This just happened. Explosion in Lebanon

SupahEwok

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Let's go with the minimum concentration of uranium in anthracite coal, 1ppm. Anthricite produces 8 kWh thermal per kilogram, uranium produces 24TWh thermal per kilogram. You have to burn 3,000,000 kg of coal to equal one kilogram of uranium. If .0001% of that mass is uranium (i.e. 1ppm), the byproduct is 3kg worth of uranium. That's just uranium, not accounting for thorium, radium, and radon. Not only does coal produce more radioactive byproducts than nuclear, it produces more radioactive byproducts than nuclear uses in the first place.

Meanwhile, 0.1% of spent nuclear fuel is long-lived high level waste with no secondary medical, industrial, or research use. This video's a pretty good starter on the topic:


So, with proper reprocessing and repurposing spent nuclear fuel, that 1kg of uranium we started with for nuclear power equals approximately 1g of radioactive waste. Nuclear produces 1/3000th the amount of radioactive waste as coal, to produce the same amount of energy.
Plus it's not, y'know. Just gassed up into the atmosphere.
 

Eacaraxe

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Plus it's not, y'know. Just gassed up into the atmosphere.
Yup. Anyhoo, back to the point.

Soviets accidentally made a bomb they pretended was a nuclear reactor. What happened on April 26, 1986, wasn't even the first time CNPP Unit-4 experienced a catastrophic failure. Yuri Andropov's correspondence about it is available publicly online, as well as that of other noteworthy and high-ranking Soviet officials. They knew, they covered it up, kaboom. Then, kaboom, kaboom, kaboom, and finally Chernobyl, if I remember the number of pre-Chernobyl RBMK-1000 incidents right.

Same shit happened at Fukushima Daiichi. TEPCO lobbied to have its site lowered below the known tsunami line to cheap out on pumping seawater, covered up safety deficiencies at the plant, had the reactors' contracts extended past their expected lifetimes, and more. Those reactors should have been in cold shutdown pending decommission long before the quake hit.

Nuclear power plants don't cause big booms at nuclear power plants, corruption and human error does. The real question is why do we insist on letting greedy, corrupt, morons administrate nuclear power plants with reactors whose designs are as old as the atomic age itself. And as Agema pointed out, if we can't trust greedy, corrupt morons to not let a 2,700-ton bomb sit next to a country's whole-ass strategic food supply for years, should we be trusting them with nuclear power plants? And these are the same greedy, corrupt morons telling us nuclear is bad and we should stick to pumping the skies full of gas that's turning the planet into one giant crock pot.
 
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Specter Von Baren

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You mean the article that says this.

Radioactive elements from coal and fly ash may come in contact with the general public when they are dispersed in air and water or are included in commercial products that contain fly ash.
The radiation hazard from airborne emissions of coal-fired power plants was evaluated in a series of studies conducted from 1975–1985. These studies concluded that the maximum radiation dose to an individual living within 1 km of a modern power plant is equivalent to a minor, perhaps 1 to 5 percent, increase above the radiation from the natural environment. For the average citizen, the radiation dose from coal burning is considerably less. Components of the radiation environment that impact the U.S. population are illustrated in figure 4. Natural sources account for the majority (82 percent) of radiation. Man-made sources of radiation are dominated by medical X-rays (11 percent). On this plot, the average population dose attributed to coal burning is included under the consumer products category and is much less than 1 percent of the total dose.
Fly ash is commonly used as an additive to concrete building products, but the radioactivity of typical fly ash is not significantly different from that of more conventional concrete additives or other build-ing materials such as granite or red brick. One extreme calculation that assumed high proportions of fly-ash-rich concrete in a residence suggested a dose enhancement, compared to normal concrete, of 3 percent of the natural environmental radiation.
Another consideration is that low-density, fly-ash-rich concrete products may be a source of radon gas. Direct measurement of this contribution to indoor radon is complicated by the much larger contribution from underlying soil and rock (see fig. 4). The emanation of radon gas from fly ash is less than from natural soil of similar uranium content. Present calculations indicate that concrete building products of all types contribute less than 10 percent of the total indoor radon.
Is saying that coal is worse than nuclear waste?


Let's go with the minimum concentration of uranium in anthracite coal, 1ppm. Anthricite produces 8 kWh thermal per kilogram, uranium produces 24TWh thermal per kilogram. You have to burn 3,000,000 kg of coal to equal one kilogram of uranium. If .0001% of that mass is uranium (i.e. 1ppm), the byproduct is 3kg worth of uranium. That's just uranium, not accounting for thorium, radium, and radon. Not only does coal produce more radioactive byproducts than nuclear, it produces more radioactive byproducts than nuclear uses in the first place.

Meanwhile, 0.1% of spent nuclear fuel is long-lived high level waste with no secondary medical, industrial, or research use. This video's a pretty good starter on the topic:


So, with proper reprocessing and repurposing spent nuclear fuel, that 1kg of uranium we started with for nuclear power equals approximately 1g of radioactive waste. Nuclear produces less than 1/3000th the amount of radioactive waste as coal to produce the same amount of energy, because yet again I'm still not accounting for thorium, radium, and radon in coal, and I'm giving a freebie in the form of using the purest coal available. Start talking about dirtier coals, and add in thorium, radium, and radon, and that number gets a whole lot tinier.
And how do you explain this information?


I already agreed that nuclear is likely where we need to go. But no, you need me to bow down and submit to everything with no reservations, it's not good enough that I say we probably need to go nuclear but be careful with it. Because God forbid I ask for us to use caution with material that when improperly managed can lead to your cells dieing as you turn into a black lump. Holy shit.
 

Eacaraxe

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And how do you explain this information?
Don't have to, it supports my point if you read to the very end of it and nothing contradicts what I already said. What that article doesn't do is explain spin-off uses for light actinides and other transuranic elements.

For example, you have smoke detectors? You have nuclear waste in your home. They have Am-241 in them, they can't function without it. That's a fission byproduct element, and it's why smoke detectors have to be replaced every ten years: the Am-241 decays to the point the smoke detector can no longer function properly.

The only other thing I have to say immediately, is how the US defines nuclear waste and the difference between low level waste products and high level waste products is...wonky. Strictly speaking, US nuclear waste repositories should be filled with rotten bananas, but they're not, let alone coal ash which is allowed to just be dumped in landfills.
 
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SupahEwok

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And how do you explain this information?


I already agreed that nuclear is likely where we need to go. But no, you need me to bow down and submit to everything with no reservations, it's not good enough that I say we probably need to go nuclear but be careful with it. Because God forbid I ask for us to use caution with material that when improperly managed can lead to your cells dieing as you turn into a black lump. Holy shit.
From your article:
To our knowledge, no one has been injured or killed by commercial nuclear waste in dry cask storage. While future incidents are possible, it is fairly clear that the rate of injury from this material pales almost in insignificance compared to the 8 million people per year who actually do die from air pollution complications caused by fossil fuel and biofuel emissions (WHO numbers).

The fact that nuclear plants keep all of their waste on site for their entire lifecycle can be considered a major positive environmental attribute compared with energy sources that emit vast waste into the atmosphere or produce vast manufacturing wastes during fabrication.
Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste into chemical forms that are totally immobilized.

France currently recycles their spent fuel. They put the remaining good nuclear fuel back in their reactors in the form of MOX fuel and immobilize the remaining waste in vitrified borosilicate glass.

The US had a recycling program featuring the use of advanced fast reactors (which have not been deployed on any major scale yet) that was shut down because it created Plutonium, which could be used to make a nuclear weapon. Were some plutonium diverted in the recycling process, a non-nuclear entity could be one step close to building a bomb. However, under programs such as the (now stalled) GNEP [wikipedia], where only countries who already have nuclear weapons recycle, proliferation-free waste recycling can exist. Since the many of the largest energy users are already nuclear weapons states, a massive expansion of nuclear could be done there with no additional proliferation concerns whatsoever.

The longest living nuclides in nuclear waste are the ones that can be used as fuel: plutonium and the minor actinides. If these materials are burnt in fuel through recycling, nuclear waste would only remain radioactive for a few hundred years, as opposed to a few hundred thousand. This significantly reduces concerns with long-term storage. This concept is called Partitioning and Transmutation and is discussed in elaborate detail in this IAEA report.
How does nuclear waste move from the reactor to the disposal site? We have developed containers that can handle the hazards of transportation without breaking. The US DOE and others have for example tested these containers by burning them in jet fuel, smashing into them with rocket-powered trains, crashing them into cement walls, and dropping them onto spikes.
If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data).
If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 3000 GW-years of electricity to make this waste.
For comparison, in 2007 alone the US burned 948,000,000 metric tonnes of coal. This means that coal plants made 32 times more waste every single day than the US nuclear fleet has made in the past 45 years! Granted, coal made a higher fraction of the country’s electricity, but the numbers are still crazy impressive for nuclear.
The astoundingly low amount of nuclear waste is thanks to the near magical energy density of the atom.
Very smart people have recognized your concerns over the decades as problems to work towards, and have in fact done so. What largely prevents new advancements being implemented to make nuclear safer is opposition to nuclear in general from being unwilling to accept that very smart people have worked very hard to make it safer.
 
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Eacaraxe

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Very smart people have recognized your concerns over the decades as problems to work towards, and have in fact done so. What largely prevents new advancements being implemented to make nuclear safer is opposition to nuclear in general from being unwilling to accept that very smart people have worked very hard to make it safer.
What's actually pretty funny about this, is up until last year the US had a critical Pu-238 shortage that actually threatened space exploration and science mission plans. If I remember right, the Perseverance/Ingenuity mission which launched last week was the last mission guaranteed enough Pu-238 for an RTG. The US stuck to test ban and arms treaties to the point we couldn't produce enough plutonium to meet demand, and we'd been buying it from Russia since the end of the Cold War.

If ORNL hadn't been able to automate part of the production process to increase production to a pound per year, NASA would have been right fucked. But on the other hand, Cassini's RTG used 50 pounds of Pu-238, and both Perseverance and Curiosity used about 11. So, a pound per year isn't even close to meeting NASA's needs.

Meanwhile there's literal tons of the shit stuck in spent fuel rods we can't use, because of spent fuel reprocessing bans.
 

Agema

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Um.


I'm not really up on the science cuz coal releasing uranium into the atmosphere is news to me, but the question is relevant if the question is "what does more harm, a country of coal plants or a country of nuclear plants where one of them goes oopsies?" Cuz it kinda looks like the country of regularly operating coal plants does more harm than one nuclear power plant going sideways.
The world is radioactive. Every time you eat, some of the carbon in your food is radioactive. Every time you breathe, you inhale radioactive radon, and so on. Radiation is coming up out of the ground, and beaming in from space. This is often called "background radiation".

Radioactivity is a really a problem when there's a lot of it in a small area. Coal belches out plenty of radioactive particles, it is true. But these particles are so few compared to all the other sources of natural background radioactivity and so dispersed, that it doesn't really matter much: it's a small fraction of natural background radiation. With nuclear power, radioactive material is massively concentrated to make the fuel, and then as waste. This therefore is a hazard in a way the radioactive byproduct of coal burning definitely isn't, and makes nuclear accidents potentially extremely serious. Thus the argument coal is more radioactive than nuclear, whilst technically true, is completely misleading.

The other reason this argument is plainly stupid and pointless is that outside new technologies to make it cleaner, coal's day is done anyway. It is frankly awful for numerous reasons (non-radioactive air pollution and CO2 are simple enough) and most countries have already turned against, or are in the process of reviewing, coal-based power.
 

Eacaraxe

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...But these particles are so few compared to all the other sources of natural background radioactivity and so dispersed, that it doesn't really matter much: it's a small fraction of natural background radiation. With nuclear power, radioactive material is massively concentrated to make the fuel, and then as waste...
It matters a whole hell of a lot when radioisotopes are concentrated in fly ash but un-sequestered as it would be in granites, shales, and slates which are the best comparison in terms of radioisotopic concentration, and dumped in landfills where those radioisotopes can leach into groundwater. The same processes as with non-radioactive heavy metals and other contaminants, and I really doubt you'd be pushing back on this if we were talking about arsenic or mercury contamination due to fly ash, instead.
 
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SupahEwok

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The world is radioactive. Every time you eat, some of the carbon in your food is radioactive. Every time you breathe, you inhale radioactive radon, and so on. Radiation is coming up out of the ground, and beaming in from space. This is often called "background radiation".

Radioactivity is a really a problem when there's a lot of it in a small area. Coal belches out plenty of radioactive particles, it is true. But these particles are so few compared to all the other sources of natural background radioactivity and so dispersed, that it doesn't really matter much: it's a small fraction of natural background radiation. With nuclear power, radioactive material is massively concentrated to make the fuel, and then as waste. This therefore is a hazard in a way the radioactive byproduct of coal burning definitely isn't, and makes nuclear accidents potentially extremely serious. Thus the argument coal is more radioactive than nuclear, whilst technically true, is completely misleading.

The other reason this argument is plainly stupid and pointless is that outside new technologies to make it cleaner, coal's day is done anyway. It is frankly awful for numerous reasons (non-radioactive air pollution and CO2 are simple enough) and most countries have already turned against, or are in the process of reviewing, coal-based power.
1) I'm pretty sure that no matter how you slice it, polluting the atmosphere with additional radiation is a bad
2) The website is called Scientific American and both Specter and I live in the official boundaries of the US, which has a boner for coal, so I don't really care that "most" countries are moving away from coal
3) has there ever been an argument you've had with Eacaraxe that you haven't treated as "stupid and pointless"? No matter the argument or data cited? Seriously asking.
 
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Agema

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3) has there ever been an argument you've had with Eacaraxe that you haven't treated as "stupid and pointless"? No matter the argument or data cited? Seriously asking.
Most of the arguments he has have start with a point or have one in them somewhere. It's mostly the bizarre tangents that seem to be an exercise in showing off some obscure knowledge rather than making a real difference to the issue at hand. There are lots of good reasons to support nuclear power, and also good reasons to have safety concerns about it. But please dear god someone tell me why the hell it matters that burning coal releases small amounts of radioactivity.

It matters a whole hell of a lot when radioisotopes are concentrated in fly ash but un-sequestered as it would be in granites, shales, and slates which are the best comparison in terms of radioisotopic concentration, and dumped in landfills where those radioisotopes can leach into groundwater. The same processes as with non-radioactive heavy metals and other contaminants, and I really doubt you'd be pushing back on this if we were talking about arsenic or mercury contamination due to fly ash, instead.
<sigh>. From your source:

"McBride and his co-authors estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly. To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors. "

So, About 0.5%. That's also in the context that moving from one part of a country to another can as much as double / halve natural background radiation, and if you got some x-rays that year, ooh boy. i.e. nothing interesting to see here, move along.
 

Eacaraxe

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It's mostly the bizarre tangents that seem to be an exercise in showing off some obscure knowledge rather than making a real difference to the issue at hand.
Somebody else made a point about the Chernobyl disaster, my point was the Soviets designed a bomb shaped like a nuclear reactor and covered it up. Nuclear energy shouldn't be judged as a whole by it because nuclear energy tech has, y'know, advanced since 1950. I tried to put that in perspective comparing it to coal.

There are lots of good reasons to support nuclear power, and also good reasons to have safety concerns about it. But please dear god someone tell me why the hell it matters that burning coal releases small amounts of radioactivity.
Because it needs to be in context to the hazards of other source.

<sigh>. From your source:

"McBride and his co-authors estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly. To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors. "

So, About 0.5%. That's also in the context that moving from one part of a country to another can as much as double / halve natural background radiation, and if you got some x-rays that year, ooh boy. i.e. nothing interesting to see here, move along.
The paragraph just before that in the article,

The result: estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities. At one extreme, the scientists estimated fly ash radiation in individuals' bones at around 18 millirems (thousandths of a rem, a unit for measuring doses of ionizing radiation) a year. Doses for the two nuclear plants, by contrast, ranged from between three and six millirems for the same period. And when all food was grown in the area, radiation doses were 50 to 200 percent higher around the coal plants.

I"m not going to get into the difference between absorbed, effective, and equivalent doses because this is a thread about an ammonium nitrate explosion in Beirut, but I'll point out the "ingested" part is the key: that's internalized dose from eating, drinking, and breathing radioisotopes. Not only is internalized dose the absolute worst form of dosage because soft tissue and vital organs which lack any form of protection (like the keratin of your skin, which shields against alpha emission) are directly exposed, this form of chronic dosage accumulates in the body, it doesn't go away. As the article pointed out, the bones of people who lived near coal plants were radioactive, because radium is deposited by the body in the bones in place of calcium.

And let's put that in context. You know what a 1mrem exposure to the public was for the nuclear industry? Three Mile Island. That "nothing to see here, move along" of yours is the equivalent of two Three Mile Islands on average, every year, across the whole-ass country. And it's not even a third of the daily ambient dose for people living in Colorado (1rem/year).

All thanks to the ignorance-berthed monstrous double standard you're trying to perpetuate.


 
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Agema

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Because it needs to be in context to the hazards of other source.
No-one here is worried about radioactivity from the basic power generation of a nuclear plant, which is what the article primarily compares against. People are worried about major accidents, either catastrophic malfunction or unsafe waste disposal.

The paragraph just before that in the article,
The article you're citing has a conclusion about the radiation health risks ofburning coal. You are selectively and unrepresentatively citing chunks of the passage to portray a conclusion different from that in the article, and thus misrepresenting it.

All thanks to the ignorance-berthed monstrous double standard you're trying to perpetuate.
Selectively comparing against the least bad major nuclear failure is not exactly the pinnacle of usefulness.
 

Eacaraxe

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No-one here is worried about radioactivity from the basic power generation of a nuclear plant, which is what the article primarily compares against. People are worried about major accidents, either catastrophic malfunction or unsafe waste disposal.
Here, no. Generally, yes. That the double standard in operations and waste management exists and is so pervasive that even here people defend it, is my point. Because, frankly, "basic power generation" of coal plants is worse for the environment and public health than "major (nuclear) accidents, either catastrophic malfunction or unsafe waste disposal". If the regular operations of coal plants were rated on the INES scale, they'd be classified level 6 incidents, above TMI but below Chernobyl and Fukushima, because we're talking about the largely uncontrolled release of significant amounts of uranium, thorium, radium, and radon into the ecosystem.

But if you want to move the goalposts and talk about major radiological accidents and disasters, why is it Kingston isn't mentioned in the same breath as Chernobyl or Fukushima?




Assuming 1.3g per cubic centimeter for mass of fly ash slurry (that was the only number I could easily find), given 15mg/Kg of uranium to fly ash slurry and 4.2 million cubic meters of fly ash was spilled at Kingston...estimated 4.2 trillion cubic centimeters, 5.6 billion kilograms of fly ash slurry. An estimated 84,000 kilograms of uranium was released into the ecosystem at Kingston. I want to be quite clear you understand I'm talking just uranium, not thorium, radium, radon, or other non-radioactive toxic elements by weight. Because...

That's about half of what was in the CNPP Unit-4 reactor when it exploded (1,661 fuel rods, 114.7kg fissile material per rod), and about 8.7 times what was ejected when it exploded (5% of the core by weight was estimated to have been ejected in the explosion and fire).

And yet, for some reason the US doesn't have a Tennessee Valley exclusion zone. In fact, we've been told the disaster wasn't that major to begin with, it's all cleaned up, and the Tennessee River valley has been perfectly safe for a decade. Nine million people still live in it. Why do you think that might be?

The article you're citing has a conclusion about the radiation health risks ofburning coal. You are selectively and unrepresentatively citing chunks of the passage to portray a conclusion different from that in the article, and thus misrepresenting it.
Oh yes, how dare I use an article titled "Coal Ash is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste" to make the argument coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. Yet here you are, doublespeaking that coal ash emission is barely above background radiation and I'm distorting the argument, but also trying to say incidents like Three Mile Island which exposed the public to half what they get from coal ash are major problems of serious import and cause for the utmost care with nuclear power.

Because, just so we're clear, rem is a measure of equivalent dose. In other words, a derived statistic measuring the probable health risks of a given dosage, based upon what parts of the body were exposed, for how long, and how strong the exposure's source was.

Selectively comparing against the least bad major nuclear failure is not exactly the pinnacle of usefulness.
No, I'm comparing the one the root cause of which can be attributed to mechanical failure, opposed to about a decade's worth of human error in the form of greed and corruption, the same greed and corruption that keeps the public largely in the dark and preserves the double standard I'm calling out. Also, the one that happened in the United States, because I'm comparing like to like and focusing my discussion about US nuclear energy policy and regulation, and public perception inside the US towards nuclear as opposed to fossil fuels.
 
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Revnak

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Given that Israel doing this is now a widespread conspiracy I want to clarify I don’t believe Israel did this despite my earlier joke.
 

Agema

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You mean the third worst.
Depends. As far as I'm aware, outside experimental reactors, there have been only three major failures of nuclear reactors leading to meltdowns / explosions, and after that a welter more minor ones. However, there have been fires and non-nuclear explosions at nuclear reactors, some of which were pretty dangerous. Including these as well, 3-Mile Island probably clocks in somewhere around 5th or 6th.

Assuming 1.3g per cubic centimeter for mass of fly ash slurry (that was the only number I could easily find), given 15mg/Kg of uranium to fly ash slurry and 4.2 million cubic meters of fly ash was spilled at Kingston...estimated 4.2 trillion cubic centimeters, 5.6 billion kilograms of fly ash slurry. An estimated 84,000 kilograms of uranium was released into the ecosystem at Kingston. I want to be quite clear you understand I'm talking just uranium, not thorium, radium, radon, or other non-radioactive toxic elements by weight. Because...
That seems to be 15mg/kg of uranium in the fly ash. Fly ash slurry is a mix of fly ash and water to the tune of about 20:80 - 40:60, so call it ~5mg/kg uranium in fly ash slurry. However, the natural concentration of uranium in normal soil or rock is commonly anywhere up to about 5mg/kg, upwards to 20-30mg/kg in some places. Fly ash slurry will of course contain a lot of other toxic (including carcinogenic) stuff, e.g. heavy metals and certain organic chemicals.
 

Eacaraxe

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That seems to be 15mg/kg of uranium in the fly ash. Fly ash slurry is a mix of fly ash and water to the tune of about 20:80 - 40:60, so call it ~5mg/kg uranium in fly ash slurry. However, the natural concentration of uranium in normal soil or rock is commonly anywhere up to about 5mg/kg, upwards to 20-30mg/kg in some places. Fly ash slurry will of course contain a lot of other toxic (including carcinogenic) stuff, e.g. heavy metals and certain organic chemicals.
Re-read the article, they were testing samples from the spill when it occurred and during clean-up, comparing it to samples from recent years. That higher concentration was the slurry. That was part of an ongoing investigative report from Knoxville News Sentinel, to which the article I cited alludes, the ash slurry from Kingston was far dirtier than TVA and the state environmental agency (TDEC) admits.

What you're missing was whether or not the slurry included bottom ash, and how much.








The EPA makes no legal distinction between disposal of fly and bottom ash, it's disposed together. Let's assume for the sake of argument the Kingston slurry was a 50% mix which has an approximate 1.4g/cc density according to that paper I just found, so we'll go with a revised estimate of 5.88 billion kilograms of ash slurry by that figure. By weight, 2.94 billion kilograms of ash. The question is, what percentage was fly ash to bottom ash; if it had a mixture in proportion of fly ash to bottom ash by production...

About 90% of that would have been fly ash, or 2.65 billion kilograms -- 39,800 kilograms of uranium from the fly ash component. About 10% of it would have been bottom ash. Most US bituminous coal has the high germanium concentration spoken about in the paper discussing CBA uranium concentrations, so I'm going to use that figure cited as it was the one I could find as a top end estimate. That paper cites 374mg/Kg of uranium in CBA, so no more than 109,956 kilograms' worth of uranium in the bottom ash. Together, as much as 149,756 kilograms of uranium might have been spilled, meaning the slurry's uranium concentration could have feasibly been in the neighborhood of 25.5ppm assuming a 50% water to ash mix.

So, yes, it was entirely possible for slurry samples of 15ppm to have been found and tested. Which by the way, we haven't even started talking about coal bottom ash, yet. And again, I want to make it clear I'm discussing only one radioactive element thus far among several.

Last, now who's trying to distort the argument? I said this upthread already. Would you care to elaborate on your carefully crafted "commonly anywhere" disclaimer? Actually, I'll do it for you: you're sneaking into the comparison uranium concentration in bedrock and parent layers, notably that of felsic rocks and intrusive formations as well as shales and phosphorites, and soils formed from parent layers of those rocks. The average of US topsoils is 3ppm, because while most have uranium concentrations well below 1mg/Kg, soils in regions with uranium-rich parent layers have far higher and throw averages out the window. That's what happens when you sneak subsoils and bedrocks with concentrations north of 100ppm into the average.

The closest comparison amid all that is fly ash to granite, except you're continuing to fail to account for one thing: uranium in granite is sequestered. It's not going anywhere unless the rock in which it's sequestered is melted or pulverized, almost all of it is well underground and only released to erosion, and it's not going to result in significant dosage even in the case of unlacquered granite surfaces in the home because uranium and its daughters are alpha and beta emitters that are absorbed by the rock around it. Fly ash isn't similarly sequestered unless it's converted to cement, and it's not legally required to be thus sequestered. Instead, it's dumped in landfills where it can and does leach into soil and groundwater.

And you have yet to acknowledge I'm pointing out there is a clear double standard in how radioactive waste products are represented, discussed, and handled. Even in the terms and conditions of your own argument as you present it. Why is that?
 
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Agema

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What you're missing was whether or not the slurry included bottom ash, and how much.
1) I missed it? So did you. That's why you're now trying to rework your maths to take into account after the fly ash didn't seem as convincing.

2) It doesn't really matter. If they tested the slurry at 5 or 15mg/kg (depending on which study), that's the uranium content irrespective of proportions of fly ash or bottom ash.

3) It's a little dishonest to cite a load of articles that don't actually defend your point.

4)
The average of US topsoils is 3ppm, because while most have uranium concentrations well below 1mg/Kg, soils in regions with uranium-rich parent layers have far higher and throw averages out the window.
See map, page 2 of this source which suggests about half the USA has soil concentrations of uranium over 2ppm, and barely any less than 1ppm.

For comparison, other places:
Assam, India: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82417047.pdf
Jordan: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/5/2/133/htm
Iraq: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijac/2018/2541020/

There is no point doing all this searching for sources if you don't get the right ones.
 
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Kwak

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So proving that security forces of governments everywhere are inhuman scum, they are gassing the citizens who are a bit pissed off about this.
 

Eacaraxe

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1) I missed it? So did you. That's why you're now trying to rework your maths to take into account after the fly ash didn't seem as convincing.
No, previously I was talking about fly ash. You questioned the slurry samples and I explained why you were incorrect in your assumption, breaking down the percentages of ash to water, as you requested, and accounting for different possible percentages since you seemed to think that mattered. Don't try to claim I'm changing the subject or moving the goalposts because the parameters you insisted this be considered by, and the factors you failed to account for, show the situation to have been worse than my initial ballpark figure. I was more than happy to let it slide until you pushed it.

2) It doesn't really matter. If they tested the slurry at 5 or 15mg/kg (depending on which study), that's the uranium content irrespective of proportions of fly ash or bottom ash.
Oh, now you want to admit the credibility of the higher sample size now that I've demonstrated the concentration may well might have been twice or even three times the amount discovered by Duke. How fuckin' magnanimous.

3) It's a little dishonest to cite a load of articles that don't actually defend your point.
Don't actually defend my point, hmm?

The first one established moisture concentrations of fly ash and clean up efforts at Kingston. The second slurry density by water mix -- what you wanted to talk about but didn't provide any citation for. Third and fifth, the difference between fly and bottom ash and their proportions and lack of regulations. Fourth, uranium content of high-germanium CBA from bituminous coal. Sixth, establishing that US bituminous coals are high-germanium content.

It's extremely dishonest to claim those don't defend my point, when they are the sources I literally cite for facts, figures, and information used in my very post. Because had I not linked them, you would have claimed I was making shit up and failing to provide citation.

See map, page 2 of this source which suggests about half the USA has soil concentrations of uranium over 2ppm, and barely any less than 1ppm.
Okay, I should have qualified that saying arable land. That I screwed up on, frankly I was thinking arable land when I said that. So how much of that is arable land? Because that tosses out the Rockies, a big chunk of the Appalachians, and the Southwest. And all of that still factors into averages.

And now, I'm going to assume you have at least a seventh grade understanding of math. If over half the country has a samples at 2ppm or less, then what has to be happening for the average to be 3ppm? Hint: it's a thing statisticians call an "outlier". Which speaking of,

Okay, what did I say earlier about igneous and intrusive rocks? What relation might rocks formed from magma and lava have with tectonic plate boundaries, subduction zones, and volcanically-active regions?

This article is literally about identifying uranium ore in phosphorite deposits.

Ah yes, elevated uranium levels barely slightly above background levels and averages, thanks to the poorly understood and rarely observed but natural geologic process, the "M1 Abrams", and its related but equally natural processes, "A-10 Warthog" and "Challenger-2".

There is no point doing all this searching for sources if you don't get the right ones.
Oh, how true. I mean you're the one over here frantically searching for any outlier spot on Earth with a higher than usual uranium concentration to try to downplay the radiological hazard of coal ash, which have higher concentrations for exactly the reasons I described multiple times earlier.

Because I'm pointing out there's a double standard in how we treat the radiological hazard from nuclear energy with any other source. There is no higher order definition of irony on these forums right now than what you're doing right now.
 
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