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December 30, 2008

Won't you be my neighbor?

Sarah Palin to the right of me, Oprah to my left... am I talking politics?

Or my dream neighborhood?

Sadly, Fred Rogers doesn't appear in the survey.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

December 27, 2008

Snowzilla

Alaska is the last American frontier. It is also the stage for a showdown between a 25 foot tall snowman and the city government of Anchorage.

City officials this year deemed Snowzilla a public nuisance and safety hazard. A cease-and-desist order was issued. The city tacked a public notice on Powers' door.

City officials said the structure increased traffic to the point of endangerment and that the snowman itself was unsafe.

You know darn well that I'm not the type to go on a pseudo-libertarian rant about Garrett Hardin's famous paper and public roads or something like that. I mean, I think we can all agree that I have a right to make a gigantic snowman in my yard. And I think we can all agree that this guy's neighbors think he is an asshat and we would all hate to have that kind of traffic on our own street. And sure, it's an interesting dilemma when those two are at odds.

But that's not what I want to talk about.

No, I'm just here to note that I wish I had some snow here in Virginia, and to note that there is always somebody who is able to make a buck off of any bizarre news story or cultural, um, phenomenon. And God bless that person, who in this case can be found here.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

December 24, 2008

ZOMG! Radioactive coal sludge will kill us all! (updated)

What could be worse than a reported half billion gallons of gallons of toxic ash sludge breaking a dike at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant and flooding about 400 acres, damaging a dozen homes?

Well, how about "news" articles that misrepresent the danger by people falsely claiming that this coal slurry is more radioactive than spent nuclear fuel? Yes, several stories have linked a bad article by Scientific American from a year ago whose headline says exactly that, even though the content of the Scientific American article clearly refuted its own headline.

Ready for a quick breakdown of the facts?

1) The headline of the Scientific American article is "Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste", and that is false. Anybody who bothered to read the article would find that out.

2) From that same article, "In fact, fly ash—a by-product from burning coal for power—contains up to 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste", and this is also false. The primary source article (link) says nothing of the kind. Please continue.

3) Again from that same Scientific American article,

In a 1978 paper for Science, J. P. McBride at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and his colleagues... estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly. To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors.

This is true.

The point of McBride's research is that shielding at nuclear plants is freaking great, and very little thought is given to the trace radioactivity of coal plants. Because it's trace. Less than 1% of the coal sludge is any flavor of radioactive isotope--it's actually on the order of 10 parts per million. Meanwhile, well more than 90% of spent nuclear fuel is uranium. In other words, coal waste (including fly ash) is orders of magnitude less radioactive. If you were to mount a Geiger counter on your dashboard, you wouldn't even be able to tell when you were driving past a coal plant or a coal slurry pond.

Shame on Scientific American, and shame on ignorant, sensationalist writers who quote an article after only reading its headline or maybe a couple of intro paragraphs. The sludge spill in Tennessee is awful enough from a chemical point of view that we really don't need to sensationalize and make up nuclear problems.

22:55 UPDATE: I have emailed Rick Hind, Legislative Director of Greenpeace’s Toxics Campaign, regarding an interview he gave on the issue. While I am sure he won't enjoy being taken to task on Christmas Eve for not weakening the environmentalist argument in favor of honesty, I do hope he will give some thought to how valuable honesty is in any public campaign.

Posted by Wulf | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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