Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste

[Marlin]

This is an old article from Scientific American but is topical for the issues with the coal ash spills and cited recently on local news sources. I don't live far from the major spill in Kingston Tennessee and have worked with some of those from that cleanup, they have no trust of safety personnel after all the health issues that arose from that cleanup. The title is misleading as it has a narrow view of exposure form the waste and does not make the comparison to what most nuke workers would consider nuclear waste.

Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste


https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/?fbclid=IwAR3KzJUfy7QAW9v5P72PMeVsGRgU2cq6U1PPO4mA3ZaK4MEzlwWHrzaNTbQ

[scotoma]

Wow, the old apple and orange comparison. He didn't say much about the workers in a coal plant. They have to breathe the flyash at work. I worked at a coal plant for about 6 months and it was disgusting. When I came to work in the morning, the turbine deck was grey with flyash. I worked in an office with filtered ventilation and the papers on my desk turned grey over night. When I went into the plant, I would come back and blow my nose and it would be darkgrey. At the end of the shift, the workers looked like walking death because their skin was grey. We would go in and wash up and the flyash would collect in the sink like dunes of fine sand. I will take nuclear any day. The radiation and radioactive materials are monitored and controlled.

[TVA]

So far from the truth it isnt even funny

[Marlin]

Wow, the old apple and orange comparison. He didn't say much about the workers in a coal plant. They have to breathe the flyash at work. I worked at a coal plant for about 6 months and it was disgusting. When I came to work in the morning, the turbine deck was grey with flyash. I worked in an office with filtered ventilation and the papers on my desk turned grey over night. When I went into the plant, I would come back and blow my nose and it would be darkgrey. At the end of the shift, the workers looked like walking death because their skin was grey. We would go in and wash up and the flyash would collect in the sink like dunes of fine sand. I will take nuclear any day. The radiation and radioactive materials are monitored and controlled.

The article itself states very low levels of radiation the scope of the study is very narrow and it's definition of nuclear waste is really in the environmental area Scientific American is not what it use to be.

As for the flyash it is not exactly harmless and the problem many of the workers who saw coworkers die after exposure was the way it was handled. Bear in mind that these workers were exposed to much higher levels than you would have been and were denied the use of dust masks even when asked for. The run off from the spill did exceed EPA standards for radioactive isotopes by the way. I breathed in plenty of dust from industrial environments that I did not give a second thought to. I have silica scaring on one branch of a lung, I did not know it was there until it showed up on a routine x-ray I get for asbestos exposure.

https://www.physics.purdue.edu/primelab/safety/MSDS/Fly%20Ash%20%20%20-%20TVA.pdf


https://www.physics.purdue.edu/primelab/safety/MSDS/Fly%20Ash%20%20%20-%20TVA.pdf

[SloGlo]

it wood have been good four the article too discuss the stack emissions. plenty of radioactivity their. axe any body whose worked nuclear next two a dirt burner, frisking is a nite mayor.

[scotoma]

Some people are all upset about phasing out coal. We had electrostatic precipitators that took most of the flyash out of the exhaust. It was placed in hoppers and then loaded into trucks. A lot was taken to facilities to make concrete products. We never monitored this material for anything. We had scrubbers to remove the rest of the ash and gases that were never in use because the water became so acidic that it would corrode the pipes. The concrete floor was so pitted that it loked like stalagmites. Then they had to  neutralize the water before discharging it. Very expensive process.