islander wrote: 
You are correct on that point.  I was very surprised by the results I found on that.  Surprised to find that Ca and Hi generate similar amounts via coal.  Arizona's was very surprising @ 44k Gwh.  The states of Wa, Or, Ca, Id, Nv ( 16.6k Gwh)  Hi, and Ak combine for a total of 18.6k Gwh.  Compared to the total US output of over 2 million Gwh, 18,600 Gwh is tiny and hence my remark.  Adding Arizona take it to 60,000 Gwh which is still small out of the total of 2 million Gwh. 

So while my statement was factually inacurate, the gist of it was not.  The states of Ca, Or and Wa have a population of roughly 50 million yet generate under 11k Gwh by coal.  What % of 2 miilion is 11 thousand ?  Not much.  I did say west of the Rockies ...  You do the math, I'm way too tired.  My point of #'s of CFL's in use vs power generated by coal west of the Rockies stands as valid.  There is a divide.  You can toss in Arizona, Nevada and Idaho but it isn't going to change much.
.
And those recycling companies will go out of business once CFL's are no longer used.  Think of all the money invested needlessly or for a temporary need and the people who will be out of work ...

 kurtster wrote: 
I agree with you on LEDs, they are great, I'm using them almost exclusively. But they are still expensive and out of reach for a lot of people. You said CFLs should be banned instead of incandescents. This is where I object and pointed out one more time (I've mentioned this many times before), that burning coal for electricity to fire an incandescent puts more mercury into the atmosphere than using a CFL does. The chart provided is based on national averages for energy use and source and the associated mercury releases. Coal is burned for power in all but three states, so there is no east/west divide here. If you use incandescent lights you are responsible for more mercury in the environment than if you use CFLs. There are a lot of reasons that CLFs aren't great, and a LEDs will eventually be the standard, but if you cite mercury for a reason to use incandescents over CFLs, you are simply wrong.

Oh, and the recycling programs are already in place, and largely run by private companies.  

 islander wrote: 

Really ?

LED's are mercury free last I checked.  They also put out much less heat than a CFL, reducing the need for cooling which consumes electricity.  LED's do not require special haz mat procedures upon breakage IIRC while CFL's do.  In fact, LED's do not seem to pose any kind of risk upon breakage.  

You're using faulty logic.  Granted if all things are equal, the attempt to compare incandescent and CFL's is somewhat valid.  In 2009, according to the EIA coal accounted for 45% of electric generation.  In 2012, it accounts for 37%.  So with the banning of incandescent bulbs, the left column disappears while the right column shrinks slightly.  But in areas say west of the Rockies ?  There is virtually no power generation via coal, yet there is an unusually high concentration of CFL users due to high population concentrations.  By landfilling, you introduce a new risk, where none previously existed.  And the mercury column on the left for incandescents disappears in the west.  And you also claimed there are prograns for 'recapturing and recycling'.  Oh goody, another unnecessary bureaucracy.

With LED's the landfill part of CFL's goes away and the emmision part also shrinks.  LED's do not generate enough heat to the ambient areas to require any additional cooling, yet CFL's do.  More mercury to generate additional cooling for the heat from CFL's.  And then there is also the occilations that CFL's generate that are noisy, some requiring noise filtering and line conditioning, and do impare some people subject to visual frequency occilations, such as epileptics.

CFL's are just plain bad.  We have better technology currently available.  Ban the CFL, period and ASAP.

 kurtster wrote: 
Yes, LEDs are better than CFLs. but once again, if you are really concerned about mercury, then CFLS should be your choice. The mercury in CFLs is contained, and there are programs for recapturing and recycling it. Mercury is also contained in coal and will be released when it is burned for power. CFL makers are using less and less mercury with improved processes now. If you use and incandescent you are guaranteeing that you put more mercury into the environment than if you use a CFL.

Here's a nice little summary http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/change_light/downloads/Fact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf
How do CFLs result in less mercury in the environment compared to traditional light
bulbs?
Electricity use is the main source of mercury emissions in the U.S. CFLs use less electricity than incandescent
lights, meaning CFLs reduce the amount of mercury into the environment. As shown in the table below, a 13-watt,
8,000-rated-hour-life CFL (60-watt equivalent; a common light bulb type) will save 376 kWh over its lifetime, thus
avoiding 4.3 mg of mercury. If the bulb goes to a landfill, overall emissions savings would drop a little, to 3.9 mg.
EPA recommends that CFLs are recycled where possible, to maximize mercury savings.

 haresfur wrote: 

and to you for your thoughtful reply.

and the second bolded reflects an open mind.  Much easier to converse with.

I see natural gas as the bridge fuel to our next long term solution.  Yes, coal is now unnecessay, except for its use in iron ore processing. (coke)

 kurtster wrote: 
And thank you for the thoughtful post.   I'll just reply to the one bit quoted above (for now ). 

Nearly all of the radioactive material released to the ocean from Fukushima is dissolved or adsorbed to colloid particles.  These will disperse and not end up with all the garbage.  I'm far more concerned with toxic waste from the tsunami.  That isn't to say there won't be detectable radiation from the accident, but I see no reason to think it will be significant.

Saying the contamination will "irradiate the solid matter to be found floating there" seems to imply that matter will become somehow more dangerous.  I don't believe that is the case.  The levels of radiation given off by the contamination, even right by the plant are many, many orders of magnitude less than what you would use to irradiate food or even for medical imaging.  The US routinely scans rail cars entering the country with higher levels of gamma radiation.  Of all the possible impacts, this is probably the one I worry the least about.

I don't know enough about thorium reactors to make an informed opinion.  My personal opinion is that coal power is the biggest environmental threat we face and that every replacement option should be pursued.  That most effectively would be a mix of large scale base load plants like nukes, flexible/adjustable systems like gas plants, and renewables.  I don't want to belittle legitimate concerns with nuclear power but I find it curious that we accept the loss of life and environmental harm from the current fossil fuel use.  And don't get me started on the anti-wind farm movement here in Oz.

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
I do not disagree at all.  I'm saying that we are ignoring better choices than wind and solar.  I am firmly on board with Thorium until something better arrives.  Just as I prefer LED to mercury laden CFL's.  CFL's should be banned, not the incandescent light bulb.

Just sayin'.

As long as we believe the only choices available to us are the ones we're already using, then those are all we'll ever use. Once upon a time the only source of light at night was fire. Just sayin'.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
Thanks for the reply, seriously.

This last week or so of my renewed or new participation in this thread started out with me declaring that I prefered petroleum based energy to nuclear given that if those were the only two meaningful choices available, which as I see it is what it appears to be.  I guess that I took the side of scourge.  It went downhill from there.  Since then, it has (d)evolved into a discussion of alarmism and other isms.  Once upon a time ... I was strongly in favor of nuclear power.  Chernobyl got my attention but didn't reverse me.  I ended up blaming the Soviets for their usual methods of central planning and unweildy bureaucracy for the cause.  We had Hanford which was of the same type of reactor and we handled them properly without major incidents.  What began me leaning the other way was when the US first decided it was time to remove the spent fuel from the local plants and begin to deal with it on a long term basis.  I was OK we have Yucca Mountain.  Then along came NIMBY and it all fell apart again.  That and the flag of terrorism was waved at the idea of transporting the fuel long distances making it a target of terrorism.  I learned of the problems and tremendous expenses and political theatre involved in the act of decommisioning these beasts.  Fukushima was the tipping point for me once and for all.  My conversion was a long time in coming, hardly a knee jerk reaction.  I think that it was rather thoughtful having taken about 20 years for the total process.  Now, forget about it.  But I guess here, I made the fatal error of supporting hydrocarbons as the bridge fuel to the future as opposed to solar or wind.  Lord have mecry, the wrath was instantaneous.  Suddenly opposing nuclear fission as we presently have it became based on CT's rather than thoughtful consideration.  I have been in a defensive mode ever since on this subject.

Having said all the above, I'll dig a deeper hole.  Since I am regularily charged with unbridled hyperbole, I'll make the counter charge that those who routinely claim that there is nothing to worry about are using hyperbole themselves.  The charges of fear mongering are themselves an expression of hyperbole.  Eh wot ? 

1.  Yes I know how vast the Oceans are and especially the Pacific.  I grew up on the shores of the Pacific and marine geology was what I was originally headed to school for and enrolled at the Florida Institute of Technology to study.  At the time it was the only school offering a Bachelor in Oceanography.  Everywhere else, it was only a graduate persuit.  i read the seminal book, Waves and Beaches, by Williard Bascom as a kid in high school which began my interest in hydro dynamics as it pertained to surfing.  My heroes as a teenager were surfer Ricky Grigg and astronaut Scott Carpenter.  It was because of their participation as aquanauts in Sealab at Scripps in LaJolla,  just a few clicks down the coast from where I lived.  Go look at my interests in my profile.  They are unchanged since I first put them up.  What is number one ?  Yes, I have a pretty good grip on what the ocean is.  I've been studying it at some level since I was 12. 

2 and 3.  I didn't bring up Godzirra first, but I responded to his mention.  As I mentioned somewhere, it takes one year for the natural currents that lead from the coast of Japan to make it to the Gyre.  It takes up to seven years for the currents off the coast of California to arrive.  What ever ends up there stays there.  What ever radiation that ends up there, stays there and will radiate and irradiate the solid matter to be found floating there.  I reject the hyperbole that there is nothing to worry about as far as radiation building up there above natural background levels.  I will assert that the radiation that arrives from Fukushima will build up there to a degree more than a little above normal background radiation.  Time will tell, won't it ?  With the current interest regarding the garbage patch, we should hear about it sooner rather than later.  My exagerations only counter the reverse exagerations of no danger at all.  Yes, the garbage is a problem of the first order all by itself.  I will maintain, that the radiation from Fukushima will only make it worse, until I hear or see data proving otherwise.  I will not bury my head in the sand and assume otherwise.  Based upon my limited knowledge, it is more than plausable.

4.  That was an unrelated pot shot about the methane, though it's legitimate in its own right.  There is no direct association between Fukushima, the Gyre and Methane.  Its a little ongoing thing regarding Monsanto that Lazy and I have and I threw it in just because I could.  It was in response to the news of Monsanto ending their attempts to bring GMO's to the EU, news of which I approve.  Mea Culpa to the unaware.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
Yes, I have seen it and I think it is wonderful. Someday the whole world will be that way after we destroy ourselves. That is the silver lining in all this for the far off future, nature is resilient and will rebound once it dislodges the parasitic vermin that is homo sapiens. I look at all of these discussions in  a bigger philosophical picture that we as a species are not prepared for the technology and lifestyle that we have created over the past 150 years and cannot safely sustain it without an inevitable culling of some sort and a major nuclear disaster is just one of the many opportunities that we are creating to produce mass suffering of not only us, but the environment before Gaia shakes us loose and slowly repairs herself.

One thing to keep in mind about radiation like that from Fukashima is that we can measure the release of the radionuclides that don't occur naturally at extremely low levels because the background is so low.  So just because you can detect it doesn't mean it is or is not a danger.  It's like hearing a pin drop in a very quiet room.  It was pretty easy to track the iodine-131 isotope from the accident because it has a short half life.  That means that there isn't any left from atmospheric testing and it sticks out when it's around.  Because it has a short half life it produces a lot of radiation in a little time then disappears.  The bad news is that means you can get a fair bit of radiation in a short time if you are close to the source.  The good news is that it is only a problem for a short time.  The iodine-129 isotope has a very long half life but that means you don't get very much radiation produced in a year.  It's much less dangerous shortly after an accident, but you might be exposed for longer.  It's easy to scare yourself with watching something spread around the world but the levels seen once you get away from Japan are really, really low compared to levels of risk.

If a worker at a nuclear plant is contaminated it is relatively easy to tell because they have good detection instruments (people I've met who monitor radiation tell me they tend to find contamination on the right index finger and in the right nostril).  If a worker at a chemical plant is contaminated, chances are it won't be detected.  Different things scare different people. Personally, neurotoxins creep me out.  

kurtster wrote:
I'm going to try one more time.

"It can be measured" does not equate to "It's going to kill us all!!!!" or even "this is a greater threat to human wellbeing than the risk that the grass under our feet will sprout teeth and devour us in our sleep."

Detecting an isotope from Fukushima in, say, milk would mean...we can detect extremely minute quantities of stuff. We can detect plutonium in soil worldwide from above-ground nuclear tests in the 1950s. If those levels were high enough to be a threat radiation monitors would be going off left and right. They aren't.

I have no idea what you mean by raising allowable levels, or what relevance it would have to the current discussion.

We know an awful lot about biological concentration of radionuclides. We've been studying this for over 60 years; it's not like it just occurred to somebody. If you're worried about it go get yourself a Geiger counter and check your food with it. Seriously. If you are actually worried and not just spewing hyperbole then take some steps to alleviate that worry.

Don't take my word for it, and for dog's sake don't take the ignorant ravings of the conspiracy industry's word for it. Check for yourself. If it's worth sowing panic over it's worth actually knowing, isn't it?

 kurtster wrote: 
Kurtster, I am all for a healthy dose of skeptism and not taking everything the mainstream media serves you lock, stock and barrel, but it would be great if you thought through your arguments before posting them. Don't just associate things. Show us the causal relationships not the casual ones. Show us how it works in a convincing way. Don't just throw an implausible scenario out there riddled with scaremongering diction and demand that we disprove it because this relegates your theories to little better than the kind of thinking you would find in a B-grade sci-fi from the 50s and means we can't take you seriously, which would be a great pity.

OK, so Fukushima was/is an intense point source of radiation to the atmosphere. Something that wasn't meant to happen happened. Yes, there is a radioactive plume. Yes this plume can be traced even to the USA. Yes, traces can be found in the marine environment, etc.
1. But do you have any idea of just how vast the Pacific Ocean is? Do you know just how dilute that radioactivity is compared to the bulk of what you are measuring it in is? It is more than negligible.
2. Even in those situations where radioactivity is way above background levels, like the levels the emergency workers at Chernobyl and Fukushima were exposed to, nature responds in a very natural way. Godzilla doesn't rise up. Godzilla dies of cancer (and even then, not necessarily, some of the engineers exposed to obscenely high radioactivity at Chernobyl died natural deaths from other causes much much later in life). Do you know what the natural environs of Chernobyl now look like? Well, they are teeming with wildlife. Why? Because there are no humans out there shooting the birds and the rabbits and, in the vast majority of cases, the mutations caused by excessive radiation are weened out by natural selection. OK, no one wants stillborn or mutant babies and this is why the nuclear industry should be under extremely tight control. And I am not about to start eating radioactive mushrooms from the Ukraine. But, brutal as it may sound, the process is natural. Mutations occur all the time and nature has evolved to deal with them. Fukushima is most definitely not going to lead to the end of life as we know it. Far from it. In fact it is just business as usual for the planet.
3. The ginormous rubbish dump collecting in the Pacific gyre is IMHO a much more significant problem than Fukushima and, like you, I object to it on a number of levels. It is a perversion of nature and it is a direct result of our excessive consumerism. But again here, the sheer size of it dwarfs the amount of radiation released by Fukushima. It is NOT about to become dangerously radioactive. Claiming it will become so just weakens all the other valid arguments against it.
4. What on earth is the causal relationship between Fukushima, the Pacific gyre and the frozen methane in deep sea sediments? You totally lost me on this one.

 Lazy8 wrote: 
Yep, everything is radioactive.  You are 100% correct in the literal sense.  You know your radiation and how to measure it.  But its what you measure.  These isotopes have specific traceable fingerprints.  We have already seen and no one in the scientific community to my knowledge disagreed that certain short lived isotopes were found in milk and grasses throughout the West Coast in a time specific frame that pointed directly back to Japan.  The isotopes found in certain fish caught off of the coast California contain isotopes specific to Japan.  These facts have been longstanding and unchallenged.  Yet you disagree with this for some reason.  As the article mentions, allowable levels have been raised for no apparent reason other than to say, done worry we changed our minds on what is safe.  And when it comes to nuclear radiation, nothing in this country is placed closer to the vest than all things related to the subject.  From the Manhattan Project, though Silkwood, to Iran, with Chernobyl and Fukushima along the way.  Chernobyl was human error and Fukushima was by a force of nature.  We have now had one of each kind and they were both a level 7.

The radiation plume in the Pacific is real.  The damage to the ocean is the real long term concern.  Japan's land problems are their own and their own to deal with.  I'll grant that the problems from the airborne are relatively small.  I've been concerned about the garbage in the Pacific Gyre for at least tens years.  Go back to the links and check it out.  The garbage link has been heavily updated since my last visit a couple of years ago.  The problem is better defined.  It takes one year for something to move from the coast of Japan to arrive at the spot where its all found.  The currents and temps keep particulates from settling out before arrival.  They will attach to the larger particulates already there reconcentrating themselves onto visible solid matter to be ingested by fish and bird alike.  Who knows what the long term affects of highly edible concentrations of this radiation will do ?  Whatever it will be, it will not be good.  Does not radiation likely cause genetic mutations ?  Godzilla won't rise up from the SF Bay but he could rise up out in the middle of the Pacific.  Fish may become inedible solely due to mutations.  Fish live long enough to migrate long distances.  They will eat fish from there and enter our food chain.  Radiation is cumulative over a life time.  Another thing to worry about besides mercury.  We are what we eat.

Its all about the oceans.  They have a greater and infinitely more immediate impact on life on this planet, compared to what man does.  Unless its what man does to it.  More so than the air we breathe.  The ocean is the ultimate regulator of our weather and especially green house gasses.  There is also enough frozen methane at the bottom of the oceans to fuel the world for centuries or kill all of us if it melted all at once and entered our atmosphere suddenly.  Some mass extictions have been linked to an event of this kind in Earth's past.  And that was well before man existed.

Monsanto, the EU and your thought that CT's and superstitiion are used as a cover for what is really protectionism in the EU ?   How does that apply to the theory of pronounced long term global warming which basically was originated and documented (I use the term documented rather loosely based upon the famous emails) in the EU ?  Mea culpa.  That wasn't fair.  We all know that pronounced long term global warming as a direct result of man is proven to everyone's satisfaction.  Those that scoff are unworthy of consideration of having any mental worthiness or understanding of science. 

Protectionism, eh ?  Oh my.  Isn't that similar to the other reason that people object to Monsanto here in the US ?  The GMO's are one thing, but to put all of our food sources in the hands of one entity is the other reason people here object to Monsanto.  Protectionism against a monopoly or monolith that would be Monsanto.  Same objections as the EU'ers it would seem based on your assessment.  And just as more valid than worrying about GMO's.  I'll take one out of two to get the job done.

kurtster wrote:
This is junk food for shallow thought.

There are always radioactive fish off the west coast. There were radioactive fish off the west coast before primates evolved. You were born radioactive, so was George Washington and Julius Caesar. There are radioactive isotopes always and everywhere. There is a radiation plume, and (outside Japan) the levels in it are very, very small. Measurable, but very small. That means we're really good at measuring tiny things, not that godzilla is about to step out of Frisco Bay or that it's killing people. If you want to check radiation levels in the US here is an open-source network of monitoring sites; sadly they use raw Geiger counter count rate rather than Sv/h, and I don't have a map between the two. Worse, they use a variety of instrument types with incompatible measurements. These are useful for tracking trends but not absolute numbers; that said when I just checked the west coast sites were showing pretty typical background levels.

Ionizing radiation measurements at the Fukushima Daiichi site are about 144 uSv/h (microSieverts per hour). The natural background radiation level in Denver is about 1.3 uSv/h. If you go 50 km northwest of Fukushima (along the highest-radiation level windblown plume) radiation levels are equivalent to Denver's; if you go south of Fukushima the levels are that low within 10 km.

You know those things that aren't conspiracy theories? There's proof of them. They're real. They can be verified. Spreading lies (and in this case a ridiculously transparent lie) deserves ridicule.

As for your claim about the Pacific Garbage Patch...this is the first I've heard of it. Go ahead and claim it. This is the internet! You can say anything!

If the half lives quoted in the article are accurate they are the only things in the article that are.

And Monsanto bowing to the political reality that conspiracy theories and superstition masking protectionism are powerful forces in Europe conclusively proves...what, exactly?

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
Yeah, but all those :cough: contrails are causing global dimming. 

Better try and find something else that will work without the sun.

 buzz wrote: 
I know, right?

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
 no. it was something with you first. 

 buzz wrote: 
it's always something with you...

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
Damn right, I can't wait until I am totally solar!