[OSM-talk] radioactivity

Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdreist at gmail.com
Mon Aug 10 17:48:43 BST 2009


2009/8/10 Paul Houle <paul at ontology2.com>:
>    Radioactivity is just one of many man-made hazards,  and,  overall,
> people overestimate it's danger compared to other hazards and often
> don't understand the real hazards.  If you're going to tag radioactive
> hazards,  you ought to be tagging other hazards as well.

surely, if you about them, go and tag other as well :)

> In Upstate NY
> there are a large number of industrial "brownfield sites" ....affecting an elementary school,  nursing home and
> the entire South Hill neighborhood.

>    Note that these hazards are both pointwise and diffuse.  For
> instance,  you could be quickly killed by a lethal radiation field if
> you were to go for a swim in a spent fuel storage pond at a nuclear
> reactor.  On the other hand,  there are good procedures in place to
> protect the public and the workers at nuclear plants;  for one thing
> you'd need to get past the fence and armed guards.

in case of big damage it won't save you to stay out of the fence
though ;-). There is so many scandals worldwide about not using the
obligatory security measures in nuclear power plants, that I don't
have lots of confidence in the industry to solve these issues. Besides
that no solution is available how to store the fission products in a
save way until the don't radiate more than natural background
radiation (at least thousands but probably hundreds of thousands or
millions of years).

> There's a
> hypothetical danger there (the glaciers could come and spread the
> contents of a temporary nuclear waste repository across a wide area) but
> no "clear and present" immediate danger.  You might as well tag all the
> roads as dangerous since hundreds of thousands of people get killed in
> automobile accidents every year.

and by lung cancer (I'm a smoker) and other stuff as well. Hundreds of
thousands seem little bit overestimated to me though. E.g. in Germany
(80 million people) there were killed 4 477 people in 2 294 000
registrated traffic accidents in 2008 (and they don't even have a
speedlimit on motorways). If you consider that in the parts of the
world with the highest population (africa and asia) there are far less
cars then it is probably less people dying in accidents.

>    Now,  coal burning power plants release about 300 times as much
> radiation into the environment during normal operation as a nuclear
> power plant.  The issue is that there are trace quantities of uranium
> and it's decay products such as radium and polonium in coal:  the coal
> burning plant in my county consumes about 120 freight cars of coal every
> day,  to produce only 1/3 the power of a typical nuclear plant,  which
> consumes 1 kg of U235 and produces about 1 kg of fission products every
> day.  It deposits a fallout plume for hundreds of miles,  which includes
> radioactive elements,  sulfur compounds and which contributes to lung
> and heart diseases.  It emits more carbon dioxide,  as a point source,
> than all of the other activities in the county put together,  but yet,
> by some Jedi Mind Trick,  it was left out of a report on "Global Warming
> In Tompkins County" since they charged CO^2 emissions to the places
> where electricity is used,  not where it is produced.

actually it is possible to use filters to eliminate the sulfur in the
fallout of coal plants. But they cost money.




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