LadyTevar wrote:I will simply state that one of WV's largest steam turbine power plants was build with the option to switch from coal to nuke. IIRC, it would take less than a month.
Got any more info on that? I'd be amazed if they had something that simple to convert, with the cooling towers and reactor vessels and all that associated magic nuke engineering stuff.
(Not saying you're wrong, just that it'd be intensely cool if so.)
Cynical Cat wrote:It will. A number of their workers took high doses. On the other hand, if you compare energy generated to number of deaths caused nuclear beats every other type of power plant. Coal, for example, kills far more people and dumps more radioactive pollutants into the atmosphere.
Rad sickness is actually specific to receiving a big-ass acute dose. Now I did stop following the story after a month or so, but up to that point nobody had received dosage past the regulated special limits, which were still within spitting range of the usual conservative industry standards from what I saw.
Now, somebody might come down with a radiation-induced cancer later on, but even that's probably iffy. The standards the US runs trend out to a one percent increase in cancer risk if you work a forty year career in radiation-related fields, according to my Rad Worker classes.
The rad business is funny because it's so hyper-intensively regulated, to the point where what are miniscule risks are treated as potentially catastrophic. Now a lot of people say "Good! It's RADIATION!" but it gets to where you'll have major drama because a skosh of leaked tritium from an exit sign can become a major issue. Outside of a rad facility, nobody would think a thing of it, but inside and in the wrong place it becomes a major drama inducing endless meetings, finger-pointing, and maybe somebody gets fired, usually the guy who caught the buck last.
So you go from this hyper-regulated environment to the wide world outside. Any landfill in the world is rife with mercury, arsenic, and so on, has a shitload of methane waiting to cook off in a lovely fire that won't go out for days, etc. But very few people worry about stuff like that. Coal, as you point out, is nasty every which way and it dumps radioactive elements into the atmosphere.
(Which is much less bad than everything else it dumps, mind.)
To give an idea of how the safety standards roll, at least in US industry, the federally mandated max whole-body exposure in a year is 5 REM. Now we capped at 2, because going over your internal cap will produce drama and paperwork, but going over the fed cap will produce a shitstorm.
The average person gets over 1 REM a year from environmental sources alone. The average smoker gets 1.8 REM a year just from smoking. What does that mean? Pretty much jack and diddly, because the standards are extremely conservative. Living in Kentucky or Pennsylvania means you'll get triple the fed allowable radon dosage each year, just because of how much of the stuff occurs naturally there. Swimming in the ocean means you're swimming with microscopic uranium. Eating bananas or Brazil nuts gets you a dose. Sleeping next to somebody gets you a dose. Sleeping by yourself gets you a dose because we all have some radioactive elements within us.
It's another failure of education and it really pisses me off because I preferred radiation hazards to chemical hazards. Radioactivity is often polite- you can get a meter and check for it, or take a quick smear and get a read on it in a few minutes. If it's pumping out enough juice enough to kill you quick, you know it's there and you know how close you can get reeeeeal easy. On the other hand if you want to deal with something like arsenic, hey, take a smear and send it to the lab. In a couple of weeks you know how bad it is.*
The worst I ever worked in any proximity to was a bit over 200 REM an hour contact dose. That's kind of nasty, lethal dose is about 500 REM and so if you took a nap on the shit you'd get a lethal dose after a while. I stood about 200 yards away with a good berm of cover and didn't catch jack shit in dose. Inverse square law and some dirt shielding and it's easy-peasy. Highest dose on that job was the crane jockey, who took a whole whopping 15 milliREM dose.
Radiation is seriously, seriously misunderstood and it's a function of shitty education and an environmentalist lobby that has a fucking brain seizure on the topic. Of course, in our current media environment the coal companies are bigger players, so you could watch the usual 'journalism' on Fukushima followed by ads for Clean Coal, a bullshit scam if there ever was one.
Urgh.
/soapbox
* It can get a bit more complicated than that with airborne, crits and so on, but other than the airborne that's totally outside of my field and in the hands of the pocket protector brigade.
