Posts by Graeme Ross 7 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2008
I would agree with "cap'n", however although the actual content of the registers articles on this mission has been excellent, I can only describe the titles assigned to each of these articles as infantile, about what I would expect from a 13 year public school boy (no disrespect to public schools).
Certainly not the high standard I usually expect from the register - shame on you !!!
You have to remember what these companies exist for. It isn't to make it cheaper for us to run our homes - It is to make money, a lot of money, as much money as possible (preferably without anyone screaming, but if they do, so what)
Historically a perceived shortage never ever hurt the suppliers (the price just went up, as did their profits), in fact it is when there is a surplus that the suppliers suffer.
It is in the suppliers interest to frustrate any technology which looks as if it will make power generation cheap and plentiful. Wind power, tidal solar etc are ok in this perspective as the power will never be plentiful and it will never be cheap and they can claim "Look we (the power suppliers) are doing our utmost best to secure supply for you our customers"
At the moment the power supply industry is just one huge cartel bleeding the consumer for what they can get.
Just to back up my earlier post, I found this link
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/industry/Sparton_More_uranium_in_Chinese_coal_ash-020807.shtml
The concentration of Uranium in Coal tends to range from 1 to 10 parts per million.
The interesting thing is that once the coal is burnt the concentration seems to go up by a factor of approximately 20 to between 100 and 200 parts per million.
These are significant amounts !!!!
I am not sure but since Uranium is heavier than coal dust (and I think its non soluble) we could use panning techniques to extract and concentrate the uranium from the ash heaps (just like panning for gold - except at a certain point of concentration the water would start to heat up)
I was wondering how long it would be before someone brought this up.
There is no proof that there are such things as cancer clusters near reactors. The latest research seems to be pointing at agricultural fertilizers rather than radiation (however this has been conveniently ignored by the greens)
I seem to remember (only memory, could be wrong) that there was a really significant cancer cluster in East Kilbride however no one could get Nuclear Energy to admit to having built a reactor near there (sneaky off them to build one and not tell anyone)
One of the theories about cancer clusters was that it was due to large numbers of people moving into an area for large construction projects (new towns, new factories, new nuclear reactors etc) and exposing each other to virus's and bugs etc that they were not used to.
Ok.... If I understand you correctly J you have just suggested a solution to our nuclear waste disposal problem, just grind it up and spread it really thinly through the topsoil of our fair country, we'll pick a really large dilution ratio say a million to one and everyone will be happy.
I think not !!!!!!
My point was that the greens love to berate the nuclear industry for producing nuclear waste products, which are tightly controlled but they conveniently ignore all the other sources of nuclear waste which are just discharged into the environment - they seem to promote this idea that there is a difference between natural radioactivity and man made radioactivity - get a grip guys its just radioactivity wherever it comes from.
Oh by the way "Learning physics, sounds lovely! You could start yourself, how about that?" - I have an Honours Physics degree from a major British university. Admittedly many years ago, but I think I do know the physics (my maths may be a bit rusty but.....)
I would suspect the best place to look for deposits of uranium are the slag heaps of existing coal burning power stations. Coal has uranium in it in parts per million, which doesn't sound a lot but for every million tons of ash and slag you will have tons of uranium - should keep us going for quite a while. Plus apparently because of cosmic ray impacts and background radiation there is a slow conversion rate of some of the Uranium into plutonium, so the weapon mongers would be happy too.
All we need to do is dig up the slightly radioactive slag heaps and refine the Uranium out of them....... Oh hang on haven't we build massive housing estates on top of most of them. (I wonder if these proud householders actually realise what their house is built upon, but then again they shouldn't worry as its only NATURAL radioactivity nowhere near as dangerous as that man made stuff that nuclear power stations apparently produce :)
I really do wish that these greenpeace people would actually learn some physics but then what can we expect from tree-huggers (why do people listen to them?)
Someone mentioned it earlier, but I feel it is probably worth mentioning again.
Each year every working coal burning power station in the UK emits more radioactive waste in the ash (a good proportion going straight up the chimney into the atmosphere) than has EVER been released from all of the worlds Nuclear power stations since the 1950's. (and at least the nuclear power stations waste is controllable and containable)
As for the government just wanting nuclear power stations so that they could replenish their stocks of Uranium and Plutonium, it would be so much easier to just mine the slag tips around all our major power stations (parts per million Uranium in coal dust soon mounts up when you are talking about millions of tons of waste), plus there are natural process that also produce Plutonium in the waste as well.
Several years ago the US government did a study on reclaiming Uranium and Plutonium from waste from coal burning power stations (they figured that there was more available energy in the waste by orders of magnitude than was actually produced in burning the coal in the first place). The conclusion of the study was that it was feasible to retrieve the materials but politically it would be a bad idea to draw attention to the nature of the materials they were pulling from the ash as the pressure groups might close down the coal burning power stations as well as the nuclear ones.
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