I would hate to distract anyone from talking endlessly about tritium in Vermont - even though there are no health syndromes observed from it anywhere in Vermont, and in fact, no evidence of human contamination of the same, but - and let's drop this one quickly because we certainly wouldn't want to make Amory Lovin's contracts with Conoco, Shell, Chevron, BP etc to
look bad, but it seems that the deposition of dangerous fossil fuel waste (DFFW) in children's lung tissue might be bad for them.
A recent paper from the
Proceedings of the American Thoracic Surgery which can be downloaded for free
http://pats.atsjournals.org/cgi/reprint/6/7/564">on line reports on particulate matter, which is identical from burning dangerous fossil fuels - despite greenwashing from Amory "coal is a great
bridge fuel" Lovins (cf Lovins "The Road Not Taken,
Foreign Affairs Summer 1976) - smoking cigarettes and um, um, um,
burning biomass.
Quoth the paper:
There are several reasons why environmental exposures in childhood are relevant to understanding the pathogenesis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). First, attenuation of lung growth due to air pollution in childhood is a risk factor for adult-onset respiratory disease. Second, there may be common cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying impaired pulmonary innate host defenses in children exposed to air pollution, and the susceptibility to infection in COPD. Third, lung damage initiated in childhood may contribute to an emerging global health issue, namely, COPD due to biomass smoke exposure (1). Carbonaceous particulate matter (PM) is a common component of emissions from fossil fuel combustion (Figure 1), burning of tobacco (resulting in environmental tobacco smoke ), and biomass fuels.
The bold is mine and is explicitly raised to those giggly types here who are happy - despite their eagerness to clear cut Vermont and replace it's
harmless nuclear plant with aerosol carcinogenic particulates that do injure people - about replacing plants with
no health implications with those that have
deadly health implications.
You can download the article by the way and get a nice micrograph of a wonderful clean sustainable biomass particle in the lung tissue of an Ethiopian.
We need to be more like Ethiopia, especially in Vermont, which is why we need to
start dumping dangerous fossil fuel waste, biomass waste and other crap in Vermont. It would seem Vermont is lagging on such dumping now, and lagging on deforestation as well because of that darned old nuclear plant.
Also we need to drive trucks across Vermont's mountain ranges for the next thirty years to try to build windmills, roads to service them, in hopes that after 30 years, Vermont will be as close to Denmark on wind generation - in another 10 years Denmark will be able to produce in tens of thousands of acres strewn with lubricants and roads (and wrecked windmills) as much electricity as Vermont Yankee produces in a few acres of land.
Of course, the goal of rational energy policies should be to demand that the best energy systems are inferior to the
worst energy systems, because the best energy systems are not perfect.
Later on we can prove that the most expensive and unreliable energy systems are superior to the cheapest and most reliable systems - that would be nuclear energy - because nuclear energy is "not too cheap to meter" and solar - if you are wealthy - can provide tax breaks, assuming of course one has a great job, like say wiping dust off solar cells in the desert.
Later we can produce an argument claiming that we need to listen to "Philosophers" with biology degrees working at religious universities lecture us on morality and ethics in energy, in case we have presumed to question the religious statement that "nuclear energy need be as perfect as Jesus" before it can displace dumping particulate waste into the lungs of small children.