Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to You're not looking at the other side...

re: The good side is
Johannes — (archived)

That I can enjoy the use of my computer even when it is dark outside.

But at the same time I may have to say: To heck with future generations.

I know that you do not really want to hear bad things about the use Uranium, but according to this site, when a radon 222 decays it releases about 2447 million electron volts of energy.

Could such energy levels be dangerous?
How many decaying radon 222 molecules are there in the atmosphere?

Could radon come from uranium tailings and be spread into the larger environment by animals, birds, wind and rain?
Could radon gas escape from depleted uranium storage areas?

Could you verify that there is an error at the ending of that linked to page?

Other bits of info:

On February 25, 1986, the Wall Street Journal printed a front page story that portrayed the 220 million tons of uranium tailings in the U.S. as an ecological and financial time bomb. (In Canada, we have about 150 million tons of such tailings.)

Thorium- 230, itself a by-product of uranium, is an alpha-emitter with a half-life of almost 80,000 years. It continually replenishes all the other radioactive by-products of uranium in the abandoned tailings piles. Radium-226, a bone-seeking alpha-emitting carcinogen which is at least 20 times as harmful as strontium-90, is blown in the wind, washed by the rain, and leached into the waterways from the tailings piles, where it re-concentrates by factors of thousands in aquatic plants and by factors of hundreds in land plants. It has a half-life of 1,600 years.

When the levels of radium increased in Canadian rivers as a result of uranium mining activities, the nuclear establishment obligingly increased the standard for an acceptable level of radium in drinking water by a factor of nine."
If we do not come to grips with the Pandora's box of problems which it spawns, and soon, our children and grandchildren may find that we have left them with a burden too great for them to bear.


http://www.ccnr.org/salzburg.html

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (49 posts)