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.
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