All I can say is - CANDU.

Things like this still don't change my stance on nuclear energy, though.

Go....Nuclear Energy!! Yay!!

D*mn skippy. I'd take nuclear over the acid rain of coal and co-gen any day.

And as a former employee of the company that used to own TMI during the accident...it was nowhere NEAR Chernobyl.

People are just afraid of what they don't understand and propaganda just heightens the fear. It's one of the reasons I've become so critical of the press to the point that I don't believe anything they say. I've seen the press stretch the truth or just straight out guess wrong about things that happened in the plant that I was a witness to!

You're right, there is an almost psychotic aversion to nuclear plants in this country.

There, as far as I know, have been no verified deaths in the US from a nuclear accident. However, the number of people that have been killed mining coal over the years is many thousands in the US alone. That doesn't take into account the health damage and deaths of people who have suffered from the effects of using coal as a fuel.

The US has also lost the world lead they had in designing and building nuclear plants.

I think we're a great example of the effects of media hysteria.

It was not Chernobyl, but only because they got lucky...half the core was exposed and they almost had a full meltdown. Thus the usage of the word 'almost' in my description.

But having said that, I believe nuclear is a good source of power for general use.

Coal, being organic, is a reductant (as opposed to an oxidant), and therefore gets enriched in many rare metals including U and Th both during deposition as a peat swamp and during it's maturation while subsurface fluids percolate through it. These elements are released into the atmosphere during combustion.

North American coal averages between 1.5 to 3.4 ppm U and Th. The average coal plant uses about 1 million tonnes of coal each year. This means the average plant will spew between 150kg and 340 kg of uranium and thorium into the atmosphere every year, though filtering can bring down that number (couldn't find any quantitative data on this one so I don't have a number or percentage).

This doesn't even take into account the other pollutants such as the SOx and NOx responsible for acid rain or As and the other nasties.

I'd much rather live near a nuclear plant than a coal plant!

At this point not too many people are probably reading this, but as an FYI...Back when I was working for a company that ran both coal and nuclear plants I had a converstation with one of the coal plant operators who told me the goverment fines for not filtering costs about the same (and usually less) than the cost of purchasing, installing and maintaining the exhaust "scrubbers" to filter the air below the fining levels. That's right..it was cheaper to pollute.

I don't know if that's gotten any better--I haven't worked for a power company in 15 years other than as a consultant for a hydro-electric plant for about 2 days last year. :) I hope the fines are a lot more step these days...and BTW that coal plant is still in operation about 5 miles from my home...but alteast they had scrubbers because they knew it was the right thing to do.

Did you work there Moe? Or know somebody who did? ..I'm just curious. Yes a good amount of the core was exposed...but "exposed" means it wasn't submerged in water..it was still completely contained inside the containment vessel which was inside the containment bulding. It was a level 5 event (Chernobyl was a 7..the only 7 EVER) because the core was a lost cause. The sad thing is...from what I was told..the computers TOLD them the water level was dropping, but the operators thought it was an instrument error (which happens) and by the time they found out it wasn't an error it was too late to save the reactor.

I was also told that Chernobyl was as bad as it was because of the fires...and the lower standard of insulation in the control room which resulted in an inability to resolve the steam explosions safely. The nuke plant I worked at had atleast THREE locations to nuetralize the reaction (maybe more, but I only saw 3 of them) and NRC standards prohibited the use of the types of materials used to build Chernobyl making that particular series of events an impossibilty in the U.S...Like DerAlt1 said..we were the best. :)