At 10:46 AM 10/1/98 -0700, Tim May wrote:
Finally, the "environmental burden" imposed by a coal-fired power plant is vastly greater than that from a nuclear plant. Do the math on particulates, carbon levels, etc. Many libertarians have proposed better schemes for dealing with such environmental burdens....if fossil fuel-powered plants had to actually pay their share of environmental costs, they'd be even more expensive than nuclear.
A normally operating coal plant releases more radioactive material (carbon 14) than a normally operating nuclear plant. The waste products from a coal plant are not only more voluminous (though less dense) than the coal that goes in but also contain a substance that is more poisonous than plutonium (arsenic trioxide). DCF