>>> Part 1 of 2...

 -=> Quoting Wayne Chirnside to Leonard Erickson <=-

 -=> LEONARD ERICKSON wrote to ROY J. TELLASON <=-
 
 -=> Quoting Roy J. Tellason to Wayne Chirnside <=-
 
 WC> A search on "nuclear accidents" is anything but comforting.
 
 RJT> Yeah,  no doubt.  And as I type this there's a thing on the TV about
 RJT> Indian Point (NY),  and how it's a terrorist target...
 RJT> Did I ever mention that I _see_ Three Mile Island on my way to work?
 RJT> The whole nuke thing bothers me because they *still* haven't got a
 RJT> good answer for waste disposal.
 
 LE> Actually, they've got several. As with just about everything
"nuclear"
 LE> the problems are *vastly* exaggereated.
 
 LE> The waste from the reactors won't be any more radioactive than the
 LE> original uranium ore after a measly 300 years. that's a long time, but
 LE> it's nowhere *near* the *thousands* of years that people insist storage
 LE> facilities be designed for.

 WC> Really now, last I looked the half lives of plutonium
 WC> and uranium ran into hundreds of millions of years.

Sure, and they aren't *dangerous. Or no more dangerous than the
original ore.

The intensity (and thus *hazard* of a radioactive material is
inversely proportion to the halflife.

 WC> This is the time for that radioactive element to decay to half
 WC> it's elemental mass. Mind you that during this time the redioactive 
 WC> elements by nature of their decay are also generating deadly
 WC> radioactive daughter products.

 WC> In fact it is these very daughter products that make uranium
 WC> and plutonium used in a nuclear reactor so much more deadly
 WC> in the first place. It's a fact you can hold a freshly 
 WC> manuafatured near pure uranium pellet in your hand for
 WC> a couple of minutes with no significant harm.

Actually, you could probably hold it there for a *lot* longer than that
without exceeding the exposure limits.

 WC> Don't try this with the same pellet at the end of it's fuel cycle
 WC> as you'll wind up dead. Plutonium isn't safe from the get go because
 WC> it  can spontanously burst into flames generating plutonium oxide
 WC> fumes easily inhaled and quite deadly, examples avaialable
 WC> by researching Rocky Flats and other sites where such has occured.
 WC> Yucca Flats permanent nuclear storage facility is not geologically
 WC> stable having had a quake there that caused significant damage to 
 WC> surface buildings just 18 years ago. Scientists have said
 WC> this site may never be suitable for permanent storage yet
 WC> politicians have given it the go ahead.

 WC> Bear in mind this stuff only needs to be jarred around some so
 WC> that a sufficient quantity generates enough heat to cause
 WC> a steam, non-nuclear, explosion sreading this crap far and wide.

That's utter bullshit. The waste that is that active is still stored
underwater at the reactors. After a year or two (maybe less, I don't
have references handy) the most active (and dangerous) daughter
isotopes have decayed. And the rods are less radioactive and not
generating anywhere *near* the heat required for that.

It's only going to be moved to the long term storage sites *after* it's
gotten to that point.

 WC> This DID happen in the USSR during their weapons development program
 WC> and there are very questionable storage tanks at the Hanford
 WC> Washington site as well.

Yes, and they hold very different sorts of waste. Stuff that happens in
weapons production and research isn't dealing with "spent" fuel either.
It's dealing with enriched uranium or plutonium. Enriched to 90% or
better. Power reactors don't use fuel that's anywhere *near* that level.

You are comparing apples and oranges.

Reactor waste from regular power reactors isn't liquid either. 

And such liquid waste as is going to need long term storage is going to
be converted to something solid before they try storing it.

Those tanks at Hanford are a royal mess. Mostly due to nobody wanting
to spend the money on doing something better.

 WC> You say these radioactive elements only remain active and dangerous 
 WC> for three hundred years?

I said that after 300 years theyt werre no more radioactive than the
original *ore*. That's not the same thing. 

The point being that if its no more active than the original ore, then
it *doesn't* need the insane levels of protection that people are
calling for. 

 WC> Well a great deal of the heat
 WC> from the Earth's core is generated by nuclear material, thorium
 WC> perhaps as my recollection isn't perfect.

Actually, much of it is generated by potassium-40. and it's generated
in the *mantle*, not the core.

Much of the heat is leftover heat from the formation of the planet.
Thing is, a few hundred miles of rock provides a *lot* of insulation.
So the (rather small) quantity of heat generated by radioactives deep
in the earth is trapped and accumulates. Which raises the temperature.

Look up the rate at which heat flows from the interior of the earth to
the surface. Look up the heat capacity of the type of rocks in the
mantle. Work out the mass of the mantle. WWork out how much heat is
trapped in there. And then work out how long it'll take for that mucjh
heat to escape at the given transfer rate. The answer will be billions
of years. Lots of them.

Also, work out how much heat (in calories) per cubic meter of rock in
the mantle it will take to match that heat transfer rate.

The answer will be a *very* small number. And you'll find that an
ordinary hunk of basalt or granite generates that much heat per cubic
meter due to the decaying radioisopes in it.

 WC> Guess the world is only three hundred years old written history
 WC> not withstanding.

No, the problem isd that you (like the people I'm complaining about)
can't be bothered with *details*. 

I didn't say that the stuff totsally decayed in 300 years. Hell, it
won't be "totally" decayed for trillions of years for the longer lived
isotopes. So what?

*Everything* is radioactive to some extent. What matters is *how*
radioactive it is.

And in 300 years those high level wastes will be no more radioactive
than uranium ore. Uranium ore is far more radioactive than a piece of
granite. But it's not a hazard unless you plan on living surrounded by
it.

and granite is just as radioactive as those rocks in the mantle that
help maintain the internal temperature of the earth.

 WC> Do a net search on "nuclear accidents."

Which is irrelevant to the topic of the long term storage site and how
long it needs to be "safe".

Why don't *you* do some research (and it'll take a lot more than a
simple web search) on the number of accidents every year due to mining
porocessing and transporting coal. Then add in the problems with
disposing of the ash and the sludge from stack scrunbbers. also find
out how much radiuoactive material (from naturally occuring
radioactives in the coal) is released into the air by a coal fired
power plant every year (hint it's huindred or thousands of times what a
nuclear plant is allowed).

 WC> You'll get hits on everything from an entire town in
 WC> Mexico contaminated by a single source that killed dozens,

Due to improper disposal of a piece of *medical* equipment. And due to
uneducated peoiple deciding that the piece of *glowing* (from air
ionization due to *extreme* radiation levels) metal was "magic" and
showing it off to everyone.

 WC> 20,000 sources lost annually at Logan airport alone. Radioactive
 WC> seeds being left in cancer patients who died as a result.
 WC> A missing H-bomb off Thule Greenland, Spain and in a swamp
 WC> in the southeastern United States. Many thousands of more examples.

And none of them have a thing to do with nuclear power or disposal of
waste from nuclear plants. Those would all still happen (or not happen,
in the case of some of the nuclear bomb items you mention, since the
bombs were located)

 WC> Near me in Mulberry Florida people die at an accelerated
 WC> cancer rate from radon gas at a rate of three to six times
 WC> the national average depending on who you take as a reliable source
 WC> and this is a daughter product of your natural uranium
 WC> you claim is so safe and it's not even high grade uranium 
 WC> ore but merely the trace amounts found along with 
 WC> phosphate mining. Plenty of dead uranium miners too.

Which is my exact point. This has nothing to do with nuclear waste
disposal.  

People have higher cancer rates from living at high altitudes, from
living where there's more igneous rock, from dozens of other *natural*
sources.


If after 300 years, the waste is no more dangerous than a naturally
occuring material, and is buried deep underground, then I say we've
done enough. There are *millions* of equal hazards that anybody digging
or drilling could expose. so why waste the extra effort.

LIFE IS NOT SAFE. PERIOD.

Trying to make this safer than the natural ore is wasting time effort
and money that could better be spent elsewhere.

 LE> I could go on about other things, such as Three Mile Island being proof
 LE> of how *well* designed US reactors are. They had far more things go
 LE> wrong, most due to human error, 
 
 WC> You mean human error such as the stuck pressure relief valve
 WC> and defective indicator light on that same valve at TMI?
 WC> The human reactors operators were performing precisely 
 WC> according to the book by draining reactor water under
 WC> the assumption the reactor was _overfilled_ and thus the low
 WC> pressure when in fact _two_ simultanious  _technological_ failures
 WC> led to this erronious pressure reading.

And accordiung to all the "experts" in the antinuclear camp *before*
that accident, any one of the *several* things that went wrong were
"guaranteed" to have resulted in somethinhg worse than Chernobyl.

 WC> Here's another example, read "We Almost Lost Detroit",
 WC> a rather interesting read about a nuclear reactor outside
 WC> Detroit over which operators fussed and fumed over a month 
 WC> afraid to do ANYTHING because it might disturb a near critical 
 WC> mass at the bottom of the reactor. Eventually
 WC> the entire reactor was dismantled, shipped off in containers
 WC> and buried. The same thing nearly happened at TMI both
 WC> between the hydrogen bubble of unknown size and the
 WC> melted mass of enriched uranium at the base of the reactor
 WC> of which no-one knew how close it was to criticality.
 WC> These are _technological_ errors not human ones and 
 WC> who the heck cares where the fault lies anywy when the consequences
 WC> are so terrible?

Scaremongering. The fact is that reactors have to have critical mass to
*work*. They *can't* explode like a muclear bomb. The worst you can get
from an accidental assembly of a critical mass is a "squib"
explosion. Which would be nasty enough if you were standing next to it
but is well within the specs for the containment vessel. 

Try finding a copy of "The Health Hazards of NOT Using Nuclear Power".
(I think that was the title.

It does a comparison between the health effects of generating power for the
entire lifecycle. That means mining the fuel processing it,
transporting it, using it and disposing of the wastes. The hazards of
coal, both as increased cancer risks, black lung, mine cave-ins, train
accidents, etc are so much higher it's not even funny.

 WC> It's been soft peddled but look at the projected death tolls
 WC> from Windscale in southern England as well as those from
 WC> Chernobyl. Speaking of human error, how about transporting
 WC> all that rad waste across the country?

How about transporting all that coal that will be needed to replace it?
And disposaing of the toxic sludge from stack scrubbers?

 WC> I've spent literally hundreds of hours reading up on actual
 WC> nuclear accidents either on the net or in books and I've not
 WC> even breached the subject of a dirty bomb or terrorists
 WC> getting their hands on weapons grade materials.

Pity you haven't read up on the science involved and the facts as
presented by the *rational* folks. Nor considered that *everything* is
hazardous and tried comparting the risks of nuclear to the risks of
other things.

9/11 kill more people than Chernobyl (and the fumes from the fire will
probably kill more from long term effects). You going to ban airliners?

 WC> We're still storing spent fuel rods on sites at nuke
 WC> plants because there is nothing else we CAN do with it
 WC> and think what a lovely terrorist target all that contaminated
 WC> soup would be.

 WC> We protect football stadiums with concrete barriers
 WC> to keep out truck bombs but as yet do no such thing at
 WC> nuclear plants in populated areas.

Do your research. a truck bomb wouldn't *scratch* the containment
vessel. You *might* crack it by crasshing an airliner into it. 
 
 LE> than any "worst case" put forth by the
 LE> anti-nuke camp and yet all that happened that "shouldn't"
have was the
 LE> release of an amount of radioactive material that's dwarfed by both
 LE> natural radiation and by the radioactives released *hourly* by
 LE> coal-fired power plants (which produce far more waste than nukes do and
 LE> it is toxic *forever*)

 WC> Yeah,  a trivial amount was released by Chernobyl,

We were talking about Three milre Island. Which had a proper
containment vessel. 

Chernobyl is an classic example of how *not* to design a reactor. *No*
containment vessel whatseover. If that reactor had been inside a US or
European design containment vessel there'd have been *zero* radiation
release.

Again, you compare apples to oranges and shift the subject when the
facts are against you.

Even so, compare the eeffects from Chernobyl (arguably the worst
possible accident), With the effects that were predicted for "a major
accident" by the anti-nuke people before that time.

I believe you'll find that again, their predictions far exceed the
reality. Though part of that was due to the Russians not having the
reactor near a major population center.

But a "Western" reactor *cannot* go up that way. 

 WC> radiation alarms, mass killings  of raindeer herds due to
 WC> contamination

Please be clear. The herds were killed BY HUMANS because they were
contaminated. They were not killed *by* the contamination.

 WC> Windscale in England had everyone guzzling iodine tablets so not
 WC> as to take up the radioactive isotope in their thyroids and the
 WC> English killed most of their dairy cattle in Southern England
 WC> because they were way above supposed safe levels of contamination.
 WC> Strontium and Cesium are't too nice either and are taken
 WC> up and concentrated in different body parts and these
 WC> are just a few of the istopes that come out with those 
 WC> spent fuel rods.

And look up the deaths from the "Black Fogs" in London back before
pollution controls were placed on coal burning.

 WC> So answer this question, since nuclear power is so
 WC> cheap, dependable and technologically mature why are no new
 WC> nuke plants being built in the U.S. and why did the U.S.
 WC> government find it necessary to place a unrealistically
 WC> low insurance liability cap on the industry?

No new powerplants *period* were being built for a while in the US.
That's because the anti-nuke folks got laws passed that made it illegal
for a power utility to get any of the cost of a power plant paid out of
the money collected from ratepayers (ie power customers) until after
the plant was online and producing power.

Since it takes a good 10 years to build a plant (and a moderate chunk
of that time is getting permits and doing "environmental impact
statements", and it's *very* expensive, this means that the utilities
would have to borrow the money for construction and have to borrow at a
nasty interest rate because they couldn't make reasonable payments
until *after* the plant was online. at which time, the customers will
be paying about *double* what they would have if those laws hadn't been
in effect.

So, there was no building of power plants (other than very small, and
inefficent) "topping" plants (natural gas fired generators that are
brought online at peak load time to make up for the inability of the
regular plants to supply all the load) until it was next to impossible
to do without more plants.

These same folks tried to get laws passed (and, I think they *did* get
them passed in some states) making it illegal to build nuclear plants
until there was a long term waste storage facility. Not that the exact
same groups also lobbied hard against such a site being constructed
*anywhere*. 

Oh yes, the same people got a law passed in my state making it iollegal
to store "low level waste" (defined as being more than some truly
miniscule level of radiation) without all sorts of complex and
expensive safeguards.

Shortly after it passed, a companty got cited under the law. They had
nothing to do with radioisotopes otr the like. They produced certain
rare metals from monazite sand. And the "sludge" (non-toxic, btw) from
the processing was radioactive, due to the refining out of the other
metals esentially concentrating (*not* "enriching") the *natural*
radioactive elements in it. 

So they had to pay huge amounts of money to move the settling ponds
(which might get flooded by the nearby riover once every few hundred
years) aand do a bunch of other stuff. They damn near moved out of the
state over it.

The pont being that all these laws were written to *sound* reasonable
to voters, but were intended to make it impossible to do things that
(rather small) anti-nuke groups didn't want done. What they actually
did was impose totaly unreasonable burdens on various things. 

Oh yes, that law about paying for power plants after the fact is why
power companies were so willing to *pay* people for buying more energy
efficient appliances, and sent out compact flourescent bulbs and the
like. They couldn't afford to build more capacity, so they had to
reduce demand.

Now they've run out of wiggle room. The mess in California a while back
was *partially* due to this, just greatly exacerbated by various
outfits manipulating prices for the scare power resources.

Sooner or later something is going to give. We got all these groups
making folks scared of hazards that are actually *smaller* than other

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