News Switching off lights (and brains)

[BobG]

This ignores the political reality that no one want a reactor in their back yard. And with terrorism being such a problem, controls are a huge concern. What's more, the industry lost the trust of the public long ago; and rightly so IMO. TMI was a near disaster. It is a matter of record that the two most knowlegible people alive could not agree on what to do when the system was failing. "We now know how to avoid this" doesn't carry much weight as it was promised as safe the first time.

Did you all happen to see where the US Navy just busted a sub crew for falsifying maintenance records on a nuclear vessel? Eventually, this sort of thing WILL happen.

Well, worse things already happened. Chernobyl. It was not a disaster of another scale than any other major industry knew. This is like people who are affraid of taking the airplane because it can crash, and take their car. Yes, the plane can crash. But it is 6 times safer per kilometer than car driving. Only, when a plane crashes, it gets in the news.

So we have to do what is possible to avoid a nuclear power plant releasing a big amount of radioactive material. It will probably happen some times (over long periods). It will make some victims. It won't be such a big deal.

Remember: EVERY YEAR, car traffic is equivalent to 100 Chernobyls.

Ivan's first statement is the biggest problem. A fairer comparison would be "how many people die in car traffic in my home town?"

A nuclear reactor wouldn't be placed in the middle of a large city simply because of the number of lives that would be jeopardized in an accident. You have to find a small town well outside a large city to assume the risk for the large city. It's a good move in theory, but the town selected to host a nuclear power plant usually doesn't think so.

You have the same problem with figuring out how to dispose of the waste. Everything goes pretty well, with all of the states involved very agreeable, right up to the point that the final disposal site is selected and the lawsuits begin.

You mention 'nuclear' and everything degrades into the ethics scenario of the life raft with too many occupants.

 

[vanesch]

I will have to get back to this point. But the last time that I checked, the materials were being spread over the countryside by rodents and birds, and people are eating food deemed to be unsafe - babies are drinking contaminated milk.

That is because the norms for "radiological safety" are set do draconian values. Do you know that one of the densest population areas in India has a natural radioactivity which is way higher than the rim of the contaminated area in Chernobyl ? It's also a tourist resort.

I don't say that one has to be reckless with radioactivity, but the biggest harm that is done to the whole nuclear industry is its extreme safety.

Do you remember the "news" that after the Japanese earthquake, "50% more radioactivity" was released than initially announced ? Well, what happened was that 90 000 Bq in a few cubic meters of water was released instead of the 60 000 Bq announced. But the point is: even if you DRANK UP all that water, you would still be below the acceptable yearly dose for the public ! In other words, the toxicity of what was released was of the same order as, say, a glass of oil (and I'd prefer having to drink up 90 000 Bq in water, than a glass of oil!).

So the big bad news that did the round of the world was that they didn't spill a glass, but a glass and a half of oil in the sea.

How many examples of "safe" materials and chemicals later deemed unsafe would you like?

I can assure you that in the nuclear business, we err on the other side!

Now, I find it also stupid of officials to say that there is no risk. That's stupid. There's always a risk. You simply have to give the risk (in expected number of victims, and financial loss, ...) as compared to an accepted risk, such as car driving.
And if you do that, no matter how you turn it, nuclear industry is way too safe (meaning, they've invested too much in safety).

Access and opportunity.

There is no way to outsource control, as the IAEA imposes a state control of radioactive materials. So in any case the state remains responsible. But honestly, there is already more than enough material available to make a dirty bomb. The last place you want to go for it, is a nuclear power plant ! You would be able to follow the guy with no problem, just following him with sensitive detectors. You know how to make an efficient dirty bomb ? Not with stuff from a reactor, but rather with an old industrial Co-60 source. There are many of these around, and not always well guarded. Or an Am-Be source as used in oil drilling.

But a dirty bomb wouldn't make many real victims. It would indeed scare out the hell of people, and be a great thing for a terrorist. But objectively, it wouldn't be a big deal.

 

[vanesch]

It's a good move in theory, but the town selected to host a nuclear power plant usually doesn't think so.

It's not a good idea in general to put a nuclear powerplant in a city, big or small. You should put it in the country side !

You have the same problem with figuring out how to dispose of the waste. Everything goes pretty well, with all of the states involved very agreeable, right up to the point that the final disposal site is selected and the lawsuits begin.

That's really a wrong issue, because in geological waste disposal, the "highest risk" is after about 1000 years, when the human-made containment will have lost its integrity, and we trust upon the geological structure to do the confinement - and that's where the uncertainties set in (that is: the uncertainties of being sure that we haven't overlooked a possible geological process, because for waste management, all possible scenarios have been worked out and showed that there was no problem).

So for the first few hundred years, "your town" is entirely safe. And here, the choice should be guided by geological considerations.

 

[mgb_phys]

Do you know that one of the densest population areas in India has a natural radioactivity which is way higher than the rim of the contaminated area in Chernobyl ? It's also a tourist resort.

Indians don't count - otherwise we would have closed chemical plants in the west after we killed 20,000 of them at Bhopal.

 

[Azael]

This ignores the political reality that no one want a reactor in their back yard.

Acctualy people that live near nuclear power plants is more supportive of nuclear power!
http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2007/08/nuclear-power-plant-neighbors-accept.html
Sure its from the NEI so it might be industry propaganda. But I know from polls in sweden that its exactly the same here. People in communities near nuclear power plants think they are great. Placing new reactors at those sites will not be a problem.

And with terrorism being such a problem, controls are a huge concern. What's more, the industry lost the trust of the public long ago; and rightly so IMO. TMI was a near disaster. It is a matter of record that the two most knowlegible people alive could not agree on what to do when the system was failing. "We now know how to avoid this" doesn't carry much weight as it was promised as safe the first time..

In what way was TMI a near disaster? Even if it had been a complete meltdown instead of a partial meltdown what would have happened? Not much at all. The consequenses are irrelevant compared to the consequenses of coal. Acctualy a 1GWe coal power plant in normal operation kills 200 people each year(according to ExternE's LCA). So every coal power plant is like a chernobyl. If we replace all coal with nuclear we can have several chernobyls and it still won't be as bad as coal was.

But most of all risk of meltdown is a mute point since its possible to design reactors with passive safety that eliminates the risk of meltdowns. There is light water reactor designs cooled by natural convection, pebble bed and high temperature reactors with fuel particles that can not melt since the temperature in the reactor can't reach the melting point of the materials even with total loss of coolant(demonstrated), molten salt reactors where the fuel is molten during regular operation so obviosuly there can be no melt down ect. So even if meltdown was a serious potential disaster in current gen LWR's they are eliminated by design in many new reactors.


There is also the question, what else? What else except nuclear have even a slim chanse to replace a fraction of coal?

 

[vanesch]

Ivan's first statement is the biggest problem. A fairer comparison would be "how many people die in car traffic in my home town?"

BTW, I think that even that comparison is ok. Probability to die in a car accident is about 0.01% per year worldwide. Now, take a town of about 100 000 inhabitants, and consider a Chernobyl nearby in that town every 100 years (they are not going to win the lottery every time! We assumed a Chernobyl every 10 years, worldwide). Per year, we have 10 victims in car accidents, which make about 1000 victims in 100 years.
Chernobyl made about 4000 victims in the nearby town, but that was due to very late evacuation. So let us say that reasonably, we could bring that down to 1000 victims if we have better evacuation plans and so. Given that there is a Chernobyl every 10 years, we can tune the procedures.

So we see that under the super disaster hypotheses of having a town of 100 000 inhabitants with normal drivers, but with a Chernobyl every 100 years (each tenth Chernobyl is for this town if we assume there is one every 10 years worldwide, which is already a hugely pessimistic disaster hypothesis), that in this very unlucky town, driving is as dangerous as having the power plant there.

But I want to stress again that I have made extremely pessimistic hypotheses. Indeed, if there is a Chernobyl every 10 year worldwide (which is already a crazily pessimistic hypothesis), given that there are 400 power plants working now, that would mean normally that the town would only be hit on average every 4000 years. But I gave them bad luck, and put it to 100 years.

 

[Azael]

It's not a good idea in general to put a nuclear powerplant in a city, big or small. You should put it in the country side !

Its still a good idea to place NPP's close enough to supply district heating to cities. There where major plans for that in sweden until they where stopped by environuts. A big chunk of the heating needs of Copenhagen could have been meet by the Barsebäck plant in sweden. Same with Göteborg and the Ringhals plant.

 

[vanesch]

Its still a good idea to place NPP's close enough to supply district heating to cities. There where major plans for that in sweden until they where stopped by environuts. A big chunk of the heating needs of Copenhagen could have been meet by the Barsebäck plant in sweden. Same with Göteborg and the Ringhals plant.

Mmm... personally, I'd prefer them to be in low population density areas, because it eliminates the very last of worries. Chernobyl was really the worst of the worst, with a high smoke plume, driven by a fire and a not-stopped reactor (the reactor was still working many hours after the accident, because there was - in contrast to all western reactors - no passive safety mechanism that stopped it). It was THIS which spread out the activity over such a large area. But this is simply physically impossible in a plant with build-in passive safety, which means that the worst of the worst in such a plant (breakdown of reactor vessel, breakdown of the containment building, massive dispersion of the core material) is a heavy contamination, but of a more restricted area. The long-term consequence is then that this area is turned into a natural reserve with build-in guarantee against promotors The contamination will last for 100 - 200 years.

So one should foresee a zone of a few miles around a power plant as a potential natural reserve which will be selected randomly by the distribution of accidents. It is then economically wasteful to put towns in there.

This view has the advantage that one can create more natural reserves worldwide by lowering security standards for power plants So again, I wonder why ecologists are against nukes: in the worst case, they generate natural reserves with guarantee

 

[Azael]

Mmm... personally, I'd prefer them to be in low population density areas, because it eliminates the very last of worries. Chernobyl was really the worst of the worst, with a high smoke plume, driven by a fire and a not-stopped reactor (the reactor was still working many hours after the accident, because there was - in contrast to all western reactors - no passive safety mechanism that stopped it). It was THIS which spread out the activity over such a large area. But this is simply physically impossible in a plant with build-in passive safety, which means that the worst of the worst in such a plant (breakdown of reactor vessel, breakdown of the containment building, massive dispersion of the core material) is a heavy contamination, but of a more restricted area. The long-term consequence is then that this area is turned into a natural reserve with build-in guarantee against promotors The contamination will last for 100 - 200 years.

So one should foresee a zone of a few miles around a power plant as a potential natural reserve which will be selected randomly by the distribution of accidents. It is then economically wasteful to put towns in there.

This view has the advantage that one can create more natural reserves worldwide by lowering security standards for power plants So again, I wonder why ecologists are against nukes: in the worst case, they generate natural reserves with guarantee

Thats one way of looking at it

 

[mgb_phys]

Thats one way of looking at it

There was a semi-serious suggestion that the best way to preserve the Amazon rain forrest was to detonate a dirty bomb over it so that you couldn't cut it down and grow cattle for McDonalds - I like to suggest this to the more over the top eco-freindly types!

 

[Moonbear]

A nuclear reactor wouldn't be placed in the middle of a large city simply because of the number of lives that would be jeopardized in an accident. You have to find a small town well outside a large city to assume the risk for the large city. It's a good move in theory, but the town selected to host a nuclear power plant usually doesn't think so.

It would seem there are a number of good potential sites along the "rust belt." To put it bluntly, many of those areas are already so contaminated and polluted from the old industries that have died off that you couldn't do much more harm to them if you tried, so you'd alleviate such unfounded worries. They're located near the sorts of waterways that would be required for the cooling systems. The towns are depressed, with few residents left, and in desperate need of the jobs such a plant would bring to the area. These are already locations that have been deemed "industrial" much more than residential, so they seem like perfect places. Many of the people "stuck" living there are only stuck because there is no value to their property anymore, so they can't afford to pick up and move out...who would buy? But, if a power plant comes in and offers them a good price for their land, they could relocate out to a nicer place (so you don't have to deal with the "not in my backyard" issue...give them a price that gets them out of the backyard of the proposed site), yet they also may stay close enough to benefit from the jobs and provide the workforce for the site.

One thing that would limit a few areas, however, is mine subsidance issues. Unfortunately, the towns that might be willing to adopt an industry that's cleaner, but still provides jobs for them, would be the coal-mining towns. Coal mining accidents have taken far more lives than nuclear power plants in this country. But, the ground there would be too unstable I think.

And, maybe we need some brave politicians...perhaps some nearer the end of their careers who don't have to worry about getting reelected...who will simply say, yes, this is the site for it, and you can complain all you want, but it's still happening.

 

[russ_watters]

One of the more likely ways to die is by a meteor impact; not because we usually have large impacts, but because when one does hit, billions will die. The same logic can be applied here. One catastrophic failure is unacceptable, and there is no such thing as perfect controls.

It is not true here because one catastrophic failure will not kill enough people for it to be that big of a deal. Chernobyl was orders of magnitude smaller than what is needed to equal the yearly damage done by other forms of energy. Vanesch used cars as a comparison, but the same comparison works for coal power. We'd need several Chernobyls a year to equal the death rate due to coal power. Air pollution kills people at a pretty surprising rate.

This ignores the political reality that no one want a reactor in their back yard.

Anti-nuclear environmentalists are stupid, but that doesn't mean the rest of the general public is. 20 years after TMI, it is easy to show people the evidence and convince enough that it is a good idea - especially when you factor in the money it feeds into the town.

I live about 5 miles from Limerick and there is no vocal opposition to the existence of the plant. I realize that there are places out west where there are people working to get plants closed, but areas where the concentration of enviro-nuts is very high are the exception, not the rule.

 

[russ_watters]

A nuclear reactor wouldn't be placed in the middle of a large city simply because of the number of lives that would be jeopardized in an accident. You have to find a small town well outside a large city to assume the risk for the large city. It's a good move in theory, but the town selected to host a nuclear power plant usually doesn't think so.

A nuclear plant (or any other large power plant) isn't built in the middle of a city for technical reasons. There is no safety benefit to placing a nuclear plant in Limerick (20 miles west of Philly) rather than in Philly. The fallout from an accident would be more effectively spread over Philly than if, for example, the plant were placed on the Deleware in south Philly.

 

[russ_watters]

By the way, vansech - you are being far to accomodating of the fearmongering. I know you gave the caveats already, but there is simply no reason to use Chernobyl as your basis for analysis of the risk. It is like using the Titanic for analysis of car accident risk. Cars don't strike icebergs and sink and a Chernobyl type accident is a technical impossibility in the west.

Using TMI as the basis for a risk analysis shows just how "risky" nuclear power is. The worst "what could have happened" scenario for TMI probably still wouldn't have killed anyone. But then, of course, you run into the problem of trying to predict a disaster rate based on a historic rate of zero. After 40 years of waiting, we're still at zero. Assuming we haven't been unusually lucky, a bad disaster tomorrow would set us up for a rate that would probably allow all the world's energy to be nuclear based and have one disaster a year. Given the death rate from things like air pollution, that's certainly something people could live with.

 

[vanesch]

By the way, vansech - you are being far to accomodating of the fearmongering. I know you gave the caveats already, but there is simply no reason to use Chernobyl as your basis for analysis of the risk. It is like using the Titanic for analysis of car accident risk. Cars don't strike icebergs and sink and a Chernobyl type accident is a technical impossibility in the west.

I know, but my reasoning is the following: nobody will claim that any car accident will be WORSE than the titanic sinking. If we can show now that "titanics sinking" are still less risky than making shoes, then we should allow for cars.
Translated: no imaginable accident with a power plant will ever be worse than Chernobyl: we've had the maximal accident there. This puts an upper limit, by observation, to the phantasies about what could happen with power plants. If given this upper limit, we're still having acceptable risks, then the REAL (but yet unobserved) risk will definitely be lower.

Because it is the fact that the real risk is still unobserved which feeds the fears: "we've been lucky, but the Big Bang is maybe for tomorrow". Well, consider, as a cure for that fear, that the worst possible Bangs happen regularly...
and you'll see that even that is no big deal compared to other accepted risks, such as driving cars, smoking...

 

[Art]

By the way, vansech - you are being far to accomodating of the fearmongering. I know you gave the caveats already, but there is simply no reason to use Chernobyl as your basis for analysis of the risk. It is like using the Titanic for analysis of car accident risk. Cars don't strike icebergs and sink and a Chernobyl type accident is a technical impossibility in the west.

Using TMI as the basis for a risk analysis shows just how "risky" nuclear power is. The worst "what could have happened" scenario for TMI probably still wouldn't have killed anyone. But then, of course, you run into the problem of trying to predict a disaster rate based on a historic rate of zero. After 40 years of waiting, we're still at zero. Assuming we haven't been unusually lucky, a bad disaster tomorrow would set us up for a rate that would probably allow all the world's energy to be nuclear based and have one disaster a year. Given the death rate from things like air pollution, that's certainly something people could live with.

Last time I checked Windscale (Sellafield) was in the West.

 

[vanesch]

Last time I checked Windscale (Sellafield) was in the West.

Windscale wasn't a power reactor. It was a hastily build military reactor to produce plutonium an tritium after Eisenhower had decided to cut the British off from the military applications of nuclear technology (and hence material supply).

It was an extremely dangerous design: it was essentially a graphite reactor in a corridor, with a big ventilator on one side, which blew air (!) through the channels in the reactor in order to cool it, and a stack on the other side, where the air was given off to the atmosphere. And regularly, one let the reactor overheat (to a few hundred degrees C) in order to relax the Wigner energy in the graphite. So you essentially had a hot cole stove with a ventilator and a stack, stuffed with uranium and - this was the main contribution to the contamination - a lot of materials to be irradiated, such as polonium.
At one point, the overheating went wrong, and the graphite/uranium took fire.

One estimates that the Winscale accident has made around 200 victims (over 50 years), again under the hypothesis of linear dose-effect relation etc...

All this has nothing to do with a western powerplant.

 

[russ_watters]

I know, but my reasoning is the following:

I follow your logic and it is sound except for the fact that it allows crackpots and the ignorant to believe something that isn't true. Yes, you are working within their expectations/beliefs and still making a convincing argument, but I just don't like letting untruths slide. Conceding the point will undoubtably make people who are simply ignorant think that Chernobyl really is a possibility here. It isn't so much a problem for this discussion because people are smart enough to follow your reasoning, but as a general tactic, I prefer to demand realism.

 

[t-money]

Biofuel is a joke!

If we devoted the total biosphere of Earth to production of biofuels we still could not sustain our current and future energy demands which is ever increasing.

 

[Art]

Windscale wasn't a power reactor. It was a hastily build military reactor to produce plutonium an tritium after Eisenhower had decided to cut the British off from the military applications of nuclear technology (and hence material supply).

It was an extremely dangerous design: it was essentially a graphite reactor in a corridor, with a big ventilator on one side, which blew air (!) through the channels in the reactor in order to cool it, and a stack on the other side, where the air was given off to the atmosphere. And regularly, one let the reactor overheat (to a few hundred degrees C) in order to relax the Wigner energy in the graphite. So you essentially had a hot cole stove with a ventilator and a stack, stuffed with uranium and - this was the main contribution to the contamination - a lot of materials to be irradiated, such as polonium.
At one point, the overheating went wrong, and the graphite/uranium took fire.

One estimates that the Winscale accident has made around 200 victims (over 50 years), again under the hypothesis of linear dose-effect relation etc...

All this has nothing to do with a western powerplant.

It has everything to do with Western nuclear safety records and Sellafield is still a part of the nuclear power plant cycle supplying reprocessed fuel.

The fact it wasn't a far far bigger disaster was entirely down to luck.

Once the reactor started burning they hadn't a clue what to do. In desperation they tried using water to put it out. They didn't have enough people on site and in desperation recruited volunteers from a local cinema to man the fire hoses.

This didn't work and they were incredibly lucky they didn't cause a steam explosion which would have caused an absolutely massive catastrophe spreading contamination over hundreds of miles.

Eventually someone had the bright idea of switching off the fan to stop the flow of air to the reactor which put out the fire.

The point is, it is not only in the East reckless and stupid decisions have been made in relation to safety matters in the nuclear industry and so although Western reactors might be safe from an exact replica of the problems of Chernobyl, based on prior experience, there is nothing to say they can't cobble together an equally disastrous outcome albeit with different ingredients.

btw As recently found following the publication of secret documents released under the 50 year rule the fire wasn't caused by heating to dispel the Wigner energy. It was caused by the components placed in the reactor catching fire due to political decisions to reduce the size of the heat fins on these components to increase production of tritium. This was discovered at the time but was covered up and all references to it in the official report deleted personally by the then PM Harold MacMillan who chose to blame the workers instead.

The reason there is a deep distrust of nuclear power is because this reaction by the British gov't is typical of how the industry responds to problems. It's knee jerk reaction is to cover up it's mistakes and lie to the public. The public however aren't stupid. They know they have been lied to in the past and wonder what other lies they are being fed. A recent example would be the use of depleted uranium in weaponry, gov'ts who use these armaments still keep insisting they are safe no matter how much evidence to the contrary accumulates. Even if you give the gov'ts the benefit of the doubt and allow they believe their own bs then you are merely substituting a fool for a liar neither of which fills one with confidence.

 

[russ_watters]

It has everything to do with Western nuclear safety records and Sellafield is still a part of the nuclear power plant cycle supplying reprocessed fuel.

Except that since it is unlike any other facility, it cannot be used to extrapolate the safety of normal power plants. The saftety of normal power plants is what people would be worried about if we planned to double (quadruple?) the number we currently have. When a company proposes a new plant, no sane person would calculate a failure probability of that plant based on what happened at Sellafield. Again, it would be like deciding not to buy a car because you are afraid of hitting an iceberg.

 

[Art]

Russ - Seems to be a lot of icebergs around

From today

Radiation leak at Russian plant
Russia says there has been a radiation leak at a nuclear reprocessing plant in the Ural mountains east of Moscow, but that it has not harmed anyone.
Local emergency officials say a faulty tap allowed radioactive waste to leak from a tank onto a stretch of road at the Mayak plant last Thursday.

Radiation levels inside and outside the plant are normal, the officials say.

The plant was a top secret Soviet atomic weapons facility. In 1957 it was the scene of a major nuclear accident.

In the latest incident, a violation of safety rules was blamed for the leak.

Russian prosecutors are considering whether to open a criminal case.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7068041.stm

Published: 2007/10/29 16:36:37 GMT

© BBC MMVII

From last year

Russia challenged by nuclear woes
By Leonid Ragozin
bbcrussian.com, Moscow


The new boss of Russia's nuclear industry, Sergei Kiriyenko, has announced ambitious expansion plans which alarm environmentalists worried about continuing radioactive contamination.


This week prosecutors charged the director of Russia's main nuclear waste processing plant - Mayak in the Urals - with violating safety rules.
Vitaly Sadovnikov is accused of allowing many tons of liquid radioactive waste to be discharged into the River Techa in 2001-2004.

In a separate investigation, the former head of Russia's Federal Agency for Nuclear Energy (Rosatom), Yevgeny Adamov, was arrested in Switzerland last year on corruption charges and extradited to Russia.

The Mayak plant was also the scene of a major nuclear accident in 1957, when a waste storage facility blew up, releasing 20 million curies of radiation into the atmosphere. The scale of the disaster was kept secret by the Soviet authorities at the time.
[snip]
The committee's chairman, Vladimir Grachev, has warned that the dams standing between the radioactive water and the Ob river basin may collapse.

Environmentalists say dangerous waste water has been seeping into the soil for years.

Gosman Kabirov, an environmental activist who has spent years near the Mayak plant, says "the situation is indeed very dangerous, because the reservoirs have accumulated 1.2bn curies - that is 22 Chernobyls".

It is silly to contend that as nuclear power plants are (probably) generally safe the nuclear industry is safe. The whole process has to be included in any safety analysis including ore extraction through reprocessing (where used) to disposal of waste.

To use your car analogy - you're saying the equivalent of a car is dead safe just so long as you don't take it out of your garage which is true if one takes the existence of the car in isolation but misleading if one doesn't account for fueling and driving the car.

In 50 years there have been 21 major accidents in Sellafield alone. If a single ship hit that many icebergs I doubt there would be many people queuing up to buy tickets for a cruise on her.

 

[Azael]

It is silly to contend that as nuclear power plants are (probably) generally safe the nuclear industry is safe. The whole process has to be included in any safety analysis including ore extraction through reprocessing (where used) to disposal of waste.

To use your car analogy - you're saying the equivalent of a car is dead safe just so long as you don't take it out of your garage which is true if one takes the existence of the car in isolation but misleading if one doesn't account for fueling and driving the car.

In 50 years there have been 21 major accidents in Sellafield alone. If a single ship hit that many icebergs I doubt there would be many people queuing up to buy tickets for a cruise on her.

How many people have been injuried or killed by radiation released from Sellafield? The acctual dosage to the population because of Sellafield is LESS than the dosage caused by some other non nuclear industries.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0952-4746/21/1/004
0.1mSv is a trivial dosage, it is not harmfull in any way.

No part of the nuclear industry anywhere in the world today release enough radioactive material for the dosage to the public to even come close to natural background radiation dosages!

If you include everything from uranium mining to waste storage nuclear is one of the safest form of energy we have. Look at the results of ExternE for instance, just one of many life cycle assesements that has been done.
www.externe.info

It seems like your demand is that the nuclear industry has to be perfect, a unreasonable demand. The nuclear industry just needs to be safe enough to harm less people than the other energy sources. The "leak" out of the chimney of a avarage coal power plant is more harmfull than the leakage from sellafield.

 

[Art]

How many people have been injuried or killed by radiation released from Sellafield? The acctual dosage to the population because of Sellafield is LESS than the dosage caused by some other non nuclear industries.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0952-4746/21/1/004
0.1mSv is a trivial dosage, it is not harmfull in any way.

No part of the nuclear industry anywhere in the world today release enough radioactive material for the dosage to the public to even come close to natural background radiation dosages!

Not deliberately perhaps As for deaths due to Sellafield - it's impossible to say owing to gov't lies and propaganda. Here's a recent extract from the N Ireland gov't assembly

1957, the British Government carried out a massive deception in relation to the catastrophe and covered up its own records on the wind direction in the area at the time of the incident. At the time, reports that were backed up by the Meteor*ological Office stated that the wind was blowing seawards towards the Isle of Man and beyond to the Dublin area. However in 1974, 17 years after the disaster, a Government agency claimed that the winds at the time came from the northwest, thus blowing the radiation inland. The prime purpose of that announce*ment was to create the belief that no significant radiation made its way to the Isle of Man or Ireland.

When members of the Low Level Radiation Campaign (LLRC) went to the Meteorological Office in Windscale to find the truth, they found that the original reports detailing the westerly direction of the wind, and its speed, had been tampered with. Record sheets for 1957 had been removed and replaced with new sheets that were slightly different in colour from the sheets of previous and subsequent years. The new pages for 1957 read: “No Record – Mast Dismantled”.

According to the records, the mast reappeared in November 1957, which perhaps says something.

It may be wrong to despair, but I fear that we will never learn the true facts about the catastrophe, or be able to prevent a reoccurrence of the event at Windscale. As individuals we have no chance of discovering the truth, and, as much as we might try, I doubt that the Assembly as a body would fare any better. However, we must continue to try. I pay tribute to my colleague Eddie McGrady MP, as did Carmel Hanna, for his endless efforts to keep the Sellafield debate alive. I am sure that successive British Governments have wished that Eddie McGrady would ease up on the issue, when they should have been admitting failure and warning their people of the constant threat that exists.

As we have heard, the people of Dundalk, many people on the east coast of Ireland and the people of the Isle of Man do not need a Government admission to confirm the facts. The death rate on the Isle of Man soared in the decade following the incident at Windscale, and many mothers in County Louth believe that they know only too well of the consequences of the radiation clouds that descended on their area in 1957 — conse*quences that they live with to this day.

If you include everything from uranium mining to waste storage nuclear is one of the safest form of energy we have. Look at the results of ExternE for instance, just one of many life cycle assesements that has been done.
www.externe.info

You saying it's the safest doesn't make it so. Where is the data to support that contention? It seems it's safe so long as nobody actually looks, for example

DAKAR, 28 April 2005 (IRIN) - When residents of the desert town of Arlit, Niger's uranium mining settlement in the far north of the country, started getting increasingly sick, they questioned whether this had to do with their overexposure to radioactivity and called in French NGOs to investigate.

Reports by the French teams found that water, soil and metal scrap from the area where two uranium mines are mainly exploited by subsidiaries of French company Areva-Cogema were contaminated with dangerously high radioactivity levels.

"Contamination levels in water samples were 10 to 110 times higher than standards considered acceptable by the World Health Organisation," said Bruno Chareyron, who carried out the tests at the laboratories of CRIIRAD - a French NGO specializing in protection against and monitoring of radioactivity.

"The French multinational Areva-Cogema and its subsidiaries ... released contaminated metal scrap from their site, distributed water contaminated with uranium to the populations, left radioactive waste in the open where desert winds could disperse it far away and disregarded internationally recognised international norms for the protection against radioactivity," the nuclear physicist told IRIN from France.

Unfortunately most of the problems related to the nuclear industry are in 3rd world countries with zero health screening and zero records.

It seems like your demand is that the nuclear industry has to be perfect, a unreasonable demand. The nuclear industry just needs to be safe enough to harm less people than the other energy sources. The "leak" out of the chimney of a avarage coal power plant is more harmfull than the leakage from sellafield.

Err no.. my 'demand' as you call it is simply that the nuclear industry stop lying, stop covering up it's mistakes, stop cheating to reduce costs and explain how it intends disposing of the stores of highly toxic pollutants it has already created before producing an order of magnitude more, that way we actually might be able to draw a fair comparison with other energy producers and avoid silly emotional based arguments.

 

[Azael]

Not deliberately perhaps As for deaths due to Sellafield - it's impossible to say owing to gov't lies and propaganda. Here's a recent extract from the N Ireland gov't assembly

Well the link I posted states that the dosage to the most exposed is 0.1mSv. I seem to remember reading studies that show releases from sellafield in the past might have exposed some people to 1mSv. Thats still far from anything even remotely dangerous!

Like I said, the biggest release of radionuclides into the sea around the UK is not from nuclear industries.

No study that I have seen or even heard of have been able to show a statisticaly significant increase of cancer rates around Sellafield, La Hague or around any civilian nuclear site anywhere in the west. You can't cover up a large release of radiation today, its so damn easy to detect.

You saying it's the safest doesn't make it so. Where is the data to support that contention? It seems it's safe so long as nobody actually looks, for example Unfortunately most of the problems related to the nuclear industry are in 3rd world countries with zero health screening and zero records.

The data is in the link I provided! ExternE has examined all externa costs of electricity production from different energy sources. Its one of the biggest life cycle assesements ever done so you can't claim that nobody is looking. The external costs of nuclear power is about the same as for windpower and that includes the entire nuclear fuel cycle.

I honestly don't care what they do in third world countries, its not representative of how it is done in the west, accidents in third world country mean only one thing, that they are incompetent and need to get a better safety culture.

Most uranium is mined and enrichened in western countries not in thirld world countries. Show me proof that uranium mining or enrichment in australia or Canada causes statisticaly significant increase of cancer rates!

Where is your evidence that modern nuclear power is more dangerous than other energy sources? Even if the windscale incident back in 57 did cause a statisticaly significant increase in death rates(something you have shown zero proof off) it still doesn't say ANYTHING about nuclear power of today.

Err no.. my 'demand' as you call it is simply that the nuclear industry stop lying, stop covering up it's mistakes, stop cheating to reduce costs and explain how it intends disposing of the stores of highly toxic pollutants it has already created before producing an order of magnitude more, that way we actually might be able to draw a fair comparison with other energy producers and avoid silly emotional based arguments.

Whats wrong with the current method of storing waste until it can be transmute in gen 4 reactors? Whats wrong with the swedish KBS-3 method? Whats wrong with Yucca mountain? The reasons no long term storage method has been implemented yet is political, not scientific.

I don't know how much the nuclear industry lies, cheats and cover things up. What I do know is that western civilian nuclear power has never killed one single member of the public in europe and as far as I know it hasnt in the US either. Does any other industry have that kind of safety record. You are the one making emotional arguments not based on any facts at all.

If you claim nuclear power is more dangerous than other energy sources then provide evidence. None of the things you have quoted has stated any population dosages or anything else even remotely significant. Seems like regular media fearmongering. Nuclear power has problems, but the problems are smaller and easier to handle than the problem for all other baseload power sources.

 

[vanesch]

Err no.. my 'demand' as you call it is simply that the nuclear industry stop lying, stop covering up it's mistakes, stop cheating to reduce costs and explain how it intends disposing of the stores of highly toxic pollutants it has already created before producing an order of magnitude more, that way we actually might be able to draw a fair comparison with other energy producers and avoid silly emotional based arguments.

The problem here, as with all the rest of the nuclear business, is that the demands are much much more severe than for any other activity.
Each time a nuclear site "has a radioactive leak", it seems as if another bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, while the objective consequences of it are most of the time totally neglegible, and would, for equivalent toxicity (because that's what matters!), be ridiculous in another industry.
As I noted before, the "radioactive leak" from the plant in Japan had a toxicity equivalent of one single glass of oil. Now, I've never heard somebody complain about a garage where, after an Earth quake, a glass of oil was spilled in the grass !
People go screaming when they discover a "cover up" that a pump or so wasn't working in a nuclear power plant (where there are often several backup systems ready to take over), while nobody will ever look upon a similar disfunctioning in, say, the chemical industry. The report level required in the nuclear industry is on the level of the minor anomaly, while the same report level in other branches is usually on the level of an *accident*. And yes, sometimes responsibles for nuclear systems fail to do the low-level reporting. That's not good, but sometimes understandable. But they are reprimanded seriously for issues which wouldn't even come to mind to talk about in other industries.

People put crazy demands on the nuclear sector, which are a far cry from what happens in any other human activity - and the point is, these demands are even most of the time respected. It is this utmost safety culture which makes that the nuclear business is one of the safest around.

You really should transpose every "complaint" or demand of the nuclear industry to an equivalent (in victims, loss of life/property...) demand in other industrial sectors (car driving, chemical industry, oil industry, agriculture...) and you will soon realize the enormous difference in the public treatment of both. Most other human activities would simply have to STOP if they were required to meet the demands that are met in the nuclear sector.

===============

continued:

Concerning Windscale: nobody will deny that people have been lucky there, normally one should have had a Chernobyl style accident (probably less so, because the installation was smaller). It was a very stupid construction, build in a hurry to set up a crash atomic bomb program, and without any regard for safety (as was usual in those years, not only in the nuclear, but also in the chemical and military business). We are in 1957! People did atmospheric bomb tests at that moment. It was a different mind set.
There has been a scientific study on the impact of the Windscale accident on population, and more specifically the total dose, which is estimated to be about 2000 man-Sv. Now, the probability to die of the stochastic effects of a dose (under the linearity hypothesis) permaturely over 50 years time is 5.6% per man-Sv, which brings us to something like 112 casualties over 50 years.
http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=0955%2d3002&volume=46&issue=5&spage=479

If I understand correctly, Windscale is mainly covered up because it happened at a really bad time when the UK government was going to negociate with the US to give them again access to nuclear secrets/materials, and the argument was that they would nevertheless find them out by themselves. If Windscale had serious problems during the negociation, this meant a weaker position for the UK negociators.BTW, you site reports from the CRIIRAD, but that's an anti-nuclear lobbying organisation.

Concerning nuclear waste, this is the biggest untruth that anti-nuclear lobbyists have been able to pass as "well-known fact".
Nuclear "waste" (in fact, nuclear spend fuel) has the following properties:
- it still contains about 99% of its energetic potential, only about 1% has been used in LWR. So it is a bit silly to consider it to be a "waste".
- the real waste (the fission products) are highly toxic, small volume, and *decay*. The small volume means that it can be handled/stored in its totality without huge costs, something that cannot be said of low-toxicity high volume waste. The fact that it decays means that *the problem goes away*, something that cannot be said about most other forms of waste, such as heavy metals or CO2 for instance. As such, geological storage is ideal: the volume is small enough for it to be feasible, the timescale is small enough (most danger is gone after a few hundred years (about 1000 times less toxic after 300 years), and return to normal after a few 10 000 years for geological storage to guarantee "quarantine" from the biosphere over this small time lapse (as compared to other geological processes).
Moreover, most radiotoxic products are very immobile in most geological situations - especially the actinides.

Compare this to, say, CO2 sequestration: one has to guarantee the sequestration FOR EVER, the volumes will be HUGE, and it is highly MOBILE. The dangers of a sudden leak, 10 million years from now, of a huge CO2 repository are orders of magnitude bigger than the dangers of a leak of ex-radioactive waste 10 million years from now: while in the last case, only with sensitive instruments one would be able to detect that something came free, with no sanitary impact what so ever, a release of the CO2 would gas an entire region and give a huge spike of CO2 in the Earth atmosphere. The toxicity of CO2 is the same 10 million years from now, than today, while the toxicity of radioactive waste would have decreased with a factor about 10^10.

One can apply similar reasonings for heavy metal toxicity: it doesn't go away with time. Only radioactive waste has this property. As such, if there's waste to have, the properties of radioactive waste (small volume, decays) make it an ideal form of waste.

 

[Art]

To minimise the problem of nuclear waste is disingenuous. Already Britain which has relatively few nuclear facilities estimates clean up of their existing waste stock piles will cost stg£70 billion when they eventually decide on how they are going to get rid of it.

In the meanwhile this waste does not appear to be well managed

The nuclear material in question is held underwater in a concrete pond known as B30. Built in 1959 to store and unpack uranium fuel rods used to power Britain’s first generation of military and civil reactors, B30 was phased out in the 1970s after some fuel started to corrode, and it was closed down in 1992.
The open air pond contains uranium, plutonium, and other radioactive wastes such as caesium and strontium.

In accounting terms, the Commission said Tuesday, "it is impossible to determine accurately the quantities of material stored, and on-the-spot inspections cannot take place because of the high level of radiation and poor visibility in the part of the facility concerned."

Estimates for uranium in the pond range between 300 and 450 metric tons, and there may be as much as 1.3 tons of plutonium but it is impossible to tell because pond visibility is restricted by algae.

Confidential British Nuclear Fuel (BNFL) documents leaked to the London "Sunday Herald" last July indicate that the company does not know precisely how much radioactive material is in the pond.

BNFL documents published by the newspaper and dated 1999 give a glimpse of what corrosion and decay have done to the underwater waste. “Individual elements have also fallen from various process operations," the company wrote. "Poor pond visibility and accumulated sludge in the pond make it difficult to retrieve spilt fuel and undertake visual inspections."

As for radioactivity decreasing with time whilst true the time scales can be enormous for example Uranium 235 has a half life of 162,000 years. Plutonium 239 has a half life of 24,000 years. Plutonium 241 is intensely radioactive for 14 years, on which it converts to Amercium 241, probably the most toxic substance on Earth (traces of Amercium 241 have been found on Sandside Bay at Dounreay in Scotland). After 433 years, Amercium 241 becomes Neptunium, which remains consistently radioactive for 2,000,000 years, and so the process goes on ad infinitum

 

[Azael]

Art you still haven't shown how large dosage the population is exposed to because of civilian nuclear waste.

We can talk about horror stories all day, but until you can show that it acctualy endanger someone its just horrorstories without any basis in science.

 

[Art]

Art you still haven't shown how large dosage the population is exposed to because of civilian nuclear waste.

I already pointed out much of the damage from waste occurs unrecorded in 3rd world countries and damage from nuclear 'accidents' are deliberately minimised in 'the national interest' example

The full extent of the Chernobyl disaster has yet to be assessed, but some years ago a leader in the British Medical Journal said that the amount of fatalities would be much higher than previously estimated. This information was produced by examining the lungs of young people in Eastern Europe killed in traffic accidents, which showed much more plutonium than was anticipated, with a likely 100,000 extra deaths.

We can talk about horror stories all day, but until you can show that it acctualy endanger someone its just horrorstories without any basis in science.

Poorly stored nuclear waste does endanger people or do you wish to argue to the contrary? If you are suggesting a problem isn't a problem until it actually kills and that view is prevelent in the nuclear industry then we have a lot to be concerned about.

To minimise the dangers of radioactive pollution is naive and reckless given that every person on the planet now contains strontium 90 in their bones as a result of the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons 40 years ago which demonstrates just how mobile and persistent this stuff can be.

And as an example of the previous recklessness of the nuclear industry there is over a ton of radioactive plutonium at the bottom of the Irish Sea dumped there by the reprocessing plant at Sellafield. Spread evenly over the planet that is enough plutonium to extinguish all life on Earth.

 

[Azael]

I already pointed out much of the damage from waste occurs unrecorded in 3rd world countries and damage from nuclear 'accidents' are deliberately minimised in 'the national interest' example

That sounds like a conspiracy theory unless you have proof that dosages are higher than what is stated by IAEA ect.

As I also siad, most uranium is mined in western countries and what they do in 3rd world countries does not matter since it doesn't tell anything about the safety of nuclear power.

Here is what the IAEA has to say about chernobyl. 28 confirmed deaths, 4000 possible extra fatal cancer cases. Far from 100 000.
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf

The number of deaths due to acute radiation syndrome(ARS) during the first year following the accident is well documented. According to UNSCEAR (2000), ARS was diagnosed in 134 emergency workers. In many cases the ARS was complicated by extensive beta radiation skin burns and sepsis. Among these workers, 28 persons died in 1986 due to ARS. Two more persons had died at Unit 4 from injuries unrelated to radiation, and one additional death was thought to have been due to a coronary thrombosis. Nineteen more have died in 1987–2004 of various causes; however their deaths are not necessarily — and in some cases are certainly not — directly attributable.
.

The international expert group predicts that among the 600 000 persons receiving more
significant exposure(liquidators working in 1986-1987, evacuees, and residents of the
the most ‘contaminated’ areas), the possible increase in cancer mortality due to this
radiation exposure might be up to a few per cent. This might eventually represent
up to four thousand fatal cancers in addition to the approximately 100 000 fatal
cancers to be expected due to all other causes in this population. Among the 5 million
persons residing in other ‘contaminated’ areas, the doses are much lower and
any projected increases are more speculative, but are expected to make a difference
of less than one per cent in cancer mortality.

Poorly stored nuclear waste does endanger people or do you wish to argue to the contrary? If you are suggesting a problem isn't a problem until it actually kills and that view is prevelent in the nuclear industry then we have a lot to be concerned about.

Well civilian western nuclear waste has been stored for around 60 years without injuring one single civilian. Id say that is pretty damn good waste management. Compared that to how many dies from fossile fuel waste every single day. Even if there was a large waste accident it still would not change the fact that nuclear power kills far less people than any other major energy source. Do you argue that point?

To minimise the dangers of radioactive pollution is naive and reckless given that every person on the planet now contains strontium 90 in their bones as a result of the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons 40 years ago which demonstrates just how mobile and persistent this stuff can be.

and what is the dosage received from the Strontium 90? The fact that we have strontium 90 in our bodies does NOT mean we are getting harmed by it.

And as an example of the previous recklessness of the nuclear industry there is over a ton of radioactive plutonium at the bottom of the Irish Sea dumped there by the reprocessing plant at Sellafield. Spread evenly over the planet that is enough plutonium to extinguish all life on Earth.

And how high is the population dosage because of this waste? 0.1mSv to the most exposed population group! Compare that to the natural radiation dosage that ranges from 2mSv to several hundrads of mSv.

You are missing that the only significant quantity is the dosage that the population is exposed to. Talking about how many tons or how many Bq's there is is totaly irrelevant.
There is enough gasolin in a car to kill plenty of people if they ingest it. Should we ban all cars because of that simple fact?

How many people can the chlorine used by the indsutry each day kill? Should we can all chlorine use?

LD50 for plutonium is higher than for nicotine! Yet smoking hasnt killed the entire world population.