Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumA 26,000-ton pile of radioactive waste lies under the waters and silt of Lake Powell
And that ain't nothin'....
https://riveroflostsouls.com/2017/12/15/a-26000-ton-pile-of-radioactive-waste-lies-under-the-waters-and-silt-of-lake-powell/
CrispyQ
(36,225 posts)NNadir
(33,368 posts)How many billions of tons of coal waste is in the waters we drink?
It's not all carbon dioxide you know/
From whence do you think the mercury in water, from Antarctic ice, to the permafrost in Canada and every damned body of water in between comes? Nuclear Power plants?
No it comes from coal.
The Colorado Plateau has always contained uranium, and it always will. People who drank water two thousand years ago from the Colorado river were exposed to uranium and its daughters.
The tendency to isolate any environmental issue in nuclear energy from the environmental issues of everything else - all of which are much, much worse - borders on criminal, since it implies that unless nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy is perfect - everything else will be allowed to kill on a vastly larger scale.
The death toll from air pollution - never mind the mad hatter's disease from the mercury routinely and constantly issuing from coal plants that defines the modern world and may account for people like Trump - is seven million people per year.
The mine tailings on the Colorado plateau have been there for decades. What's the associated death toll.
People react like Pavlov's dogs when they hear the word "radioactive" because they simply don't understand what it means. You would die if you were not radioactive, since you would die if you didn't have potassium in your body. All of the potassium on this planet is radioactive unless subjected to expensive (and very rare) isotopic separations.
Any comment on radioactivity without units is generally an expression of ignorance, particularly in this context.
Radium forms one of the most insoluble carbonates and sulfates known. Thorium oxide is one of the most insoluble oxides known, and for many years it was mostly widely used to make mantles for gas lamps people used on camping trips.
Sulfate by the way, in the form of sulfuric acid is just one of the thousands of dangerous pollutants released by coal plants whenever they operate.
And the gas scam isn't much better. Flow back water from fracking is often more radioactive than the waters outside of the Fukushima power plant, not that people burn much gas to discuss this fact.
These kinds of scare stories end up killing people, because nuclear power, saves lives.
Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power
Nuclear power need not be without risk, need not be perfect to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.
The contempt held on our end of the political spectrum for nuclear energy - usually expressed by people who clearly know nothing at all about nuclear science and engineering but hate it anyway - is our creationism.
It is a crime, in the age of climate change, against all future generations.
shanny
(6,709 posts)but nuclear power is vastly superior to everything else? riiiiight
NNadir
(33,368 posts)One would need to have spent the 30 years I've just spent in the primary scientific literature reading about nuclear science to get it of course, but if one hasn't done so, I suppose one could just smugly mutter "riiiight" and soldier on.
This sort of attitude will kill people, of course, whether or not the person has read a single paper on the topic of "Life Cycle Analysis" of energy systems, a topic which will more or less instantaneously produce more than 69,000 hits in two seconds on Google scholar.
If one has soldiered through as many papers on this topic as one can do in a normal lifetime, one might be more qualified than others to discuss the merits and demerits on the topic of various kinds of energy systems.
Unfortunately this practice is not wide spread, which is why the rate of the decomposition of the atmosphere as represented by carbon dioxide concentrations is the highest ever observed.
Nuclear power saves lives, and the corollary is that anti-nuke ignorance costs lives.
Have a nice weekend, alriiiiiight.
shanny
(6,709 posts)That's silly. Darn near everything is cheaper and becoming more so by the day: https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/25/cost-of-solar-power-vs-cost-of-wind-power-coal-nuclear-natural-gas/
And that's ignoring other issues with nuclear: it is expensive to build, nobody wants it in their back yard, it's non-renewable (or have you got the solution to nuclear fusion in your pocket?), it is dangerous, and of course there's the storage of waste, which after 50+ years we still haven't figured out. If there had been nuclear reactors at the time of Christ, the plants might have lasted 50 years...and we would still be storing the waste (surely nothing untoward could happen in that span of time, or even longer)
But soldier on, do. Everybody needs a hobby.
randr
(12,408 posts)would beg to differ.
The enormous amount of money invested in a dwindling source of energy would have gone much further in development of solar, wind, tidal sources without contributing to the industrial military conmplex's insidious interest in weapons of mass destruction
NNadir
(33,368 posts)I do.
I wrote about them here: Sustaining the Wind Part 3 Is Uranium Exhaustible? The references to the scientific papers from which my discussion excerpted below comes can be found in the links I provided when I submitted the work to Dr. Brooks for publication on his website.
I showed, citing something called the "scientific literature" that about 63 miners died earlier than expected in a control population from lung cancer, while fewer cancer deaths among the miners took place than expected in a control population from all other cancers. Many miners died from other causes - like automobile and other accidents
Right now, on this planet, not that our fetishizing anti-nuke selective attention crowd gives a shit about anyone who dies unless uranium is involved, 7 million people die every year from air pollution, about half from the combustion of of "renewable biomass," and the other half from dangerous fossil fuel waste.
A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 19902010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 222460: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)
This works out to about 19,000 people per day, or around 800 every hour.
If a little fewr 70 uranium miners died from premature lung cancers, and there's good evidence they did, this amounts to about 13 minutes worth of air pollution deaths.
Like all anti-nuke fetishes, it's purely selective attention.
I note that nobody gives a shit when native Americans or anyone else dies in a coal mining accident, or black lung disease, or a gas explosion, but tons of books have been written about the uranium miners.
Now the Dine miners didn't die instantly, as shown that many were still alive well into old age, in contrast to say, people killed in a coal mine explosion, deaths numbering the thousands.
By contrast, most of the people who die because assholes carry on about the risks of nuclear energy while allowing the growth of fossil fuel combustion to kill more people each year than in the previous year from air pollution are under the age of 5.
But the uranium miners and their "suffering" matters, and the five year old's suffering is trivial.
Excuse me if this mentality disgusts me.
The relevant excerpt my analysis is here:
As I prepared this work, I took some time to wander around the stacks of the Firestone Library at Princeton University where, within a few minutes, without too much effort, I was able to assemble a small pile of books[50] on the terrible case of the Dine (Navajo) uranium miners who worked in the mid-20th century, resulting in higher rates of lung cancer than the general population. The general theme of these books if one leafs through them is this: In the late 1940s mysterious people, military syndics vaguely involved with secret US government activities show up on the Dine (Navajo) Reservation in the Four Corners region of the United States, knowing that uranium is dangerous and/or deadly to convince naïve and uneducated Dine (Navajos) to dig the dangerous ore while concealing its true deadly nature. The uranium ends up killing many of the miners, thus furthering the long American history of genocide against the Native American peoples. There is a conspiratorial air to all of it; it begins, in these accounts, with the cold warrior American military drive to produce nuclear arms and then is enthusiastically taken up by the evil and venal conspirators who foist the crime of nuclear energy on an unsuspecting American public, this while killing even more innocent Native Americans...
...Still, one wonders, was hiring Dine/Navajo uranium miners yet another case of official deliberate racism as the pile of books in the Firestone library strongly implied?
Really?
A publication[51] in 2009 evaluated the cause of deaths among uranium miners on the Colorado Plateau and represented a follow up of a study of the health of these miners, 4,137 of them, of whom 3,358 were white (Caucasian) and 779 of whom were non-white. Of the 779 non-white we are told that 99% of them were American Indians, i.e. Native Americans. We may also read that the median year of birth for these miners, white and Native American, was 1922, meaning that a miner born in the median year would have been 83 years old in 2005, the year to which the follow up was conducted. (The oldest miner in the data set was born in 1913; the youngest was born in 1931.) Of the miners who were evaluated, 2,428 of them had died at the time the study was conducted, 826 of whom died after 1990, when the median subject would have been 68 years old.
Lets ignore the white people; they are irrelevant in these accounts.
Of the Native American miners, 536 died before 1990, and 280 died in the period between 1991and 2005, meaning that in 2005, only 13 survived. Of course, if none of the Native Americans had ever been in a mine of any kind, never mind uranium mines, this would have not rendered them immortal. (Lets be clear no one writes pathos inspiring books about the Native American miners in the Kayenta or Black Mesa coal mines, both of which were operated on Native American reservations in the same general area as the uranium mines.) Thirty-two of the Native American uranium miners died in car crashes, 8 were murdered, 8 committed suicide, and 10 died from things like falling into a hole, or collision with an object. Fifty-four of the Native American uranium miners died from cancers that were not lung cancer. The Standard Mortality Ratio, or SMR for this number of cancer deaths that were not lung cancer was 0.85, with the 95% confidence level extending from 0.64 to 1.11. The Standard Mortality Ratio is the ratio, of course, the ratio between the number of deaths observed in the study population (in this case Native American Uranium Miners) to the number of deaths that would have been expected in a control population. At an SMR of 0.85, thus 54 deaths is (54/.085) 54 = -10. Ten fewer Native American uranium miners died from cancers other than lung cancer than would have been expected in a population of that size. At the lower 95% confidence limit SMR, 0.64, the number would be 31 fewer deaths from cancers other than lung cancer, whereas at the higher limit SMR, 1.11, 5 additional deaths would have been recorded, compared with the general population.
Lung cancer, of course, tells a very different story. Ninety-two Native American uranium miners died of lung cancer. Sixty-three of these died before 1990; twenty-nine died after 1990. The SMR for the population that died in the former case was 3.18, for the former 3.27. This means the expected number of deaths would have been expected in the former case was 20, in the latter case, 9. Thus the excess lung cancer deaths among Native American uranium miners was 92 (20 +9) = 63.
Thanks for your comment. It pretty much - once again, for the umpteenth time - lets me know all about the ethical universe in which anti-nukes live, a fetishist world where anything and everything is allowed to kill in massive amounts just to assure us that no one ever dies from radiation.
Please excuse me if I find this indifference to human life appalling.
Enjoy the coming work week.
randr
(12,408 posts)the coal industry. You present a well researched and deserved analysis of the real life situation we are confronted with. Given that, your adherence to an alternative you support by demeaning your adversaries is subject to the same economic realities that determine the fate of all energy sources. The market has a way of leveling the playing field, in spite of the massively moneyed interests that have been influencing governing and regulatory institutions to the detriment of all humans.
The stone age did not end due to a lack of stones and our current extractive dependent systems will meet the same fate.
I hope you come to understand that most people care deeply for humanity and our planet, probably as must as you do.
NNadir
(33,368 posts)Last edited Sun Jan 21, 2018, 10:21 PM - Edit history (1)
People expect that they are speaking to another idiot when they pull out stuff like their "uranium miner" fetish, which is, to be perfectly honest, Trumpian in its scale.
Between 1950 and 2005, the period covered in my post, according to the US Department of Labor, 16,702 people died in coal mining accidents.
It's pretty funny when nominally liberal people start lecturing all the time on "markets forces" and "economic realities."
The economics of gas and coal and oil are all dependent on the dubious practice of not including their well known and well understood external costs, which are the costs in human health and human life.
Suppose we valued a human life at $10,000 - a figure that is obviously arbitrarily low. This means the economic cost of seven million deaths per year is 70 billion dollars a year. If we raise the figure to $100,000 for a life it's $700 billion a year, or 7 trillion every decade.
Please don't lecture me about markets and economics.
As it happens these calculations do not include the cost of dying. My father, a cigarette smoker, died from lung cancer. I watched him die. The cost of his struggle cost the government, his insurers, not to mention my stepmother, a little over $200,000.
Again, please don't lecture me about markets and economics.
The all sacred "market" doesn't level the "playing field." It allows one subset of people to kill a larger subset of people without any attempt to account for the economic, never mind the moral cost.
And excuse me if I don't necessarily agree that I need to understand that "most people" care deeply for humanity and the planet.
If they cared deeply, they wouldn't make so many glib and poorly thought our remarks as I see all the time on the topic of energy and its impact on humanity. Please note that I care not just for people killed by energy technology, but also those people who die from a lack of access to energy.
The average continuous power consumption of human beings on this planet is about 2500 watts, roughly a quarter of the power consumption of the average American.
I have argued that if we were - in a campaign to eliminate human poverty - to double this average to 5,000 watts, and provide that power from the fission of plutonium, each person living to the age of 100 would responsible for the fissioning of about 100 grams of material in their entire lifetime.
Current Energy Demand; Ethical Energy Demand; Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come
I've heard this platitude about stones and the stone age many times; I believe it came from a Saudi oil minister.
It's insipid, and frankly doesn't mean anything at all.
The technology to eliminate fossil fuels in their entirety was invented by some of the finest minds ever to grace this planet. It's operated despite opposition from people who are rather lazy, uninformed and engaged in poor thinking for half a century.
It hasn't been allowed to advance to do what it might have done, because, for one example, people evoke fetishes about uranium miners to the exclusion of all other energy related deaths.
This doesn't strike me as "caring." It strikes me as indifference.
hunter
(38,264 posts)It ought never been built.
Some day it will come down, hopefully by well-engineered demolition, not by catastrophic failure.
It almost failed in 1983.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Canyon_Dam
I'm indifferent to nuclear power, but I find dams loathsome and celebrate every time one is removed.
Irish_Dem
(45,619 posts)Education for our children and healthcare?
An end to American violence, racism and misogyny?
Will America ever be a civilized country?