It Was the Worst Industrial Disaster In US History, and We Learned Nothing 290
superboj writes "Forget Deepwater Horizon or Three Mile Island: The biggest industrial disaster in American history actually happened in 2008, when more than a billion gallons of coal sludge ran through the small town of Kingston, Tennessee. This story details how, five years later, nothing has been done to stop it happening again, thanks to energy industry lobbying, federal inaction, and secrecy imposed on Congress. 'It estimated that 140,000 pounds of arsenic had spilled into the Emory River, as well as huge quantities of mercury, aluminum and selenium. In fact, the single spill in Kingston released more chromium, lead, manganese, and nickel into the environment than the entire U.S. power industry spilled in 2007. ... Kingston, though, is by far the worst coal ash disaster that the industry has ever seen: 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash, containing at least 10 known toxins, were spilled. In fact, the event ... was even bigger than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010, which spewed approximately 1 million cubic yards of oil into the Gulf of Mexico."
Not even close to the worst. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Exactly! We need to all stop exhaling immediately! You first
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Re:Not even close to the worst. (Score:5, Informative)
We don't dig up fossil fuels out of the ground and eat them.
What do you think saccharin is made of?
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Isn't aspartame a petroleum product as well?
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and floride. Dont forget that byproduct of the oil industry.
Something I always wondered about fluoride - if they put it in our drinking water, why does the dentist always tell you to avoid swallowing it?
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Amount of fluoride in mouthwash? 225 ppm
So drinking an ounce of mouthwash is equivalent to drinking between 188 and 321 ounces of water. In standard 8 ounce glasses of water that would be between 23.5 and 40 glasses of water.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org]
http://thyroid.about.com/libra... [about.com]
So you may have a point if you drink a couple of gallons of tap water a day. I am going to guess that you don't though, so I would recommend that you dr
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2 Possibilities: It is a way more concentrated version and may react harmfully in that dosage, or more likely, it'll make you vomit like swallowing toothpaste often does.
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Hmm.
'Twould make an interesting study, to folks interested in that sort of thing.
Side note, I don't think I've ever ingested enough toothpaste to boot; then again, I've never tried.
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I would wager 50% of the food we eat depends on green houses an 'life stock stalls' that are lighted, heated and cooled with energy made from fossil fuels. ... exactly: industry, the age of mere farmers is gone since ages.
Add to that transportation of food and water for life stock, transportation of their dung, themselves their meat etc.
The meat industry is one of the biggest polluters of the planet
Re:Not even close to the worst. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not even close to the worst. (Score:5, Informative)
Where do you think we get fertilizers that are used to grow the food we dig out of the ground?
Not to mention that we dig food out of the ground with fossil fuel powered equipment.
Our modern agricultural system is not possible without petroleum inputs.
Re:Not even close to the worst. (Score:4, Interesting)
We don't dig up fossil fuels out of the ground and eat them.
If only we did. That would lower fossil CO2 consumption compared to most of the types of food we actually eat.
Alas, coal is not very tasty and the human body cannot do much useful with it.
Re:Not even close to the worst. (Score:5, Insightful)
And I work in the energy industry...
Re:Not even close to the worst. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not even close to the worst. (Score:4, Insightful)
hyperbole that equates controlled use of energy resources to industrial accidents
Melting the north pole may not an accident but it is certainly an environmental disaster of unprecedented proportions.
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You sure are putting the "coward" into AC.
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bullshit, more lives saved and extended and given modern life of luxury through the use of fossil fuels than any other technological action of man
Re:Not even close to the worst. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but the point you guys need to come to terms with is that fossil fuels aren't the only source of energy production and transport, and it's becoming apparent that the harm outweighs the minor increases in fiscal cost of many other technologies.
We do indeed have those that think that somehow things were better before industry, but those aren't the people you should be discussing the future with. Just like I shouldn't be discussing energy plans with people who think oil is a divinely provided renewable resource.
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Clean energy is cheaper than coal once you account for the indirect externalized costs. Your electricity bill has a nice easy number at the bottom, but your health (or the health of some guy in the next city) is much harder to evaluate.
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Actual US congressmen have said that, sitting on the energy committee have said it. Look up Joe Barton. Terrifying.
Nukes+solar+hydro+wind is absolutely viable to replace fossil fuels in 20ish years if we started systemic migration today, and there's been more than enough examination of this point by now.
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Are you still pretending that nuke isn't part of the solution I described? Am I some kinda straw-hippy here to only make the arguments that make me look stupid?
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Re:Not even close to the worst. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing that nuclear power can't fix with a much lower impact.
Re:Not even close to the worst. (Score:4, Insightful)
i agree, however we're not smart enough like other nations to be researching or building the reactors that can't melt down, make no long -term waste (as in decay in decades rather than millenia), and that can even burn our enormous cache of cooling pond and cask "spent fuel"
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i agree, however we're not smart enough like other nations to be researching or building the reactors that can't melt down, make no long -term waste (as in decay in decades rather than millenia), and that can even burn our enormous cache of cooling pond and cask "spent fuel"
Exactly how would that put money into the pockets of the Big Oil corporate sponsors?
(in case it's not obvious, I agree with you completely)
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Re:Not even close to the worst. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's being done, but outside the USA.
Terrestrial Energy Inc of Canada are developing a simpler version of the LFTR reactor, the DMSR, operating on a mix of Thorium and Uranium, with the ability to be at least 50x more efficient than regular LWR reactors (as in GWh of energy produced per ton of fissile/fertile material fed into the reactor). Since it's a molten salt / molten fuel design, once the reactor is decommissioned, it's core materials can be recycled into a new reactor. They are skipping the nuclear material reprocessing (as well as a few others technological advantages of LFTR that carry perceived regulatory hurdles).
But reprocessing could be performed every so many years, for a huge gain in efficiency (the more fission products kept inside the reactor, the less efficient it gets).
The main difference of LFTR to DMSR is the DMSR always runs of a mix of Thorium and enriched uranium, such that any U-233 produced is instantly mixed with U-238, such that it makes the U-233 produced just as hard to extract than U-235 from mined uranium.
But contrary to regular water cooled / solid fuel reactors, Xe-135 produced is immediately captured at the top of the reactor (Xe-135 is the biggest efficiency problem in solid fuel reactors), plus the molten fuel means annual fuel top offs can be done without stopping the reactor, making for a reactor that can run much closer to 100% of the time.
Finally as all molten fuel / molten coolant reactors, it has the drain tank, the catch pan and the freeze plug that makes the reactor walk away safe (if the reactor overheats the freeze plug melts draining the core material into the drain tank, if the reactor suffers a leak the leakage either solidify plugging the leak or drains into the catch pan. And finally, since the core material is a solid below 300C, and there's nothing at any high pressure, the reactor isn't trying to throw radioactive materials into the atmosphere.
Hopefully this will be online by 2022.
Long video (73 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Bottom line, if this works (I think it will), doing a full blown LFTR Thorium reactor will be much easier, since the DMSR is in most ways a simplification of the full LFTR reactor.
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The CANDU [wikipedia.org] reactor program got it right decades ago and keeps getting better, but since it's not from the US, and has the false reputation of promoting nuclear proliferation, the US is not interested.
CANDU also, unfortunately, has a politically-fueled false perception of promoting nuclear proliferation partly because it was falsely accused to have aided the Smiling Buddha program (that was CIRUS, not CANDU, but who's paying attention?).
Oh, there is that unavoidable 1% tritium release rate, though.
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True, but it's too expensive.
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As opposed to the release of massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere from animals exhaling?
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Parent is an illegal alien.
He has to be. He's advertising the fact he's a martian right in his name and no country on earth has laws to allow martians to immigrate.
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Yeah, but he's Mighty too, so maybe we should pretend his papers are in order... just in case.
Re:Not even close to the worst. (Score:4, Funny)
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those antibiotics are created, transported, marketed with oil and coal power and would not exist without them. fossil fuel has driven human progress, and the ony viable scalable alternative is nuclear power from third and fourth generation reactors.
Where have I heard about spills like this before? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh yeah .. this year .. huge coal-ash spill at a retired Duke Energy coal plant [newsobserver.com]
Re:Where have I heard about spills like this befor (Score:5, Interesting)
It's smaller. What's more annoying(as a local...ish) is that the state department of environmental regulation has been gutted by a governor who actually owns a lot of stock in Duke Energy. And even after the big news about this, it turns out that Duke actually still has pumps designed to pump coal ash directly from their pools into the cape fear river "for maintenance", in direct violation of the clean water act.
They excused it by saying "we didn't get any recommendation against it by the state environmental agency".
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Molasses Molasses, sticky sticky goo (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget the Great Molasses Disaster(s) [wikipedia.org] which release tons of toxic sulfur into the rivers. These are an on-going problem over the years [nationalgeographic.com] and we have learned "Nothin".
We've learned nothing? (Score:3)
Oh, we've learned something. We've learned that this is something the government doesn't want to deal with. How much sludge does a company have to pour into a river before the government not only takes notice but does something about it?
Re:We've learned nothing? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a matter of "how much" it's a matter of "Who lives down river"
I'm going to hazard a guess that in this case it was poor people.
what "company"? It's a government operated plant (Score:4, Informative)
What are you talking about? It was a government operated power plant, run by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
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We also learned that the CEO of BP felt really, really bad about it... [youtube.com] not bad enough to, you know, fix the problem, or make right with the tens of thousands of people his company harmed, but really, really bad nonetheless... [youtube.com]
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And hippies complain about nuclear waste. Last time I checked, no nuclear waste ever caused an accident worthy of a single-paragraph story, much less something like this...
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Last time I checked
If you had checked anytime since about 1976 you might have discovered this [wikipedia.org].
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I stand corrected then. Still, disregarding the soviet general disregard for safety, my point stands.
Re:We've learned nothing? (Score:4, Informative)
How much sludge does a company have to pour into a river before the government not only takes notice but does something about it?
TVA is wholly owned by the federal government. The federally owned earthen embankments were known to be leaking by the federally funded TVA employees for years before the slurry that the federal government was responsible for containing broke lose.
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Fixed that for you. US is a democratic republic; it's government does what its citizens want.
Sort of makes sense it happened in 2008 (Score:2)
Its a good reflection of Finance sector dealings and the "controversy" about global warming trumpeted by the media (it was a large component of the media's product-output at the time, needlessly fuelling a pattern of denial and argument for its own sake).
Don't forget Duke Energy (Score:5, Informative)
Their recent coal ash spill coated 70 MILES of the Dan River, but thanks to them buying off the legislature and a Governor who happened to have worked for Duke Energy, they may escape any liability for the cleanup, leaving it up to the taxpayers to foot the bill.
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last I checked everyone there benefits from the electriicty Duke makes, of course utilities get special treatment. any financial punishment of Duke would just raise your electric bill, they are called "Utilities" for a reason
er whoops I mean nationalized (Score:3)
er whoops I mean nationalized
You know, the opposite of what I wrote.
More coffee please
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leaving it up to the taxpayers to foot the bill.
In November, those taxpayers will overwhelmingly vote to reelect the same legislators and Governor- because the alternative would be voting for a Democrat and their Socialist job-killing environmental regulations.
Simple answer to all of this: Energy Policy (Score:2)
All of this should be via a TOTAL ENERGY POLICY.
Nope (Score:5, Informative)
The worst industrial disaster in US history occurred in 1947 when a series of explosions killed 581 people, including all but one member of the Texas City fire department.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
The initial blast was also one of the largest non-nuclear explosion in US history.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
indeed, and even if we confined ourselves to worst coal slurry accidents in 1972 there were 125 killed, over 1000 injured and 4000 left homeless in the so-called Buffalo Creek Flood in Logan County, West Virginia
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Yay! Texas wins again!
Deepwater Horizon non sequitur (Score:2, Troll)
In fact, the event that woke Sarah McCoin that nightâ"the deluge that moved houses and ripped trees from the groundâ"was even bigger than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010, which spewed approximately 1 million cubic yards of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
The oil that 'spilled' into the gulf in 2010 was a naturally occurring substance, as evidenced by how easily the environment dealt with it. And it genuinely makes sense to imagine that sub-surface events are exposing oil to the ocean on a regular basis, but we don't know about it because it's all very normal.
No, a better comparison would be to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org] which spews ash everywhere on a somewhat regular basis. Ash = ash.
Unless of course you're trying to make less of an environmental
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The oil that 'spilled' into the gulf in 2010 was a naturally occurring substance, as evidenced by how easily the environment dealt with it.
I think a lot of Gulf folks in the seafood industry would have something to say about "how easily the environment dealt with it".
They're still digging oil out of the beaches in Alaska and the Exxon-Valdez incident was a long time ago now.
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The Exxon-Valdez wasn't hauling the same thing that leaked from the hole they made in the ground...
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In fact, the event that woke Sarah McCoin that nightâ"the deluge that moved houses and ripped trees from the groundâ"was even bigger than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010, which spewed approximately 1 million cubic yards of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
The oil that 'spilled' into the gulf in 2010 was a naturally occurring substance, as evidenced by how easily the environment dealt with it.
Mercury is a naturally occurring substance - are you really trying to argue that dumping 100,000,000 cubic yards of mercury into the Gulf would have no negative environmental effect?
Re:Deepwater Horizon non sequitur (Score:5, Interesting)
Ash = ash.
Coal ash is different from volcanic ash.
I used to do ash analysis on coal samples - coal ash is pushing 95% silica and alumina. The rest of the elemental analysis are trace elements, which can be made to sound super-scary when you scale up the quantities to thousands of tons. OMG! There's 100,000 pounds of this KILLER element released! Yes, but it's spread out evenly though 10 million tons of slurry over 100 square miles. You could probably strip-mine the top 5 feet of the same area in a city and find higher concentrations.
The biggest problem is not all the toxic waste, it's all the bloody inert sludge that's everywhere.
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There's 100,000 pounds of this KILLER element released! Yes, but it's spread out evenly though 10 million tons of slurry over 100 square miles. You could probably strip-mine the top 5 feet of the same area in a city and find higher concentrations.
Yes, but the difference is that isn't not all in a highly soluble form with a high surface area. This is why mine tailings are such a huge source of acid and metal contamination. What would take millions of years to expose to streams and waters via natural erosion is ground up and dumped straight into waterways by industry. The resulting contamination is much higher than you would find by running water over the top of the material before processing.
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OMG! There's 100,000 pounds of this KILLER element released! Yes, but it's spread out evenly though 10 million tons of slurry over 100 square miles.
Perhaps we can apply this sort of logic to nuclear waste? Instead of keeping it in storage, we could simply blow it out the smokestacks in trace amounts, much like what we do with the radioactive contaminants in coal?
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I used to do ash analysis on coal samples - coal ash is pushing 95% silica and alumina.
Says here it's as much as 30% alumina, depending on what's being burned. That sounds like a practically free feedstock for refining aluminum, though apparently something would have to be done besides the Bayer process. Oddly, that possibility is absent from the list of uses of coal ash. The alternative to the Bayer process must be difficult.
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The oil that 'spilled' into the gulf in 2010 was a naturally occurring substance, as evidenced by how easily the environment dealt with it.
OK, let's kill this "naturally occurring substances cannot be pollutants" meme.
Arguably *every* substance is a naturally occurring substance. But even substances that are normally found in a habitat can be a pollutant if they enter that habitat in amounts that disrupt it. The classic example of CO2, which is a normal and necessary part of the atmosphere, but is toxic to humans at a rate of as low as 1000 ppm. What's more, moderately elevated levels of CO2 that humans would not notice change the behavior o
Johnstown? (Score:5, Informative)
What about Johnstown, when a dam built by a railroad company collapsed, killing well over 2000 people. Yes, at the time the dam belonged to a club run by industrialists as a hunting and fishing preserve, but it was still an industrial accident.
Oh shuit up you just hate frreedom (Score:5, Insightful)
You just hate freedom. You want to take away my right to pollute the atmosphere so badly that it causes massive socio-political upheaval s around the world completely re-ordering the geopolitical landscape , uniting our enemies and making new ones under a unified belief that THIS is what America did to us, unleashing waves of suicide terrorism both abroad and domestically, all fueled by the deaths of hundreds of millions of innocent people, and unified by the theme that "this (desertification, devastating ocean rise unsurvivable heat waves, crop failures and finally, the death of large ocean life as the acidification takes out the lowest levels of the oceanic food pyramid, causing all above to collapse - THIS is what America did to us".
You just hate America and you're against freedom. That's all.
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Individual events vs. entire industries (Score:2)
Is the biggest event really important, or is it more important to look at entire industries? Has coal in Appalachia been better or worse than gold mining in California? The gold mining contaminated many bodies of water with mercury, and fish are still unsafe because of it. How many streams and lakes in Tennessee have warnings like, "pregnant women should eat no more than one of these fish per month"?
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What's even funnier is that, according to Wikipedia, this river "is an important source of drinking water for the central portion of New Jersey". Well, that explains why my tap water has a delicious flavor (I'm not joking).
Fingers In Ears, Eyes Closed (Score:2)
And just like Global Warming, if you ignore it, there are no consequences!
Hooray for human greed and hubris.
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What are the ideal atmospheric CO2 levels?
I'd hazard a guess that pre-Industrial Revolution levels would be a good first approximation.
However, if I could, I'd reply to your post with a picture of my big, fat, hairy, spotty bottom.
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Good Thing They Linked Wikipedia (Score:4, Informative)
Kingston Fossil Plant coal slurry spill [wikipedia.org]
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Although residents feared water contamination, early tests of water six miles (10 km) upstream of the ash flow showed that the public water supply met drinking water standards.
The fuck? How does testing the water upstream prove anything whatsoever?
Coal sludge is bad, hyping it doesn't help (Score:2)
One billion gallons is about 10 billion pounds.
There was 140,000 pounds arsenic in 10 billion pounds of sludge.
Concentration of arsenic in sludge is 1.4 * 10e5 / 1e10 = 1.4 * 10e-5
Or about 1 part in 100,000.
This is why they got away with it. Coal ash sludge is nasty, but not quite nasty enough to be a hazardous substance per se. Hell, one of the best ways to get rid of it is to add it to concrete, which is then poured where people live.
The figure you should worry about is the change in the arsenic level i
It is not "coal sludge." It's coal ash slurry. (Score:2)
It is not "coal sludge." It's coal ash slurry.
Did the OP even read the article? Even TFA refers to the flood as consisting of coal ash slurry.
There is no such thing as "coal sludge," but there is "coal slurry" which is something entirely different from coal ash slurry that allows transport of coal through pipelines in a very expensive process.
Does not compare to Texas City Disaster (Score:2)
How is this the worse industrial disaster in US history, compared with the Texas City Disaster [wikipedia.org] that killed 581 people, injured more than 5,000 people, and destroyed 500 homes, 1100 vehicles, and 362 rail cars due to an explosion of 2.9 kilotons TNT equivalent energy?
Re:There real reason ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There real reason ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've read a number of different estimates for deaths related to coal pollution, 10-15K annually in the US, 150-300K globally. Even if those estimates are 10 time actual, it is hard to beat coal pollution as the top killer for industrial activity. Disasters like collapses of mines, dams, coal ash pond get a lot more attention.
Turning off every coal plant today would be a much bigger disaster -- people freezing, starving, diseases, etc. would be far worse, but hey, I am all for replacing coal with safer nukes, etc. All major systems will results in accidents and deaths, it is kind of the way it is. Even today, $/kwh from coal is generally cheaper than the viable alternatives. Arguably, a new generation of nuclear power could be cheaper than coal (fuel costs on the order of 15-25% of coal), but this is certainly not guaranteed.
You still need transportation fuels (hard to replace jet planes with battery operated or nuclear).,
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They're going in a bin labeled "pointless rhetoric that doesn't actually begin to address real-world problems." Both major parties are really good at sucking votes out of that bin, and the remaining sludge in it is made of people who think cynical non-participation makes them somehow morally superior.
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So, it's come to this. The best way to promote nuclear is to present the false dichotomy that it's nuclear or coal and there is no other alternative. I think this means you lost the argument.
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I have read that successively diluting a solution by 100 times will make the medical effects stronger. I've read that a perpetual motion machine has been verified but is kept under wraps by big oil. But fortunately I have more than two brain cells and can spot the bullshit.
Re:There real reason ... (Score:5, Interesting)
We had the huge recession, and the media was more interested in Obama's victory.
More importantly, the coal industry spent a lot of money and legal effort to prevent the media from getting photos.
I heard about it from the main stream media and remember being offended by how the industry was restricting coverage.
If you didn't, then perhaps you should accept responsibility for watching crappy media instead of blaming the media for being crappy.
That is, not all media is as incompetent as the ones you watch.
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I heard about it from the main stream media and remember being offended by how the industry was restricting coverage.
The media needs to stop "being offended" and start being journalists.
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There are many stories that are "gotten" but never actually make it to mass media. I agree with the sentiment that a motivated reporter will usually be able to get a story, but that doesn't mean it gets printed or played on air. Most media outlets have giant corporations as their parent, and often those corporations are heavily influenced by lobbyists and others who are actively working to keep negative news from the press.
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It is a shame that some things are swept under the rug when they should be magnified appropriately. But when people want to silence an issue, there is ALWAYS a price it can be paid to be achieved . . . .
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Editors and publishers have learned the hard way that you don't fuck with the energy companies unless you have a battalion of lawyers at your disposal. You especially don't fuck with Big Coal in the middle of coal country.
As far as the Bush Madministration, the link is trivially easy to make. Shrub reduced inspections, regulations, reporting, safety rules and liability levels for the entire range of extractive industries. Obama's only blame is not restoring them.
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Well, certainly not proper spelling and punctuation. Its not nothin, its nuthin'.
These dang Slashdot editors don't know a dang thing about proper English. Sheeit!
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The DOE's cleanup job is a joke here. I refuse to support any new nuclear power plant in the U.S. until it can be proven that the mess that results can be cleaned up.
Now, that's a bit too far. Hanford was contaminated long before we had any good understanding of how to properly contain radioactive waste, had any solid idea of what kind of harm it could do, and had any kind of national environmental regulation that established standards for proper handling. Oh, and it was a military site which meant that it would have likely been handled incredibly irresponsibly due to the lack of accountability that secrecy provides them.
You should consider whether or not in the curre