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I recently had an argument with a relative who lives in West Virginia. He was proud of how he was reducing pollution by driving his new Chevrolet Bolt. He got rather upset when I pointed out that he was polluting more than a modern gasoline burning vehicle. He had never thought about the majority of the electricity in the state being produced by coal fired plants. Allowing for the inefficiencies in the system, he produces about 200% more carbon dioxide per kilometer than the equivalent sized gasoline vehicle. Then we got into the amount of radiation produced by the coal fired plants, an amount that would get any nuclear powered plant in North America shutdown (the fly ash from a coal fired plant produces about 100 times the radiation from the equivalent nuclear powered plant).
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