From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Jun 02 2001 - 12:08:01 MDT
Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de wrote:
>
> If this is indeed the piece most people mention when they say "radioactivity
> release through coal plants blah blah" it's not just misleading, this is
> actively planted piece of misinformation, concocted by a government
> physicist in a national laboratory, probably a trained nuclear physicist.
I agree you've demonstrated (quite impressively) that the argument that
nuclear power is *inherently* less radioactive than coal power is probably
politically biased. Let it never be heard again. But, in practice,
nuclear wastes *are* contained; they are *not* released into the air and
the environment. I agree you've demonstrated that talking about the
amount of uranium released into the atmosphere by coal burning as if
uranium were supremely dangerous, *uranium* (gasp!), is disingenuous and
may even indicate a political bias on the part of ORNL (so you've
justified that part too). Nonetheless, it looks to me like there's still
room for a calculation about whether the amount of radioactivity sent into
the open environment by coal plants does *in fact* exceed the amount of
radioactivity released by nuclear plants by some number of orders of
magnitude, possibly exceeding the radioactivity of, say, all known nuclear
leakages or containment failures combined. If so it would still be both
true and fair to say "Coal plants release orders of magnitude more
radioactivity into the environment than nuclear plants because of
radioactive isotopes in the fuel." (Eugene has demonstrated that it would
not be fair to say "because of trace amounts of uranium in the fuel"
unless the audience knows that uranium isn't evil.) If the amount of
radioactivity released is trivial compared to ordinary background
radiation, than that deserves to be pointed out as well.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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