Reply #28: If coal had a rad limit even 1000x as high as Yankee there would be no operating coal plant in US.

[Statistical]

According to the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), the average radioactivity per short ton of coal is 17,100 millicuries/4,000,000 tons, or 0.00427 millicuries/ton. This figure can be used to calculate the average expected radioactivity release from coal combustion. For 1982 the total release of radioactivity from 154 typical coal plants in the United States was, therefore, 2,630,230 millicuries.

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colma...

0.00427 mCuries / ton of coal.
0.00427 mCuries = 4.27 million pCuries.

1 ton of coal = 4.27 million picoCuries
Vermont Yankee = 2.95 million picoCuries.

So the amount of radiation released from Vermont Yankee is roughly equal to the amount of radiation released by burning a half ton of coal.

Last year Vermont Yankee produced 4.7 BILLION kWh of energy.
Burning 1/2 ton of coal in coal plant at 35% efficiency (6670 kWh / ton * 0.5 * 0.35) 1167 kWh.

Not only is the radiation release negligible but no coal plant in the country could operate is subject to same regulatory standards that nuclear plant are.

To produce the same amount of power as Vermont Yankee does annually, a coal plant would require two million tons of coal and release 9.47 TRILLION picoCuries. That is roughly 4 million times as much as found in the tritium leak at Vermont Yankee.

4.7 billion KWH / 6670 kWh * 0.35 = 2.01 million tons of coal
2.01 million tons of coal * 4.7 million pCuries per ton = 9468451 million pCuries.

The attack of Vermont Yankee is an attack of science.