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144 comments on Implications of Energy Return on Investment, Peak Oil and the Concept of “Best First”
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144 comments on Implications of Energy Return on Investment, Peak Oil and the Concept of “Best First”
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Cooking and heating with natural gas potentially can expose home residents to radiation exposure from radon gas that is present in natural gas. Radon exposures through natural gas have been estimated to kill as many as 20,000 Americans every year.
BS !!
Radon has a half-life of 3.825 days. Massive quantities of natural gas are stored for winter use. Radon is totally depleted in this gas.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/natural_gas/ngs/ngs.html
It takes over a week for NG to be piped from LA & TX to northeast, Midwest, CA and even longer to show up at the burner tip.
Even locally, any radon in the natural gas has gone through several half lives by the time it hits the burner tip. Except for cooking, combustion of NG goes directly outdoors.
ANY radon from cooking (very very little) quickly leaves the house. Exposure to radon is nil (New Orleans has among lowest naturally occurring radiation), we get much less than living on top of rock or using more rock (such as concrete aggregate) in construction or being farther above sea level (more cosmic rays).
I could see one or two "computed deaths"/year from radon in natural gas but I suspect << 1.
A made up "threat",
Best Hopes for Concentrating on Real Risks,
Alan
I suppose Alan thinks that on the frequent occasions when natural gas blows up houses, workplaces, and the vicinities of pipelines, these are not nuclear explosions of radon. True.
A week in transit does indeed allow ~75 percent of the radon the natgas emerges from the ground with to decay. What does it decay into, 'AlanfromBigEasy'?
(Threats from small amounts of radiation from natgas and LPG are no more made up than the threats from any small doses of radiation. They are, of course, much less small, much bigger, than doses of radiation from you-know-what.)
--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)
222Rn decays to 218Po (half-life 3.10 minutes). The remaining elements in the decay chain are bismuth and thallium, ultimately ending in 206Pb.
Number 7 in the above-linked list, lead-210, is the interesting one. Its 22-year half-life means gas and LPG plumbing accumulate it. Each second about one in a billion of its atoms turns into 210-Bi, and that, within days, turns into 210-Po. 210-Po is also known as Litvinenko's bane.
--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)
And, once plated out on the plumbing (which it is likely to do as soon as it becomes 218Po), it is very unlikely to ever wind up at the burner tip and bother anyone.