This just happened. Explosion in Lebanon
- Thread starter Specter Von Baren
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You've collected a hodge podge of indirect information, sprinkled a load of magic "original research" (guesswork) pixie dust on the top with some maths as a bogus attempt to make it look better. That's not "demonstrating", that's pseudoscience. You want to criticise my knowledge of maths, but I am a professional scientist with a career spanning over a quarter century. Whilst stuff like geology is definitely not my forte, I understand how to use scientific sources to build and defend an argument: and thus also see when someone fails to, as you are doing here.
1)
Interpreting your sources properly is incredibly important. For instance, your article on "high-germanium coals". The paper examines coal from just one area of China, which is high in germanium (and uranium), and most of the paper is actually about how to extract the uranium from the ash. It may be true that all high germanium coals are necesasrily also high uranium, but your source simply does not support that claim (which you use as a premise for further arguments). At the point you then also take this particularly high-U Chinese coal and apply its bottom ash U content as a proxy for the American coal ash in the spill, you may as well be writing a fiction novel. Never mind that there is no clear evidence supplied that bottom ash has more uranium than fly ash from the same combustion event. Indeed, papers such as this suggest the opposite may be true.
2)
Next, your source actually stated the fly ash was measured by TDEC at 4.61mg/kg uranium in 2011; the coal ash "waste" (is this the ash, or ash slurry, or post-spill matter?) at 5.4mg/kg by TVA & Jacobs, and the Duke analysis of "the Kingston ash" (again - what exactly are they measuring?) at 15mg/kg. The 15 mg/kg for the end spill waste you have claimed is absolutely not clear at all from your source: I'm entertaining it as a possibility given this lack of clarity. Then to compound the problem, you then notice bottom ash and start trying to make more arguments out of that. But if the bottom ash was mixed in with the fly ash as you say, when all the above sampled the coal ash / waste, they necessarily measured a mixture of fly ash and bottom ash in the first place. Consequently your original research estimates of a yet higher uranium content by including the bottom ash are invalid, even without taking the objections from (1) into account that there are serious errors in how you did so.
3)
You need to provide some actual clear and direct data to defend your claims, not inventing exclusion criteria and arguments just on your own say-so. No matter what part of the world we look at, there is broad consistency that up to 5mg/kg uranium in soil is normal. Here's another, an atlas of the EU, which also has an option to select for uranium concentrations in soil and shows most of the EU at 2-5mg/kg.
Radiological Maps - European Commission
The Radioactivity Environmental Monitoring (REM) group of the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC)
Making up spurious, belated arguments about arable, blaming igenous rocks, claiming some soil measurements just don't count, or that somehow the USA and UK managed to fire enough tons of uranium to substantially alter Iraqi soil content (deeply implausible) is not sufficient. If you are faced with mutiple, reptuable, consistent sources, it is unreasonable and unscientific to hand-wave all of them away without specific and well-sourced rationale.
You're deliberately side-stepping the point that Specter von Baren and I were making, which is the danger from nuclear accidents. The context of this is Lebanon leaving nearly 3 tons of explosive poorly secured in the middle of its capital for six years. Would you trust a government like that with oversight of a nuclear plant? I wouldn't.
And as I said, were laws for radiological waste disposal equal, nuclear waste repositories would be full of rotten bananas.
And as I said, the daily dose of someone in Colorado above the national average is twice, daily, what the public was exposed to at Three Mile Island, once. That's in equivalent dose, your argument about adaptation and comparative risk is meaningless as it is already factored into the equation.
Because I'm pointing out a double standard. I don't know how many times I have to say this before it finally sinks in.
Sure.
Clearly.
Established how much uranium was in the ash, didn't it? And, apparently you didn't notice the COALQUAL comparative analysis paper showed comparable contents in US bituminous coals.
It also measured only U-238 concentration in sub-bituminous sources. Their feed coal sample had .48ppm of uranium. Now who's yanking in irrelevant papers and trying to make the conclusions suit their argument?
Because the article is about TDEC and TVA covering up the level of contamination from the spill.
No, you leapt to the lower value in the article hoping I wouldn't notice you were trying to bullshit. The article was entirely clear about having tested samples taken from the original spill, when the spill occurred.
No, I showed the higher figure was possible, because you said it wasn't based on a false presumption only fly ash and not slurry had been tested, trying to argue the addition of water would have diluted the uranium content.
Here's another, an atlas of the EU, which also has an option to select for uranium concentrations in soil and shows most of the EU at 2-5mg/kg.
Radiological Maps - European Commission
The Radioactivity Environmental Monitoring (REM) group of the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC)remap.jrc.ec.europa.eu
Maps reveal the truth about population density across Europe
It's often said that England is the most densely populated large country in Europe – typically in discussions about the nation's rising population, and the growing strain on public services. But it's not true.
Major mountain ranges of Europe
Congratulations, you discovered mountains in Europe,
because you want to talk about uranium concentrations in top and subsoil, parent layers, and bedrock, but don't want to talk about where it comes from and why uranium concentrations differ.
Yes, that's literally what happened between '91 and '03. Your source wasn't an analysis of "Iraqi" soil, it was an analysis of soil in Basra.
Your own source cites this. Read your own fucking sources before you cite them.
And I'm pointing out that even in that extremely limited scope, you're still spewing double-standard laden bullshit.[/quote]
You should back off a bit, or a lot, either way. The argument is "nuclear is bad"; "nuclear is less bad than other things like coal and much more highly regulated"; "coal isn't that radioactive compared to bananas"; "I know, circle back to the first point!"
Nuclear power exposes people to less radiation than bananas. If you don't disagree with that, you don't disagree, and are picking a fight you don't care about. If I may give the perspective of someone who lives close enough to both Three Mile Island and Centralia, PA, I know pretty well which one is safer and cleaner.
Looks tough, having to choose between prospective radiation poisoning & prospective explosive fuel mishaps. I suppose we could just go for renewables, since they're actually clean and safe.
You know what? I'm going to skip most of your post because there's only one interesting thing:
Congratulations, you still have nothing. Absolutely nothing. Zip, nada, zero, zilch, diddly squat. You have a massive, gaping, expanse of nothing, putting even the tiny number of molecules in a litre of interstellar space to shame for sheer nothingness.
If the uranium content of soil is really as low as you say, you should have no problem demonstrating published data showing so. As you've been challenged to do. And yet you have presented nothing. You're just there trying to fob it off with increasingly feeble, unsupported excuses. This is the only useful thing in your post, because it sums up the titanic tower of bullshit you've been constructing here. It's all a fantasy of bluster and poorly cobbled together extrapolations of poorly selected information.
Beyond that, given the dictum that it takes an order of magnitude more effort to disprove bullshit that make it, I'm not letting you waste my time any longer and I am just going to dismiss any more bullshit you come out with the only one word it merits.
It has been clear back since posts like #79 and #87 that a) everyone agrees coal is shit and needs to go, and that b) no-one has clearly opposed nuclear.
That's how fucking averages work. I don't have to prove shit, you're arguing against basic arithmetic. If a set, even discounting outliers, ranges numerically from 2-5 and therefore its mid-range is 3.5, what does it tell you about the distribution of numbers within that set if the mean is 3? You're the fucking scientist apparently, you tell me.
Look at your own EU map, the entire low countries region and most of Poland, most of Great Britain and Finland, have less than 1mg/Kg concentration. Regions with concentrations higher than 3mg/Kg correlate to the Alps, Alpennines, Balkan ranges, Massif Central, northern and central Mesetas; those are comparatively smaller regions with much higher concentrations, dragging the average up. Also, the Stockholm archipelago. But god forbid we ask why it's comparatively radioactive as hell.
And to think, all this to fight down to the very eyeteeth to deny a double standard exists in how radiological waste and radiation are perceived and discussed in relation to industries that create it, compared to nuclear. Because god forbid literally any other industry, the planet's own geologic processes, or any cosmic event up to and including the remnants of the Big Bang itself, be held to the same standard as nuclear energy.
What's fucking hilarious about this, is we're discussing a fertilizer explosion in Beirut, and the fertilizer industry's still ahead of rare earths (but well behind coal) in terms of uranium production as a byproduct due to phosphate rock mining last I checked.
Until you account for externalities of rare earth production, and the energy costs associated with its refining and parts assembly, anyhow. That's why I'm anti-photovoltaic but pro-solar thermal, for starters.
That's the thing, we really don't. Least of all in the US. If we had moved forward with high-temp and breeder reactors in the '50s rather than getting stuck with commercial BWR and PWR reactors, and committed to reprocessing and sequestering heavy actinides and transactinides, we'd be able to make that claim.
Bottom line, what would happen to the coal industry if it was required to adhere to standards set for the nuke industry by the EPA and NRC for waste management?
So why are you arguing? Is there anything here beyond enjoying telling someone who demonstrably is communicating these ideas with you that they don't know anything repeatedly?
I'll address this.
You're checking the shades wrongly. Attached is a map for Belgium from a study connected to the wider project that constructed that Atlas.
Thus on the Atlas, the area at the top of Belgium covering Brugge and Antwerp is 0.5-1.6 mg/kg (corresponding to most of Poland). The thin layer south of that (corresponding to the lighter half of the UK) is 1.6-2.4, and the darker layer south of that with a "tongue" heading northeast over Brussels (the other half of the UK) is 2.4-3.4.
I know how averages work. I also know that scientists that encounter outliers tend to double check them and often exclude them; and that we have ways of assessing distribution of data (standard deviation, standard error of the mean, range values, etc.). I don't think you can reasonably insist the data is skewed abnormally high by outliers without any idea of what those outliers may be or what the people who collected data might have done about them.
However, the useful thing about that Belgium chart is it also effectively lets us see what the observed spread is... and it's fine. Results are broadly geographically consistent, and even where the highest values are (red dots), they are few and well colocalised with other high values (orange).
Why not ask Eacaraxe?
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Okay, I see what you mean. I have poor eyesight and can't tell shades of purple from each other well, and I had to zoom in on a per-country basis to see the difference. I stand corrected, and I'll change my statement to say most of the low countries is below 1, and the GB is around 2. That is still a massive swath of continental Europe, below the average of 3ppm.
And, it's still linked to geologic and volcanic activity. Which is where I was going with that, because not all bedrocks and parent layers are created equal in terms of uranium concentration. It's why subsoil and topsoil concentrations aren't uniform -- it's influenced by the uranium concentrations of the soils' parent layer. It's not sufficient to say there is a distribution of concentrations and an average that can be drawn from that, you have to contextualize that by examining where those concentrations are and why the distribution is what it is.
I told you what the outliers are pages ago, their causes, the source of the wide range of distribution of uranium concentrations in soil. Case in point,
That would be my point. The coastal region and Ardennes forest have low uranium concentrations, and high concentrations in Belgium are localized in a more or less straight line east-southeast through Flemish and Walloon Brabant, and Liege. Would you say that's a fair eyeball assessment of the country's uranium concentrations?
If you're looking for geographic consistency, you're looking for the wrong thing. You need to be looking for geologic consistency.
It's an attempt to get someone to admit that they're pushing for something purely because of their pride at this point. There are plenty of reasons to want to change from coal power, you don't need to push for this absurd idea of coal being more radioactive than radioactive waste to make that point.
Hey, in case anyone remembers that whole "explosion in Lebanon" thing, apparently the prime minister is stepping down, with claims of widespread corruption in the country's government.
Yeah, I think that’s also partly the whole economy in free fall thing. Lebanon has been plummeting for a few months now. Also I think protesters took over like two or three of the primary government buildings.
Same here. There's probably a limit before it stops you from reading more after a certain point. The first few hits are free...
Also, in the header of that website it says "democracy dies in darkness".
Does anybody else see that as a red flag? A journalism outlet should be to report the news, not advocate for social issues or a certain system of government.