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. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG hVZVbJPCiyR27Tdf+qFl+uj9Hc2KWiql5J1jnKJf 4lXDcc7tAkwo7qEp0ZXbXv7XJqHc7d2LpmbS0UlzA ----------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ James A. Donald