Fukushima: The myth of safety

[Starving Steve]

Re: Fukushima: The myth of safety

So, if there are certain wavelengths of radiation that do cause cancer by altering cell DNA, which wavelengths of radiation are these, and which emitters of these wavelengths are in the environment around a person?

That's a good question, isn't it? The answer to it would be quite important. Also, a certain type of radiation causes cataracts in human eyes. Which wavelength and type would that radiation be? What emits it in the human environment?

[davidstvz]

Re: Fukushima: The myth of safety

I'd say most radiation is safe in standard doses or even heavy doses (we are constantly bathed in AM/FM and Cell Phone radiation among others). It's the higher energy stuff you have to worry about (higher energy than visible light). UV radiation can be a problem for people who are into extreme tanning, but sunlight is also beneficial so complete abstinence probably isn't wise for most. This is a very long term problem. X-rays are a problem for the techs that work around them every day. They aren't as exposed as a tanner, but it's higher energy radiation than UV and they work with it every day. The patient doesn't have to worry because they only get x-rays a few times a year. For radiation with a high enough wave length, you don't want any exposure at all because it can cause immediate damage.

In theory, a few stray photons could cause cancer if you were incredibly unlucky. One whiff of asbestos might do it if you had terrible (perhaps statistically impossible) luck. The more you expose yourself to bad luck events, the more likely it becomes to suffer the consequences. With enough exposure, the probability approaches 100%. The kind of materials in power plants are in fact dangerous. They emit the high energy radiation that causes immediate damage and must be safely contained. When spread over a large area due to a meltdown (think Chernobyl) it gets diluted, but it's persistent. There will be a day (if it hasn't come) when people walk around there with suits even though it's unnecessary, but you probably still couldn't live there safely even if you could walk around for a few hours without much risk.

[Polish_Silver]

Re: Fukushima: The myth of danger!

According to my news, no one died from radiation exposure near Fukushima. The three emergency workers have a slightly elevated risk of lifetime cancer. So nuclear seems to be a lot safer than other forms of power generation.

Plants are often kept running past thier original design life time. Besides the financial advantage, there is actually an engineering reason in some cases. A factor limiting the lifetime is the corrosion of the stainless steel pipes holding the pressurized water. Since the plants were built, it was found that by altering the mineral content of the water, the corrosion is slowed way down. So the original factor limiting the life is no longer there. Of course, some other wear out mechanism is now the limiting factor. Also, designs and sensors have improved massively since the old plants were built, so there would be a safety improvement by replaceing the old plants with new ones.

But would people be willing to pay double for electricity, for elmination of a very small risk? I doubt it.
They already face much greater risk driving thier cars than they do from radiation.

Nuclear waste is more of an emotional/political issue than a technical problem. Yucca mountain was actually a good idea, it's too bad it was canned.

Future designs will not produce waste, or will be able to process existing waste.
There are many sorts of reactors that could be used: thorium, pebble bed, Plutonium/Uranium
fuel cycles, etc.

We could even use the reactor waste as a heat source---wrap some hermetic heat exchangers around it and it is free heat!

When oil is $300/barrel people will re-think all these phobias.

[charliebrown]

Re: Fukushima: The myth of safety

it should have been easy to move the spent rods to another facility, not on the coast right?

[Polish_Silver]

Re: Fukushima: The myth of safety

The Fukushima fuel rods should have been moved to a more secure location.

As EJ pointed out, this was not a problem at Chernobyl, where the spent rods were not stored at the reactor.
The Soviet Union did not have to mess with opinion polls, and this was actually beneficial in cases where public opinion
is completely assinine!

Worldwide, many countries, including the USA, are storing the rods very near the reactors. This is obvioiusly stupid,
but as long as nothing goes wrong, nothing changes. Meanwhile the phobia around nuclear waste prevents any rational
action---the fear is making the problem much worse than it has to be.

[davidstvz]

Re: Fukushima: The myth of safety

it should have been easy to move the spent rods to another facility, not on the coast right?

I'm just using intuition here, but if a compromised containment facility caused so much trouble, then to move the stuff would require a mobile containment facility. I'm sure it can be done (and is done), but it's probably not cheap to do (functionally; I'm not even considering political costs). So as with the BP oil spill, or New Orleans levee failure, Japan has paid a much larger sum for failing to make a smaller upfront investment in safety.

It's Taleb's Black Swan problem in each case. Overall, I would agree that nuclear is relatively manageable and ought to be expanded at some point and worried about less (in regard to irrational worry by the public), but you need Black Swan protection which is going to look like an unnecessarily high expense from the present looking backward.

At any given time if you look backward and use the most extreme event as a prediction of the severity of future extreme events, you will find (by definition) that the worst event on record was never bad enough to prepare you for a record breaking event. That is something that seems obvious* once pointed out... but think of how often actual preparation is planned around the past worst event even if people do imagine and talk about worse events occurring.

*credit goes to Nassim Taleb for discussing this in sample/preview material for his new book coming in October this year.

[c1ue]

Re: Fukushima: The myth of safety

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the reason why spent fuel rods are stored near the reactors is because the spent fuel rods need the same thing as the reactors: high volumes of distilled water.

It isn't a case of just tossing them into a hole in the ground and pouring some water in, the SNFs require circulating purified water to keep temperatures down.

Thus the reactor locations are ideal since at these sites there is already such provision. I'd also presume there are benefits to have SNF pools nearby the reactors for when a core switchover occurs - rather than carry radioactive fuel rods many miles overland, an SNF pool on site means just having to transfer the SNFs a few yards.

[charliebrown]

Re: Fukushima: The myth of safety

Agreed, I just think it might be worth the money to build or enlarge an existing SNF pool at an inland site.

I think ... the SNF would have survived the quake. It was the Tsunamie that did it in.
I hope we have learned that lesson and are thinking about this for fuel rods stored in close proximity to the Pacific coast of our country.

[Polish_Silver]

Re: Fukushima: The myth of safety

Engineers regularly consider "worst case scenarios" which have never happened. Of course they do not think of everything, which is why accidents do actually happen. Titanic, for example.

As for the fuel rods, only the newest and hottest need flowing water. After a year or so, they need "standing water", and after a few years, can be suspended in air. (I don't know how long each stage is.)


The hottest rods should be stored at the reactor for a few months. When they cool a bit, they should be moved offsite.
This would limit the worst case reactor accident greatly.

It is cheap to store them at the reactor, because flowing water is already there. But it is not the safest, since if something goes wrong at the reactor, then the spent fuel also becomes a problem. Better would be a dedicated fuel repository for the ageing rods.

Unfortunately, the political and regulatory environment is such that all the rods are stored near the reactor, which is a really stupid thing to be doing! The public anxiety is counterproductive because it prevents a rational policy towards the spent fuel.

[Starving Steve]

Re: Fukushima: The myth of safety

Breeder reactors can produce Thorium ( element 90 ) from Uranium or Plutonium. The way I understand it, Uranium can directly produce Thorium, or Uranium can produce Plutonium which then can be used to produce Thorium.... So, there is almost no end to the fuel for atomic power plants.

There is no problem whatsoever with atomic power. The problem at Fukushima was the world's strongest earthquake ever recorded, and the world's largest tsunami ever seen......... I think Fukushima did very well, thank you.

What the greenies won't tell you is that the earthquake at Fukushima was so strong that it sent an out-bound tsunami across the Pacific. The out-bound Fukushima tsunami reached the California coast, some eight or ten-thousand miles away, days later. That trans-North Pacific tsunami caused considerable damage along the California coast, especially to fishing boats tied-up to piers..... With the possible and lesser exception of the Alaska earthquake in 1964, and its south-bound tsunami which damaged fishing boats at Crescent City, California, nothing like the Fukushima tsunami has ever been witnessed on the West Coast of North America before, at least during modern times.

Every generation which follows us, is entitled to the highest standard-of-living possible. That means they will require penny-cheap, reliable, and abundant electric energy, generated at atomic power plants.

In the history of civilization, 90% of the achievements of mankind happened after energy became penny-cheap, and not before. The achievements of mankind in the 20th Century are unsurpassed.

[davidstvz]

Re: Fukushima: The myth of safety

Steve, note that each element has several isotopes with differing numbers of neutrons. Each particular isotope has a particular decay path (by which it turns into particular isotopes of other elements and so on). So not all uranium, thorium and plutonium is good for reactors because it doesn't all decay the same way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Isotopes

[davidstvz]

Re: Fukushima: The myth of safety

Steve, here is a take on nuclear safety that is very much contrary to what you believe:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/...d-the-big-lie/

I'd like to look into this in more detail. If the wrong kind of radioactive materials are released as particles in the air, it could indeed have significant negative impact. Imagine doubling the cancer rate for a 100 mile radius. How do you calculate that kind of damage and accept it? Not an easy thing to think about.

[c1ue]

Re: Fukushima: The myth of safety

Steve, here is a take on nuclear safety that is very much contrary to what you believe:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/...d-the-big-lie/

I'd say that the article in question has very low credibility, pushing as it were all the usual alternative energy suspects and environmental saints: solar, the IPCC, the New Scientist, and so forth.

I also find it interesting that the supposed 'investigative reporter' Mr. Grossman neglects to mention that the "Radiation and Public Health Project" is not a governmental organization nor is it affiliated with the Centers for Disease Control.

Its own web site: http://www.radiation.org/about/index.html

notes:

In USA Newborn Deterioration in the Nuclear Age: 1945-1965 , RPHP found

...a cumulated excess of about 1 million infant deaths over the 50 year postwar period, attributable to exposure to all post-1945 releases of chemical and radioactive pollutants.

Then when the article starts throwing in quotes from such scientifically reputable organizations like "Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility" and "Physicians for Social Responsibility", well, of course it is objective. /sarc

[davidstvz]

Re: Fukushima: The myth of safety

Thanks for acting as a BS meter... can't read anything these days without being on guard.

[Polish_Silver]

CounterPunch article very weak

Just looking at the first page, I found several falsehoods:

"even as it became clear that any amount of radioactivity can injure and kill."

We are constantly exposed to measureable radiation from the sky above and
the rocks beneath our feet. To rant about "any amount" is ridiculous!

"The possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania.”

The statement is completely out of context. No discussion of the probability of the accident or the
toxicity within the area. Radiation forms a distribution of exposure---strong at the center, weaker as you
go further away. You can get as large an area as you want by taking a low level of exposure.

The estimates turn out to be low considering the toll of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant accident.

Definitely wrong!

Credible estimates put the Chernobyl death toll at 4000--and hard to quantify because it is a small part of the mortality
in the population of exposed people (about 600,000 rescue workers).

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/...byl-fatalities
In 2005, the Chernobyl Forum a consortium of global health agencies and governmental organizations, including the IAEA and World Health Organization--put the death toll at about 4,000. That still makes Chernobyl the worst industrial accident in history. As such the consequences of the accident are not to be minimized or trivialized, but bear in mind that hundreds of thousands of people die yearly from exposure to emissions from coal-fired power plants.

(the above article has a numeric mistake in paragraph 3--you cannot have 825000 fatalities from a group of 600,000 workers)

and the blog is good too:

And I've so far overlooked the fact that the statement is wrong in the first place. The worst dam failure killed over 26,000, and even if you don't include dam failures, the Bhopal chemical disaster killed 4,000 as a lower limit.