[ RadSafe ] [RadSafe] A Retraction

[George Stanford]

All:

      The other day (December 9) I sent an email in which I tried to 
dramatize the ease of disposing of long-lived fission products from 
spent fuel by suggesting that they could be mixed with coal ash 
without increasing the ash's activity very much. (That was part of 
the now-discontinued "Global Warming" thread.)

      After prompts from Hal Wood and Mike Brennan, I have gone over 
my calculations, and am now convinced that I made several errors -- I 
used too high a value for the activity in typical coal ash (should be 
10 - 30 ppm of U, not 170 ppm), and seriously underestimated the 
relative activity of the 200-odd pounds of long-lived fission 
products that come from creating 1 GWe-yr of nuclear electricity.

      Please disregard that message.

     The long-lived radioactivity from a nuclear plant is something 
like 25 times that from a coal plant (I now think).

      Sorry.

      -- George