dand@tekigm.UUCP (Dan C. Duval) (08/03/84)
Yesterday, I kicked out a set of opinions, without the necessary backing of hard facts. Now come the facts. >>1) We don't need it. In 1982, nuclear power plants provided 12.6% of the electricity generated in the United States. If we shut that down this instant, there is not enough unused capacity to take up the slack. It is questionable if there are enough possible other sources available within the next ten years also. For instance, the Trojan nuclear plant northwest of Portland has the third largest generating capacity in the US, at 1.13 gigawatts. The Grand Coulee Dam has a current capacity of 6.43 gigawatts, and the second largest dam (John Day, also on the Columbia) a capacity of 2.16 gigawatts. In other words, to replace the power Trojan puts out, you need to find a place where you can build a dam that has as much as 50% of the capacity of the second largest electricity-producer in the entire US hydroelectric inventory. Such a dam on the Missouri River near its confluence with the Mississippi would flood a large chuck of the Mid-West. The fact is, nearly every large dam site in the US is already occupied. Coal-fired plants could pick up the slack, but I've already gone over the effects on the air and the plant life. This sort of energy production is already 44% of the total electricity production in the US, and the Eastern Seaboard is dying from it. Harry's figures showed who was dying directly for getting the coal energy onto the power grid, and I went over yesterday what emissions from coal plants are doing to the US and to the German Black Forest. Many people are working as hard as they can to get solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, etc power sources working, but even with 10 years effort, this still makes up less than 0.2% of the total electricity generated in the US. And these alternate sources still do not take into account the need for concentrated energy sources. To run just our VAX 780 and its air conditioning, a 30% efficient solar panel the size of the entire Jark Murdock Park building is required, and this doesn't take care of the other computers in the building, the lights, heating, air conditioners, dehumidifiers, work benches, and all the other misc. electricity needs of just this one site. Of course, we can all stop using that 12%. From now on, everyone must only work 7 hour days(your employer must turn off anything using electricity, and they will probably not want to pay you for the time you are not working), you must turn off all power in your home for three hours per day(including the freezer, refrigerator, pilot lights, etc), and street lights must be off one eighth of each night. (Actually, if we turned off all the power from 8PM to 11PM, we wouldn't have to put up with the TV networks "prime time", hmmm.) >>2) The future generations. I've already gone over all the other nasties our industries kicks out, but lets look at the numbers. According to the EPA, from a 1971 study, ie, before the latest raft of legislation and restrictions on radiation emissions, all sources of nuclear-power related radiation added 0.01 millirems of exposure to 23% of the US population. Natural background level is 88 millirems annually. In terms of genetic damage, medical X-rays add 103 millirems of exposure to 33% of the US population annually. (For example, you get 10,000 times more radiation by checking for the cancer you might have gotten by living next to the nuclear waste facility than by living next to it.) Indeed, in 1972, consumers (all 100% of us) received 0.2 millirems from TVs, air travels, and such like. AEC scientists (John Gofman and Arthur Tamplin) put the maximum permissible dose as 17 millirems per year, which is 10 times less than the current limit, at 170 millirems. The nuclear industry thus provides one seventeen-hundredths of the maximum permissible dose, even under the proposed standard. I assume everyone plans on using their TVs, flying once in a awhile, sitting face to face with a terminal (assuming you are not using an AR-33, at 110 baud), so we are all accepting twenty times as much exposure from our lifestyles as from the nukes. Has anyone considered what the results of the fusion research is going to provide? Plenty of power, but also a bunch of free neutrons and high-energy photons(X- and gamma-ray stuff). The current fission plants are increasing the release of radiation from naturally radioactive sources, but fusion is going to add a lot of radiation to the environment that wouldn't have ordinarily shown up. And yet I don't hear anyone decrying the fusion research. Actually, the neutron source may be a boon to us, since the one of the most desirable ways to be rid of the real nasty by-products of fission, iodine-129 and strontium-90, is to bombard them with neutrons and transmutate them into other, less grim, elements (I'm not saying these new elements are not rdioactive themselves, but these transmutated elements are less likely to head for your bones and thyroid.) In other words, we put the radioactive fission wastes into the containment vessels of the fusion plants, and extract the less nasty of the isotopes once in awhile for other forms of disposal. The biggest worry we have from the nuclear industry is an accident, that releases lots of grim and awful stuff into the air and/or water. Of course, its not any less grim and awful when dioxins are released into the biosphere, or the phenol plant next door blows sixty tons of one of the worst mutagens known to man into the air. The nuclear power industry is a risk. Petroleum is a risk. Coal is a risk. Waking up in the morning is a risk. My opinion after looking into what the risks of radiation are versus those that show up when the power provided is no longer available, is that the nukes are a better risk than many other things I risk my life on each day. Radiation may kill you, but carbon monoxide is faster. Radiation may mutate your chromosomes, but phenol is guaranteed to scramble your genes. Nuclear power plants are not absolutely safe, but we already have evidence that coal is going to teach us all more about famine, denuded forests, and that nowhere can you see a thousand feet, much less a thousand miles. Finally, the total amount of radioactive wastes can be stored in a solid form, as radioactive salts, in a space 200 feet square and 12.5 ft tall, and this includes all the waste through the year 2000. The effluent from coal and oil fired plants is currently being stored in a miles thick band of gases fondly called the atmosphere, by those of us that like to use it. Convince me that this is safer than the nukes. Dan C Duval ISI Engineering Tektronix, Inc tektronix!tekigm!dand P.S. Sources were: Radiation levels: Living in the Environment: Concepts, Problems, and Alternatives; Miller G. Wadworth Publishing, Belmont, CA; 1975. Power Generation Figures: 1984 World Almanac