Shale gas is the cause of coal mining decline

[SLAG]

The recent decade long decline of the coal mining industry is not the primary fault of The Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) & President Obama.

The recent explosion of shale derived natural gas stocks and its drastic drop in price are to blame. That gas is greatly cheaper than coal. So cheap that electrical generation plants are switching from burning coal to gas.

93% of coal is used in power production.

Natural gas combustion has several advantages over burning coal. It produces no mercury emissions, and half the amount of carbon dioxide than coal, and 80% less sulfur.

Try this reference and have an enjoyable  read.

http://phys.org/news/2016-10-shale-gasnot-epa-ruleshas-decline.html

Regards to all the technical subject enthusiasts on I. F. I.

SLAG.

Also try this article, as another factor in fossil fuel's eventual demise

ttps://techxplore.com/news/2016-10-price-solar-panels.html

[Frosty]

You forgot another coal fired plant byproduct. If you take a Geiger counter and an isotope testing kit down wind you'll discover more radioactive emissions per day than 3 mile island and all the other American reactors total release.

Then again if you take the same instrumentation on an airliner you'll probably take the train there after. Don't forget to check the gravel in concrete, asphalt or on your roof.

Everything is radioactive, it's the dosage that gets you.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Anachronist58]

Getting this bookmarked, be back in two weeks when I have (hopefully) something intelligent to add. If I must now also take up nuclear paleontology, I will need better equipment than my $500 Geiger counter. I'll be out in the dark tonight trying to get a count from the coke.

Frosty, I've quite the dose in my basement.

Very thought-provoking, you people.

Robert

[SLAG]

Frosty I did not remember the radioactivity reason. Thanks for that heads up.

Strangely, the main uranium ores carnotite, and, I think also uraninite are often found in fossil bone beds. in the American southwest. For some reason, uranium containing salts were differentially picked upand concentrated  by these fossil dinosaur bones.

The containment building caught almost all, or all the radioactive emissions from the meltdown. Chernobyl reactors did not have containment buildings. (Marxist reactors were thought to never fail).

Generally, the level of radionuclides is fairly low in coal and also granite.

Another source of radioactivity is much more serious. That substance is radon gas. It is found in many parts of the U.S. people should inquire about it. Especially young people and also people with children.. Radon comes from the off gassing of radioactive minerals. It can seep into houses and collect to high levels in the basement. There are tests that detect radon gas, and people that live in radon occurring areas should consider using them. (a basement can be sealed off against radon, should such a test prove positive). Ask the seller about radon when buying a house.

I am glad that a few i.f.i. denizens enjoyed the article.

SLAG.

 

[Frosty]

I used to have a autunite crystal about 2x the size of a paperback on display in my bedroom. we hunted Autunite at night with blacklights in Utah I think. I was maybe 10 so I don't remember things like where or when but Dad said it's all over the basin and range country.

I used to wonder about uranium ores concentrating in sedimentary formations, maybe bacterial concentration like black banded iron ore say Hematites? Fossilized specimens of all kinds can be radioactive it just depends on what the available replacement mineral is. Probably the coolest fossil sites I've seen specimens from were mineralized with: fire opal, another with iron pyrite and another chalcopyrite. Agate is the most common, silica is everywhere.

You remember some of the coolest weird things when you  grow up with a rock hound, I only SOUND like I know mineralogy.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Anachronist58]

Honestly SLAG, we are still on topic .

Shale gas......

Frosty, I am acutely interested in everything, including mineralogy. Consequently, I am a journeyman at precious little.

I am supposed to be at my brothers house working right now, so I will have to submit a detailed blather about the images later.

Bananas sequester potassium isotopes, tobacco collects polonium 210 and lead 210.

I wonder if nuclide uptake in bones, and also wood, is due carnotites' potassium component, entraining the nuclides incidentally.

[SLAG]

Anachronist,

Try this reference I stumbled on last night during acute bout of insomnia.

http://phys.org/news/2016-10-dont-panic-avocado-radioactivestudy-eyes.html

It seems that the human body has evolved to cope with small concentrations of toxins and radioactivity.

In the 1950's prospectors learned to search out the yellow bands in rock. Sometimes located high up in canyon walls. They indicated yellow carnotite deposits.

Enjoy,

SLAG.

[ThomasPowers]

Radionuclides start out as components of igneous rocks.  As the rocks erode the radionuclides are released into the environment where they preferentially bond in organic complexes---why we have point bar deposits and coal swamps having higher radiation levels.  We covered this in my Economic Geology class as well as the Mineralogy classes, etc along the way to getting my BS in Geology/Geophysics.  (One professor even showed us a deposit that was WARM TO THE TOUCH due to high levels of radioactivity; and of course everyone is aware of the Natural Nuclear Reactor(s) that existed in Africa: "Oklo is the only known location for this in the world and consists of 16 sites at which self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions took place approximately 1.7 billion years ago, and ran for a few hundred thousand years, averaging probably less than 100 kW of thermal power during that time"   A bit before our time.....)

So when people worry about my visiting the Trinity Site I point out that I am living at an altitude, in an area with many igneous rocks and where our water supply exceeds radionuclide levels at times---and driving to work is *STILL* orders of magnitude more dangerous!

[Anachronist58]

Wow, so many great references here - Frosty et al.:  bog uranium; Thomas: Oklo, et al.

SLAG, and all of you geeks here is what appears to be quite a scholarly book excerpt concerned with the balance between radioactive exposure and biological systems:

https://www.ratical.org/radiation/NRBE/NRadBioEffects.html

And for those of you who embrace the Scientific Method, am I missing something here? Is this coke sample REALLY 12,000 CPM, or do I have a 'controls' error?

Edited October 10, 2016 by Anachronist58
Post Assembly

[Frosty]

I think what's missing here is a reality check on the author's part, that or she's stuck on "publish or die" so follow the popular mythos. Not one word about large scale populations of people and other life forms living on fairly rich uranium deposits, eating food growing in it, drinking water percolating through it and breathing the dust for a long LONG time without effects discernibly different from populations not exposed to radioactives.

It's the same philosophy that causes "scientists" to publish about how humans are significant causes of. . . (whatever direction the temperature is going this month). Remember, what, 20 years ago and all the man made pollution was plunging us into the next ice age? Then it's "global warming" That's not a supportable premise either so now it's "global climate change!"

If you want Gvt. financing you have to publish what the Gvt. wants to see. Nothing new.

You'll never find a NO NUKES!! person who'll admit the released radiation from the worst accidents on earth are more toxic than radiation hazards. Even Chernobyl as ugly and poisonous as that was isn't the radioactive dead zone folk are told it is. Pripyat just what 13 miles down wind is overgrown and over run by returning life. Cancer rates in folk who refused to leave are on a par with the national average.

The bulk of the radioactives released by Fukushima melt down were very short lived isotopes and that was about as bad as a modern responsibly designed and maintained reactor is likely to get. All the medial uproar when winds that carried material from Fukushima made it to the west coast could only talk about daughter isotopes and elements that COULD be radioactive. Believe me if anything was found to actually BE radioactive it would've been screamed all over everywhere. It's not done though, I have a couple friends who swear the reactor is still dumping radioactive material at the same rate is when it was in an uncontrolled reaction, melt down state. They even have articles to "prove" it.

If the Japanese aren't concerned I don't believe it's something to worry about. I don't think anybody on Earth knows more about living with radioactive isotopes and fallout.

Of course that's just my opinion I could be wrong.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Anachronist58]

I guess I'd best read these things in their entirety, as opposed to skimming, prior to posting links. Wrong TWICE in the same day?

[Frosty]

12 minutes ago, Anachronist58 said:

I guess I'd best read these things in their entirety, as opposed to skimming, prior to posting links. Wrong TWICE in the same day?

I don't think you stated a position, how could you be wrong?

Masterfully played sir!

Frosty The Lucky.

[Anachronist58]

I like you a LOT, Frosty!

[SLAG]

Frosty,

Beware.

The Japanese firmly believe in reincarnation. Could that be a reason why they appear unconcerned?

Should I be upset?

Methinks that Fukushima might have been a government make work project?

SLAG.

Mildly hysterical, but improving.

SLAG.

By the way a person can small amount of plutonium (U239), salts and he/she will not absorb it from  the alimentary canal. be passed out and the swallower will be unscathed

[ThomasPowers]

Ahhh don't you mean Pu 239  U is for uranium 

[SLAG]

U239 is plutonium.

Sorry to be so obscure.

U238 is the standard uranium isotope and U235 is the fissionable one.

SLAG.

and U233 is thorium

[ThomasPowers]

"Uranium-239 is an isotope of uranium. It is usually produced by exposing 238U to neutron radiation in a nuclear reactor. 239U has a half-life of about 23.45 minutes and decays into neptunium-239 through beta decay, with a total decay energy of about 1.29 MeV.[9] The most common gamma decay at 74.660 keV accounts for the difference in the two major channels of beta emission energy, at 1.28 and 1.21 MeV.[10]

239Np further decays to plutonium-239, in a second important step that ultimately produces fissile 239Pu (used in weapons and for nuclear power), from 238U in reactors."

U 239 is an isotope of Uranium Pu 239 is an isotope of plutonium.

[Anachronist58]

Pu - it's on the periodic table.

[SLAG]

Now I understand it.

Thanks T. P.

SLAG.

[ThomasPowers]

The Albuquerque baseball team is "the Isotopes"; Los Alamos is out here and has a nice museum, (with a picture of a friend at work in it), The Trinity Site is open for visits 2 days a year----not much to see as it worked; but a good reminder of what nerds can do when they are unleashed.  NM also has on-going issues from housing made using tailings from the uranium mines.

so we tend to be up on radiation---I've eaten lunch at the same diner that the scientists working at the Trinity site used to use---which was a heck of a drive back then...

Come on out for a visit!--- the VLA usually has a special tour for the Saturdays that the Trinity site is open and there is even a bus that goes to both sites from Socorro NM...

[Anachronist58]

Trinity is certainly on my list.

I have been to the Titan II Museum in Green Valley, Arizona, twice.

I think my image of the coke in the pretty orange bowl sums up my obsession with the relationship between humans and 'hazardous' materials.

At one time, I had a nice list of links concerned with flora and fauna adapting over time (from the beginning) to the presence of cosmic and terrestrial radioactivity.  I have forgotten the keyword that will bring forth a slew of hits - it is the name for the general theory that attempts to explain these adaptations........

[ThomasPowers]

"it is the name for the general theory that attempts to explain these adaptations......."        "Life" ?    

Some of the pretty old ceramics that used the uranium based glaze for the yellow will crank a meter over pretty good, as well as the depression era "vaseline glass",  Smithsonian had an article a few  decades ago  about a fellow who was big on "Radium Water" as a patent medicine---did not come to a good end drinking massive amounts of it.

An interesting point about why the Trinity site is so restricted is that it is NOT due to radiation; but because it's in an active military testing facility and so not someplace you want folks wandering around in.  Take a good look at White Sands Missile Range on the Map it's almost 3,200 sq mi (8,300 km2) so several times larger than the State of Rhode Island!  White Sands Park is interesting too; but best seen during the summer on nights of the full moon when they stay open late.  We lose folks on a semi regular basis that don't pay attention to the DANGER HEAT warnings during the day in the summer.

[Anachronist58]

1 hour ago, ThomasPowers said:

"it is the name for the general theory that attempts to explain these adaptations......."        "Life" ? 

 

Yes Thomas, that is indeed the overarching general picture, and I am quite at ease naming it "Life". As I said, "from the beginning".

Nonetheless, there are nattering nitpicking minutia-parsing studies out that I am sure you would enjoy.

I have the original pamphlet somewhere for a Revigator - a fascinating read. Still searching for the actual item.

 

[ThomasPowers]

Strange to think you could be prosecuted for *not* having enough radium in your radium water at one time...A local town is called Radium Springs...

[Frosty]

How about the xray machines in shoe stores. You stepped onto the platform with your feet tucked in and you could look at your flouroscope(?) of your feet while a photo was exposed. IIRC the story wasn't so much the exposure of folk buying shoes as employees catching about 1/2 a rad every time they used it.

Oh for the good old days.

Frosty The Lucky.