Re: David Lochbaum (again) and TMI case

[Neon John <johngd@bellsouth.net>]

"Weiner, Ruth" wrote:
> 
> Thank you, Steve.  The whole "blowout" theory contains a fundamental
> fallacy:  any plume will disperse from a stack like any other plume.
> Dispersion is a function of the ambient weather conditions and the wind, not
> the plume.  The heat content of the plume determines largely how high the
> plume goes BEFORE it disperses downwind (the  "effective stack height").  I
> spoke at a meeting at Whitman College in the early 80s, on the same platform
> as one of our current more prominent anti-nukes, who came out with this same
> sort of thing -- that a plume can travel hundreds of miles undispersed.  I
> corrected him.  It turned out that an EPA expert on air dispersion was in
> the audience and complimented me.  I always wondered where the idea of the
> non-dispersing plume had come from.

I think we did it to ourselves again.  Early in my career when my
main assignment was to become close personal friends with TVA's
Sequoyah NP FSAR, I used to find it so fascinating that the
projected plume models from an accident were drawn as either neat
little cigar-shaped clouds or neat little pencil-shaped clouds. 
Sharp boundaries and all.  It took one of those "shower
inspirations" for me to realize that a real plume would not behave
that way and that the maps were simply shorthand representations. 
Another example of our shorthand being used against us.

John

-- 
John De Armond
johngdSPAMNOT@bellsouth.net
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