Re: Motives (Trash)

["Zack Clayton" <zack.clayton@epa.state.oh.us>]

Okay, I was gonna let this one die.  But I see that it keeps cropping up.

When I said trash in my earlier post, I was using the commonly accepted term - paper, garbage, litter, stuff that blows around and piles up against fences.  Nuclear plants that I have seen don't have this problem.  I was not and would not confuse that term with spent nuclear fuel which most assuredly does not blow around and act as litter.  Spent nuclear fuel (SNF) is carefully controlled in the spent fuel pool or dry storage casks at plant sites and needs to go to a central disposal point for permanent storage.  Yucca Mountain or some other PC location.

As a contrast, the SNF is handled to prevent release of radioactive material and minimize ionizing radiation exposure to the public.  Compare this with the way spent coal is treated.  This material is TENORM (technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material) because the NORM in the coal is concentrated in the flyash and cinders during burning.  This radioactive material is then processed into consumer and industrial products or dumped into ash pits or sludge lagoons that can overflow and are in contact with the ground water.  

Now I don't anticipate many people drinking water that comes from a dry tunnel in a mountain ridge 60 miles from the nearest town.  (If you think that the repository horizon has water problems then dig footer drains 50 or 100 feet below the storage level and angle those tunnels so they drain out naturally to some collection/processing point.  It is an Engineered facility.)   I do think its entirely probably that people will be drinking, fishing  or swimming in water that has been in contact with soluble radioactive elements in coal ash that is scattered around the entire country in lagoons, piles, and recycled products.  


Since this is a response as I am catching up on my mail, I want to give my two cents on alternate power sources.  You have to look at the life cycle cost of technology to make an informed decision for power sources.  

Windmills are ugly, have limited siting possibility, and cost a lot of raptor lives.  Perhaps a different rotor design like a vertical squirrel cage rotor would be a safer design.   (But just as ugly.)

Hydro silts up rivers and destroys some of our most beautiful waterways.  The Three Rivers Gorge in China will soon be a memory in their quest for power.  In the US Glenn Canyon is gone.  Every continent and many countries have lost national and historic treasures under damned lakes. And this doesn't even begin to address the improved breeding area that is made available for insect disease vectors
in a dam impoundment.

Solar has a high cost of manufacture in terms of solvents and high tech hazardous waste.  It is expensive to install and will stay so for the near future.

In spite of Quebec Hydro's grand scheme on tidal energy  I don't think it has been highly successful. In more populated areas it competes with other estuarine uses.

So shut down hydro and wind.  Clean up solar and make coal compete on an equal footing in terms of its handling of TENORM waste.   Nuclear starts to look real good when it gets all the other technologies warts out for view in addition to its own.  



Zack Clayton
Ohio EPA - DERR
email:  zack.clayton@epa.state.oh.us
voice:  614-644-3066
fax:        614-460-8249

************************************************************************
The RADSAFE Frequently Asked Questions list, archives and subscription
information can be accessed at http://www.ehs.uiuc.edu/~rad/radsafe.html