Nuclear Power, Coal Ash, and You
by Donna Schoenkopf
I'm an old nuclear reactor hater. I haven't liked them for decades. All that nuclear waste sitting underground waiting to kill us in 10,000 years. I remember an article in Scientific American (maybe?) many years ago which dealt with the quandry of trying to figure out how to tell human beings in the distant, DISTANT future about the danger they were about to touch in the long abandoned radioactive waste depositories of our age. It really was quite a dilemma.
But Nephew Mike, who takes chemistry in college (which makes him an expert in MY book) tells me that in his humble opinion nuclear reactors should not be feared. And that, really, coal ash is very much more radioactive than nuclear waste. But that both are pretty much not a health problem to people. We get more than what those two processes do than X Rays we get every year.
And, he says, thorium is the newest rage, producing next to nothing in nuclear waste. It's much, much more economical, easier to produce and requires simpler mechanics. Thorium. It's like Uranium 235 but slightly less dense. He shared a sixteen minute long video from youtube about it.
I hope that's what President Obama had in mind when he decided to give Georgia 4.3 billion dollars for a couple of brand new nuclear reactors.
We can only hope.
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