I thought of an initialy regulated industry!...

[Duncan Frissell]

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