It proves nothing and took all of 2 minutes to read.
Your post seeks to steer the debate away from the question of radiation from coal. Again, attacking only nuclear power while pointing none of the blame at coal at all.
Your posts all seem to tread very gingerly when coal's faults are brought into the discussion. Curious... If I hated coal as much as I state that I do, I'd be posting about the toxic emissions from coal plants:
Lead, which causes neurological damage to the unborn and to children. Gosh, that sounds like something an "environmentalist" would be squarely against.
Mercury:
Mercury causes brain, lung, and kidney damage, as well as reproductive problems, and even death in
humans and other animals. Mercury is found in fish after it falls into a lake or stream. Just one drop of
mercury can contaminate a 25-acre lake to the point where fish are unsafe to eat, making mercury
contamination the most common reason for fish advisories issued by States and Native American tribes.
The EPA estimates that at least six million women of childbearing age have levels of mercury in their
bodies that exceed what the EPA considers acceptable and that 375,000 babies born each year are at
risk of neurological problems due to exposure to mercury in the womb.
http://www.rockymtnsolar.com/Deaths_and_Injuries.pdf Just one drop of Mercury makes all the fish in a 25-acre lake unsafe to eat!
Gosh! If I were an environmentist I'd be pounding on every desk in D.C. to make them stop allowing the coal power plants to freely pollute as they do.
Here's more about coal's wonderful emissions:
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Solid waste
Waste created by a typical 500-megawatt coal plant includes more than 125,000 tons of ash and 193,000 tons of sludge from the smokestack scrubber each year. Nationally, more than 75% of this waste is disposed of in unlined, unmonitored onsite landfills and surface impoundments.
Toxic substances in the waste -- including arsenic, mercury, chromium, and cadmium -- can contaminate drinking water supplies and damage vital human organs and the nervous system. One study found that one out of every 100 children who drink groundwater contaminated with arsenic from coal power plant wastes were at risk of developing cancer. Ecosystems too have been damaged -- sometimes severely or permanently -- by the disposal of coal plant waste.
Cooling water discharge
Once the 2.2 billion gallons of water have cycled through the coal-fired power plant, they are released back into the lake, river, or ocean. This water is hotter (by up to 20-25° F) than the water that receives it. This "thermal pollution" can decrease fertility and increase heart rates in fish. Typically, power plants also add chlorine or other toxic chemicals to their cooling water to decrease algae growth. These chemicals are also discharged back into the environment.
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c02d.html---------------------------------------------------------------
Wow! Coal power plants are allowed to just spew out all that toxic crap into the air, into the water, and onto the land (which my earlier post shows causes ground water pollution). Coal is a deadly enemy even without global climate change taken into account. Even if coal had to pay for the damage caused by its CO2 emissions alone, nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal power, wave power, and increased efficiency would all be cheaper by comparison. Now what if it also had to pay for the clean up costs, the lives lost each year, cleaning up the poisoned lakes and rivers... there would be no hope of coal being anything but the most expensive form of electrical power there is.
But coal gets a free pass on all of that toxic crap it puts out into our air, the air that good and decent hard-working American's kids need to breathe, and the water they need to drink to stay alive and grow, etc. And some posters here on DU want to only talk about the radiation coming from a 50 year old nuclear plant halfway across the world? Double standard, much?