The Iowa State Daily seems to be taking a lesson from Stephen Colbert and doing its part to “Keep Fear Alive.”

Featured on the front page of the Oct. 12 issue was an article by Tessa Callender about a protest of Iowa State’s coal fired plant. It begins with some enlightening data that make me want to reduce my consumption of electricity: we burn 148,965 tons of coal per year, and produce 77 tons of fly ash per day. But then it takes a Colbert-esque turn:

“[The] fly ash is sent to … an unlined and unmonitored quarry. Such disposal could lead to contamination of the water supply since fly ash contains harmful levels of radioactive elements such as uranium and thorium.”

Wait a second. Now, I’m no coal advocate, and I don’t think that grinding up the Appalachians to power our school is a fair trade, but let’s take a step back here. Iowa State is a science school, right? That’s still in our name, the last time I checked. So, why is the Daily publishing un-cited, fear-inducing statements without making the slightest effort to put things in perspective?

The snippet above has all the keywords right in order: unmonitored, contamination, harmful levels, radioactive. All that’s missing is “terror plot” and you’ve got the next big cable news story. So, should we be afraid of mutating the citizens of Waterloo with our coal ash? Probably not. Here’s why:

Yes, there are radioactive elements in coal ash. There are radioactive elements in the bricks of every building on campus, in your granite countertop, in your bananas and in every living thing, including you. The concentration of these elements is what matters, so the way to determine if something is harmful is to compare its elemental composition to something we encounter every day.

First, we need to know how much uranium and thorium are in coal ash. Fortunately, the United States Geological Survey has already done the hard work for us. You can look at their U.S. Coal Quality Database for information about specific sites, or take a look at a fact sheet they’ve compiled about U.S. coal in general.

For those who like quick answers, the fact sheet says this: “In the majority of samples, concentrations of uranium fall in the range from slightly below 1 to 4 parts per million … coals with more than 20 ppm uranium are rare in the United States. Thorium concentrations in coal fall within a similar 1-4 ppm range.”

But the article in the Daily wasn’t talking about coal; it was talking about coal ash. When coal is burned, it is reduced in weight by about 90 percent, leaving the remaining 10 percent as ash. Elements like uranium and thorium get concentrated in this ash, so their final levels are 10 times the original, or 10 to 40 ppm.

So, is that dangerous? For comparison, a 1994 study of Iowa’s soil by Ames Laboratory found a typical soil concentration of 85 ppm for uranium. This means that Iowa topsoil has generally two to four times more uranium than the fly ash we dump in Waterloo.

What about thorium? A similar study from the Iowa Geological and Water Survey found average soil concentrations of thorium to be about 11 ppm. Since the majority of ash has between 10 and 40 ppm of thorium, it would seem at first that this could be cause for concern. However, the range of detected values in soil was less than 6 ppm to 31 ppm, or only slightly lower than that of the ash. Also, the EPA’s soil concentration limit for thorium is 50 ppm for topsoil and 150 ppm for deep soil. I’m not sure whether a quarry counts as top or deep soil, but the ash is below the limit for either.

In other words, there’s no chance that the good citizens of Waterloo are going to start growing extra limbs because of the fly ash we dump into their quarry. Even the USGS’s fact sheet concludes with: “[Water testing shows] dissolved concentrations of these radioactive elements are below levels of human health concern.” That certainly doesn’t sound harmful to me.

The less fear mongering we have in journalism, the better our chances of a rational discussion of politically sensitive topics. So, to the Daily: How about some well researched, insightful, and balanced articles? If you can pull it off, then there’s hope for the rest of the media.