Re: I thought of an initialy regulated industry!... (fwd)

["James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>]

At 07:46 AM 10/2/98 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
> The largest environment impact issue with a nuclear plant
> is hot water discharge (which is much larger than the
> exhaust from a coal plant) 

Since the operating temperature of the steam of a typical
nuclear reactor is only a little lower than the operating
temperature of the steam of a coal fired plant, the hot water
discharge is necessarily about the same for the same amount
of power generated.  For a nuclear plant to discharge much
more hot water than a coal plant, it would have to have much
lower thermal efficiency, which is not the case.

> and spent fuel storage because of the amount of time that
> is required to guarantee seals.

High level nuclear waste should be kept isolated for five
hundred years.  Since there are plenty of buildings, mostly
fortresses and monuments, that have survived for a good deal
longer than five hundred years, this does not seem terribly
difficult.

> The issue with storage is that it occurs on a time line
> that is best described as near-geologic. Periods of time
> that are orders of magnitude longer than human
> civilizations survive.

Bunkum:  The contaminant that lasts geological ages is
plutonium, and the arsenic dumped by a coal plant constitutes
far more lethal doses than the plutonium dumped by a nuclear
power plant.

> Consider the difference in volume of these two waste
> products...

So dilution is an acceptable solution for the poison in fly
ash, but it is a big problem for the plutonium in radioactive
waste?

If dilution is acceptable, let us dump our waste in the cold
salty current coming off the arctic icecap, as the russians
are doing.  It will be a thousand years before that stuff
comes back to the surface, and by that time only the
plutonium will be a problem.

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         James A. Donald
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