It's one thing to be a blogger, but speaking to your local Rotary Club is another great way to get the message out about our industry and how it can protect the environment while supporting energy security.
Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu
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This is simply not true.
Carbon emissions aside, which he did not qualify in his statement, from the fuel fabrication process, routine operations release a wide variety of radioisotopes to both the air and water and eventually the soil. Simply look at the annual radioactive discharge reports for each and every nuclear power station and you will see a wide variety of routine release rates.
Oyster Creek for example released more than 1 million curies out the elevated stack in 1979 alone and nobody at NRC as much as batted an eye.
Such claims are also in denial of the radioactive waste stream that comes from reactors and remains unresolved.
So alot more than water vapor is coming off every reactor. Clearly the hope here is that if you tell a lie enough times, people will start to believe it.
Well, Mr. Gunter, working for NIRS, you should be well equipped to educate us about that. Only, you call them "factoids."
Anyone in the nuclear power industry can tell you that routine discharges from commercial nuclear power are trivial by way of comparison with the fluctuation in natural background radiation. Note I said the "fluctuation" and not the actual level. Even releases from incidents such as TMI-2 were inconsequential.