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All French Nuclear Reactors Deemed Unsafe
hweimer writes "A new study by a French government agency, commissioned in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, found that all French nuclear power plants do not offer adequate safety when it comes to flooding, earthquakes, power outages, failure of the cooling systems and operational management of accidents. While there is no need for immediate shutdown, the agency presses for the problems to be fixed quickly. France gets about 80% of its power from nuclear energy and is a major exporter of nuclear technology."
MERDE !
The only alternative is coal. Nucular and coal is all there is. And coal is worse. Coal ash has more radioactive emissions than nucular plants, and arsenic and landslides too.
There is no geothermal. Don't look at geothermal.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
That's unfortunate - France's nuclear power plants were a key part of Germany's decision to go non-nuclear but still buy tons of nuclear-based power from France.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
the report says the plants have to exceed the limits that are planned for/ stated. How can you build a completely fail-proof plant? By not building one...
If a coal power plants fails, it is just a big fire, annoying and hard to put out BUT controllable. A hydro dam that breaks will NOT cause the water to shoot up stream. Sure it sucks for the people down stream and there might be a lot of people downstream but the risk is calculable and limited.
Chernobyl and Fukishama have now both shown that nuclear incidents are ALWAYS worse then estimated and even worse then admitted to afterwards by the nuclear lobby. You can build again on a flood plain, but radiated soil will be unusable for decades.
It is not as nuclear technology can't be made safe but since about the only argument in the past has been that it is cheap, costs are going to have to be cut in the hope that "it" never happens. That is not a very reliable method to prevent accidents. Or at least not reliable enough. The public might want safe power but they are not willing to pay the price of 1 nuclear accident every couple decades.
Nuclear energy is the same as oil drilling, techs that for many reasons are necessary but nobody wants in their back yard OR simply spend enough money on to make it safe. And when it fails, it fails so enormously that people lose all sense of proportion. Hey Japan, sure you lost a sizable area of your country BUT you build your economy on cheap electricity. Surely it is worth it because you thought it was worth it back then when you decided to build them? Oh, that is not how voters think? How unexpected.
Nuclear tech doesn't fit in a capitalist democracy. You can't have reactors build by the lowest bidder at the whim of voters with no accountability.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Give us more money"
I'm not against the concept of nuclear power per se, but eveything I've read about the industry and its practices makes me think they're rather untrustworthy and greedy.
Maybe the French industry is different, I don't know.
How likely is it for there to be an earthquake in France? Why should earthquake protection matter when other bad things are much more likely?
In related news, all nuclear reactors were deemed unsafe againt a meteorite strike.
People don't like geothermal because of the earthquakes. Also because EGS isn't proven technology yet.
Geothermal, along with wind, solar, and so on, are not yet thought to be cost-effective.
Which is worse:
Taking the risk of a few nuclear catastrophes during the next couple of centuries, or to keep dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere ignoring the fact that it pretty darn definitely has some effect in the long term...
Wild prediction: People 200 years from now are going to look upon us like idiots who thought relocating people due to a nuclear accident was harder than getting all that 'effing carbon dioxide back where it belongs and restoring the climactic balance to a reasonable degree.
.: Max Romantschuk
The chronic problem is that, no matter how good your technology gets, you can always find a way to produce "almost as good and a lot cheaper". If nobody is looking too closely, you can probably go with "not actually almost as good; but cheaper still".
There are engineering problems that are simply at the outer bounds of present technology and inherently risky. For most everything else, though, the heart of the problem has more to do with some combination of lousy risk assessment, active dishonesty, or the fact that it isn't hard to take risks so that the rewards accrue to you and the consequences to somebody else.
This is why I'm somewhat pessimistic about our ability to innovate our way into safety: team science, and their applied brethren in engineering, have enormously expanded the scope of what we can do; but have had relatively little effect on the fact that we basically want it fast and cheap and the 'we' doing the choosing frequently aren't the 'we' doing the living next to it...
The "If it's not nuclear, it's coal" fiends are below us now, ranting their "coal is evil" rants as if there were no other options. I'll call that a win.
Coal and nuclear are both proven bad. Why not look at something else?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Cancer is not cost-effective.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What? They seem to like fracking..
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/14/1950245/did-fracking-cause-recent-oklahoma-earthquakes
Of course, if the tsunami from the Pacific Ocean is still 49ft feet high when it hits France, the whole world is pretty screwed anyway.
You shouldn't build large numbers of an experimental design until you've actually had time to run the experiment.
Leave it to Slashdot commenters to immediately jump to the aid of the poor defenseless energy industry. It's always funny to see how eager many here are to defend a corrupt industry by repeating the same old tiresome mantras "Nukular is safe LALALAICAN'THEARYOU" and "There's no alternative, stop looking!!!1".
There is no geothermal. Don't look at geothermal.
The problem with your argument is reality. We are still building new coal fired plants today. Not just not shutting down old plants, building new plants. Because it's known, cheap, and legal.
So let's go with your argument that geothermal is better than both coal and nuclear for a second. That doesn't change the fact that nuclear is better than coal, does it? So until we shut down all the coal fired plants, any talk about shutting down existing nuclear plants is an instance of defective prioritization.
We need one or two armies to safe-guard these reactors.
US: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9q7b_2tkMo
or
China: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n50xmLNalIM
BTW, does France still have an army or is it an over-arching EU Army? Wikipedia didn't tell.
OK, I'm a reactor operator for a nuclear reactor and this report is talking about "beyond design basis" faults. Faults which were not taken account for within the safety case for the plant. Now, bear in mind that this area of the world is not susceptible to the kinds of earthquakes Japan is, and also the fact that tsunamis just cannot happen to most of France's plants because they're inland, would make the event that happened in Japan certainly beyond design basis. Now, that's not to say that more safety cannot be added. Many of France's plants are relatively old and new ideas have been integrated into newer plants. All this report is talking about is that more things can be done to address big bang type stuff, stuff that's practicable and useful, like adding more generators and installing them onto roofs. Not prohibitively costly, and can be useful in most faults. There's always more things that can be done to all plants, it's a judge of whether it's practicable, economical and in all probabilities, worth it. If statistically, an event is not likely to happen for 10,000,000 years, are you really going to design it out?
This report isn't saying that France's plants are unsafe. The editor should be shot. In my opinion, Fukushima was a success. These plants were due to be taken out of service within a year, they were very very old, old design and old in age. Yet, even with a massive earth quake, and a beyond design basis fault that wasn't understood during their design phase, no-one died due to radiation and contamination is well controlled and understood. It's also worth noting that all the modern PWRs in Japan surrounding Fukushima all shut down properly with no issues.
The only alternative is coal. Nucular and coal is all there is. And coal is worse. Coal ash has more radioactive emissions than nucular plants, and arsenic and landslides too. There is no geothermal. Don't look at geothermal.
In Europe I believe the backup plan is buying more natural gas from Russia.
I see this comment a lot. It looks like the education cuts since Reagan left their mark.
One professional liar better known for writing books about classic cars writes a propaganda piece in a Oak Ridge Labs newsletter (Alex Gabbard: Soldier, Scientist and Author Extraordinaire!) and suddenly people think coal is more radioactive than the impurities of small amounts sand in it that actually contain those radioactive trace elements. Do the banana dose calculations and you'll see how many tens of thousands of tons of coal you'll need to match a banana.
Maybe it's homeopathic radiation!
The people that believe the crap about ash being nuclear waste should read to the end of the original source article. The "OMG Terrorists making nuclear bombs out of coal!" bit should show to even the dimmest readers it doesn't come within miles of serious science.
From the summary:
France gets about 80% of its power from nuclear energy and is a major exporter of nuclear technology.
No. France generates almost 80% of its electricity from nuclear energy. Not its overall power.
I'm sick of this consistently sloppy reporting about energy usage in the mass media. And sick of the idiots who think that electricity consumption is the big issue (oh noes! we need solar to make teh watts, and CFLs to save teh watts!). Dumbshits.
France's planes, ships, trucks, cars, and more still run on OIL. Not nuclear. Do the math. Electricity is relatively small component of power usage.
Would you call this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents a few? Also, putting the carbon dioxide back where it belongs is actually really easy. Just don't cut the trees and put trees back where we cut them. The rest comes naturally.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The data doesn't come from an Oak Ridge Labs newsletter or Alex Gabbard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation#Human-caused_background_radiation
It was already published in Science magazine in 1978.
Coal plants cause more deaths due to radioactivity (statistically) than nuclear plants. Even in this year, with Fukushima blowing up.
No, per gram fly ash doesn't contain more radioactivity. But coal plants emit a lot more fly ash in a year than nuclear plants consume fuel.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The question is not how to make safe, but at which point you want to stop the safety measure. From what I know of the report of their criteria, they erred on the side of safety recommending some change which are beyond their probability of happenning in a French nuclear plant. Some other recommendation I agree with.
Furthermore I would like to point out that the *worst* human generated catastrophe ever, both on ecological level and human death level, were not nuclear but oil and chemical plants. And that is not counting some industry which not only kill by mining (coal) but also with their emmission in the air are noxious (coal again even with good filter) , and also displace population (coal again, see tagsabbau braunschweig). The irony is, since such things happens small bit by small bit, they are not seen as problematic, whereas nuclear catastrophe even if having less death are seen as a boogy man. They are manageable. Nuclear indiustry can be made safer. Coal industry cannot.
Because the other options are unworkable pipedreams? Even massive improvements in wind/solar will not change the fact they cannot supply base load in all conditions and you will still need an always-on coal or nuclear plant for the times it can't work. Coal/oil and nuclear happen to be the only options that do not currently require violation of the laws of physics.
Great Intellect...
How come? You think you overpaid for yours?
Of course the plants can be made safer. Everything can be made safer. We could all wear crash helmets 24/7. All cars could be made crash proof (take the wheels off). "All the dams in France bursting at once and flooding the plants", if that happens the least of your problems is the nuclear reactor. Just like the problems at Fukushima were the least of the worries of the 20,000 killed by the earthquake and tsunami. No industry in the world spends money on preventing staggeringly unlikely events causing harm like the nuclear industry has to. Do you want to double your electricity bill so that the chances of a disaster move from 1 in 10 million years to 1 in 20 million according to the design calcs? Humans are staggering bad at risk assessment and the nuclear (and terrorism) panic proves it conclusively. You would think that a bunch of geeks could figure some basic stats.
He kept on that theme for a few later articles. Scientific American later used one as a source. I suggest finding that peice of crap that marks the low point of Scientific American online to read the comments from people that actually have a clue instead of Mr Gabbard and the journalist at Scientific American.
Nuclear isn't "proven bad."
Coal is "proven bad," because it has continued to consistently kill people en masse. Nuclear has not, short of accidents caused by huge natural disasters and ancient primitive soviet technology.
Even massive improvements in wind/solar will not change the fact they cannot supply base load in all conditions
Or improvements in energy storage. Calling solar energy a pipe dream is absurd and ignorant, virtually all the worlds energy comes from the sun in one way or another (except nuclear and geothermal, they came from another sun). Sure the energy industry aren't having any wet dreams about the profitability of solar energy right now, but whether big industry has a hard on or not is no measure of the viability of future technology. You would have called the internet a pipe dream too.
false: the geothermal is very big in France: all the "bassin Parisien" ( about 30 million people) is a big hot water undergroung area. Some cities near Paris just heat their citizens with this. The big building in Paris " maison de la radio" is entirely heated with a thermal source at just 400/600 meters deep, since the sixties ! but this resource is unexploited. Other big geothermal areas: Brittany, bassin Aquitain, Alps, massif central...
Another unexploited very big ressource in France is "hydrauliennes" ( big watermills in the sea streams), because most of France is surrounded by coast with huge sea streams. Both geothermal and tidal/sea streams energy are 24/24 and 365/365 energies, with very few impact on ecology. But banksters prefers nuclear.
Wrong. If you go to Germany or the Netherlands you'll see that coal is not the only alternatives. Those places are crowded with wind turbines. In the Netherlands it's mainly along the coast (at least the last time I went there) but in Germany they're all over the place. True, the infrastructure probably is not as simple as you need to connect each turbine to the grid in stead of connecting a single power plant but there's no real risk of a disaster in comparison to a nuclear power plant. That said, I think that the fear mongering by media after the Fukushima disaster caused a real outburst of hysteria in Europe (although the country I live in confirmed the plans to construct the first nuclear power plant but we have the highest electricity bills in the EU)
it's 80% of electricity energy that comes from Nuclear power in France.
it's not 80% of ALL energy.
Also, any nuclear plant has to be by a very big source of water for cooling. So any nuclear plant on earth is at risk of flooding. It's not a French specific problem.
These events are very unlikely to happen. The plants are perfectly safe.
Now all you need is a well run nuclear power station or one that doesn't do frequent serious leaks and you've shown that coal is more radioactive than nuclear.
I'd be very wary of pinning all my energy hopes on future technology (that XKCD stip makes the point quite well). Nuclear is the best option we have to satisfy our current energy requirements.
As for the reason that the Nuclear advocates don't mention alternative energy, why should they? What's the point of arguing against something that doesn't exist?
we can't do energy storage for decent ranged electric cars, how do you propose to store a couple of hundred megawatts? Flywheels are temporary. they basically last long enough to bring full power plants online.
solar, wind, and tidal will always be secondary sources as at least 50% of the time they are forced to sit idle. (night, no wind, and tides don't happen 24 hours a day).
Nuclear can run 24 hours a day 365 days a year no problem.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Which will blow-up first, the French Economy, or her Nuclear Reactors?
Note: If the French Economy blows up, the Reactors won't be too far behind. :
-- "To ask a question is to show ignorance; Not to ask a question means you'll remain ignorant."
My previous comment covers the replies:
So many slashdot nuclear apologists in denial about the dangers of nuclear power that they marked your post interesting instead of informative.
This one is going to be interesting to watch, nuclear can't be dangerous, no-one could of predicted Fukushima. Chernobyl, one-mile island and Windscale were a one-off (count them, 1-2-3.... ONE) and will never happen again because the modern safety systems are too good.
Nuclear power stations never leak and it wouldn't matter anyway because radioactive waste is not really all that harmful.
Terrorists could never get hold of nuclear waste, gov'ts never support terrorists and gov'ts never fall. There is no such thing as corruption, and nothing ever gets lost.
It beggars belief the mindset you need to support nuclear, ignoring all of the above.
Wind-power, there are technologies to store energy with 90% efficiency. It doesn't create deadly waste that no-one knows what to do with. The price of the energy input is free and unchanging. IT'S CHEAPER THAN NUCLEAR.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
There's one big problem with geothermal: the theoretical amount of power we can draw from it (the thermal flux) is in the same order of magnitude we, as a civilisation are, it's still larger, but it isn't even twice that.
Please look up Desertec, solar has a bright future. ;)
None of them can provide base load in all conditions.
Gas supply cut: no baseload.
Coal supplies run out: no baseload.
River temps too high to cool station: no baseload.
Unemployment government collapse civil war no electricity...these things are dangerous too and far more likely far more important to worry about.
Um, the storage requirements for an electric car and for an electricity grid are different.
Not that I think the storage tech is there yet, but for example: one idea is to store compressed air underground in caves/old mines/whatever.
Obviously one has to look at how much energy is lost in the compression/leakage/extraction/etc but you can think big when it doesn't have to also be light and small.
It's not like the energy you store has to be electrical.
I also agree that nuclear is the best bet right now and, for something as important as electrical grid power, that it's smarter to go with something we know will work than something that we think might work in the future.
There are realistic limitations dictated by material technologies (i.e. laws of physics + sum of current know-how) which name your "energy storage" as even further pipe dream then cold fusion.
Source: current capacitor and battery technology moving in a few percent increments at best, and typically being extremely polluting due to materials used while at it.
You can look at geothermal all you want but when it comes to France, you may find a distinct lack of volcanic activity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volcanoes_in_France. So although you could use geothermal heat pumps, that's not practical to do on a large scale.
At the end of the day, a sensible energy policy has to be based on local conditions. For France, you're probably better off using a combination of wind (near the coast) and solar (in the South) with possibly a small geothermal capacity in the Massif Central (which wouldn't necessarily help as it's one of the least populated part of the country).
Geothermal is downright dangerous when used too much (read on geothermal depletion for example). Wind has severe issues with material science, specifically we do not possess materials that are sturdy enough to survive the massive grind of a wind turbine long enough to even pay for themselves, and are enormously work-intensive to maintain.
Solar, in addition to obvious problems with "must have Sun visible", "must have as little atmosphere between Sun and panel" and others also suffers from massive problems with material technology as well. We simply do not have material technology to convert sun rays to energy efficiently enough for panels to ever pay for themselves (beyond the manufacture in places where energy and materials are dirt cheap because they're produced on coal/nuclear energy and materials mined in conditions that no one that can afford to buy a panel would ever work in).
Essentially current wind and solar are not only not "cost-effective" but simply lack necessary materials.
The one realistic third option we do have is hydro. Unfortunately it's very location-specific, and in many countries pretty much all places you could make a hydro plant on are already dammed up. So again, we're left with only coal and nuclear for places that can't be reliably supplied by hydro, or are small enough and are sitting in a place where small scale geothermal operation can reliably supply the demand without causing depletion.
Last option is burning various fossil fuels, from oil to natural gas.
So, the 99 or so percent of all nuclear power stations?
It's right actually. A very unaddressed and unpublicized reality in Germany is that while politicians and press rave about wind... They are building coal plants in numbers that are in higher twenties at any given moment.
Disclosure: I have family member working in a large multinational corp that makes coal power plants. He can't stop being amazed at the hypocrisy of media and politicians in Germany as their business is booming in Germany at the moment due to them building large coal plants to replace all the nuclear that is planned to be shut down and preparing for tenders for new ones that are in early planning stages.
It's also worth noting that Germany largely relies on nuclear power in France for electricity imports.
The only alternative is coal.
Human nature and history show that when people set a necessity as a high priority they will come up with solutions.
If suddenly we ran out of all the oil, coal, and nuclear, would we just shut down civilization, sit down and complain?
Didn't think so.
Let's see - name (guess who www.alexgabbard.com is about?), workplace, quote from his website (Soldier, Scientist and Author Extraordinaire!) and mention of a Scientific American article on fly ash radioactivity that's online. If anyone cares there's a search engine that will bring up far more than a single link from me and they won't feel they are being led to a biased article.
To sum up, his many talents unfortunately don't include knowing anything at all about coal or ash but he's a fine writer of fiction. I'm not "playing the man", I'm calling the bullshit he's written what it is. That is what the "coal is nuclear too" PR bullshit of a few years ago was about. It backfired but we're still left with a residue of bullshit decades later.
Anyway, I'm not going writing about the merits or otherwise of either form of power generation but merely about an incredibly stupid lie. If people would think about it for more than a few seconds (ask themselves how coal is formed and think back what they were told in school) they would see how obvious and stupid it is. Because of the time scales involved coal is going to be less radioactive than your lunch.
Now idiots will try to change the topic and write about other problems and not understand that I know better than they do that there is a large yearly death toll from coal mining - but that is a story for another time and has nothing whatsoever to do with whether ash has levels of radioactivity approaching beach sand or not and if idiots can stretch that to pretend they can compare it with nuclear waste.
There is no geothermal. Don't look at geothermal.
Geothermal is not automatically safe any more than nuclear is automatically unsafe. In the USA, where we have the world's most geothermally active region on the planet, we have a geothermal power plant that is perpetually under production and over budget. Calpine's steam plant at The Geyers, CA, has also been the source of a superfund site; when one of the massive turbines gets encrusted with deposits coming out of the vent, they position them above a concrete pit and pressure-wash the blades clean. The water is permitted to evaporate off and the remainder sits in open ponds. When the pond fills up with this material, they cap it over with concrete. The material contains a lot of heavy metals including some radioactives. In the past, they used to just put the slurry into drums and then bury the drums. This naturally contaminated the local water and we had cows born with two heads and that sort of fun stuff. Not being especially interested in Brahmin ranching, the locals made a stink and eventually it was all dug up and reburied with a rubber liner which will eventually fail and cause the same problem all over again, for our descendants.
Unfortunately, the concrete layer cake of heavy metals and radioactives at the site is just waiting for some major seismic activity to break apart and become a hazard itself. And because of its layered nature, even if the slurry were reprocessable into useful elements (which it isn't, at least not cost-effectively, or they would do this instead of storing it) it will be horrendously hazardous and expensive to clean it up later.
Geothermal is cool when you're talking about a cute little geo tap used to heat some water with a heat pipe. It's not so cool when you're talking about power generation on a grand scale. There are not very many places well-suited to such a facility, so it can never produce a significant amount of our current consumption. And it is not inherently clean as many people think. About the only technology we have for power generation that doesn't necessarily have a massive impact is solar. We can install it where we want shade. Oh, and wind, now that we know how to build windmills that won't kill birds even if you put them right on a migration path like a greedy tool.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I haven't got the time or the inclination to debate this with you. Have it your way.
You're wrong, but I can't fix everyone's stupidity.
The 1993 link on Wikipedia to an article by Alex Gabbard was not the original in print but instead a later inclusive article on the same topic that was written to go on that new WWW thing of the time. The 1978 Science article came after the Oak Ridge Newsletter articles and a PR campaign.
Also the page linked above links to the fly ash article on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash) that contains the line "Studies by the U.S. Geological Survey and others of radioactive elements in coal ash have concluded that fly ash compares with common soils or rocks and should not be the source of alarm.[37]" http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.pdf
Big oil has way more money than big nuclear (which is generally nationalised because it's only profitable after something like 20 years). If he was being force fed paid for opinions, why would he be suggesting nuclear is better than coal? Here's another idea - maybe not everyone who disagrees with your strict view of the world is a shill or a puppet for a shill?
I know it may be hard to imagine, but even in the affluent west there are people who will struggle to pay their energy bills this winter - and that's for the relatively cheap fossil fuel energy they're currently using. Disregarding the cost factor of energy is the pipe dream - it's not only energy companies that lose out if the price is too high.
For deserts where there is year round sun. I don't think France qualifies for either of those statements.
I can think of at least two things these three places all have in common . . .
The relevant issue here is cost. If we wanted to, we could build enough windmills to supply twice the power we need. Then we could user the power to generate hydrogen, which we could store and burn in combined cycle plants when the power is needed. It is absolutely possible to do this. But we'd need to spend time and effort doing it, and people don't seem to want to.
Let's not confuse things. Nuclear, wind, or geothermal... there's no space for fundamentalists, fanatics, and intentionally confusing people.
Energy expands to fill the waste available. A transportation executive told me of a simplified cost analysis for transportation that is roughly
1 for water/ship transport,
10 for rail/train
100 for road/trucking,
1000 for plane/air transport.
That's actually costs, but it does reflect labor, fuel and energy consumption. So to get more free energy (and reduce your national costs), encourage rail and ship transportation.
Policies are for decisions, technology is for implementation.
There's no reason to not adopt a policy of reducing waste. There is plenty of work that can be done more intelligently, reduce waste, and increase work output and capacity. That's just policy, and it can be implemented. As any change, it requires changes, and there will be resistance from whatever sectors that will lose business and money. Unavoidable, reducing waste implies someone reducing consumption of something. They will try and cloud the issue, create lots of confusion and barriers.
Once decided, structure taxes on one energy form to subsidize another, that will modify their market prices, and motivate the industry to seek the lower cost forms. It's simple. Even though some people don't want it to be.
Without analyzing numbers, facing the opposition, and reducing waste, we're going nowhere. That'll give more time to research more technology, and allow that research to go on without so much policy confusion.
The way it's looking, Europe is separating these issues better than most areas, and facing up the challenge to change - though they are also still quite slow.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Also note that huge natural disasters and ancient primitive soviet technology both kill far more people on their own, without any help from nuclear.
Oulala dites moi pas que c'est pas vrai mais quesque c'est que cette merde...
Exactly. If your plant gets attacked by aliens, you may have bigger problems than safety protocols.
When I read your post, I at first thought you were pointing out that you get what you pay for, and thus wise investment is always good policy for both individuals and groups.
And then I thought, well, maybe he's also pointing out that some worthwhile goals are not achievable by individuals or markets and that an equitable, democratically controlled pooling of resources has historically been shown to be a useful way to defeat such problems of scale.
But on the second reading, I realize you might be just another freeloader who wants other people to pay your bills. I detect a hint of irony. Are you one of those "taxation is theft" nut cases, perchance?
All right ... all right ... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order ... what HAS Rome ever done for US?
This nonsense. You don't know what baseload actually is. Every plant can be used for baseload. The fluctuations, the peak load is a problem. Typical baseload plants are brwon coal or nuclear, and THOSE are (traditionally) bad in handling FLUCTUATIONS. However modern coal plants can do that just fine enough. ...
Germany already produces far moe wind power than needed for base load
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes, the 100% of nuclear plants seem to release less radioactivity than the coal plants. But you know, statistics on both are hightly unreliable...
Rethinking email
Where you locked away the last 25 years somewhere?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms
Then sue flowing water turbiens, they don't need a dam, problem solved.
Someone who actually never investigated about "how power production works" should perhaps not claim so many: this does not exist, that does not exist and this is impossible ... while all this stuff actually is in large usage right now.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This is wrong. Germany is a net exporter. And France is one of our main customers. There is only one single month in the lat years (and that was this year in May I believe) where we imported more power than we exported. ...
Regarding the new coal plants. Most of them are intended to replace old ones
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Seriously, nobody should be referring to the Yablakov book, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Envirnoment". It has been reviewed by a number of scientific experts, and found to be complete junk science.
http://atomicinsights.com/2011/10/devastating-review-of-yablokovs-chernobyl-consequences-of-the-catastrophe-for-people-and-the-environment.html
(Someone might note that the link I've provided is to a pro-nuclear blog and say the conclusion is biased, but the pro-nuclear blogger in question is simply citing someone else's review).
What I really mean to say is: Don't get all your numbers from anti-nuclear zealots and realize that the picture is not even close to as ambiguous as you portrayed here. There's science, and then there's bullshit, and you need to sort one from the other.
You should know that we'll do both, dump all the carbon we can gather into the atmosphere AND have a few nuclear accidents in this century. I consider ourselves luck if we get out without any proposital nuclear detonation.
Rethinking email
Too bad thorium reactors haven't been used as much. Totally safe.
Dumb governments.
What are your thoughts about EGS geothermal?
Nuclear has not, short of accidents caused by huge natural disasters and ancient primitive soviet technology.
Construction of the plant and the nearby city of Pripyat to house workers and their families began in 1970. So I'm not only old, but I'm older than ancient? Fuck you, kid, get off my lawn.
Free Martian Whores!
Just because you say so doesn't make it so. Because just a few weeks ago, english edition of Spiegel ran a nice article on these new German offshore wind farms. Latest tech, those things. Google for it.
Still, same mechanical problems because stuff just doesn't last under that stress. Materials aren't strong enough. Same problems with ridiculous maintenance requirements. Still same problems with not functioning all the time due to both too strong and too weak winds. Etc.
Just thought I would point out that solar isn't as green as you might consider it to be. First, a lot of heavy elements go into making the photovoltaic panels themselves, which last at best, 20 years before needing replacement and this is without any incidence of weather phenomena (hail, etc.). Second, they only work in the daytime so to store the energy through the night, batteries are the most viable option for most locations with the least annual cloudiness. Current battery tech also has a pretty short lifespan and also includes the use of many hazardous elements to produce. Solar really isn't viable at all in my opinion, when yyou have to replace elements at such a rapid pace. The cost balance tips too far into the red to maintain a grid on solar, and that is without even considering the land necessary to locate enough panels to power an area.
I'd be very wary of pinning all my energy hopes on future technology (that XKCD stip [xkcd.com] makes the point quite well). Nuclear is the best option we have to satisfy our current energy requirements.
Except that nuclear as it is done today, i.e., basically the once-through uranium technology, is not an acceptable long-term power generation technology, even hard-core nuclear apologists will admit that. In fact it's arguably not an acceptable civil energy generation tech at all, as Fukushima has demonstrated. So to really be sustainable we need to develop either
none of which currently exists in any commercially viable way, so the argument you put forth really does apply to NP before anything else, as common sense would have it - NP is obviously technologically more challenging that anything renewable.
As for the reason that the Nuclear advocates don't mention alternative energy, why should they? What's the point of arguing against something that doesn't exist?
Still they mention the technologies above all the time as if they were here anytime soon. So the real reason seems simply to be that they're totally blinded by the faith in their pet technology and not nearly as much interested in devising realistic solutions to humanity's energy need as in pushing their personal agendas forward .
I also love your "flowing water turbines" (unless you're talking about turbans, in which case I'm sorry). Do you even understand WHY we erect huge dams instead of just tapping the flowing river? Are you really that ignorant of laws of physics?
First, a lot of heavy elements go into making the photovoltaic panels themselves, which last at best, 20 years before needing replacement and this is without any incidence of weather phenomena (hail, etc.).
Thin film bonded to sheets of steel with corrugations between the panels only last maybe 20 years but are essentially immune to hail (As they continue to work if the panel is dented) while some PV panels have now been in service for 30 years, albeit at somewhat diminished efficiency. PV panels could pay back the energy investment in 7 years in the 1970s while thin film panels can pay back the energy investment in 3 years now. It's not "A lot" of heavy elements in all types of solar panels, the quantities used are sometimes vanishingly small. And it's still preferable to put those elements into a panel as opposed to spewing thorium and uranium from coal plants.
We would have to pretty much reshape society (or discover much better energy storage technology) in order to use solar for the majority of our power needs, but I believe it could make up a significantly lager portion than it supplies today. Even here in boondocks maybe 15% of roofs are actually suitable for solar, for example, due to a combination of all the factors that decide such things (I can go into it if there is demand, but one can even more easily look it up) and rooftops are one of the most desirable places to put panels because they actually provide advantages there. So I'm not proposing that we fill all our power needs with solar, just the percentage which we can reasonably and economically fill.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What are your thoughts about EGS geothermal?
Too soon to tell, but so far, I am not encouraged. There was to be a project at The Geysers but the drilling choked several times and the same type of drilling may have been responsible for seismic activity elsewhere (significant similarities exist between the materials involved in both cases) and they stopped the drilling here pending, AFAICT, reduced public interest.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Care to try it? If you did you'd notice that beach sand produces far more and granite far more again than beach sand. Even wikipedia has something that shows you up so you didn't look very far did you? Just throwing the name of an instrument you suppose I've never heard of to try to impress is a bit childish and simply lets me know how old you are.
Why do all these idiots assume that just because they are in High School the rest of us are as well?
Let's pretend there is no geothermal. Because it's base load power, and that screws up our arguments.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
are an inexhaustible supply of tremendous amounts of heat that should be tapped.
You've found a place to put the spent fuel?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Desertec is meant to provide electricity to Europe, including France.
You are 100% correct. The problem is perception and fear. If you cannot find the dead, you invent statistical deaths. Deaths will be found. You cannot simply say that less than only about 100 deaths can be attributed to Chernobyl. The people will not stand for it - there was too much commotion and too many lives were affected for only 100 deaths. So you will get your millions deaths. If you cannot get millions of deaths how can you justify the panic??
When a few people caused havoc on 9/11, what was the response? Was it to inform the passengers that any hijack attempt should be fought against? Was it locking of cockpit doors so hijackers cannot get easy access (not before passengers do something about it). Of course not! The next thing that came from the "Great Terror Threat" were notions of "suitcase nuclear weapons" missing in Russia and probably owned by Taliban. By container ships being loaded with nuclear weapons heading for major cities. By terrorists using crop dusting planes to spray chemical weapons on cities. By terrorists getting their hands on biological weapons and dispersing them at major events. etc. etc. THAT WAS THE NEWS!
If there is panic, then news will invent the reason. Terrorists will have their WMDs and only way to stop them is the tens of billions spent on monitoring the population and other "security". Nuclear reactors all melt down and kill MILLIONS! That's the perception! It is futile to try to claim facts. It is futile to claim that only about 50-100 people died as result of Chernobyl (most were responders to the accident and died immediately afterwards). It is futile to claim that you have a higher chance of "winning big" at a lottery than because of terrorists (also, most people do not understand the odds of lotteries!!)
Regarding the new coal plants. Most of them are intended to replace old ones ...
Which you shouldn't be doing if you care at all about environmental issues, as the Germans claim to do. Coal is the dirtiest energy source we have - mining, air pollution, greenhouse gases, the lot. Extolling the virtues of green energy while building new coal plants is rank hypocrisy.
I'm rather fond of space solar with microwave transmission. The science is good, it would provide base power, and it uses technology we already have. It would be an engineering problem to get a system in place, but you can have environmentally responsible base power, without taking up major swaths of land.
http://www.areva.com/EN/operations-1572/assets-of-the-epr-nuclear-reactor.html
Summary: "We will make the decisions for you, your industry and your company because we know how things work better than you."
Funny, there is a lot of this kind of thinking going around these days....
Another reason why Americans fear Arabs more than they fear the French: Their curses sound like somebody broke off his artificial fingernail: "Merde!" ("Shit!"). Or like a sneezing hamster: "Tais-toi!" ("Shut the fuck up!").
In Arabic, on the other hand, everything sounds like the nastiest fucking curse of a war threat you've ever heard. He could say things like "I love you!" ("ana bahibbik"/"ana uhibbuk"), and to you it would sound like he tries to regurgitate a demon straight from hell.
Who knows, maybe all that time Bin Laden just told us how much he loved us, and we would have known, if only we had bothered translating ourselves what the CIA translated for us. ;) ;P
Also, maybe we should have nuked France instead?
In a way, that is true. Look over in EU. They get one minor quake from some geo-thermal and scream bloody murder. They are busy shutting down their nuke plants rather than fixing them. So now they are going to import natural gas from Russia and the middle east, as well as increase coal on which to provide power. Quite honestly, we need a DIVERSITY of energy input, not fewer.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How did you get modded up. EGS is PROVEN in that it works. Several small systems are operational and new ones are coming. The earthquake in EU has caused the idiots to repeat the current phrase: "when in danger or in doubt, run around in circles, scream and shout". What SHOULD have happened is that they should have said, lets move this away from populations and try this first away from ppl. For example, in the USA, we should be testing this in Colorado, Wyoming, NM, etc. The fact that you minor tremors out of this is ridiculous that ppl get upset about it. Of course, drilling and injecting on fault lines is not too bright either.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think that if you are honest, you MUST agree that ppl have DIED from nukes. For starters, there are deaths occurring in Japan right now due to radiation and more will happen. A number of those ppl that were in the plant working were in their 60's because they KNEW that it was a death sentence (and it was).
However, coal has done a lot more damage.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Geothermal is downright dangerous when used too much (read on geothermal depletion for example).
Uh, no. Just because you use up too much of the heat too quickly is NOT dangerous, just foolish. The reason is that you must wait for future use.
OTH, depleting water/steam from inside OR injecting too much, CAN be dangerous. But that is a different issue.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You seem not to be able to to read, even if you cite it:
Again: new plants (very efficient) replace old plant (very inefficient) do you get it?
Likely not ... ... you know ... since AGES we clean/scrub the exhaust.
German coal plants don't have notice able pollution
We already have reduced our CO2 exhaust significantly, you not. So I would say you are the hypocrisy guy. Till 2020 we will have reduced it by 40% ....
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The one who is ignorant is you.
You seem not to know what a flowing water turbine is ;D ... but go ahead and educate /. with your I know noting but I'm right attitude.
Energy generation changed quite a lot since you went to school ... only the USA did not catch up.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Sorry, the crafters of the turbines give 30 years warranty. So, *WTF* who cares if there is a probelm if the factory fixes it for free?
And: you wrong anyway. No idea what crack you are on.
We sold millions of wind mills the last 10 years. Do you really think anyone would buy them if they would fail randomly?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
do you know how expensive it is to drill?
you need the geothermal resource right at the surface, a 250 foot well costs >10 grand and probably isn't deep enough!
and then you need sufficient cooling water, you need a lot of cooling water. typically you run out of sufficient cooling water before you run out of thermal resources. the water you put down the hole gets strongly mineralized which reduces heat transfer and the efficiency.
whee...
I'm curious as to where you got that from because I've been following this issue since the 1990s and all that comes up from the radioactive fly ash crowd is "we plan to do some sampling soon" but no actual published results. Care to show me what makes you so confident and "informed"? I would like to be informed as well and see the results of this sampling that contradicts what everyone else has observed.
I do know how expensive it is to drill. And a lot more things about your questions. You're way off. You're thinking about this on a "what you might expect" level. It turns out what it is is very much different than you might expect.
Geothermal is baseload power. It can reliably generate up to 98% of its capacity 100 percent of the time - day or night, maintenance or no maintenance. This is even better than nuclear, which has reactors that must be periodically shut down for maintenance. Better than that, since an EGS plant can overextract the heat available it can moderate its consumption of this resource to compensate for variability of other energy resources like wind and solar in a way that nuclear plants can't.
Nuclear takes 10x as much water, and coal needs as much. The geothermal resource must not be at the surface - in fact, a dry well from oil drilling will often do for a start and to prove the resource. Frequently oil and gas exploration terminates with "too hot to drill" conditions that indicate the explorer has found a different kind of energy. The US Department of Energy places the new enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) at about $0.05/KWh, which compares favorably to nuclear. Plant investment is less than nuclear too, but not less than coal. Sometimes geothermal drilling accidentally finds oil, gas or coal resources incidentally, as was recently the case in Britain with a well that found all four. All the major energy drilling companies probably have huge data on geothermal resources they've categorized as "unfit to drill because the rock is too hot" and dry holes to start at. For 50 years or more they call these dry holes and cap them and walk away. There's maybe drillers in receivership you could get with this data for under a million dollars. It's lost data come useful.
The new EGS systems are a closed loop: water is injected into deep dry hot rock, typically after opening up a large surface area for thermal transfer with fracking. When the water comes back up hot the heat is transferred to a second closed loop system that uses another fluid with a low boiling point, much like your refrigerator. This allows conversion of the energy retrieved from water that's not necessarily above 100c when it reaches the surface. The cooler (but still warm) water is then reinjected back into the well, resulting in a closed subterranean loop, and incidentally injecting this warmer water increases the efficiency and lifespan of the well, meaning there are no emissions whatever, ever, except for the precipitates of dissolved minerals that rain out during cooling.
Google, which has been doing some research into minimal footprint power because they use so much of it, funded a study you can find here that allows you to explore geothermal resources with a Google Earth interface. To put it simply, the US has vast amounts of subsurface energy available to be tapped. It costs less than nuclear, has no carbon emissions like coal does, requires no fuel that might fluctuate in cost or availability, is clean available baseload power, but it can be moderated to counteract the variations of wind and solar dynamically on a moment's notice, so it can help integrated those sources into the grid removing the risk.
Over-exploitation can overcool the hot rock to the point where it's not useful, but it doesn't halt the energy flow. Ultimately a level is found that delivers an average use that can be varied in the short term.
Best of all there's no mountain of toxic fly ash to be rid of, no spent fuel you can't find a home for. There is no waste - at all. There's no fuel cost commodity spikes, shortages, embargoes, import levies or restrictions because there is no fuel and this reduces the risks associated with building a plant that must generate power for 50 years or more, and the cost of insurance against such risks. Men don't need to toil miles beneath the ground to
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The energy storage capacity of a solar thermal plant varies based upon the tons of salt employed. We have many gigatons of salt available. More than enough to compensate for periods of dark, periods of winter. We have cubic kilometers of salt.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So until we shut down all the coal fired plants, any talk about shutting down existing nuclear plants is an instance of defective prioritization.
Just to be clear, any talk about shutting down existing nuclear plants because there are better options is the problem. Talking about shutting them down because they are at the end of their design life and will not be safe much longer is still a good idea.
Flowing water turbine is the extension of the idea we had before we learned laws of physics enough to support dams instead of them. It's the idea that you should just feed turbine off flowing river, instead of damming it.
Now, tell me why is it we spend so much resources damming up river. Specifically, reasons that are glaringly obvious in laws of physics.
The extremely obvious problem would be that many important and expensive components of the turbines last about 12-15 years. Which means that if they give you warranty for 30, they also charge you for 30.
Or they charge you for about 5, and charge your government for 25 in subsidies. Which is what actually happens.
And on your last question: yes, but not in the scope you mention. You effectively strawmanned the argument - no one said they fail RANDOMLY. What was said is that they fail QUICKLY - too quickly to ever break even right now, which is why they are heavily subsidized. Now, this isn't bad per se - this is relatively new technology and most new technologies need subsidies to get off their feet. Problem is, it's being rolled out in full... when it's glaringly obviously not ready. And coal and gas plant builders absolutely love wind to death and another dirty secret is that coal and gas lobby lobbies for wind. Because it isn't their competitor - it's their best friend. All wind power will be backed up by coal or gas or similar. At the same time, it shafts their real competitor, nuclear on PR front.
Anyway, most wind turbine failures are fairly predictable, as those are mechanical failures. We have a lot of history and science on how to predict those.
Again: new plants (very efficient) replace old plant (very inefficient) do you get it?
A little better, not much. But a little better than awful is nothing to boast about.
Scrubbers aren't 100% effective and do nothing for CO2, coal is still the most polluting energy source.
Oh, and Germany's co2 emissions are higher than my country's (both totally and per capita) if we're going for comparisons. We also have coal power stations but at least aren't building any more.
It's been a while since I've read a post in which nearly every statement is false. Well, not counting trolls, I guess. Your information might have been true 30 years ago, but it's out of date now.
>>which last at best, 20 years before needing replacement
No, you're thinking of the old PV panels that were only rated for 5 years or so.
Modern solar panels are rated at 20 year lifespans. But this doesn't mean they hit 0% production at 20 years out - it means the manufacturer is guaranteeing that they will not drop below a certain efficiency target (80% or 90%) after 20 years.If they degrade too quickly before then, the manufacturer replaces them. Some even have lifetime warranties now.
>>this is without any incidence of weather phenomena (hail, etc.)
Solar panels typically use tempered glass which are rated at withstanding 1-inch hail at 50MPH. If you're going to have hail larger than that, then you're probably not in the right climate for solar anyway. :p
>>Second, they only work in the daytime so to store the energy through the night, batteries are the most viable option for most locations with the least annual cloudiness. Current battery tech also has a pretty short lifespan and also includes the use of many hazardous elements to produce
Irrelevant. Most rooftop solar systems these days are grid-tied, which means they feed power into the grid during the day (building up on-peak kWh credits) and then suck them back out at night (at off-peak rates). The way the math works out, you don't need to even cover all of your energy consumption to zero out your bill, due to the rate arbitrage differences between on-peak and off-peak pricing.
That's for the individual. But the grid benefits from it too, having seasonal increases in power production right when the grid needs it most, which allows you to escape having to buy very expensive new plants which will run at a low capacity factor.
>>The cost balance tips too far into the red to maintain a grid on solar, and that is without even considering the land necessary to locate enough panels to power an area.
Rooftop solar works, if you're worried about running out of land in the desert areas (heh). Also, we have several pumped-storage units in California which are reasonably efficient ways to store energy at nighttime, but really solar with a nuclear backstop is a perfectly workable model. I used to complain about the cost, but give the extortionate rates we're paying to PG&E for natural gas and hydropower, solar+nuclear would clock in at about half the price.
Rooftop solar works, if you're worried about running out of land in the desert areas (heh).
The real reason PV solar isn't a fit for the desert is that now you have to maintain a bunch of panels in the desert where they a) are probably not close to anything and b) will get wind-etched, trackers will get sand-clogged, et cetera. It has nothing to do with available land. Solar thermal makes sense in the desert, since that's where the solar thermals are. Too bad you can get permits to drill for oil or mine coal in the BLM (which holds a lot of the potentially useful desert land, which must be above sea level to be worth building a multibillion dollar structure on) but you can't get a permit to do solar.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>>Too bad you can get permits to drill for oil or mine coal in the BLM (which holds a lot of the potentially useful desert land, which must be above sea level to be worth building a multibillion dollar structure on) but you can't get a permit to do solar.
Yeah, and when they do issue permits, like the Ivanpah plant, the Sierra Club and NIMBYs will fight tooth and nail to shut it down.
(NIMBYs? In the middle of the desert? Yep.)
PUTAIN !
Not all salt is created equal.
The salt that is used in solar thermal isn't the same as the salt you put on your food, or the use to clear the roads.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The only alternatives are nuclear and coal?! Someone's been playing too much Sim City.
This sounds interesting, but I question depending on it too much, at least right now.
What I am thinking is let's say we have a lot of power coming down from a satellite, and it fails. Its not like a terrestrial power plant where we can focus really hard on the problem and get it back up and running, it might take a minimum of months or even years to restore an orbital power plant, or at least it seems to have that potential problem anyway.
Maybe with redundancy and a regular launch schedule it would not be an issue, but I see it proposed a lot as an easy solution, but very little discussion of its possible problems.
http://richardbrenneman.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/the-chernobyl-death-toll-1000000-not-4000/
Thank you very much for this background information. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't appear on Calpine's "History - The Geysers" page.
All water cooled reactors, boiling or pressurized, which need water to be actively pumped to cool them, are unsafe. The only way to ensure safety is by passive stability, such as the molten salt cooled reactors.
That depends on the alternative. If the alternative is coal, it may be wise to make whatever safety improvements are necessary to keep them in safe operation until such time as the alternative is no longer coal. (Of course, this also ignores the alternative of replacing old nuclear with new nuclear. But that would require us to get past the hysterics and recognize that, no matter what your opinions are, newer nuclear plants are objectively safer than older nuclear plants. Which means there is no principled argument against building new plants if the next best alternative is to continue operating the old ones.)
You have no clue about wind energy an neither about how subsidies in the wind sector work, so please either educate yourself or troll elsewhere.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You still don't know what a flow water turbin is it seems, it does not need a dam. ...
So what exactly is your point? Law of physics require a dam so that a flow water turbine is running? ROFL
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Ash is almost completely silica, the ash gets very hot and the silica liquifies, so if there really was a pile of radioactive material in there it would be vitrified and enclosed in a glassy substance anyway! Maybe that's one reason why the stupid "coal is radioactive too" PR campaign backfired at a time when the nuclear industry was saying that vitrification was enough for their waste.
You say coal isn't more radioactive than other things. The argument isn't that it is.
The argument is that fly ash contains some radioactivity and that so much is emitted directly into the air by coal plants that the coal plants end up emitting more radioactivity than a nuclear power plant. And my understanding is the radioactivity comes from Carbon-14, so you don't need to find other elements in the ash as you seem to say you would.
You keep trying to re-frame this argument to demonize a single bit of fly ash. That's not what it is. It's a commentary on the massive amount of material that a coal plant emits that is not only directly pollutive but also slightly radioactive.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95