Comment Well... (Score 2) 215
Russia is extending the lifetime of nuclear power reactors beyond their engineered life span of 30 years
What could possibly go wrong ?
Russia is extending the lifetime of nuclear power reactors beyond their engineered life span of 30 years
What could possibly go wrong ?
From the article:
A 250 MW unit weighing about 500 lbs. (227 kg) would be small and light enough to drop under the hood of a car, he says.
250 megawatts? Somebody is just making up numbers. Takeoff power for a 747 is about 100MW.
Ya that's what I was wondering, just think of the waist heat that baby gives off.
Thorium is found in small amounts in most rocks and soils; it is three times more abundant than tin in the Earth's crust and is about as common as lead. Soil commonly contains an average of around 12 parts per million (ppm) of thorium. Thorium occurs in several minerals including thorite (ThSiO4), thorianite (ThO2 + UO2) and monazite. Thorianite is a rare mineral and may contain up to about 12% thorium oxide. Monzonite contains 2.5% thorium, allanite has 0.1 to 2% thorium and zircon can have up to 0.4% thorium. Thorium-containing minerals occur on all continents. Thorium is several times more abundant in Earth's crust than all isotopes of uranium combined and thorium-232 is several hundred times more abundant than uranium-235.
We're worrying about it now because the way it is being used has changed, and it has become FAR more widespread.
As a result - contamination is happening left and right.
Please tell us where it's happening??
Here's a quote from Wikipedia;
A 2011 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that "The environmental impacts of shale development are challenging but manageable.". The study addressed groundwater contamination, noting "There has been concern that these fractures can also penetrate shallow freshwater zones and contaminate them with fracturing uid, but there is no evidence that this is occurring". This study blames known instances of methane contamination on a small number of sub-standard operations, and encourages the use of industry best practices to prevent such events from recurring.
I believe it (fracking) can be done safely, with regulations to guide companies. We don't need FUD, that doesn't help anyone or anything.
Wait, what? So we need to have a nice high tally before we can stop being stupid?
How about any tally? or is it OK to be so risk adverse to anything? Around 150 people die a year from Coconuts, more than shark attacks, should we ban those?
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2405/are-150-people-killed-each-year-by-falling-coconuts
Stupid seems to be the word of the day.
1) The light-your-water-on-fire incidents were in Colorado and PA. In both cases they were proven to be connected to drilling. In the case of Colorado, the state-level EPA (which has multiple high-level employees with financial ties to the gas industry) ruled that it was biogenic. The federal-level EPA reviewed this and concluded that the methane was NOT biogenic and matched shale gas in isotopic content.
2) They reached out to a member of the gas industry and he said he had "no recollection" - it's just more gas industry "sweep it under the rug" tactics.
Actually that was the state office, not a oil & gas company.
No, it wasn’t naturally occurring. People who lived by fracked wells had FINE water. Post fracking, animals lost hair and died, the local EPA told them to stop drinking water and their water LIGHTS ON FIRE!!. SO SOMEHOW the “component chemicals’ of Haliburtons frack mixture shows up in water sources??? You have a agenda to fool the public. Truth tells the opposite of what you write. YOu're just another energy lobbyist.
I wish I was an energy lobbyist, could use the money, just a mild mannered physicist. You don't have to take what I said, look here;
http://www.energyindepth.org/2010/06/debunking-gasland/
quoted passage;
From GASLAND; “In 2004, the EPA was investigating a water contamination incident due to hydraulic fracturing in Alabama. But a panel rejected the inquiry, stating that although hazard materials were being injected underground, EPA did not need to investigate.”
* No record of the investigation described by Fox exists, so EID reached out to Dr. Dave Bolin, deputy director of Alabama’s State Oil & Gas Board and the man who heads up oversight of hydraulic fracturing in that state. In an email, he said he had “no recollection” of such an investigation taking place.
* That said, it’s possible that Fox is referring to EPA’s study of the McMillian well in Alabama, which spanned several years in the early- to mid-1990s. In 1989, Alabama regulators conducted four separate water quality tests on the McMillian well. The results indicated no water quality problems existed. In 1990, EPA conducted its own water quality tests, and found nothing.
* In a letter sent in 1995, then-EPA administrator Carol Browner (currently, President Obama’s top energy and environmental policy advisor) characterized EPA’s involvement with the McMillian case in the following way: “Repeated testing, conducted between May of 1989 and March of 1993, of the drinking water well which was the subject of this petition [McMillian] failed to show any chemicals that would indicate the presence of fracturing fluids. The well was also sampled for drinking water quality, and no constituents exceeding drinking water standards were detected.”
* For information on what actually did happen in Alabama during this time, and how it’s relevant to the current conversation about the Safe Drinking Water Act, please download the fact sheet produced last year by the Coalbed Methane Association of Alabama.
New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman
