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Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
"snip…Based on the predicted combustion of 2516 million tons of coal in the United States and 12,580 million tons worldwide during the year 2040, cumulative releases for the 100 years of coal combustion following 1937 are predicted to be:
U.S. release (from combustion of 111,716 million tons):
Uranium: 145,230 tons (containing 1031 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 357,491 tons
Worldwide release (from combustion of 637,409 million tons):
Uranium: 828,632 tons (containing 5883 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 2,039,709 tons
…snip"
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/10/the_uranium_par_1.php
The only credible was the first one and that referred to a single paper written in the 70’s. There is nothing showing the measurement of radioactive fallout from coal plants. And at the end of the day a coal plant that burns to the ground poses no real health hazard beyond a loss of electricity.
Though a coal mine can burn for an estimated hundreds of years and render the land above it extremely unpleasant to live on. 
These arguments are off point. We who don’t like nuclear energy do not embrace coal. Coal needs to be cleaned up now. But the energy companies pay the politicians to make laws allowing them to do whatever they want. Cleaning up plants and mining without destroying the land they mine, would cost profits. So they corrupt our politicians into exempting them from laws and they buy off the regulators. so we have dirty energy companies polluting the land as they subvert our system. That includes nuke.
Do you have a cite for any of this nonsense? power and coal companies are regulated by a variety of agencies for pollution and fee structures. On top of state and Federal agencies regulating these utilities there are private environmental groups riding shotgun.
A recent example, Cheney pushed for fracking to be exempted from the Clean Water Act, in 2005. Why? Haliburton is a major supplier of fracking fluids. No it couldn’t be that, he was supposed to be outside corporate influence then.
RCRA Exemption Challenged Obvious waste being exempted from regulation. it is business as usual.
http://www.roselawgroup.com/blog/wordpress/?p=3078 It is business as usual. They own politicians who offer bills allowing them to escape regulation. It is just business.
A few weeks ago ,House Repubs pushed a bill cutting 131 billion from regulation of nuclear plants. It cut millions from disposal and cleanup programs. It cut millions from prevention of nuclear proliferation prevention programs. It cut 1.4 billion from training of first responders in a nuclear accident.
Waxman is calling for a hearing on this bill.
They cut billions from lots of stuff. get used to it.
So nuclear safety is just the same as lots of stuff? So regulation of energy companies is just “lots of stuff”. Were you awake during the BP spill in the gulf? Regulators were cut and bribed into not doing their jobs. That must be just more stuff.
No I will not get used to it. I will fight every politician who makes us less safe so extremely high profits can go even higher.
Cite the new power plants are unsafe. Cite a regulator was bribed in the BP spill. That entire disaster was a decision made in house by one person against the advice of other companies representatives. You have an almost psychotic distrust of anything that makes a dollar.
Your claim is they are safe. Please prove it.
While you are at it convince the Germans. The new German government was a rejection of the present governments stance of going ahead with nukes.
Our government has been warped by money. Because you conservatives continue to believe corporations are benevolent job creators, don’t think others can not judge the obvious and apparent evidence that refutes it. Nothing psychotic about it. The evidence supports that corporations will buy politicians to allow them to act against the public interests. Not everybody is as blind as you.
I think money should be made as cleanly and honestly as possible. I think corporations should have responsibility for operating as cleanly as possible, They should be judged severely when they cause damage and their charters should be revoked.
BP was a crime that took a long time to create. They bought regulators and politicians and we all paid for it. They were determined to get away with as much as possible to cut costs. Then ,when the trash the gulf, they throw some money at it and go on to their next mess. They never get severely punished or have execs go to jail.
Sorry, that’s not how it works. I asked you first.
Again, cite where the new reactors are dangerous. If you look at the new Westinghouse design it’s set up so that it will shut itself down without any powered assistance.
No we don’t. You can tell that because we don’t jump into every thread with a rant about how great they are. You have a habit of adding a “business is evil” rant to every thread. The BP thread is a prime example of what one person can do wrong. And this doesn’t excuse BP from being the bottom feeder of all the major oil companies but at the same time it doesn’t mean all the other businesses suck either. One person did this.
The GE plant in Japan is an old design that nobody is contemplating today. It survived a 9.0 earthquake but they didn’t engineer it for a tsunami of that magnitude. If they had prepared for a larger tsunami then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It wasn’t a function of anyone cutting corners or bribing politicians.
We scrubbed a nuclear power plant in my state because it didn’t meet the standards set for it. There was no bribing or skirting of the law. They cut their losses and built a coal plant in it’s place.
We have a state and a federal EPA system that overseas pollution standards and we have OSHA for safety standards and a variety of other government institutions that set standards for construction. It’s not perfect but we are not a 3rd world country where bribery is a way of life.
Nice definition of survived you have. It is becoming more and more apparent that the cores are open. Cesium indicates a core breech. The water knocked out the pumps but water did not bust the core.
We are a first world country where bribery, buying of politicians and capturing regulators is normal. We have lobbyists actually write the legislation that covers them. Isn’t that sweet. How is that any better? We have merely elevated government corruption to a hidden and dangerous level, while convincing some gullible people that we actually are in charge.
Thing is, what with the current public perception of nuclear safety (nevermind whether or not you or I agree with that perception), getting new nuclear through knowing that the oversight will be less, not more, in the future, will be even less probable.
The structures survived a 9.0 earthquake. It was on old design nobody is even remotely considering and I’m not too worried about tsunamis in Ohio. Certainly the modern Westinghouse design that doesn’t rely on any recirculating pumps (as a last resort) suits our modern needs without the same level of risk.
And yes, lobbyists actually write legislation because unlike members of congress who are trained in nothing beyond a law degree, they represent industries that know what they’re doing. I pay money for lobbyists to represent me so I don’t get screwed by bad legislation. Congress relies on the input and expertise of people in the field.
You may be right that both the pressure vessels and containments are no longer intact, but I doubt it. Last I checked, containments and vessels were holding pressure. They have been periodically venting steam from inside the pressure vessels (where the reactor cores are) into the containments, and from the containments into the outside world, since the start. So there have been repeated deliberate “core breaches” releasing cesium, iodine and everything else you’d expect, but describing the current containment status as “the cores are open” is a real leap.
How well the reactor buildings themselves survived the earthquake and tsunami will come out during the post-mortem on all this. It is entirely possible that if the recommended 1990’s modification of fitting hard vents to the toruses had been performed on these reactors, there would have been no venting into the building, no hydrogen explosions, and personnel would have been free to walk around on the fuel pool decks, checking spent fuel pool water levels visually and topping them up directly with hoses.
The reactors may have physically survived the earthquake AND the tsunami just fine. Their ability to survive a prolonged station blackout was poor.
I ran across a pdf of a short Tepco slide presentation about an integrity inspection of dry storage casks and spent fuels at Fukushima power station, as of March 2010.
It has a couple nice illustrations, especially of the common storage pool they added, and worth looking at just for that.
As of last March, Fukushima had 1760 tons of spent fuel, in about 9700 spent fuel assemblies. They have 408 assemblies in dry cask, and generate about 700 spent fuel assemblies per year.
If we assume they’ve generated more spent fuel assemblies since the inspection, that’s basically 10,000 fuel assemblies. Full capacity is 15,558 assemblies.
In case there’s disagreement about the amount of spent fuel at Fukushima, I think this is a pretty good reference for that.