ----------------- 2,563,375
Surry 1, 2 ------------------- 11,625,750
Three Mile Island 1 --- 2,988,250
Turkey Point 3, 4 ------- 7,186,250
Vermont Yankee ------- 38,682,500
Zion 1, 2 -------------------- 24,661,750

For these 36 atomic plants, the total average airborne radioactive releases (almost all accidental and unplanned) =

3,458,880,625 millicuries per year

Now, 36 COAL plants release (mostly to storage, but lets be generous and pretend its emitted into the environment) per year = 17,100 millicuries x 36 =

615,600 millicuries per year

So here we see that the atomic plants accidently dumped 5,600 times as much radioactive material into the biosphere as the equivalent coal plants.

(I am not including waterborne nuclear plant effluents, but they are also huge)

All analyses comparing coal to nuclear plant radiation releases assume DESIGNED emissions not EMPIRICAL REALITY

This is acknowledged here - in their parentheses:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/question481.htm

lol

Lets now include the reason for the above report, the core damage at TMI-2. This caused a release of 2,500,000,000 millicuries out of the containment system. This was equal to the complete radioactive discharge of 100 coal plants for 1,460 years (!)

Going international for a moment, the Chernobyl reactor released 80,000,000,000 millicuries of radiactive materials. This is the same as exhausting all the radioactive material of 100 coal plants into the environment for 46,783 years.

Bottom line... claiming that coal plants release more radioactive materials then atomic plants is DEAD WRONG.

 

morningsideqld,

I was not trying to insult you. I am quit aware of the use of rads, rems and curies though so don’t try to return the imagined slap.

As for the recovered ash which contains 99% of the trace thorium and uranium this is only in coal plants with proper filter, in unfiltered plants about 10% escape into the atmosphere directly rather then 1%, as for recover ash its self is not monitor and usually thrown way and ends up contaminating water supplies so unfortunately most (as in the majority of) radioactive material from a coal plant does enters the environment.

Also in the table you showed, you did not mention that that is release of halogen isotopes with half-lives below 8 days. This is why I don’t like curies as a measure of amount of radioactive waste released because this is how many disintegration per second from the theoretical total release at start (at the first second) it would be a lot easier if the calculations were made in micrograms even though this would not tell you the potency of the radiation release. Because the half-life is under 8 days in just a few weeks to month the curies would have drop down to background. Just below that chart is one on how many curies from emitted wasted with half–lives over 8 days: the total average per year is 24,179 millicuries, now I don’t need to remind you of the half-lives of uranium and thorium isotopes but those are WAY over 8 days so it would only be fair to compare to the long-lasting waste from a nuclear power plant to a coal power plant. This long-lasting waste is cumulative rather then yearly or monthly like the short-lasting crap, because the half-live are so long it would be centuries, even millennia before the curies would drop noticeably from just one years release. So in conclusion: A average of 25,000 millicuries of long-lasting waste from our nuclear plant per year to a average of ~3,000,000 millicuries for our coal plants per year. So the claiming that coal plants release more radioactive materials then nuclear plants is DEAD RIGHT.

 

I live about 4 miles from a nuclear power plant...the closest one to Washington, DC mind you. Although I am more than well aware of the safety backup systems, and backups for those backups, I still live in fear, and plan to move far, far away from any nuclear power plant in the future. Why? Because my father worked there for many years, and told me stories of how there would be occasional radiation releases that no one ever reported for obvious liability reasons. Because there are spent-fuel pools that release more radiation than the reactors simply because no one knows where to put the waste. Also because I know of too many idiots that work there, I don't completely trust the plant. It can't run on it's own, and I put my life in the hands of them. Finally, there was an illegal citizen working there for like 10 years before they ever found out about it. And because there are arial photos and maps of the plant on the internet that I found within minutes of searching. I cringe every month when they test those darned emergency sirens. I suppose it's better than polluting with fossil fuels, but how about we investigate nuclear fusion? We made it to the moon, surely we can do this.

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Thirty years of research and it's still thirty years away.

 

I could write, but here's an image macro that describes the (fallacious) reasoning why all but a few are opposed to it:

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There are a few legitimate, thoughtful arguments against it, but unfortunately those who bother to learn the facts are lost in the static of the Greenpeace demagogues. Personally, I have yet to meet an avid no-nukes advocate who has an elementary grasp of the steam cycle of a PWR.

 

Salty

Ever read about fast breeder reactors? Please read this site and then think about what they could do if they were used instead of what we are using now.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/fasbre.html

 

The fear with those is what happens if terrorists hijack a shipment of recycled fuel. Stupid, yes, but legitimate and enought to scare uneducated people out of their wits.

 

LMFBRs kick ass, and offer us an excellent source of energy production versus the single light-water fuel cycle most countries use now. Unfortunately they produce Plutonium, an excellent weapons fuel (and also difficult to moderate in a reactor) so they make people who know no better pee their pants over them. Overall, though, they're a good idea that only makes better do with what we already have.