Both coal and nuclear suck. You can't justify one by pointing to the other. If you gave a hoot about the issue of the environment you wouldn't make inaccurate, inappropriate and irrelevant comparisons of coal to nuclear. We need to shift to a distributed renewable grid. The nuclear industry AND the coal industry, together with most power structures in the utilities and governments wish to perpetuate the centralized system built around those sources of energy. When you promote nuclear, you are helping to support the system built around coal.
This 2010 article from Deutsche Welle shows part of the problem. It was written after Merkel's procoal government decided to extend the life of their nuclear fleet and before Fukushima made that impossible for them:
Renewable energy technology developing faster than expected
the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy Systems Technology released a report on Thursday that offers a little sun-related succor. The institute has recorded better-than-expected progress in harnessing the power of the sun on these hot summer days. Much earlier than expected, solar, wind and water power are expected to cover Germany's total energy demands.
...Rainer Baake of the environmental group Deutsche Umwelthilfe (German Environment Aid), which commissioned the new report, expressed his delight. "Nobody expected the development of renewable energy to be as quick as we're experiencing in Germany," he told Deutsche Welle. "Our government now estimates that in the year 2020 we will already have 40 percent feed-in from renewable sources. That is phenomenal."
The conflict of supply
But there is one problem. ... This puts the grid in a paradoxical situation. Since Germany has introduced a law designed to give renewable energy precedence on the grid, and since there will be times in the next few years - the sunniest, windiest times - when renewable sources will be able to cover 100 percent of Germany's energy needs, nuclear power stations will be surplus to requirements. But they can't be, because nuclear power stations can't be switched off at short notice.
..."That means that we need flexible power generators that can always produce electricity when wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine," explains Baake. "It is simply not possible to shut off nuclear power generators from nine o'clock in the morning to four o'clock in the afternoon, for example. And that means we're going to have a big conflict in our electricity system if our government decides in favor of life-time extension for nuclear power stations."
I know you are really big on denying economic realities but nonetheless they exist. Nuclear, as well as coal, retards the growth of renewable infrastructure and slows the response to climate change. That is why all of the environmental groups focused on climate action are opposed to nuclear power as evidenced by 700 Climate action NGOs condemnation of Japan for promoting nuclear power.
Japan criticized for pushing nuke plant exports despite accident
TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Japan has been given the Fossil of the Day "award" at a U.N. climate change conference in Panama for pushing a scheme to promote its exports of nuclear power generation technologies to developing countries as a way of curbing global warming, an international environmental group said Monday.
The Climate Action Network, which groups some 700 nongovernmental organizations in 90 countries, said in a press release it had given Japan "first place" in the award for pushing for a mechanism for exporting nuclear technology despite the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant triggered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
The network said the Fukushima calamity "certainly destroyed the myth that nuclear power is safe and clean" and rapped Japan for its failure "to learn an important lesson from the accident."
In a working group meeting on climate change in the Central American country, Japan refused to drop the option of including a scheme under which exporters of nuclear plants to developing countries can earn emissions credits in the so-called "clean development mechanism," the network said.
The mechanism...
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20111004p2g00m0dm048000c.html When are you going to stop making false representations about the data related to radioactivity released from coal being comparable to that from nuclear?
I know for a fact you've previously read DUer struggle4progress' post addressing the claims you are making since it was in a thread you started:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x292136I've put the related material from several of S4P's posts together for continuity:
-- Posted by struggle4progress Mon May-02-11 at 03:50 PM, Mon May-02-11 08:39 PM, and Tue May-03-11 01:09 AM at the above thread.
On the comparitive radiological hazard:
Here's Gabbard's estimated global total radioactivity release from coal, 1937 - 2040:
... Thus, by combining U.S. coal combustion from 1937 (440 million tons) through 1987 (661 million tons) with an estimated total in the year 2040 (2516 million tons), the total expected U.S. radioactivity release to the environment by 2040 can be determined. That total comes from the expected combustion of 111,716 million tons of coal with the release of 477,027,320 millicuries in the United States. Global releases of radioactivity from the predicted combustion of 637,409 million tons of coal would be 2,721,736,430 millicuries ...
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.htmlSo, over a century, he estimates a cumulative worldwide radiological "release" (mostly in ash) under 3 x 10^6 curies
Let's compare that to just a few bad days at Chernobyl, where perhaps 14 EBq (14 x 10^18 Bq) was released -- or over 3 x 10^11 curies
if we had been burning coal, at present rates, since humans first walked the planet, the coal burning wouldn't have had as much radiological impact as the Chernobyl accident. (And actually, that's simply an impossible scenario: if we burned all our coal at present rates, we'd run out in a century or two)Estimates for the Chernobyl release vary by perhaps two orders of magnitude; I found the 14 EBq figure on a standard nuclear industry site. Divide it by ten or a hundred or a thousand: the Chernobyl release still dwarfs coal releases
Since we are all discussing Gabbard, I quoted Gabbard as saying coal burning will release 2.7 million curies between 1937 and 2040
If you don't want to discuss Chernobyl, we can discuss TMI or Fukushima
For comparative purposes, consider the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island:
The total radioactivity released during the accident was 2.4 million curies. See: Thomas M. Gerusky. "Three Mile Island: Assessment of Radiation Exposures and Environmental Contamination." In: Thomas H. Moss and David L. Sills: The Three Mile Island Nuclear Accident: Lessons and Implications. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences,1981, p. 57
http://echo.gmu.edu/tmi /
For further comparative purposes, releases of a single isotope (I-131) from Fukushima may exceed 2.4 million curies; see
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/2206Of course, there are plenty of good reasons to hate coal, but comparative radiological hazard isn't on the chart. On the potential for nuclear weapons development:
...So most of this thread is debating Gabbard, whether or not people recognize it, and for that reason, I cite Gabbard's numbers: they are the numbers under discussion
I rather dislike the Gabbard webpage, as it rather incoherently wanders between mass, radioactivity, and dose estimates, and because its discussion of doses from nuclear plant relies on design basis estimates, rather than on actual emissions
In fact, much of what is on the Gabbard page is simply nonsense; here, for example, Gabbard suggests coal ash poses a nuclear weapon proliferation threat:
Because electric utilities are not high-profile facilities, collection and processing of coal ash for recovery of minerals, including uranium for weapons or reactor fuel, can proceed without attracting outside attention, concern, or intervention. Any country with coal-fired plants could collect combustion by-products and amass sufficient nuclear weapons material to build up a very powerful arsenal, if it has or develops the technology to do so. Of far greater potential are the much larger quantities of thorium-232 and uranium-238 from coal combustion that can be used to breed fissionable isotopes. Chemical separation and purification of uranium-233 from thorium and plutonium-239 from uranium require far less effort than enrichment of isotopes. Only small fractions of these fertile elements in coal combustion residue are needed for clandestine breeding of fissionable fuels and weapons material by those nations that have nuclear reactor technology and the inclination to carry out this difficult task.
Such claims are simply laughable: extracting enough fissile material, from coal ash, in order to make a nuclear weapon, would require enormous financial and energetic and technical resources -- with enormous facilities for chemical separation and isotopic enrichment.
Coal ash consists mainly of compounds like silicates, alumina, and iron rust:
a rather glassy or ceramic material, which has been formed at high temperature in an oxidizing environment, so it won't be very reactive. The first challenge is to extract a trace element from it
Coal ash is (say) 10 ppm natural uranium. A good quality uranium deposit is about 20% U308 -- say, 20 000 times richer in uranium than coal ash. The chemical problem of extracting an element, from a sample which is 20% of that element, is quite different from chemical problem of extracting an element, from a sample which is 0.001% of that element. Coal ash contains almost everything at low concentrations, so in the initial stages of a separation attempt, you're going to get a "soup" that contains all manner of stuff at very low concentrations. To overcome the entropic barrier presented by the extreme dilution, you will need some very favorable reactions
Weapons-grade uranium is about 85% U-235, with a critical mass of some tens of kilograms. Natural uranium is about 2% U-235 49% U-238, and 49% U-234. Thus, you need to start with at least 40x more natural uranium than the amount of weapons-grade uranium you hope to obtain
What's it going to take to produce ten kilograms of weapons-grade uranium from coal ash? At 10 ppm natural uranium, you can't get more than 10 g natural uranium from a metric tonne of coal ash, so 10 kg of natural uranium requires at least 1000 metric tonnes of coal ash; multiplying by 40, you'd need at least 40 000 metric tonnes of coal ash to produce ten kilograms of weapons-grade uranium. The actual numbers will be much worse, since you cannot expect quantitative extraction of a trace element, and you can't expect easy isotopic separation. You're actually contemplating a very substantial industrial enterprise
For perspective, consider this: the average abundance of uranium in crustal rock is about 2.5 ppm. If you can figure out a feasible way to extract uranium from coal ash, you can probably figure out a feasible way to extract uranium from most rocks: there's only a factor of about four in the trace concentrations.
ETA: Compare to this:
How Civilian Nuclear Power Enables Nuclear Proliferationhttp://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x316252 
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