Everything is a tradeoff. And unusual risks are of course looking “worse” than the usual day to day ones, even if they are many orders of magnitude smaller and effectively negligible (terrorism, I am looking at YOU).
The worst is a combination of this and emotion-based decisionmaking.
And there may be significantly more emission reduction from metallurgy, using a range of electricity dependent technologies - from electrical furnaces to electrorefining to electrowinning. (Edit: Also, using hydrogen as an ore reducing agent instead of carbon.)
Greenies meanies of course don’t want to hear this and keep screaming their usual chants, effectively becoming mass murderers.
The only real ecologist and land management expert that I know doesn’t care whether it’s solar, wind, nuclear or biomass so long as CO2 stops rising and people stop stupidity that allows soil erosion and loss of habitat. From that point of view Chornobyl is a success story because it has created a nature reserve, even if with a higher than average mutation rate.
It is important to remember that there is a big difference between the Greens on the one hand, and ecologists, biologists and so on on the other.
Yeah, but mutations drive evolution. Russia is going to pass us on an evolutionary scale. There will be a mutation gap which can probably only be overcome if we nuke a couple cities in the US.
According to this logic, do various kinds of radiometric dating count as “rock memory” or “wood memory”? Does thermoluminescence count as “ceramics memory” or “mineral memory”?
I’ve never heard of those. But water memory comes around on the BBS occasionally.
Perhaps you could provide a wikipedia link to those terms just invented, as I did to explain the joke when asked, instead of emitting whatever radiation i am detecting off you?
the guy even talked of water comprised of the radioactive element. Like it… remembered its time at Indian Point FROM WHICH IT LEAKED, right?
However, if you drink tritiated water, the stuff gets right into your cells and so can bombard your DNA from close up.
I have a degree in environmental toxicology, specifically environmental fate and transport in the subsurface, just FYI, before you apply a label that would appear to allow you to discount my opinions as less than, as you have others here.
“Water memory” is a woo. I assumed you refer to the tritiated water and its use for dating of water age due to its tritium content decay over time from its naturally occurring concentration.
According to your clarification, any source of dissolved materials or isotopic ratio (check the oxygen-16/oxygen-18 ratio used for several kinds of analyses, and check also the other isotopic signatures as they are interesting) could count as “water memory”.
(Edit: I nibbled a little on some environmental forensics books but never encountered the term “water memory” there.)
Granted, Cuomo likes to take the Chicken Little approach to these sorts of things (viz. his misnamed “New York State Early Warning Weather Detection System,” a $24M mesonet of 120 weather stations, as a silly response to Sandy and the Buffalo show of '14). But I’ll bet real money that his upset at this pump-failure-induced-overflow boils down to one word: Flint.
If all you’re thinking about is replacing coal, then of course nuclear power looks good in comparison. If you start asking questions like "what do we use/need all this energy for, then coal and nuclear both start to look bad, compared to pulling back on this extraordinary waste.
We need energy for transportation, for production of materials from concrete to metals, for manufacturing fertilizers (the hydrogen for the ammonia production comes from natural gas for now but can be made in a nuclear way)… Name it and it needs energy.
The alternative would require large-scale changes in civilization, against which the process of building a reactor looks easy peasy.
“Deaths per gigawatt hour” sounds like a very convenient way to sweep a bunch of environmental costs under the rug. The Fukushima disaster hasn’t contributed any deaths to this ratio, and it may never do so. There’s the economic value of all that land lost to radioactivity, in a country that has no arable land to spare. The long term impacts that don’t outright kill anybody, but shorten people’s lives in ways that are hard to quantify. As dirty as coal is, its waste products are relatively inert compared to the leftovers from nuclear power. But since that stuff doesn’t bother you, then I guess it shouldn’t bother me either, is that your thinking?
The radiation limits are insanely low. The exclusion zone is limited at 20 mSv/year.
Cf. natural places. E.g. Guarapari, where monazite sands give doses of up to 175 mSv/year, and that’s a tourist beach. Or Ramsar, Iran, where the doses can top 250 mSv/year. And still, the locals at either place don’t seem to have two heads and/or tentacles.
And when you look at the map, the zone is a barely visible spot.
There is the value of land lost to water dams, too.
Everything has its cost. So build the reactors, I want my hydrogen and my cheap titanium.
Holy Fuck. No. 100% incorrect about my point. Not even gonna bother, please have a sense of humor and stop being so literal with woo jokes. Maybe you’ve assumed I like woo? Can’t say i care, feel free to misunderstand!
