U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2015 are 12% below their 2005 levels

[NNadir]

9. Really? You're serious? Since you started this thread with great praise for the gas industry...

...even if you weren't aware that this was, in fact, the industry you were praising, maybe you can inform me about what will be done the about the radon and radium in Pennsylvania flow back water.

The scientific literature is full of papers on the subject of (NORM) naturally occurring radioactive materials in the Reading Shale that being ground into dust forever increasing the surface area of the uranium ores in the gas occurs.

If one searches on Google Scholar, using the terms "NORM, flow back water," one will get 295,000 hits in less than a second.

How many of those papers pique your interest?

No interest? It's just natural gas, and oh well, it's a transitional fuel until the world comes up with 200 trillion dollars to dig thorium laced lanthanide ores in China to make stupid wind turbines that will turn into landfill after twenty years?

Of the 295,000 papers on the subject, I'm sure I've read parts of several hundred in recent years. You?

So a native American cattle rancher stumbled on a uranium mine? He died did he? That means that on the day the uranium he stumbled upon killed him instantly, nuclear energy was responsible for 1/19,000th of the number of people who died from air pollution on that same day. Which is more dangerous, uranium mines abandoned in a sparsely populated area or the entire atmosphere laden to the point of no return with carcinogenic soot, mercury, um, well, uranium, and 30 billion tons of new carbon dioxide every year?

Oh wait a second, we don't give a rat's ass about those seven million people...because...because...because a rancher stumbled on an abandoned uranium mine.

How many of the many thousands of papers on that subject have you actually read from the primary scientific literature of the subject of the Dine (aka "Navajo&quot uranium miners. Maybe you can list them. As it happens, I've read lots of these papers and in fact, with citations included, commented on the internet, with direct links to the primary scientific literature. not that they're likely to get as many links as one gets from dumb ass anti-nuke websites even as 7 million people die each year from air pollution.

Here's what I wrote:

As I prepared this work, I took some time to wander around the stacks of the Firestone Library at Princeton University where, within a few minutes, without too much effort, I was able to assemble a small pile of books[50] on the terrible case of the Dine (Navajo) uranium miners who worked in the mid-20th century, resulting in higher rates of lung cancer than the general population. The general theme of these books if one leafs through them is this: In the late 1940’s mysterious people, military syndics vaguely involved with secret US government activities show up on the Dine (Navajo) Reservation in the “Four Corners” region of the United States, knowing that uranium is “dangerous” and/or “deadly” to convince naïve and uneducated Dine (Navajos) to dig the “dangerous ore” while concealing its true “deadly” nature. The uranium ends up killing many of the miners, thus furthering the long American history of genocide against the Native American peoples. There is a conspiratorial air to all of it; it begins, in these accounts, with the cold warrior American military drive to produce nuclear arms and then is enthusiastically taken up by the “evil” and “venal” conspirators who foist the “crime” of nuclear energy on an unsuspecting American public, this while killing even more innocent Native Americans.

Now...

I made some remarks about American history and racism and then added - with citations this:

A publication[51] in 2009 evaluated the cause of deaths among uranium miners on the Colorado Plateau and represented a follow up of a study of the health of these miners, 4,137 of them, of whom 3,358 were “white” (Caucasian) and 779 of whom were “non-white.” Of the 779 “non-white” we are told that 99% of them were “American Indians,” i.e. Native Americans. We may also read that the median year of birth for these miners, white and Native American, was 1922, meaning that a miner born in the median year would have been 83 years old in 2005, the year to which the follow up was conducted. (The oldest miner in the data set was born in 1913; the youngest was born in 1931.) Of the miners who were evaluated, 2,428 of them had died at the time the study was conducted, 826 of whom died after 1990, when the median subject would have been 68 years old.

Let’s ignore the “white” people; they are irrelevant in these accounts.

Of the Native American miners, 536 died before 1990, and 280 died in the period between 1991and 2005, meaning that in 2005, only 13 survived. Of course, if none of the Native Americans had ever been in a mine of any kind, never mind uranium mines, this would have not rendered them immortal. (Let’s be clear no one writes pathos inspiring books about the Native American miners in the Kayenta or Black Mesa coal mines, both of which were operated on Native American reservations in the same general area as the uranium mines.) Thirty-two of the Native American uranium miners died in car crashes, 8 were murdered, 8 committed suicide, and 10 died from things like falling into a hole, or collision with an “object.” Fifty-four of the Native American uranium miners died from cancers that were not lung cancer. The “Standard Mortality Ratio,” or SMR for this number of cancer deaths that were not lung cancer was 0.85, with the 95% confidence level extending from 0.64 to 1.11. The “Standard Mortality Ratio” is the ratio, of course, the ratio between the number of deaths observed in the study population (in this case Native American Uranium Miners) to the number of deaths that would have been expected in a control population. At an SMR of 0.85, thus 54 deaths is (54/.085) – 54 = -10. Ten fewer Native American uranium miners died from “cancers other than lung cancer” than would have been expected in a population of that size. At the lower 95% confidence limit SMR, 0.64, the number would be 31 fewer deaths from “cancers other than lung cancer,” whereas at the higher limit SMR, 1.11, 5 additional deaths would have been recorded, compared with the general population.

Lung cancer, of course, tells a very different story. Ninety-two Native American uranium miners died of lung cancer. Sixty-three of these died before 1990; twenty-nine died after 1990. The SMR for the population that died in the former case was 3.18, for the former 3.27. This means the expected number of deaths would have been expected in the former case was 20, in the latter case, 9. Thus the excess lung cancer deaths among Native American uranium miners was 92 – (20 +9) = 63.

I had a friend whose parents were each diagnosed with lung cancer – they were cigarette smokers – within a few weeks of each other. (They were descended from Irish immigrants, had no Native American blood, and neither had mined uranium, although the father was an executive at a company that sold petroleum products for home heating.) The father, the second parent diagnosed, informed the mother that his case was much worse than hers.

“Why is that, honey?” the mother asked.

“Because it’s mine,” he replied.

(Remarkably, the father survived for more than 30 years after his diagnosis, the mother died within a few years of hers.)

My father was a cigarette smoker by the way, and lung cancer killed him. It is a horrible way to die, gasping for air while your lungs fill with blood and other fluids.

“Because it’s mine…”

Statistics are no comfort to a family member who has watched a family member die of cancer. It’s a gut wrenching process, and, trust me, the emotions connected with it never go away. One learns to live with these emotions, but they never go away: (Personally I still despise cigarette companies and all the people who work in them.)

I’m sure that nearly every member of the families of the 92 Native American uranium miners who died from lung cancer despises uranium mining, even if there is, crudely, without any more sophisticated Bayesian type analysis, a (92-63)/92 = .33 probability that the particular cancers were not caused by uranium mining.

I then added the calculation you refused to make when I pressed you on the subject, using units of time:

...On the other hand, roughly 7 million people will die this year from air pollution.[52] Of these, about 3.3 million will die from “ambient particulate air pollution” – chiefly resulting from the combustion of dangerous coal and dangerous petroleum, although some will come from the combustion of “renewable” biofuels. Every single person living on the face of this planet and, in fact, practically every organism on this planet is continuously exposed to dangerous fossil fuel waste, and every person on this planet and practically every organism on this planet contains dangerous fossil fuel waste. The only way to stop dangerous fossil fuel waste from accumulating in your flesh is to stop breathing, which is, of course, what some people do as a result of such accumulation, many of them as a result of, um, getting lung cancer. This means that about 6.3 people die every minute, on average, from “ambient particulate air pollution.” Seen in this purely clinical way, this means that all of the Native American uranium miners dying from all cancers, 93 lung cancer deaths and 54 deaths from other cancers, measured over three or four decades, represent about 23 minutes of deaths taking place continuously, without let up, from dangerous fossil fuel pollution...

I have added the emphasis here and bold I did not include in the original.

The full text is here: Sustaining the Wind, Part 3: Is Uranium Exhaustible?

Note this is my work, some some lazy assed googled link to some half read website. It includes 59 references, most to the primary scientific literature.

Now, as I showed elsewhere in the text, the planet contains, fully open to the fluid dynamics of the hydrosphere and atmosphere, more than 4 billion tons of uranium. All this horseshit wherein people who know no science and care even less about the subject express hatred for an element in the periodic table that is as common as tin, will not make the element disappear. In fact, fissioning it to produce energy at a rate that is four or five times the current rates of consumption won't make the element disappear.

Uranium is a feature of the planet, and always has been, throughout the entire course of life's evolution and it always will be here. If one has an insipid fear of the element, one will need to move to a planet where it has no mobility, let's say Mars. I'm sure, if one is unconcerned about 7 million deaths per year from having an atmosphere laden with poisons, but is deeply concerned, almost to the point of mysticism, about the deaths of 93 uranium miners over a 40 year period, one will be unconcerned if there is no atmosphere.

The conceit of the anti-nuke community, the awful conceit is that they think it fully sufficient and complete to point to any death from nuclear energy is vastly important than millions of deaths that routinely occur because less than perfectly educated - far less than perfectly educated - have a tragic, and frankly deadly obsession with bad mouthing, destroying and maligning what is, and has been for many years, the world's largest, and by far the safest, exajoule scale form of primary energy, nuclear energy.

My contention is that this type of ignorance kills people and does so on a vast scale. It's a claim that nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy, need be perfect in the eyes of every beholder, even the spectacularly uneducated beholders, or everything else, being far more dangerous, can kill at will.

I find this position to be morally reprehensible, but then again, well, I'm often lectured by my self declared moral superiors here and elsewhere when I give a shit about 70 million deaths from air pollution every decade.

By the way, are you going to shut your computer off for a few minutes tonight in remembrance of people who suffered mercury or cadmium poisoning from the run off of abandoned coal mines. Are they still dangerous? Don't care? I thought so. On behalf of all future generations, I would like to ask you how your generation, the generation that is so proud of itself for having reduced emissions by substituting dangerous natural gas for dangerous coal, is going to render "safe" all that radium laced flowback water.

No interest? I thought so.

By the way, elsewhere I have written about how to decontaminate the fractured uranium bearing rocks of Pennsylvania, even if our resident anti-nukes don't give a shit while they celebrate dangerous natural gas. The process would involve injecting supercritical carbon dioxide into the wells, extracting the uranium and then fissioning it. This process would cut out many of the NORM decays, particularly the most insidious members of the natural decay series, radium and radon.

Antinukes basically disgust me, but then again, maybe my ethics are peculiar.

Have a nice evening.