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Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard
Are wind turbines or solar PV panels radioactive? I'm sure they can be recycled.
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As a matter of fact, yes. They are radioactive, because EVERYTHING is radioactive.
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Do you live near Vermont Yankee? Leaking radioactive water gets into the ground water -- who drinks that?
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No, I live on the other side of the continent, on the east side of a large granitic/igneous mountain range (the Sierra Nevada). Get my water from a well: as the groundwater seeps down through the rocks, it picks up some of the natural radioactive minerals in those rocks, leading to probably more net radiation than you'd get from a nuclear plant. Frankly, I'm a heck of a lot more worried about the stuff the $@#! golf course upstream uses - the same sort of stuff those large-scale solar plants would use to "discourage" vegetation.
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The damage from Japan's nuclear accident is ongoing and will be for a long, long time.
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So what's the death toll so far?
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They use fuel rods for between 3 and 6 years.
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Using up a few percent of the fissionable material (at most: a properly-designed breeder reactor produces more fuel than it consumes). Reprocess the fuel, as any sensible enterprise would do (ever hear of recycling?) and the storage problems go away.
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Plutonium is the most poisonous material other than maybe botulism.
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That is simply not true.
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A single tablespoon in the water supply could kill everybody in a very large city.
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Neither is that. Why don't you try reading some actual research - even the Wikipedia page, fer gawdsakes - rather than repeating this crud?
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Talk to us after someone blows up a so-called dirty bomb.
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So what do "dirty bombs", or Pakistani/Iranian/North Korean conventional nuclear weapons, have to do with commercial nuclear power in the US?