Replies

"the reactor has now been completely dismantled.
***Bowl Sheet."

This sounds like the people who reported contaminated milk years after TMI. TMI was decommissioned and dismantled. The other reactors at TMI continue to operate as safely as TMI, which means without ever having hurt anyone.

"Chernobyl... no one was hurt.
***Again, Bowl Sheet."

You didn't correct my statement, which should have made it clear that we are talking about the post meltdown cleanup. Chernobyl was not a commercial nuclear plant. Had it any containment there would have been no injuries, but the Communist government was not so concerned about law suits or bad publicity in the USSR. Three people died from radiation poisoning and estimates for the five year effects from higher than average radiation ranged from 20 to 60 additional premature deaths from leukemia and similar radiation related illnesses. That was, of course, over five years. The US EPA estimates an additional 200 deaths from respiratory disease are caused each year from each thousand megawatt coal-fired plant. Coal replaced the electricity from Chernobyl, which was a graphite core reactor, like the Fermi reactors at Chicago. Chernobyl's reactors also produced heat used to generate electricity, and used to heat nurseries and homes. It's design, because the USSR had boiling water and steam reactors then, was to produce weapons grade plutonium. Still, after five years, 940 more people died because Chernobyl was off line. Coal produces effluents too expensive to entirely remove. Coal is still far better than no electrical energy.

"Would you build your house on top of Chernobyl or Three Mile Island,

I worked for twelve years one floor above a research reactor, and would have no concern living just outside the the containment dome of a reactor, if it didn't obscure the view. The additional radiation from a reactor is about 1/500th the natural background radiation from a town on the Northeast coast of Brazil, where annual natural radiation is around 5 rem/year. It is a lovely town and there are no measured health effects from the radiation. There are other places with high radiation. One Taiwanese government study over 10,000 residents of a housing project where steel was accidentally contaminated with Cobalt 60, exposing all inhabitants to from 40 to 50 microcuries of radiation, day and night, showed a dramatic drop in cancers of all kinds, highly correlated with the stability of the inhabitants. The fish at Seabrook love the slightly warmed water, which has improved the already great fishing off the New Hampshire coast.

And no! I would not want to live near a coal plant. Hard to tell sometimes whether people are simply ignorant, or if they have bought the nonsense published by the environmentalism hawkers. Coal comes out of the ground. Uranium and radium come from under the ground. When one hundred coal cars of mined coal are burned each day to feed a thousand megawatt electric plant, it is perfectly natural that radium and uranium go up the smoke stacks. I doubt that it poses any danger, but coal plants have never met NRC standards for radiation, so it is not unexpected that they are not generally monitored for radiation. Some are, and the radiation reflects the geology of the mines from which the coal was extracted.