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The World Falls Back In Love With Coal
Hugh Pickens writes "Richard Anderson reports on BBC that despite stringent carbon emissions targets in Europe designed to slow global warming and massive investment in renewable energy in China, coal, the dirtiest and most polluting of all the major fossil fuels, is making a comeback with production up 6% over 2010, twice the rate of increase of gas and more than four times that of oil. 'What is going on is a shift from nuclear power to coal and from gas to coal; this is the worst thing you could do, from a climate change perspective,' says Dieter Helm. Why the shift back to coal? Because coal is cheap, and getting cheaper all the time. Due to the economic downturn, there has been a 'collapse in industrial demand for energy,' leading to an oversupply of coal, pushing the price down. Meanwhile China leads the world in coal production and consumption. It mines over 3 billion tons of coal a year, three times more than the next-biggest producer (America), and last year overtook Japan to become the world's biggest coal importer. Although China is spending massive amounts of money on a renewable energy but even this will not be able to keep up with demand, meaning fossil fuels will continue to make up the majority of the overall energy mix for the foreseeable future and when it comes to fossil fuels, coal is the easy winner — it is generally easier and cheaper to mine, and easier to transport using existing infrastructure such as roads and rail, than oil or gas. While China is currently running half a dozen carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects — which aim to capture CO2 emissions from coal plants and bury it underground — the technology is nowhere near commercial viability. 'Renewed urgency in developing CCS globally, alongside greater strides in increasing renewable energy capacity, is desperately needed,' writes Anderson, 'but Europe's increasing reliance on coal without capturing emissions is undermining its status as a leader in clean energy, and therefore global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions.'"
Due to the economic downturn, there has been a 'collapse in industrial demand for energy,' leading to an oversupply of coal, pushing the price down.
This does not make sense. A collapse in demand leading to an oversupply can plausibly cause other people, i.e. non industrial customers, to pick up the excess but that does doesn't result in more people using it than before, just different people.
The fact is that today's children are terrible. The increase in coal production is purely for Santa to leave lumps of it in stockings for these children.
Granted the CO2 is not good if we want the climate to stay as is but if coal is too cheap then we MUST figure a way to use it without the drawbacks.
There has been talk about talking CO2 from the air and making diesel out of it. Why not get straight from a coal burning plant? (BTW: sequestration of CO2 in the ground was proven to cause Earth quakes.)
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Sources suggest that apart from a brief blip during the economic downturn in 2009, worldwide coal consumption has been steadily increasing for the past 10 years or so, after plateauing in 1988-2000.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That's what you get for knee-jerking and planning to shut down all of your nuclear reactors. The promise of replacing that power with clean renewable energy is proving a tad hard to follow up, right? I'm not exactly surprised.
I expect Europe will eventually start driving coal down once more, but it'll take a while to do such a shift, during which time coal will be the stopgap measure. That, or they finally wake up and do nuclear right instead of writing it off entirely.
America is the only country it would seem, still building clean nuclear plants (much less shutting them down as Germany has done!). We are also the only country going full speed ahead on fracking, giving us lots of natural gas to use which burns without emitting CO2. Also where are realistic electric cars like the Telsa being designed? America.
Frankly I did not ever see Europe being a leader in CO2 reduction, they were all talk. It's one thing to sign a paper or give statements of support, it's quite another to carry through with real actions that will actually cause the reduction you seek. If Europe had been at all serious about CO2 reduction they would have leaned on Germany not to close down nuclear plants.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Coal reserves are much higher than oil and gas reserves, and it's dirt cheap to extract when strip mined. The only real question is whether we'll make coal plants cleaner by using all sorts of filters.
I misspoke in saying it burnt without emitting CO2, but as you say it burns cleaner than coal which is what as the article says, they are turning to in Europe.
So switching to a much heavier use of natural gas can significantly reduce CO2 emissions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Or Obama's policies make it too expensive to compete against cheap Chinese coal, even with demand up.
Our leaders have mostly lost faith in the doctrine of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming caused by our emissions of CO2 as we burn fossil fuels.
If our fearless leaders actually believed that we are in danger of runaway catastrophic global warming, they would never allow new coal power. Instead, they pay lip service to CO2 reduction while implementing policies that fly in the face of CO2 reduction.
It's much like the boy who cried wolf. People like Al Gore and James Hanson have been crying their alarmist warming for so long that influential people have stopped believing them. The downside is that those people have also stopped listening to the real scientists.
Don't put France in the same bag as the Germans. The situation is totally different.
That way each one individually get to spend their current share without overloading the planet.
I don't see another solution. It seems countries have better _actual_ results in convincing people to have less children than using green energy.
none
So we are already sliding back, and we haven't even had an Empire and a Foundation.
Since China is the world's largest IMPORTER of coal, there is no cheap Chinese coal on the world market. I didn't even have to RTFA to get that from the summary. The coal industry in the US is hurting because cheap natural gas is displacing it (free market at work, but Murray Energy blames it on Obama). Natural gas outside of the North American market is not (yet) so cheap so it is not pressuring coal outside N. America.
My guess is that the situation in the US is different from the rest of the world in that with the now widespread access to natural gas reserves and all the gas fired power plants built in the 90s it makes more economic sense to burn gas rather than use coal rather. Nothing to do with the alleged Obama policies.
Fukushima killed 20,000 people! Think what a tsunami like that would do in central Europe!
Besides, Europe is going to be 100% solar and wind powered in five years. I think hand-cranked generators are the way to go, though. Think of all the jobs that would be created.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It's not so much PR as reality. Germany is one of the greenest countries in Europe, yet they're building new coal plants. Why? Because they're decommissioning old nuclear plants, and they have to replace them with some suitable base-load source. Since Fukushima, new nuclear plants are practically off the cards, so coal is about it. It's cheap, it's not nuclear, and we don't have to buy it from the Arabs; what's not to love?
Oh no... it's the future.
It seems to me the Greenpeace's successful campaign against nuclear power and failure to campaign against coal power has been a major cause of global warming. No doubt Greenpeace knew or should have known since the 1980s how much worse coal is for the environment.
China and the US have similar reserves of coal (about a quarter of the world's supply each.) Coal is a PITA to transport compared to natural gas (weight vs. energy). There's lot's of natural gas in the Arctic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_exploration_in_the_Arctic, which is probably why China is building icebreakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Xue_Long. When their second one is built, they will have as many active as the U.S., which *is* an Arctic nation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Council with corresponding mineral rights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Law_of_the_Sea.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
Elections have consequences.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It astounds me that people who call themselves, "green," because they have a car that runs on a battery. I'm not talking about hybrid cars, but rather the ones that plug into a charging station, a majority of which have a power plant powered by coal supplying it energy.
Here's a visualization of energy flows (including coal) for the World, USA, UK and China for 2007
Still cleaner unless it's 100% coal or very close to it. A dirtier electric car is only possible in a few places in the US and China. In most places they would be FAR cleaner.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This should be great for the zeta cartels - it seems they've expanded from drugs and mass-murder to the coal industry.
Now when we do such things as turn on a light, we can relish more than our collective carbon boot-print on the Earth's bemired face -- we can smile as we bask in the sanguineous luminosity of torture and intoxication too!
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Coal spews more radiation than a nuclear meltdown, and kills many more people in it's extraction and mining. How's that for some things not to love?
..don't panic
Or the people who deride others for flying, as they prefer to go by high speed train. Tip: traversing a country like France by plane is actually greener, unless that high speed train is powered by those nice French nuclear power stations.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Coal spews more radiation than a nuclear meltdown, and kills many more people in it's extraction and mining. How's that for some things not to love?
Well, I don't love it, and you don't love it, but the people with the money who are making the decisions love it.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The nuclear accident of Fukushima has yet to kill *a single person* due to radiation. I don't know where you get your data, but surely it's not factual.
"Coal spews more radiation than a nuclear meltdown"
I'd like to see a source for that. More radiation than a properly functioning nuclear plant, maybe. But accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima: no way!
Plus: the radioactivity released by coal plants is mostly in the fly ash, which is filtered out in modern plants. So it's essentially comparing near zero amounts of radioactivity.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Fukushima killed 0. The earthquake and tsunami killed 20,000. Is that what you meant?
The global picture is very different from the American picture. Worldwide, gas is expensive, and coal is cheap. In the US, fracking has caused the price of gas to plunge. (European gas prices have doubled since the 2009 crash; in the US they've *dropped* by 20% since then.)
I teach a college class on energy: we visited a New England coal power plant a couple of months ago. They only operate the plant one day out of four now, because they can't compete against natural gas plants.
So TFA is right, from a European perspective (the article is from a UK site). And in the US, Murray Energy *is* feeling the squeeze. But not because of Obama's "war against coal": coal companies are losing out to gas due to cold hard free-market capitalism, and Murray's taking the opportunity to kick his workers to the curb just before the holidays (as he's done before), and blame his political enemy for it.
I have heard coal emits 100x more radiation than nuclear (in normal operation), but that radiation is still is mostly harmless (it certainly doesn't emit less than an uncontained nuclear meltdown, though). Waste coal releases mostly non-fissile Uranium and Thorium, both of which have an extremely long half life and are beta and alpha emitters, respectively. It also will release some radon since that is a byproduct of Uranium and Thorium decay chains, and I'd be a bit more wary of that, but not as much as natural gas, which directly puts radon in your house. Still, I am not a fan of conventional nuclear or coal and would like to see LFTR nuclear replace both.
It's not so much PR as reality. Germany is one of the greenest countries in Europe, yet they're building new coal plants. Why? Because they're decommissioning old nuclear plants, and they have to replace them with some suitable base-load source. Since Fukushima, new nuclear plants are practically off the cards, so coal is about it. It's cheap, it's not nuclear, and we don't have to buy it from the Arabs; what's not to love?
Emphasizes mine.
Thats wrong.
The new plants are planned and commissioned since a decade, long before the final step to abandone nuclear was done.
On top of that the new plants replace older plants that will get decommissioned. Because the new plants are cleaner and more efficient and integrated into "community heating networks".
And the final error: we don't need more coal plants for "base load", we have by far enough wind power for base load.
What you miss: wind power can not be used to follow the load and adapt to changing load/demand.
Coal can, so coal plants are used for load following, not for base load.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Since China is the world's largest IMPORTER of coal
Net, not gross. There's plenty of coal in China, they just consume more than they produce.
there is no cheap Chinese coal on the world market
"Not enough coal to be self-sufficient" isn't the same as "not enough coal to drive down prices."
The coal industry in the US is hurting because cheap natural gas is displacing it
Apples and oranges in the power industry. Coal is base load, gas is peak.
Agree.
It's not the cost of regulation that's causing coal to shut down, it's the straight-up cost of fuel vs cost of electricity.
Proof? This fall I visited the Brayton Point coal power plant in southern Massachusetts. Because they're in Mass, they've been forced to install every last state-of-the-art pollution control device on the planet, including most recently $600 million to build two enormous cooling towers. They've already complied with the regulations you say are causing coal plants to shut down, and they have a gigantic bill to pay off -- that bill doesn't go away if they sit idle. So you'd think they would run the plant every day, even if they only made a nickel of net profit. But since the fracking boom, they only run the plant once every few days, when the price of electricity is highest: at other times, the cost of coal is greater than the sale price of electricity.
The medical community isn't serious about cancer research, because if they were they'd be pouring money into researching alternative forms of medicine that are more advanced than traditional biology, including crystal therapy and homeopathy. Which based on the evidence are two of the simplest ways to cure cancer.
Well, the 13,000 deaths per year that are attributed to coal-fired power plants in the US alone. How about not loving that?
Source: http://www.catf.us/fossil/problems/power_plants/existing/
How many deaths in the US are attributed to nuclear power per year? None?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Not sure if you're trolling, joking, or just an idiot. You can't point to an example of a Fukushima-like population center wiped out due to radiation from coal because the effects are distributed invisibly among the entire population of the planet. The solution to pollution is dilution, and coal plants get rid of their radioactive waste by 'diluting' it right into our lungs.
You won't see any earnest young reporters taking us through the pulmonary ward at the local nursing home, or the hospice where a wide cross-section of people regularly die of cancers that we normally associate with smoking. Jane Fonda isn't going to picket the ICU at the hospital where people succumb to pneumonia they might otherwise have survived. Nothing in those places is glowing green, melting through concrete floors, or setting off radiation alarms. That's not how coal pollution kills people.
I sincerely hope IHBT, in which case I will STFU and HAND.
Ya, but what other source of power provides enough output to cause a tsunami!
Sorry, answered to some posts and can't mod anymore or I had modded you up again. Complain to support, perhaps the modder is a "known rogue mod".
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That's nothing compared to solar power! Have you even seen how much radiation the Sun emits?
Outside of wikipedia the distinction between base and peak is not so clearcut.
Forbes Magazine (outspoken defender of free markets) had these two articles in May of 2012:
"Shale Gas Takes On Coal To Power America's Electrical Plants", May 30, 2012
and "Why Shale Gas Is Closing Coal Plants, So Why Do The Hippies Hate Shale?", May 5, 2012
http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/05/30/shale-gas-takes-on-coal-to-power-americas-electrical-plants/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/05/05/why-shale-gas-is-closing-coal-plants-so-why-do-the-hippies-hate-shale/
So the electric utilities in the US are substituting natural gas for coal due to price differences. I read it first in The Economist.
Very bad example.
First the high speed traines ARE powered mainly by nuclear or german wind ;D
Secondly even if it was coal, the train would be more ecologic than going by plane.
The plane uses roughly five liter diesel/kerosine per 100km per passenger, the train *one*.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So, "settles for Coal compromise" is "Falls in LOVE with Coal".
That difference is industry propaganda.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Have you been playing Fallout recently?
The 13,000 is CATF's estimate of deaths from *all* power plants in the U.S., not just coal plants.
More directly relevant is that coal plants cause 4000 deaths for every one death caused by nuclear power.
For some weird definitions of "green". ... that's about it.
Yes, they sort waste and have nice big photovoltaic plants on their roofs.
And
Otherwise, it's just big cars, bigger cars and more expensive cars with a nice "Atomkraft, nein Danke!" sticker.
It's also wind and solar electricity that is exported to Norwegian dams with imports mainly coming from French, Swiss and Check nukes.
It's also using escalators everywhere, and then paying 70€/month for the gym.
It's finally flying to Turkey/Mallorca/Bali for a week-end.
Sorry, that's just PR bullshit to me.
"Coal spews more radiation than a nuclear meltdown" I'd like to see a source for that. More radiation than a properly functioning nuclear plant, maybe. But accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima: no way!
No matter how I count, I get a few PBq in the form of long-lived isotopes from coal, annually, and Fukushima released something like 14 PBq of moderately long lived isotopes, in total. You know, all the 238U and 232Th from the coal is going to stay with us for a very, very long time...
Ezekiel 23:20
And the death's related to coal aren't presented the same way in the media as death's related to nuclear meltdowns.
In a mining disaster, typically a cave-in that traps miners underground, focus is initially on recovering the miners, then the mine owner is fined/put out of business and that's the end of it.
For a nuclear meltdown, it's focus on the actual meltdown itself, then fine/put the owner out of business, then push for the shutdown of all nuclear reactors everywhere.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Gee, and all this time we were burning it, when we could just as easily put it directly into our nuclear reactors!!!
Actually, there are companies doing precisely that - separating uranium from the ash to sell it to the nuclear industry. And for good reason: AFAIK, there's even more energy in the fissile and fertile material present in coal than in the coal itself.
Ezekiel 23:20
Dear AC, I don't give a damn about what's better for the economy. I am not going to advocate for killing retired people, or turn a blind eye to issues that cause them to die.
> what's not to love?
I think your Devil's advocate deserves a response, so here's one: the wanton destruction of future civilizations and the mass extermination of a large percentage of the species on the planet perhaps?
Give or take some fluctuation in the actual numbers, this article is still well worth the read, the math doesn't change:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719
Cheap labour is the way of the future and has been for the past 3000 years. It's also referred to as trade, growth, and prosperity.
This is not to say that America hasn't made some blunders. American manufacturing was in the catbird seat until Detroit happened. Want a small, fuel-efficient car that doesn't fall to pieces the minute your service contract expires? The Japanese will make one (eventually). Detroit could have matched the Honda Civic while the Civic still sucked, but they had their heads up their ass-hats. It would have cut into selling overpriced and oversized cars you really didn't need. Why sell utility when you can sell dreams.
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Jap-Crap. Jap-Crap with a plan. Jap-Crap planning to kick your ass.
Oh, yeah? You and who else?
It takes a real genius to spin the globe and miss China. Well done, Detroit, well done.
If it weren't for Asia, America would still be making oversized shit that breaks like clock-work. Outside of high tech, that's mainly what America was good at. We don't bring out our A game until we have a trillion dollar sustainment program on the boondoggle warpath.
The golden era of high domestic wages and low productivity was paved by the global petroleum monopoly. Did the Arabs really want to sell us all those barrels for half the net proceeds accruing to what we could manufacture by its consumption? Hint: they didn't have many great choices.
Knock, knock.
Who's there.
F18.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
OK, let's talk business. Name your price.
But go ahead and spin your weird little protectionist narratives.
With the F35 we're now balanced on the knife edge at the post-knock knock end of history.
Ultimately coal may be the most expensive source in human history but the trick is proving it without denial wiping out the evidence. Just look at Sandy. And yes I do realize it wasn't caused by global warming that was never the issue. The point is was it a stronger storm because of the energy provided by warming? I can't remember the last time New York was threatened with being swamped. It was threatened a year or two ago then nailed this year. There's some belief it may happen every four years now. Sandy did around 60 billion in damage. Look at the tornadoes we had a couple of years ago in the mid west. I think that's a much stronger case for global warming caused storms. The tornadoes wiped out whole towns and hit multiple states. That's two incidents in one country. The worldwide total is likely in the hundreds of billions a year and it could be much more. Eventually it could be in the trillions a year. Ridiculous? Given the latest projections by mid century we could be easily talking those numbers. The coast will likely retreat anywhere between a few hundred feet to a few miles on average. That's a lot of expensive property lost just on the coast. The point is we're being short sighted and just reacting to the symptoms of climate change. We're already locked in for a few degrees of increase but what happens when we get several times that? Don't worry about changing your lifestyle, it will change! We may be able to control the degree of change but that option is going away very fast.
I live in Berlin, and while I agree that a lot of Germany's green image is PR hype, there are a few facts I want to add:
Germany also has huge amounts of wind generators, you did mention this but in the wrong paragraph.
The majority of buildings in Berlin don't have elevators (that might become wrong soon, all new ones do).
and also one that supports your point:
Germany's waste sorting is a giant sham, they put almost everything non-organic into a 'recycling bin' and then they only recycle the stuff that it is profitable to recycle, and send the rest to the third world. I think it is around 25% of the contents of those bins that is actually recycled. The bottle refund system seems to work though
Other than that you have it about right
And solar radiation is directly responsible for more cancer deaths than any other radiation source. BAN SOLAR FOR THE CHLDRNZZZZ!!!!!
The irony is that the greens spent so much time in the '80's and 90's demonizing nuclear energy and we are just now reaping what they sowed. Nuclear plants could be designed to be basically accident proof, yet they are saddled with such regulatory burden that it is basically not possible to build new ones in the US.
Hence we are stuck with a national energy policy that is based on wishes, rainbows and unicorn farts. And, like it or not, coal.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
You still need to multiply by nuclear accidents per year to get your final numbers.
Yeah, sometimes, and I found my source after the fact with a bit of searching. It basically says what I did above and what you said - thorium and uranium are concentrated about 10x in the ash and are either processed out or go up the stack, but the added radiation is really not a big deal. The radiation burns you get from that giant fusion reactor in the sky are definitely a lot more risky.
Multiply that by 1000x and you get the estimated yearly deaths due to outdoor air pollution, mostly created through burning of fossil fuels. Indoor air pollution (i.e. cigarette smoke) kills about 2 million yearly. I don't know how many deaths occur through uranium mining, but I'm sure it is far outstripped by deaths due to coal mining, as they need an awful lot more coal to make the same amount of power as nuclear.
The wind turbines say "Whoosh!"
The problem is similar to cars vs airplanes - you are WAY more likely to die in a car accident than in an airplane accident, but many people absolutely panic when they have to fly because when accidents do happen, they often kill hundreds of people instead of a handful. People are irrational that way - they see a volume event as a way greater than a gradual event. I have a friend that spends $10 a week to play the lottery because he's sure he will win. If he wisely invested that money instead, he'd probably be off welfare (yeah, we're paying him to play the lottery, facepalm).
or geothermal! - Have you seen how much power that giant thorium fission reactor in the earth's core puts out?
True, in France the TGV will run on nuclear power. But in any other case, the plane does win on long distance journeys. The thing is that a plane uses *assloads* of fuel on take-offs, but once airborne it uses little. If your journey is long enough, it'll beat the train.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
In face, the entire article is misleading.
The World is IN LOVE WITH MONEY.
Anything you can do to increase profits is acceptable, irrespective of how badly it damages the environment.
And I say THE Environment because THERE IS ONLY ONE, we all share it, and once it is so badly damaged that it no longer works well for ANY part of humanity, we're ALL screwed.
Seriously folks, either clean up your act here on PLANET EARTH or fund NASA (and friends) sufficiently so that we have "a backup plan" on some other planet.
Yours Faithfully,
The Selfish Gene.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
People like to believe that Coal and other fossil fuels continue to be long-term viable energy sources because they honestly believe that "carbon capture works".
Surely there's NOBODY out there who doesn't know that bandaid solutions eventually fail, and when they do they fail MUCH WORSE than just getting off your fat arse and fixing the problem.
My prediction for the future is that at some point a large number of previously "successful" carbon-capture schemes will fail.
Fail in the sense of "containment failure" , suddenly releasing all that previously 'captured' cee-oh-too back into the atmosphere.
In the space of a year-or-three The Balance will shift and Venus will not be much of a mystery anymore.
Don't believe me? Well think on this - millions of years ago they had a warming planet due to excess CO2 emissions, someone thought up the great plan of capturing all that excess carbon into great 'deposits' and fossilising them. (Coal, Oil, etc) "nobody will ever bother these deposits, they'll be safe FOREVER".
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I'd like to see a source for that. More radiation than a properly functioning nuclear plant, maybe. But accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima: no way!
Plus: the radioactivity released by coal plants is mostly in the fly ash, which is filtered out in modern plants. So it's essentially comparing near zero amounts of radioactivity.
Much of the radiation from coal is released during mining/extraction. The remainder is released during burning. The problem is, you need many times more coal to produce the same amount of energy, than from uranium. We're talking 5 or 6 orders of magnitude larger masses of carbon compared to uranium. That's why, per kilowatt hour, coal fired plants + extraction of coal emit about twice as much radioactive material into the environment, than nuclear plants.
But the sad thing is, the radioactive material isn't even nearly the worst that coal fired plants release into the environment: the list of toxins that are released is staggering and frightening. One of the worst is mercury. There was a time when eating salmon was a no brainer (sorry for the pun), while today you are weighing the pros and cons, due to the accumulated methylmercury. In Finland, children under 1 year of age are not allowed to eat salmon at all, because of the brain damage that mercury causes.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
We all hate moronic talking points - how about we agree to drop them? Chernobyl is an example of radiation problems. 3 Mile Island was a tamer example. And, now, Fukushima. The Greenies talk about all that radiation from coal, but they can't point to one example of a population center depopulated due to radiation from coal.
Try sticking to the REAL drawbacks of using coal.
The reason you have depopulated population centers around the nuclear plants where things have gone wrong is to prevent deaths that we are already seeing in the coal industry and coal power plants but are used to. Is your goal cheap energy, saving lives, or being green? The only one coal comes out better than nuclear is being cheap. All that mercury that we get warned about in fish, guess what percentage of that came from coal mines and power plants.
If you think wind power provides base load, you may need to review what "base load power source" means.
Does a dead human produce when burned? Soylent Green isn't people, the fuel used to create the power to your house is.
And you just pinpointed the reason coal is so popular : The damage it does is not concentrated. Instead of wiping out a small area it slowly poisons a large one. The number of deaths may be greater, but they (mostly) can't be proved to be the result of the coal - it's hard for it to kill you quickly. So they just fade into the background - and that's when everything goes right with the power plant.
Nuclear power is capable of high death counts when things go wrong, and very little pollution otherwise. But when things do go wrong, the deaths (even if there are relatively few) are gruesome and therefore highly visible. At the same time it's easier to track the radiation they do release - it's above the normal background radiation, rather then setting the background radiation like coal.
And if you want to drag Chernobyl into it (which was the result of scientists experimenting, not some sort of a random accident), then why not also compare it to some other accidents? Like the Banqiao Dam failure, which killed about 170k people.
The difference is that the residual radioactive materials in coal power station exhaust and fly ash tend to be long-lived ones from natural decay processes -- U238's half-life is 4.5 billion years so a tonne of uranium metal isn't actually very radioactive and in a lump nearly all of the decays that happen every second occur deep inside the lump and never make it to the outside where they can have an effect on the environment. In the case of power station fly ash radioactive contaminants like U238 and Th232 are diluted in lagoons under water and the perceived problem is the chemical toxicity of the sludge (toxic metals, dioxins, sulfur compounds etc.) rather than its radioactivity.
Conversely fission products from a reactor fuel rod that's been run for any length of time have a wide range of half-lifes from milliseconds to millenia. Some are long-lived enough to be an ongoing problem for disposal while also having short enough half-lives that they emit noticeable and possibly dangerous amounts of radioactivity. For example cesium-137 has a 30-year half-life so a kilogram or two spread as fine particles over a wide area due to an accidental release such as in the Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents will emit significant amounts of radioactivity for a time measured in human lifespans. Coal power station waste has virtually no radioactive contaminants with such a short half-life, but there is a very large amount of it produced every year. The exception is radon which is released in both coal mining and combustion -- all of the radon isotopes are quite short-lived and highly active.
Enough radioactive material escapes coal station chimneys even with 99%-plus filtration and precipitation in the stacks that it can be trivially detected downwind for long distances, especially if rain washes it down onto population centres nearby. I've seen a report of radioactive material attributed to the Fukushima releases being detected with simple radiation monitoring instruments in rainwater samples in the middle of St. Louis MO not long after the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. One of the biggest coal-fired power station complexes in the US (Labadie, burning over 8 million tonnes of coal each year to produce 2.3GW of electricity) is about 20 miles to the west from where the measurements were taken.
Also, the Germans are increasing imports of electricity, from France, who generate most of their electricity via nuclear power. So the Germans are keeping French nuclear reactors in business while they decommission theirs. And they will continue to do so unless they ban the cross boarder importation of electricity generated via nuclear power. Utterly crazy.
I always say: What do I fear about flying? The taxi ride from the airport.
I assume you mean civilian population because I know a few people went into right into the nuclear leaking part to manually fix things and they came out with radiation burns covering large portions of their bodies. I'm sure those people didn't live.
Nope, you mean to do that ;D ... since 25 years.
The old traditional base load as it is written in english wikipedia does no longer exist
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
What part of:
a plane needs 5 litres per 100km per person
a train uses 1 liter per 100km per person
did you not get?
That is irrelevant of distance!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And what about hydro power? There's DHMO all over the place at hydro power plants!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
That's actually a persistent myth. Yes, a plane uses much more fuel per minute during take-off than during high-altitude cruise. But take-off doesn't take that many minutes. On any but the shortest flights, the bulk of the fuel carried by a plane is burned during cruise. And it's certainly not more energy-efficient than an electric train. And most countries that have high-speed trains happen to produce a large percentage (much larger than the US, that is) of their electricity from non-fossil-fuel sources.
odd but it seems to me that coal usage has increased ever since we discovered it and so has our average life spans. It seems that the dilution argument would have some data that is at odds with it. I dont really care either way but I generally dont go for reasoning that starts with a "you cant measure it so we have no correlation data but trust me its there" foundation.
If you don't start building another nuclear reactor fairly soon after you've finished the last one you don't have much of a nuclear industry any more and it costs a fortune to set up a new one almost from scratch.
What we see now is a bit of spin to make retiring old plants look "green" when instead it's being done on economic grounds as the old stuff gets more expensive to maintain or is already at the end of it's design life. Restarting a civilian nuclear program is just not going to happen in Europe until the state of the economy changes, and the same applies in the USA even though the startup costs will be a bit less.
Ah, the Alex Gabbard article in the Oak Ridge labs newsletter has got another follower. Note I said newsletter, since that bullshit never ended up in a peer reviewed paper and the guy that wrote it was a manager and not a researcher. It did end up in a bit of lazy journalism in Scientific American, but if you look at the comments on the online version you'll see a few pointing out precisely why it's fictional crap.
We've had the equipment to detect all this radioactive material that is supposed to be going up the stack for well over a century but nobody has seen it yet. I wonder why? Maybe Mr (not Dr) Alex Gabbard can write his first peer reviewed paper in his life about it. He won't be able to put a fantasy about terrorists being able to build nuclear bombs from ash in it if he wants to get past peer review unless he can back it up with more than just hand waving bullshit.
It's easy, it's a divide by zero error. The fanboys are assuming a fully contained meltdown (like TMI) so "spewing" zero radiation. Nice trick but an entirely pointless and juvenile thing to put into anything other than a joke.
Gotta give you points on that. Hydroelectric is clean and safe - until it isn't.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Here's a little exercise. Find the most radioactive coal on earth and calculate how many hundreds of thousands of tonnes you'd have to extract the radioactive material from to get enough material to give you the infamous "banana dose".
This "coal is nuclear too" bullshit is what we get left over from a backfired PR exercise to try to get people to accept nuclear waste by comparing it to coal ash and relying on people to not be able to grasp the idea of background radiation. I'm sure if you put in a bit of thought you can dig your way out from under this delusion.
The sad thing is the radioactive material is a complete non-issue which distracts from the real ways that using coal kill people. It was part of a failed 1970s PR campaign to try to get restrictions on nuclear waste relaxed, and at the heart of it was an Oak Ridge manager that has never published a peer reviewed paper in his life, and since he retired to write novels it doesn't look like he ever will.
Not much. Most of it is from gold mining.
Actually it is starting to do that in some places. It's still an expensive way to do that though and relies on pump storage of some form (water or pressurised air) to provide continuous supply.
As someone active in biomedical research (inflammation, not directly cancer) I can say that any claims that cancer researchers do not want to find a cure and that there would be some sort of "conspiracy" holding progress back is pure bullshit. The sad truth is that cancer is not a single disease and lately it has become evident that even within a single patient, the population of cancer cells can be highly divergent (including the still controversial idea about "cancer stem cells", which are non-dividing and thus resistant to most chemotherapy). There are lots of very interesting data still in basic research which will take years before they get out into clinic and sadly there are also very promising drug candidates that due to economic reasons will have a difficult time getting promoted by drug companies. One of those examples is salicylic acid - which has shown very promising results against colon cancer and a number of other types. The problem is that it is an old drug of natural origin which is basically impossible to patent. This means that no companies are interested in funding phase I to III trials (which is actually the most expensive part of drug development). Other highly interesting developments at the moment are the cancer-specific T-cell treatments (or vaccinations), which I do believe will become a future treatment strategy - unfortunately most of this research is publicly funded at the universities and the industry only steps in after they are nearly sure that they will be able to reap the benefits.
It astounds me that people who call themselves, "green," because they have a car that runs on a battery. I'm not talking about hybrid cars, but rather the ones that plug into a charging station, a majority of which have a power plant powered by coal supplying it energy.
It all depends on where they live. There are places in the world, and in US in particular, where hydro is the source of most electricity (e.g. PNW).
Dude he is spending $10 a week on LOTTO TICKETS, you think any "investments" this guy would make would actually do better? And what kind of broker is gonna take a client that only has $10 a week to invest?
I hate to say it but your friend has better odds with the lotto tickets than with any penny ante stocks you could get for $10 a week, at least with the lotto he has like a 1 in a bazillion chance of winning, with those low rent penny ante stocks its gotta be pretty damned close to zero as you sure as hell ain't buying no Google or Apple stock for $10, hell you can't even get MSFT for $10.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I assume you mean civilian population because I know a few people went into right into the nuclear leaking part to manually fix things and they came out with radiation burns covering large portions of their bodies. I'm sure those people didn't live.
Well, in the sense that they don't exist they don't live.
Because nobody "came out with radiation burns covering large portions of their bodies".
A couple of people got burns to their feet by standing in radioactive water, but they (AFAIK) haven't died.
There are videos on Youtube claiming things are much worse, but I don't consider that a reliable source.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I'm not an American. If I was, it wouldn't affect me, if anything I'd be happy about the decreased fossil fuel extraction.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Not on any scale worth mentioning. It's possible to do, but no one is doing it, so why even MENTION it?
It's just a way for people to rationalize that "oh, we can clean up coal" when in fact no one does clean up coal's CO2.
--PM
Hello,
It's not clear to me that fusion can EVER be made practical. It's quite possible that a SMALL fusion plant just can't be made, which leaves you with investing in mega-plants. Then, if you pay more in capital to build a fusion plant than you can recover from selling the power than, say, wind power, no one will ever build a fusion plant.
As an example of the stringent constraints on fusion, did you know that a thermal plasma of reasonable size with elements heavier than hydrogen + helium cools off faster via Bremsstrahlung than it generates heat via fusion? That pretty much leaves us with D-D (harder) and D-T (easier) fusion as possible reactions, both of which produce lots of neutron flux. These neutrons activate many materials and require big thermal conversion units that'll get really, really radioactive. Furthermore, it seems apparent that a thermal plasma fusion plant will have to be "big enough" or it won't be able to sustain burning, pointing at a large capital investment to make it go.
Thus, I have strong doubts that fusion plants can ever be justified as a capital investment vs. an investment in, say, geothermal or wind or fission.
Best,
--PM
when the labor market is saturated and there are no jobs for the masses to do
The trend is towards "labor market saturation" meaning almost everyone has a job. Jobs are growing faster (and in the process paying better) than global population is.
According to this page, a person would get a dose of roughly 0.2 millisieverts from inhaling a milligram of natural uranium or 1.2 millisieverts from ingesting said milligram of natural uranium. According to Wikipedia, the "Banana equivalent dose" is roughly 80 nanosieverts.
Wikipedia noted a coal mine in North Dakota which had 0.005% U3O8 by mass or 50 milligrams of uranium per ton of mined coal.
Crude calculation is that there appears to 750,000 banana equivalent units of radiation from natural uranium alone (not counting thorium!) per ton of this coal. So we would need to ingest a bit over 1 microton (or one gram!) of this coal in order to have that banana equivalent dose.
The TL;DR for my previous post, is that you are speaking of hundreds of thousands of tons of coal while my calculation indicates grams. That's 11 orders of magnitude difference between you and reality, assuming I didn't drop a zero or two in your favor in my calculation.
Up until a few years ago, the main ingredient in solar cells, silicon, piggy-backed on the electronics industry, because the supply chain already existed. Then the volume of silicon for solar cells became larger than that for electronics. Since it does not have to be as high purity, and often can be polycrystalline rather than single crystal, custom plants to make "solar grade silicon" were built. The market price for PV silicon dropped from $400/kg to a current $16, and the price of the cells dropped right along with it.
Today the average price of the completed panels is $0.70/watt, and is expected to fall to $0.55/watt by the end of next year. So the argument that solar is too expensive is just no longer true. Please note that the panels are not the only cost for a utility scale plant, you have inverters and transformers, site prep, installation, and project overhead (design, permits, etc.), but the total cost of a solar plant is now competitive with other sources of power, especially in the US southwest. Rooftop panels are still about twice the cost of utility scale plants, because it is just less efficient to send out a crew to install a half dozen panels on a roof than to install literally hundreds of thousands in open desert.
Anyone who says solar is "too expensive" today has to explain why big utilities are signing power purchase agreements with the PV plant owners, and the banks and Wall Street are financing the plants at attractive interest rates.
While most current coal power stations have 33% efficiency it is possible to make them 50%+ ( up to 57% efficient ) with the use of supercritical co2 turbines ( or 40-50% improvement of ratio energy/co2 ) see about this technology http://www.echogen.com/documents/TMISept_Oct12_000.pdf with few percents of efficiency going into 70% capture of co2 ( which are noticeable with 33% efficiency but much less with 50% efficiency ) co2 capture turns to be quite feasible even for china
Nuclear power is capable of high death counts when things go wrong, and very little pollution otherwise.
I mostly agree with you, but the big elephant in the room you are missing is used fuel - the quantities are not huge, but it remains dangerous for very long time and the most common method of dealing with it has been "put it in the backyard in a storage facility and we will think of something in the future".
And how exactly are we dealing with the pollution that coal causes? Only instead of storing it in the back yard we scatter it around the city before deciding to do something about it 'tomorrow'.
Yes nuclear waste is a problem, but it could fairly easily be handled, either by reprocessing it or by building permanent storage facilities. It's barely a blip compared to all the waste humanity produces or the damage it's causing to the world.
Yes, as I said I agree - but the waste *is* a problem so nuclear is not without pollution. And the waste issue *must* be solved somehow. The fact that coal is more polluting is irrelevant, we can't just hope that the nuclear waste problem goes away (well, some suggest that it is ok to leave that to our (grand) children to deal with, as have suggested in the past regarding cleaning acid rain causing pollution from coal powerplants etc.).
And yes, there are solutions, you named the two most obvious ones, reprocessing is not feasible yet (due the lack of reactors capable of doing that, reasons for *that* are too numerous to list...) and long-term storage has not been widely used so far - in my country (Finland) we are just now starting to store used fuel permanently, although nuclear power has been used here since 1977 - and our bed rock is stable, and *still* it has taken 30 years to even start thinking about the long-term storage (this also tells that the amount of wast is not that big, but on the other hand also that it is a non-trivial issue).
A world (not planet) destroying trap. It's bait (cheap energy) is far, far too sweet to be resisted. Our doom is named: Coal.
What are the reasons for no reprocessing? If governments can be trusted to keep nukes 'safe', then why not trust them with reprocessing?
And storage is a problem because there is no pressure on the government to build it. If all those environmentalists campaigned for building it, instead of ignoring the waste, enough could quickly be built to store the waste of the next few centuries.
Thank you.
Considering that the waste problem is solved by breeder reactors and/or waste reprocessing, I can only assume the elephant you're referring to is pink and imaginary because you're drunk on the anti-nuclear kool-aid.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Cool - show us the working with this crude calculation instead of just asserting an answer that appears to contradict what everyone else has observed. Maybe you are actually correct, but I very strongly doubt it.
For the record, none of the fly ash I looked at in the 1990s had detectable levels of uranium or throrium (using SEM backscatter) but I never looked at fly ash from US coal.
"Coal spews more radiation than a nuclear meltdown"
Not sure why, but I initially read that as "Cows spew more radiation than a nuclear meltdown"
Show me a working breeding reactor and I call this problem solved - yes, it is nice in theory, but not in practical use anywhere, yet. I sure hope that will help in solving the problem but until actual implementations are in production it is vaporware.
Instead in the real world countries around the world are building long-term storage facilities in bed rock...
Really? Do I live on a different planet? Seems like there's big unemployment and massive underemployment in the US.
Maybe jobs are growing faster in the 3rd world, or the various dictatorships?
--PM
Cool - show us the working with this crude calculation instead of just asserting an answer that appears to contradict what everyone else has observed./quote> 1 ton coal * 5*10^-5 tons U3O8/tons coal*0.85 tons natural uranium/tons U3O8*1.2 millisieverts/1 milligram ingested natural uranium/(80 nanosieverts/banana equivalent dose) = 640,000 banana equivalent units.
So..I was off by 15% due to ignoring the oxygen content of U3O8,, but otherwise correct.
For the record, none of the fly ash I looked at in the 1990s had detectable levels of uranium or throrium (using SEM backscatter) but I never looked at fly ash from US coal.
So? What's the detection threshold for SEM backscatter? I find it suspicious that you didn't detect anything given how common uranium and thorium are in the Earth's crust.
Really? Do I live on a different planet?
Well, I don't live on Planet Berkeley so yes.
Maybe jobs are growing faster in the 3rd world, or the various dictatorships?
Well, guess where the people actually are? As I indicated, there's a lot of growth in jobs globally and a lot of growth in wages. Not everyone lives in places that are deliberately destroying their ability to employ people.
Not every rock on the planet is the same as every other. Considering that I was detecting iron from the fly ash contacting pipework on the way out I'd say the threshold was low enough to spit in the face of this stupid "fly ash is nuclear waste too" from Alex Gabbard and a pile of parrots that know even less about coal than Alex Gabbard.
I'd link to a news article from the day before yesterday about the real problem with people dying while mining coal instead of this failed PR bullshit inventing a fake problem, but there's probably no point since they may even be a new Chinese coal mine accident in the news today. Coal kills real people in real ways but the Alex Gabbard "terrorists could build a nuclear weapon out of fly ash" bullshit is something not even SF writers could get away with.
I'd like to see a source for that. More radiation than a properly functioning nuclear plant, maybe.
[ To copy a post from myself from 2005. ] I find this interesting. It's a little old (1982), but the summary is:
For the year 1982, assuming coal contains uranium and thorium concentrations of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively, each typical plant released 5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons of thorium that year. Total U.S. releases in 1982 (from 154 typical plants) amounted to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of uranium-235) and 1971 tons of thorium. These figures account for only 74% of releases from combustion of coal from all sources. Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.
And that's just for one year. The projected cumulative stats for year 2040 (100 years of coal burning):
U.S. release (from combustion of 111,716 million tons): Uranium: 145,230 tons (containing 1031 tons of uranium-235) Thorium: 357,491 tons Worldwide release (from combustion of 637,409 million tons): Uranium: 828,632 tons (containing 5883 tons of uranium-235) Thorium: 2,039,709 tons
Personally, I'd rather use nuclear power and know where all the radioactive material is than burn coal and have it dispersed into the atmosphere. Omen
"the technology is nowhere near commercial viability." They should buy from a different company. There are many with solutions that actually work.
At least the acid rain went away. The scrubber tech works, no matter which way you spin it. Even the CO2 tech works, it's just that no one is going to buy it unless they have to. There are plenty of coal plants that put out nothing but water vapor, but environmental nutjobs love to sweep that fact under the rug. Most people don't remember when the radiation myth was debunked. Greenpeace had demanded to be let into one a coal burning plant to take a radiation reading. The powerbroker obliged, but only as long as they could take a reading from the building that GP used as a headquarters. Turns out the headquarters had 5 times as much background radiation as the coal plant because it was made from granite. Pretty positive it was Alcoa, made them all look like idiots. Clean coal scrubber tech is real, and it works, end of story. If people want to complain about mining then they should go to their democratic government and make it an issue, as had been done with gay marriage, marijuana legalization and abortion (things activists actually care about, which is themselves, not the environment).
Not every rock on the planet is the same as every other. Considering that I was detecting iron from the fly ash contacting pipework on the way out I'd say the threshold was low enough to spit in the face of this stupid "fly ash is nuclear waste too" from Alex Gabbard and a pile of parrots that know even less about coal than Alex Gabbard.
So two obvious things. First, that's not a low concentration of iron unless your pipes just happen to have almost no iron in them. Second, when did you actually look for uranium in your fly ash? You state here that you were looking for iron not uranium.
I also wonder, if you even have a clue about what you are speaking of. If you did your "iron detection" with the same half-assed ignorance with which you approach the current topic, then it doesn't mean anything that you didn't detect uranium.
I'd link to a news article from the day before yesterday about the real problem with people dying while mining coal instead of this failed PR bullshit inventing a fake problem, but there's probably no point since they may even be a new Chinese coal mine accident in the news today. Coal kills real people in real ways but the Alex Gabbard "terrorists could build a nuclear weapon out of fly ash" bullshit is something not even SF writers could get away with.
Please keep in mind you were off by 11 orders of magnitude last time you made any sort of concrete claim about the subject.
Did you actually read the comments above on Alex Gabbard (the author of the link you provide) and his way of doing these calculations?
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
I was looking at the wavelengths of the backscatter, so yes I was looking for it and every other element that could produce a peak. There was nothing heavy (no heavy elements that is, such as U) above the noise. The noise floor was pretty low so if it was there it would have been in pee in a harbour concentration to not show up, since as I attempted to point out above I was looking for signs of fly ash scraping along pipework and getting very lightly contaminated by the metal in the pipework. Due to the nature of things like uranium (heavy, very high melting point, hard to reduce the oxide), I'd expect that if it had made it into the impurities in the coal it wouldn't be showing up in the fly ash anyway because it wouldn't have melted - it would be in the bottom ash that ends up as landfill instead. That would explain why nobody has actually observed it in exhaust in the last century plus that people have been looking at such things with spectroscopy, which is why this entire discussion is so incredibly stupid.
:) Observation versus taking bullshit from some Oak Ridge administrator as a divine truth instead of the PR and "spin" it really is. Better watch out for those terrorist making nuclear bombs out of a couple of truckloads of ash :)
How's that for "half-assed ignorance"
Why not write something useful about the topic instead of just some insults and a ludicrously incorrect calculation for the banana dose. How did you botch it so badly? Ore mined for uranium has less than the number you came up with.
That would explain why nobody has actually observed it in exhaust in the last century plus that people have been looking at such things with spectroscopy, which is why this entire discussion is so incredibly stupid.
Such as who? You're the only person here making that assertion. I think it more likely that you just messed up your measurement in some way, such as not seeing uranium because you weren't looking for it.
Why not write something useful about the topic instead of just some insults and a ludicrously incorrect calculation for the banana dose. How did you botch it so badly? Ore mined for uranium has less than the number you came up with.
Show what was wrong with the calculation. Some vague whining that it doesn't match with your vague impression of what reality should be like, isn't a useful criticism.
You've got to show the calculations first - I'm curious as to how you got coal more radioactive than yellowcake, let alone granite or sand so there's a huge flawed assumption in there for a start. I'll write again what I wrote before since you've dodged the issue:
What is very amusing about this fantasy is how much you cling to something from such a source. Let's imagine you get the accounts clerk in whatever group you work for to explain to somebody else something technical you do. Hard isn't it, and the results will not be reliable, even if they've done an undergraduate degree in science after a period of military service. Now imagine that instead of something you do, it's something else in a different industry your group has no direct contact with, and it's even a rival industry that the accounts clerk wouldn't mind defaming. Even harder isn't it? Throw in a the motivation to write it up as a PR puff piece and you've got how Alex Gabbard's fantasy piece in the Oak Ridge newsletter that you are basing all this bullshit on happened. No peer review, nothing, just self published, self serving junk later recycled by a lazy journalist and Scientific American.
Reality has a strong bias against utter bullshit so please stop trying to smother the gullible in this place with the bullshit you've been sucked in by.
You've got to show the calculations first
I did, Here and here. Where's your sources?
You call that showing your calculations? WTF do you get that concentration for U - you are just throwing around numbers without saying where they came from PLUS you are totally ignoring isotopes and assuming all U is the most radioactive isotope which is definitely not the case. I'll assume total ignorance and not a petty little bait and switch, so your choice, pathetic sucker or evil bastard trying to mislead this generation. Whjich is it? A bit of both?
You also want me to show a "source" for my own observations when I'm not pretending that it's anything other than my own observations when you've based your stuff on non-peer reviewed lab magazine Alex Gabbard bullshit? Look if you are going to keep on following me around trying to find fault you should at least spend the ten minutes on the net it would take you to look up the technique I used and understand it, it's not that far removed from emission spectroscopy which you would have heard about in high school. You are just making yourself look more and more like a high school dropout with each post. It's utterly pathetic that failed PR is influencing you far more than fairly obvious reality (considering that the less than 10% impurity in coal is really different types of sand).
What next? When do you start your crusade against radioactive concrete? It's got to be at least ten times more radioactive than coal on average.
I'm using 0.1 microseivert as the banana dose which is the value proposed in 1995. It appears that you are not which is why you don't get around 100,000 short tons of coal as equivalent.
I was under the impression that breeder reactors are uncommon not because they don't work, but because of nuclear proliferation concerns.
Wikipedia seems to agree with me (and also mentions that they apparently cost more than "normal" reactors), and also has a list of reactors, some of which were/are in production.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
No. That ("because they're decommissioning old nuclear plants, and they have to replace them with some suitable base-load source") is just what they want you to think. Do you really believe a CEO wakes up this morning, thinking "Hell, we need to build a new power plant!" and the next day they're starting to dig?
Planning and getting all necessary paper work done and building takes almost a decade. Most if not all those "new" coal plants have long been planned and green-lighted way before Fukushima happened. See this list http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_Kohlekraftwerke_in_Deutschland