As I started writing this book review, this item popped up on Benny Pieser’s ‘Newsbytes’ at the GWPF:
The only British company in the running to build a new generation of atomic power plants has threatened to pull out due to uncertainty over the government’s energy policy – a move that could imperil the country’s nuclear renaissance. Executives at Centrica, which is planning to build a new nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset in a joint venture with EDF Energy, have warned Whitehall officials that the plan hangs by a thread and could be scrapped if the company does not receive assurances about the future price of nuclear-generated electricity. –Guy Chazan and Jim Pickard, Financial Times, 22 April 2012
Which got me thinking about climate sceptics who are quick to condemn subsidy paid to the wind and solar industries, but prefer to talk about (future) improvements to nuclear reactor design rather than sordid financial details. This bedazzlement with technology and unconcern with cost one of the themes in this new book by Martin Cohen and Andrew McKillop.
The rather hyped up title, ‘The Doomsday Machine’ may put some people off, and it seems Fred Pearce of the Guardian and New Scientist didn’t read far beyond the dust jacket before declaring the book ‘hysterical’ and denouncing it’s author’s as ‘climate deniers’. And it has to be said the early pages do come across as polemical and a bit breathless.
However, for those who want a deeper perspective, there is plenty of substance here once the book gets into its stride, with an in depth assessment of the nuclear industry, its technology, financing, realpolitik, health and safety concerns and public costs both financial and societal. The main claims made and facts highlighted are referenced, many by web addresses as well as publication details, and a useful glossary helps you sort your PWR’s from your EPR’s and your EDF’s from your EoN’s. The book doesn’t bore you with too many tables of figures or lengthy quotes from dull official reports though. It is written to be read through, and all the better for it.
The writing is clear and direct, engaging and well varied with historical details, up to the minute news about the state of play around Fukushima’s smoking remains, and carefully researched examples concerning offical pronouncements versus reality.This thoroughness is hidden beneath catchy and provocative chapter titles such as ‘Too cheap to meter’ and ‘Radiation is harmless’ which will likely set teeth on edge among those who are for the industry. It’s a shame, because the content is worthy, and the likelihood is that some of the people who should read this book may skip it because of the provocation of the layout.
When I wrote a 3000 word report on the peaceful use of nuclear power back in the early 80’s as part of the coursework for my engineering qualifications, I concluded that the industry was primarily geared to military purposes and the electricity generated was an expensive by-product. Things have changed as I discovered by reading this book. These days, nuclear warheads are being converted into fuel for commercial reactors generating around 2.5% of the world’s energy needs (around 6% of its consumed electricity). It’s still expensive though, and that’s with most of the cost (decommissioning) shunted of the books to some nebulous future date, 135 years from plant closure in the UK. While I was researching my piece, I was amused to discover a document prepared by the UKAEA that stated that Plutonium levels in the river estuary south of Windscale (renamed Sellafield, or ‘sunny meadows’ as the locals call it, after the fire in ’58) were “around normal for natural background levels”. There is no ‘natural background level’ for trans-uranic radioactive metals…
You are left in no doubt about the viewpoint the authors are coming from, but concerning this industry there is little middle ground to stand on, you are either for or against nuclear power. If you need balance, buy a pro nuclear power viewpoint to sit alongside ‘The Doomsday Machine’ on your bookshelf. What you do get though, is an up to date, broadly considered and well written book which makes you think about just who benefits from the propping up of this eye-poppingly expensive and dangerous industry. And who pays the price, willingly or not.
Talkshop rating: Recommended
The Doomsday Machine is available from publisher Palcourt and from Amazon
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Oh dear.
For a start Pu. *is* naturally occurring. Too cheap to meter is true. (with a few restrictions such as industry)
The problem is mental and I cannot in a small space spell out the whole thing, which is broadly about society and the mental state of people after many years of a deeply broken world.
One of the useless professions is selling, adds nothing of use, yet here we have a society hell bent on money extraction, with the majority doing nothing actually of use.
Too cheap to meter.
Open your mind. Let’s take the telephone as an example.
Originally a connection was made and monitored by a human operator. Things then developed to robot controlled, automation. (robots are machines not humanoids, that is fantasy)
This ought to have brought a fundamental change. With an operator there is a direct relationship between usage and cost, but automatic there is zero cost whether the system is in use or not. Enter reality of the normal economic model of fixed_costs + usage_cost
This applies very widely with the only real limitation that of rationing and resources. For most things there is a fixed cost. A common example is supply of household water where regardless of complaining (by providers) there is little trouble over usage.
What is happening is this: organisation want lock-in to a money stream, all manner of ploys including the pay on usage time. Hello sales junk.
Back in 1992 I was one of those helping create the world’s first ISP. The model the company owner chose, deliberately was £10 a month. Extras? Shut up and get on with it. This set the ISP model and is hated by the monsters who want to milk on meter.
The key was breaking the UK access monopoly where none of the few companies would break ranks (email was 1p per kilobyte and I paid back then), solution was a 64k line to New York. This was dialup to initially 6 modems in London, for many a long distance call. (me included and there were no 0845, or 0800 numbers back then)
The next problem was breaking the telephone monopoly. It was deduced that satellite local Points Of Presence could be done, maybe 8 modems at a location each with the 64k link to London. This was a time of new telephone providers (I was involved a little here too, with software), trunck going in along railway routes, canals, power lines, all manner of things. Bit by bit we ended up with what you see today. I pay X, essentially no meter but I use far less than could be used, no want or need.
Why is electricity metered? There is a shortage and it was the case that people had to be paid to dig out coal.
Power generation should be big, really big, not the pittance done today. We need more like 100x current capacity and then many good things happen. Particularly electrochemical engineering, already vitally important to daily life.
Costs tend to be quantised, the fixed cost of new resources has to come from somewhere.
Safety is another can of worms where reality is different from belief but this hits on a very important subject I was considering for a post.
Today we have have lost it, can’t manufacture much at all, no heavy engineering.
Very recently and to my complete surprise I came across a work by an economist which agrees with my views on what is wrong with society, although whether I agree with his solution is moot, don’t really understand it. (is not described well enough)
He puts the key cockup date at 1974, when the wrong turning came to pass and that fits.
That is directly why there is financial instability, inequality and the present financial troubles around the world. (this is neither left nor right wing)
Minder: the Russians are happily selling gas to outsiders and using the money to build nuclear. Be scared, this is a long game.
“In 2006 the major aluminium producer SUAL (which in March 2007 became part of RUSAL) signed an agreement with Rosatom to support investment in new nuclear capacity at Kola, to power expanded aluminium smelting there from 2013. Four units totalling 1000 MWe were envisaged for Kola stage 2 underpinned by a 25-year contract with SUAL, but economic feasibility is in doubt and the project appears to have been dropped and replaced by two others.
Since 2007 Rosatom and RUSAL, now the world’s largest aluminium and alumina producer, have been undertaking a feasibility study on a nuclear power generation and aluminium smelter at Primorye in Russia’s far east. This proposal is taking shape as a US$ 10 billion project involving four 1000 MWe reactors and a 600,000 t/yr smelter with Atomstroyexport having a controlling share in the nuclear side. The smelter would require about one third of the output from 4 GWe, and electricity exports to China and North and South Korea are envisaged.”
http://www.powertecrussia.com/blog/world-nuclear-association-nuclear-devlopments/
http://www.rusal.ru/en/aluminium/manufacturers.aspx
Tip of the iceberg, plenty is in the nuclear industry reports. MSM in the west is way way out of touch on technical and industry stuff. (or science for that matter) There is a problem getting any information from any of the major news organisations, myopic on themselves.
Fiddle whilst Rome burns, yes.
Sorry guys. I just asked a question, Does anyone personally know Lino Daddi and can shed any light. I have communicated with him a couple of times and he has my email address. This was about 12hours ago that the email was posted. pg
As to your 160 min.pulse beat, I would say that it is a signal impressed on the Aether and appears in all EMF that we detect. Most likely the heart beat of GOD or the central black hole. pg
pg
Based on the email you posted before it got snipped I would say that Lino’s email address has been hijacked by internet pirates. The same thing happened to my wife a couple of years ago.
So don’t send money whatever you do. In fact it’s probably safest not to respond at all.
@Roger Andrews says:
Thank you for your reply, I have not responded and am seeking second party information. pg
Just being cautious. There is a lot of trouble at the moment, sufficient for discussion off the public record.
You getting a crude email is a classic email address book exploit. If anyone does know Lino, contact him *off* the net, eg. telephone. Note it means you are now in a spam database, anything is possible.
Yes Tim, if you are on the internet you are in someones spam database. I spent 3 months fighting my provider over them giving my email account to a spammer and cutting me off from my account because of the spammer. The provider even published the fact that they were the entry point of the account hijacker.
I find your book review to be along the line of my own views on the subject. The subject of fission power has way too much smoke being published and generally little light being shed on the balance of cost to benefits. Very hard to beat coal or fission for base line power generation that modern industrial civilization needs to survive and grow. Both have large negatives but the alternatives just won’t work over the long term at known costs. I have been involved in wind, solar, small hydro and geothermal for over 40 years. These are useful in isolated situations but can never be base line power for industrial needs. Way to costly to build, repair and operate over the needed life times. Most people that dream of the wonderful green world of wind and solar have no clue of what that really means in destruction of the environment and living standards as well as the reduction in lifespan caused by reduced availability of energy. pg
Except that in terms of deaths per GW produced, it’s the safest of ALL power sources. Hence the irrational ranting of [snip] like this.
[snip]
[Reply] Keep it polite. How would you know whether what they say is irrational without reading the book?
tchannon said, April 24, 2012 at 2:12 am
“For a start Pu. *is* naturally occurring. Too cheap to meter is true. (with a few restrictions such as industry)”
In my senior year at high school, my physics tutor (Dr. John Pallister) advised me to get into power generation as nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter”. Even though my “Bullshit Detector” was not well developed at this age it rejected this concept. While I did study electrical engineering, it was the “Light Current” (= telecommunications and electronics) option that I chose.
If John Pallister had told me to get into telecommunications because international video calls would be “too cheap to meter” my bullshit detector would have steered me into “Heavy Current” (= power generation). My wife “Skypes” her sister in Colombia every day with quite decent video and it is free of charge.
With regard to the idea that Pu is “naturally occurring, Tim Channon is technically correct but he knows the Pu that matters is man made in Hanford and several other places around the world.
OK, since I’ve actually read the book (completely), I’ll argue from the author’s standpoint despite my own personal view that we should do better studies to establish the truth before we abandon or expand nuclear power.
Brian H: “in terms of deaths per GW produced, it’s the safest of ALL power sources.”
Depends whose stats you believe. The WHO says Chernobyl caused around 5000 deaths. Independent researchers say 900,000 deaths. The Authors point out that the WHO, as a UN organisation, is bound, by agreement, to produce its nuclear report in collaboration with the IAEA, another UN outfit. We know about the reliability of stats produced by the UN in general. Eyewitness accounts from medical practitioners working with cancer sufferers note *much* higher increases in pathologies than the WHO report claims.
Work on America’s long term repository for the waste which has to be kept separate from the water table for the next thousands of years has been abandoned. The highly toxic waste is currently sitting in steel drums which are rusting. There is nowhere to dispose of it safely. The Fukushima approach of ‘diluting’ it into the ocean has unknown consequences. The Earthquake and Tsunami which occurred was an entirely forseen event, a matter of time. Safety standards require plant to be able to withstand events over 1000 times less powerful than the quake which destroyed Fukushima.
Tim C: “For a start Pu. *is* naturally occurring”
Not in Morecambe bay it isn’t. Samples taken 5 miles inland at a riverbank used by picnicking tourists had to be disposed of as *intermediate* nuclear waste.
“open your mind”
Open your wallet more like. 😉
“Why is electricity metered? There is a shortage and it was the case that people had to be paid to dig out coal.”
How do you think Uranium mining is done in, say, India? Or Kazakhstan? Workers health and safety? Forget it. Not that it’s any better for coal miners in those countries.
“Power generation should be big, really big, not the pittance done today.”
Agree, but Uranium supplies are way too limited for nuclear to get really big. Half of the current need was fulfilled by dismantled warheads a couple of years ago. How long will that supply last? A lot of refining is required for Uranium bearing ore to be useful, Doing that uses energy too. What are the true rates of energy return?
“We need more like 100x current capacity and then many good things happen”
I’d love it for you, me and third world manual mining workers to live in energy utopia. Lets get busy building robots to do the dirty work. I hope Rossi isn’t bullshitting about the E-Cat. 🙂
All energy is nuclear. There are only 2 energy sources on Earth today – the Sun and Geothermal energy. The first is a nuclear fusion reactor and the second is nuclear fission decay – mainly via Uranium. The term renewable energy is factually incorrect. Energy can’t be renewed as that would violate the second law of thermodynamics. Wind, wave, solar, hydro, even fossil etc. are all minor by-products of the sun’s radiant energy.
UK energy needs are currently 90 Gwatts. Energy density of wind power is 2 watts/m2. So to provide all UK’s energy needs from wind would imply covering 45,000 square kilometers of the UK with wind farms, This might put off the tourists somewhat !
My budget won’t stretch to buy the book but I suspect that it revolves mainly around the U-Pu fuel cycle which was initially promoted to provide stock for nuclear weapons with electricity as an interesting sideline. The Th-U fuel cycle is substantially different, especially the molten-salt types.
Reason being that there is no production of fuel elements nor the need to replace those elements when less than a few percent of the useful isotopes have been “burnt up”. The molten salts, with continuous purging of fission products that makes the fuel inefficient, require no such frequent or expensive production of fuel elements. Nearly 100% of the fuel is “burnt”, producing /breeding useful isotopes while releasing vast amounts of energy. Granules of salts that are fed into the reactor using a hopper. Long-lived isotopes can be destroyed in the heavy neutron flux of the core by “tainting” the fissile core material with the awkward stuff.
Obviously, the production and re-processing of solid fuel elements is a very lucrative industry and molten-salt recator technology is extremely disruptive to the nuclear industry which has spent decades in the comfy chair.
As for subsidies; if government choose to subsidise R&D; fair enough as long as they subsidise without picking winners. But once they subsidise production, they dull the incentive to improve and distort market pressures so that eventually, everybody loses (except those dedicated to harvesting subsidies).
Thanks Bernd. How many of those type of molten salts reactors are currently operating commercially?
How many are currently being constructed?
The important thing is to have low cost energy. Coal, natural gas and hydro are the most economic currently and we have enough to buy time to find new cheap energy sources (cold or hot fusion or methane clathrates or something not even on the radar). I think all other current forms of energy production have economic or other issues.
This is not an area where politicians should interfere, rather let free market forces point the way to individual solution for specific regions and move away from a one-size-fits-all model. Our dependence on large-scale central solutions for energy and other essentials poses a massive risk to populations in the western world when we encounter the next large black swan event – either man-made or natural.
Tenuc: The important thing is to have low cost energy.
To which I’ll add, “where the costs have been properly accounted.”
and
“The equally important thing is to use energy efficiently”
In fact for less than the cost of a new reactor, simple home insulation measures would save more energy than it will produce, if you include the energy cost of storing the waste safely for thousands of years, and the energy cost of mining and refining the fuel..
OK here is my take. I always seem to miss something out that has been written before but here goes.
Nuclear energy. Uranium (plutonium) based fission reactors are first generation nuclear reactors, and whilst we have 3rd and 4th generation engineering available to build better reactors, the base method is very inefficient and extracts very little potential energy from the Uranium. These reactors are definitely an off shoot of military needs, and I think only persisted with because the fuel is available, and the military needs to spread / hide their costs.
If we were looking at the bigger picture and truly interested in nuclear power then we would be well on the way to establishing if the MSTR worked or not. But this would cut into the established nuclear energy industry, which is already heavily subsidised. If we were applying pure capitalist methodology MSTR would be well on the way as a competitor to Uranium reactors. (Capitalism is about competition and open and clear regulation, NOT money) But our current brand of Crony Capitalism (all focused on money and over regulation) is allowing the private monopolies call the shots.
If we were looking at self-sufficiency having abundant MSTR based electricity could be our next great export boom. It would also allow us to preserve our abundant shale gas for transportation, domestic and industrial needs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_University_of_Science_and_Technology_Nuclear_Reactor
Impediments to progress: Number one on the list is fear. As always this is the weapon of choice of pressure groups and Politians. When all else fails or the facts get in the way fear is used.
Some examples. Chernobyl is always used to trot out how nuclear accidents can kill thousands without ever having to establish the facts. Perhaps a dozen people were killed as a direct result of the explosion and up to a dozen more within a few days. This number doubled over the next few weeks. These are the only lives lost that can be directly attributed to the accident.
Where all the other numbers come from is the same place the number in climate science come from, statistics from computer models. Ask for the names of the people and you struggle to get to 50. When the evacuated the nearby town, they forced every pregnant woman to have an abortion, telling them with the usual fear mongering tactics that their children would all be deformed. Several women hid the fact that they were pregnant and had their children. None were deformed. It has been estimated that the sociological damage from the forced removal of the entire population of the town has cost more in human damage that could have ever been caused by the exposure to the slightly elevated levels of radiation.
The flora and fauna has been studied to death in the abandoned town and no deformities have been found, and in fact everything is thriving.
Japan. Some of the most intensely studied people on earth are the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those that suffered low dose exposure are on average living longer than the average for the whole of Japan. Now is this because they are getting better health care, or is it that low dose radiation (several times higher than x-rays or any maximum currently set) does no harm. Or is it perhaps we have evolved to need some radiation, and perhaps today’s background level is low. Whatever the answer is we will never find out without brushing aside our ridiculous fear of low dose radiation.
Tallbloke, Chernobyl was not an ordinary nuclear accident, it was pure soviet madness. Moreover, the facility was not designed to be energy-efficient, it was a weapons production reactor with a steam plant attached in order to to convert the byproduct heat to electricity instead of just dumping the heat to the environment. In this respect it resembles Windscale, England, 1957, just on a vastly larger and even more negligent scale.
BTW, all our current reactors were created with enhanced Plutonium production in mind, which is, of course, craziness, if efficient use of fissionable material is an issue. Plutonium is good for nothing, but bombs. The same amount of Uranium, with the right process, could easily produce two orders of magnitude more useful energy and substantially less radioactive waste product with much shorter half life.
Then there is Thorium, of which we have at least five times more than Uranium. The Thorium cycle hardly produces anything that could be used in warfare (this is why it was dismissed during the Cold War).
As Fukushima has shown (which, in spite of the dreadful disaster initiating it, was never ever close to the scale of Chernobyl), passive safety is a must, that is, as soon as the reactor is shut down, it should be able to cool down and take care of itself in general with no further input or intervention whatsoever. That’s possible, such designs exist and they are not even prohibitively expensive to implement.
Off topic, but I’ve just seen a new (I think) YouTube vid of a conference presentation by the good Dr Svensmark. Very well worth a post here in my opinion: http://youtu.be/VxstzCXSMH0
OK, some excellent contributions coming in. I hope questions will be answered and that we’ll be able to agree a list of talkshop recommendations at the end.
Peter B: Where is the reactor which has produced a two orders of magnitude improvement in efficiency? Is it online commercially?
The figure of 5000 deaths from Chernobyl is a ‘could eventually die’ figure. The actual death toll directly attributable is less than 50 according to the WHO – http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html.
Long time WUWT reader and found my way here from there, nice blog Tallbloke!
TB:
“Work on America’s long term repository for the waste which has to be kept separate from the water table for the next thousands of years has been abandoned. The highly toxic waste is currently sitting in steel drums which are rusting. There is nowhere to dispose of it safely.”
Well, there was until Yucca Mountain was abandoned (for political, not engineering reasons) in 2009.
It certainly would have been a hell of a lot safer to put the waste there than to leave it lying around in rusting steel drums on the surface.
tallbloke.
A lack of commercially-operating facilities based on molten-salt breeder reactors is not proof that they aren’t viable. It’s only proof that they haven’t obtained sufficient capital for R&D (since the 1970’s). ORNL research was shut down before the experimental breeder reactor was built. The experimental molten-salt reactor, which is “equivalent” to the core of the breeder, ran for a good part of a decade, adding valuable data in terms of materials and systems knowledge.
If there were one or more in commercial operation, then subsidising them would be counter-productive; for the reasons given in my previous comment. Light-water reactors were initially developed with seed capital from the military. The “boot-strap” was much less substantial for molten-salt breeders once the administration realized that it couldn’t use such reactors for submaries, aircraft carriers or to produce useful amounts of isotopes for nuclear weapons.
It should have been clear from my comment that the since-established nuclear industry as a whole isn’t “interested” in molten-salt breeder reactors. Large parts of that industry would be obsolete in 30 to 50 years; once the life of existing reactors expires. Indeed, many water-cooled reactors face being decommissioned early if they become uncompetitive with newer reactor types. (We’ve seen that replacement technology effect in many other areas of life.)
The US regulatory agency appears only able to approve reactors that are somewhat similar to light and heavy water reactors. The bureaucracy has grown inflexible and stifles rapid innovation. The best “subsidy” that the US could provide is to get the regulatory cobwebs out of the way.
Research into nuclear reactors isn’t possible in some countries. Which is why e.g. those interested in pursuing it in Australia are teaming up with people in the Czech Republic to put together a demonstration reactor by 2016. Perhaps China will get some producing on a commercial basis first. After all, China has huge stockpiles of rare earth waste from making magnets, etc; which happen to be loaded with thorium. And a delegation of scientists from China visited ORNL last year for technology transfer.
Mike (UK) says:
April 24, 2012 at 3:41 pm
The figure of 5000 deaths from Chernobyl is a ‘could eventually die’ figure. The actual death toll directly attributable is less than 50 according to the WHO…
The WHO figures are distorted by orders of magnitude and only include those who’s death cannot be attributed to anything but the Chernobyl disaster. The reality is that nuclear contamination causes heath problems for many years after the disaster and some independent researchers looking at the big picture estimate deaths as high as 900,000, so lets split the difference and agree on 450,000.
If you believe that governments tell you the truth about the dangers of nuclear fallout, I can give you some information from personal experience which will disabuse you about what really happens. At the time of the Windscale catastrophe, back in Oct 1957, I lived in Preston which is ~ 50m due south of Windscale and home to the Springfields Salwick nuclear fuel reprocessing plant.
When the Windscale Pile 1, plutonium reactor set on fire, and enormous amount of radioactive debris spewed into the atmosphere and was blown initially eastwards, then mainly south west almost following the coast to Bristol. This 2007 historic record shows the scale of the polution, with high concentrations of radioactive material across the most populous areas of the country…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7030536.stm
After the incident, my school stopped the free daily milk and for several months and the ‘men in white’ with Geiger counters were not an uncommon site around the town – “part of a post nuclear war exercise”, we were told!
Much of the radioactive contamination consisted long-lived isotopes of elements which became incorporated into the food-chain, and from there, into many peoples bodies. Once incorporated into bone and fatty tissues, these isotopes continue to release alpha particles for many many years. This damages genetic material and is a major cause of cancers. Three of my own family died over the next 15 years, two with breast cancer and one with cancer of the bones. Not sure if this was caused by the Windscale catastrophe or the several Salwick scares or natural causes. However, on reflection I suspect that it is the Windscale fire which has caused many more deaths than the authorities care to mention.
The whole of the UK defence strategy would have been in jeopardy had the scale of the event ever become public.
Footnote. Pile 1 has still not yet been completely decommissioned. Here’s a link to an overview of the event and progress being made with the pile removal process, it makes grim reading…
http://www.bellona.org/english_import_area/energy/nuclear/sellafield/37480
Mike UK: Welcome. There have been a few mentions of the UN-WHO report, which as I pointed out in the headline article was produced in close liaison with the UN-IAEA, as it has to be by agreement.
So if we are going to be consistent, then being as sceptical as we are of the content of the UN-IPCC reports, we can’t give the UN-WHO/UN-IAEA report on the Chernobyl disaster a free pass. The book details some pretty good evidence that the UN-WHO has underplayed the scale of death’s arising from Chernobyl, with the connivance of the Russian authorities, who no doubt want to downplay their responsibility to the Ukrainians.
Bernd: no problem, I just wanted to establish the status of the technology.
Roger A: Yucca “Mountain was abandoned (for political, not engineering reasons)”
The book says that the facility was abandoned because the projected costs had risen to $85billion and there was only $27billion in the pot which the per kwh levy on nuclear produced electricity had accrued to. It turned out the federal govt had been spending the cash on other priorities anyway. Oops.
So, what are we going to do with the rusting barrels of highly dangerous radioactive shit? I think we need to address this question before we allow the nuclear industry to start building more reactors, especially in third world countries such as Sudan.
How are you going to warm yourselves in the next Maunder Minimum?. I saw on TV last year that flying over the houses in winter in England, with an IR detector showed more than a 30% cold houses.
For us foreigners it is a kind of psychological/social problem which perhaps is driving your whole society to commit suicide…a kind of a ritual and collective drinking of poisoned “Kool-Aid”, like many years ago did a group in Guyana or like lemmings running to the abyss.
Usually such a thanatic impulse it is almost impossible to stop.
Adolfo,
Assuming the figure is correct, which I doubt, will be very much a tiny sample: –
Some houses are unoccupied, including people away elsewhere.
Some house are not centrally heated and use single room or floor heating on the bottom floor leaving the upper floor(s) more or less cold. There are plenty of people who literally like sleeping in a cold bedroom. Some might sleep downstairs.
Is that the protestant ethic? To a degree yes but poverty is surprisingly common. Keep in mind there is a national pressure demanding property ownership, much less rental, leaving no money.
This house until we had c/h installed got down close to freezing during the winter in the bedroom. No problem we grew up knowing only that regime, ice on the insides of windows, like is a different matter.
TB:
“The book says that the facility was abandoned because the projected costs had risen to $85 billion and there was only $27 billion in the pot”. That’s bs. The $85 billion was the total lifetime cost of the Yucca Mountain project – construction, operation, maintenance, transportation & decommissioning – from 2008 through shutdown in 2133, which works out to an average of $680 million a year. The US government spends that much cleaning out washrooms.
So why was the facility really abandoned? The US Government Accountability Office, which acts as a kind of Congressional watchdog, reached these conclusions in its April 2011 study:
“DOE’s decision to terminate the Yucca Mountain repository program was made for policy reasons, not technical or safety reasons. In a June 2010 letter to us, the Acting Principal Deputy Director of OCRWM, responding on behalf of the Secretary, stated that the Secretary’s decision was based on a proposed change of department policy for managing spent nuclear fuel. He did not, however, cite any technical concerns or safety issues related to the Yucca Mountain repository. The Acting Principal Deputy Director explained that the Secretary believes there are better solutions that can achieve a broader national consensus to the nation’s spent fuel and nuclear waste storage needs than Yucca Mountain, although he did not cite any.”
Click to access d11229.pdf
The people most responsible for the change in DOE policy were Harry Reid (Democratic, Nevada, Senate Majority Leader) who led the local Nevada NIMBYs in opposing Yucca Mountain, Barack Obama, who made a campaign promise to Reid that he would shut it down, and Stephen Chu, head of DOE, who administered the shutdown (and who also believes that global warming will wipe out California within the century, but I digress). So replace “policy reasons” with “political reasons” and you’ve got it.
As to what we’re going to do with these rusting barrels of highly dangerous radioactive er, stuff, in the US at least the answer is nothing. Current US government policy says that we can’t store them underground without a “broader national consensus”, so for the time being they stay right where they are.
And if we leave them there long enough some of the barrels will rust completely through, and then all the people who say that radioactive waste is dangerous will be able to say; “See? Told ya so.”
Adolfo,
Lots of option for power generation that are cheaper than nuclear and quicker to build and commission. We have to learn the lessons from Fukushima and the long-term nature of the problems which ensue…
“…While the first three reactors contained fuel and presented a serious threat since March 11, 2011, they have largely been contained. Reactor 4 contained no fuel when the earthquake hit. Instead, the spent fuel rods had been moved to a cooling pool on the second floor of the containment unit. The unit suffered enormous damage during the tsunami—a hydrogen explosion blew the roof off, leaving the highly radioactive fuel pool exposed to the open air. If another high level earthquake hits the area, the building will certainly collapse. Japanese and American meteorologists have predicted that such a strong earthquake is indeed likely to hit this year…”
Should the R4 building collapse a large release of radiation from the damaged spent fuel would ensue. This is the worst case scenario that then-Prime Minister Kan and other former officials have discussed in the past months. He warned during his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos that such an accident would force the evacuation of the 35 million people in Tokyo, close half of Japan and compromise the nation’s sovereignty. Such a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe is unimaginable. Hiroshi Tasaka, a nuclear engineer and special adviser to Prime Minister Kan immediately following the crisis, said the crisis “just opened Pandora’s Box”.
Tallbloke as terrible and nasty as the soviets were not even they could hide 5000 deaths given that the wall came down about 10 years later. 50 deaths is closer than 5000 or even 500. Ask for the names. Itrs not like we are trying to count an inanimate object. As I hinted at above ALL the scientific evidence collected anywhere shows that low does radiation, and by that I mean a dose much higher than the infinitesimal levels deemed safe by so called experts does no harm, and that in some instances could be beneficial.
Today’s safety levels ignore science and are based on the premise that any level is too much. During the Fukushima incident I searched high and low for actual evidence of research into what level of radiation was safe. That’s when I learnt that Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors have a higher life expectancy than the average. So the least you can draw from that evidence is low dose radiation is harmless.
Life has evolved in the shadow of radiation. It does not make sense that we would be so sensitive as to die at the first sign of an increase. It’s about joining up the thinking.
It is disappointing for those of us interested in science that so many decisions are taken ignoring science and others made using science as a cover to push an agenda.
tempestnut,
Agreed. I’ve all but given up hope of much sensible debate on the nuclear issue in the UK. That battle was effectively won by Greenpeace, even though they will lose the war. In the UK many investors are probably frightened away, and insurers too. We might have been three decades further advanced in reactor design, but it’s not even all the fault of Greenpeace. The early mishaps certainly didn’t engender confidence and trust throughout the cold war period. In the future I would guess it’s likely to be French or Chinese in origin. Whatever.
But even if it was too cheap to meter, you still need to build and maintain a distribution grid. Another case of over-enthusiastic predictions to mirror the doom-mongers.
I too have read of the health and normal mortality among people who were still alive two weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki [still not exactly something one should try at home]. Today they seem like normal cities by all accounts, and I don’t buy any of that evacuating Tokyo story. I’d rather take my chances with nuclear power rather than be one of the many thousands who were killed by the Tsunami. I found it quite revolting to see how the MSM were almost in orgasm at the prospect of some nuclear nastiness to report on. The recently appointed science editor at the BBC charged with keeping Richard Black in line, has a BA in Geography. I think someone pointed out at Bishop Hill just how many of the Chinese upper echelons were engineers [Numeracy doesn’t necessarily make them nice, but caring about penguins and polar bears doesn’t make Greenpeace correct.]
My mother’s side of the family all lived in Preston-Blackpool at ‘Windscale time’. Perhaps that’s why she later gave birth to healthy twins 🙂 [Maybe I was the ‘Kirkham’ Cuckoo]
I used to work in Morecambe. A windsurfing-friend told me that when he fell off into Morecambe Bay he tried to keep his mouth closed. But it was because of the things he saw floating in the water, not radioactivity. 😦
Heysham 1 and 2 power stations, I could see from my house in Lancaster. Successful, built on time, provided employment and still providing electricity. Yes, an architectural eyesore that can be seen across the bay from many southern Lake District fells. But what would Wordsworth have written if ten thousand satanic windmills saw he at a glance? He wouldn’t be able to see as far as the nuclear power station.
The benefits of low level radiation exposure is reported elsewhere, and one of those very interesting scientific nuggets that deserves more attention. Some have suggested that the effect may work by up-regulating the normal DNA-repair processes. It may thus detect, and repair, DNA lesions that may have otherwise gone undetected until a secondary event(s) caused a harmful mutation that could then not be repaired in time. Speculative, but interesting.
Nobody would be happier than I if Rossi turns out not to be a fraud. But I think maryyugo on the “Wired” website 21 Dec 2011 puts some pretty good points that I have not yet seen answered satisfactorily. Points that could be easily laid to rest by Rossi, but aren’t.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-12/30/cold-fusion-rival
That’s my rant.
Oh, I forgot one of the N-waste solutions that now won’t happen again, for a while at least. It’s not new, and nailed-on to inflame the opinions of some. But, here goes… Vitrification.
Then pop it into the ocean trenches when James Cameron isn’t there.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard that the Russians tossed quite a few spent maritime reactors over the side into the rather shallow Baltic with little or no ceremony. Other people went looking for all the radionucleides that just had to appear….and couldn’t find them. Thing is, if true, it’s another story that would probably go unreported at the BBC.
tallbloke wrote:
>
> Where is the reactor which has produced a two orders of magnitude improvement in efficiency?
> Is it online commercially?
The most promising design is called LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) with high efficiency, inherent safety and anti-proliferation features. There is no commercial implementation yet, although the idea is at least fifty years old and a number of experimental setups were and are being tested.
At the moment Uranium is still too cheap & abundant to shift the balance to energy-efficient use of nuclear fuel, while quantity (two orders of magnitude less with LFTR) and long-term storage of radioactive waste (thousands of centuries vs. 300 years) is not an imminent issue.
Still, I think it is a long term solution, sustainable for the rest of the lifetime of the globe (a billion years or so). Therefore it is über-green.
Another reactor design that showed a lot of promise was the pebble bed using helium as the circulating fluid and passing it through through a turbine to extract power. That could have answered a lot of the criticisms about the risks of nuclear power. Unfortunately it could never get the funding to sort out the engineering issues. Part of the reason was it was only 80-200MW turbines and the industry wanted 1GW ones.
If you want to be totally rational and approach it from a purely scientific basis, the most effective way to dispose of high level radioactive waste would be to vitrefy it into stainless containers, drop it into the bottom of the oceanic trenches, then trigger an avalanche to bury it. It will never happen of course.
I always thought the xkcd poster that showed radiation in terms of bananas. A lot didn’t want it because it showed how irrational the anti nuke hysteria really was.
Excellent, some more well informed responses. Just to let you all know, I’ve emailed Martin Cohen and asked him to fight his own corner on this thread, as I’m not going to risk people getting mad at me for having to do it for him. 🙂
He says he’s traveling until Thursday, so let’s carry on discussing this and see what he has to say in reply to points raised when he gets here. One of the stronger issues other than the safety question which is raised in the book is the geopolitical question concerning the proliferation of orders in the impoverished south on the back of unlikely looking financing packages. South sea bubble Mk II anyone?
Interesting discussion and interesting to see there is still a lot of polarization on the topic. Personally i have big questions on the storage and security of the waste.
In Germany they put it underground in salt layers on a location which turns out to be problematic. They dumped it in a hole and now have to make and dig an expensive bypass to retrieve the stuff, with huge risks of barrels already being corroded by salt water. Is a large central storage the answer anyway? Concentrating all that waste on one location, that if something goes wrong, it has a huge impact. Or was the choice wise like in Fukushima, to disperse it into nature?
And what happened to the idea of using HHO gas to neutralize radioactive waste (see youtube: Neutralizing Radio Active Waste with Browns gas).
In my opinion the discussion is currently a lot driven by emotion. I hope we can agree that the current situation on waste-storage looks horrible and i’ld like to see some genuine numbers on projected and available supply. Can nuclear energy substantially fill our energy needs at all?
Hi ACv and welcome. I’m not sure dispersing high levels of radioactivity into the ocean was a choice at Fukushima. Cooling the piles directly with seawater is the only way to prevent a big explosion. I don’t suppose anyone is eating fish from that coastline anymore.
The big problem with comparing radioactive waste to bananas is that whereas eating bananas is good for you, eating plutonium will kill you. Ingestion of a few tiny particles of the stuff can be fatal. It causes cancer.
You can probably expect a report from the WHO in a few years saying the fish are fine, however, I have a little anecdote.
Many years ago I got a lift up the lake district near
WindscaleSellafieldSunny Meadows nuclear power station from a guy who had worked there a lot. His skin had a weird translucency about it. Anyway, he told me about a sheep farmer in Ennerdale a dozen miles inland who butchered his own sheep and sold direct to the public.About six months after Chernobyl, the men from the ministry stopped by and asked if they could waft their geiger counters over his freezer. They told him that the effects of the Chernobyl cloud dump meant they had to take away his freezer because the meat was contaminated with dangerous levels of radioactivity. Then they asked if he had any more freezers. He reluctantly showed them his other freezer. They checked that and said there was the same problem.
The thing is, the farmer later told the guy who gave me a lift that the reason he was reluctant to show them the second freezer was because the meat in it had been butchered and frozen before Chernobyl exploded…
A dutch news item got my attention on the danger of reactor building 4 collapsing in Fukushima. Potentially 85 times the amount of Cesium 137 as was released during the Chernobyl incident.
http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1-/11387-does-daiichi-4-spell-the-end-qcesium-137-is-85-times-greater-than-at-chernobylq.html
Thanks, Tallbloke, for the review. Very fair, in my opinion, but then, I might be considered less than objective!
But reading these posts, I do (like Michael Hart,
April 25, 2012 at 12:07 am) despair a little. Basically, nuclear energy has nothing to do with providing electricity. In the past, it had a lot (as Tallbloke says) to do with weapons and international grandstanding. The ludicrous sight of Israel lecturing Iran on its nuclear programme shows that this kind of mindset is far from dead. However, these days, As Andrew and I stress in the book, nuclear energy is really about MONEY.
But then, as Tenuc says:
April 24, 2012 at 11:38 am
“The important thing is to have low cost energy. Coal, natural gas and hydro are the most economic currently and we have enough to buy time to find new cheap energy sources (cold or hot fusion or methane clathrates or something not even on the radar).”
And no matter which way you cut it, nuclear energy has shown itself to be totally uneconomic. Hence, the story at the moment is that it should be treated as a ‘renewable’, and given the kind of subsides that multinationals like E.ON and RWC or even Areva/EdF have gorged themselves on increasingly in recent years
Yet the debate here – (as elsewhere, certainly) has been fixated on two things. One is supposedly better versions of nuclear, and the other is the promise of wind/ solar or whatever. All of these approaches are whatever else they may be, totally irrelevant to meeting current energy policy issues. Quite apart form the dubious possibility of ever scaling them up to significant levels, for all the rhetoric, they are simply far too expensive.
And although we may write interesting posts on theoretical possibilities (Berényi Péter – “more research needed!”, all of which defy economic reality ) or split hairs (e.g. about whether plutonium that has been made by reactors is still in a sense ‘natural’) let alone about how to calculate cancer deaths from radiation ), the reality as Andrew and I see it, is of a world poised on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe. We don’t claim to predict the form it will take. IN fact, since the manuscript went off to print, Fukushima seems to be determined to provide a very old-fashioned (in a sense) ‘doomsday’ scenario – that is the meltdown of fuel rods spewing radiation worldwide. But there are plenty of other ways nuclear is threatening our futures, not least the enormous resources it threatens to consume in countries like China. Wind turbines gobbled up the Danish people’s education and health budges, solar panels helped tip Spain into mass-unemployment and recession. The bills from nuclear are weighing on many countries already, but the most vulnerable will be the developing economies that have signed up for the nuclear renaissance.
Borrowing a bit, if I may, from comments published elsewhere, I’d say that perhaps the most frightening fact that my co-author and I see from looking at nuclear issues, is that as costs rise, so do risks. The Fukushima sea-wall is just a metaphor for this. The really frightening thing today is that the Chinese are building the next generation of nuclear. The Chinese government , has standards, of course. Simple things like building materials standards… safety reports, training and qualifications. It is simply unable to ensure they are met. The next disaster will be Chinese – unless the French finish their inherently dangerous Evolutionary Power Reactors one day!
“And no matter which way you cut it, nuclear energy has shown itself to be totally uneconomic”. Here’s how the US DOE cuts it.
Estimated levelized costs (dollars/mwh) for power plants entering service in the US in 2016:
Coal 100.4 to 129.3
Natural gas 83.1 to 139.5
Wind 149.3 to 191.1
Solar 256.6 to 396.1
Nuclear 119.0
Data from http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/aeo/pdf/2016levelized_costs_aeo2010.pdf
“The next disaster will be Chinese – …”
I wouldn’t be surprised, Martin. Possibly a few dozen coal miners killed by an underground roof collapse. It might get reported by the MSM, along with how Antarctic penguins are not dying from global warming.
Of course, you don’t have to go to China to find Chinese people killed by employers with scant regard for human life. Morecambe Bay is close enough. About 21 of them, in fact:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Morecambe_Bay_cockling_disaster
If my reply seems rather “brusque”, then I’m afraid I won’t apologise for it. Most of us in the West are lucky enough not to have to put our lives at risk in the basic extractive industries any more. Whichever way one chooses to dice it, and whatever the French may get up to, nuclear power has got a long way to go before it causes as much human suffering as everything else that has gone before.
And just what does happen to all the radioactivity that is in the ash from coal-fired power stations…?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Given the choice, if I was concerned about radioactivity, I’d rather work in a nuclear power station.
Michael Hart says:
April 27, 2012 at 3:17 am
“…And just what does happen to all the radioactivity that is in the ash from coal-fired power station?…”
Michael, the normal ongoing radiation from nuclear power stations isn’t the problem, it’s when things go wrong due to human error or black swan events that causes the recurrent disasters.
Please do not use the risible ‘radioactive fly ash argument’, the amount of radiation exposure for those living close to a coal fired plant is insignificant, as stated in your linked article, and it makes you sound like an advocate for the nuclear industry rather than someone with balanced views.
Scientific American…
“McBride and his co-authors estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly. To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual “background radiation” from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth’s crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors.”
[As a foot-note, Benjamin Sovacool, founding Director of the Energy Security & Justice Program at their Institute for Energy and Environment, has reported that worldwide there have been 99 significant accidents at nuclear power plants.
Fifty-seven accidents have occurred since the major Windscale, Five Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters, with 57% (56 out of 99) of all nuclear-related accidents having occurred in the USA.
Serious nuclear power plant accidents include the ongoing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (2011), Windscale disaster (1957), Chernobyl disaster (1986), Three Mile Island accident (1979), and the SL-1 accident (1961).]
Martin: Thanks for joining in here at the talkshop, and relieving me from ‘playing devils advocate’.
Now I can state my own, as yet incomplete views more openly.
I’m torn two ways on the nuclear issue. On the one hand I’m concerned about the effect of accidents and the ongoing waste issue. On the other hand I’m a strong believer in the ongoing development of science and technology as a way to the improvement of the lot of the average human being and the key to the unlimited (in the sense of discovery and improvement) future of the human species.
So, how to weigh up the pluses and minuses of the nuclear question?
In a nutshell, I think that in order to make real progress in terms of safety and efficiency so that we may reach the point where nuclear power really is a useful contributor, not only to our mundane need for electrical and heat energy in day to day life, but for advancing the prospect of human exploration of the cosmos and realising the promise that holds for gaining knowledge and understanding of the universe we live in, some sacrifices will have to be made on both sides of the issue.
The commercial nuclear industry and the governments which built it up will have to face up to their collective and international responsibility for the Fukushima fallout. Also, until the issue of safely dealing with 50 years of high toxicity waste sitting in rusting barrels is properly dealt with, there should be no major expansion of the industry.
Seems to me that if those here advocating more highly advanced designs which can ‘burn’ the nasty stuff are right, then we need to manage the waste in accessible facilities so it can be properly disposed of later, rather than following a policy of bury and forget, and then finding that the highly toxic material is leaching into the water table. Rust never sleeps, and water is the universal solvent, and particulate plutonium isn’t bananas.That might then inspire public confidence sufficiently to steel the nerves of government to allow R&D on new designs. We already designated Antarctica as a pristine environment, so we’d better decide which continent we’re going to do the testing on, preferably a long way inland, under a dry mountain, in a country with high standards and low population in the test area. Australia? They don’t seem keen at the moment…
The hardline opponents need to accept that for society, rewards don’t come without taking risks. If they want to convince others of the efficacy of their ideas about the benefit of a return to pre-industrial ways of life, they’ll have to lead by example and prove its feasibility. They’ll also have to deal with the philosophical issue of getting everyone to accept the idea of humanity regressing to a stage where there is no alternative to the ‘waiting for the inevitable catastrophe’ scenario of a major natural cataclysm wiping out the human species before it gets around to putting eggs in more than one planetary basket. I can’t see that happening, so in my view they should get positive and join the debate on shaping a realistic and responsibly conducted development program leading to our improved energy future.
If we don’t start taking the possible energy crunch seriously well in advance of it happening, we will be inviting chaos through the door. Fracking may well be a useful stop-gap which gives us necessary breathing space to get ourselves organised in, but unfettered commercial exploitation of those resources comes with a heavy price attached. Energy policy and management is something we all have a responsibility to be putting some effort into thinking about.
It’s a big challenge.
Per ardua, ad astra, and all that.
The reason for the book is to look at the arguments put in favour of nuclear, we just had two repeated here since my last post, viz, nuclear is cheap and radiation is harmless – and to test them against a range of critical opinion. I don’t think I can usefully bat factoids to and fro here, other than to say that working out the ‘real’ cost of nuclear electricity is a great deal more complicated and ambiguous than trotting out DoE statistics implies, and controversy working out how many people died from Chernobyl is exactly like the Fukushima disaster. On the one hand, ‘only a few’ died directly from radiation at Chernobyl, and we gather that no one ‘yet’ has from Fukushima, but in both cases standard assessments of radiation risks resulted in massive social and economic upheaval, with associated costs, and unknown but likely very high numbers of additional cancers – see tempestnut versus tenuc above!
Most people (and western governments) are very careful about small risks to their health. We’ve banned lead in pipes, paint and fuel. Lots of people avoid certain food additives, and try to make of their houses near sterile environments! Some people allow doctors to put them on lo-salt or lo-cholestorol diets. And yet many people sweep aside the massive releases of radiation at Fukushima, Chernobyl, Windscale et al, as of no consequence!
I don’t really understand why people treat radiatioactive releases so casually. But they do. Tallbloke invited me to look at a recent paper doing exactly this, maybe we could have a specific discussion here later about this issue, using that paper as a starting point.
My summary here is very simple. People are using double standards. Coal is deadly dangerous radioactive stuff, when it suits to promote something they want, be it nuclear or renewables. But nuclear is harmless because radioactivity is ‘natural’ – when that line is needed!
Equally, people who I am sure are normally very sceptical of government claims about the costs of their policies lap up official statistics when it fits their agenda. Nuclear is cheap, because… governments and agencies whose role is to promote it produce statistics that appear to demonstrate that. Coal is very expensive, and we better shut down the nation’s mines, so sorry, unionised workforces!
Of course, none of us can drill down down to what might be called ‘the bedrock’ of nuclear facts. But if you read around issues, you can see enough competing accounts to begin to see patterns. And one pattern is those whose job description includes promoting nuclear energy are unreliable witnesses on its costs and risks.
Martin, one would have to be insane to casually dismiss the emissions of any subtance that has the potential to harm.
For the sane, it is necessary to assess the magnitude of the problem to determine the magnitude of the risks because the risks only become significant above certain levels of exposure. With radiation, things get “complicated” because the isotopes have different half-lives. Isotopes with intense radiation will have a short half-life. This covers most of the iodine isotope emissions from Fukushima. Which have a half-life of about 8 hours.
So while one is wise to avoid exposure to the initial “burst” of radiation, the potential for exposure diminishes rapidly.
If you dig up Cold War civil defence text; e.g. from a Sweidish telephone book, you will see practical methods of minimising exposure to radiation. Things like leaving outer clothing outside of living areas. Tossing a radiation meter onto a mound of dirt in order to get a scary reading makes for good TV; but unless one is planning to sleep directly on the mound of dirt, it’s of little practical use.
Long-lived isotopes are more of a problem, even though they are less radioactive. Their radioactivity doesn’t diminish substantially over hours or even weeks. They stick around for decades. Albeit at low levels of radiation.
This brings us back to the levels of radiation which may be considered harmful. And science is becoming more uncertain about the health effects of low levels of radiation as long-term exposure. Remember, there are substantial populations living in regions where natural background radiation prevents the building of nuclear power plants; but many generations seem to have lived there without harm. Indications are that low-levels of radiation exposure over a long period reduce the incidence of cancers, some say by activating genes which seem to preserve the quality of DNA during the splitting of cells.
The greatest danger from radiation isn’t physical. It’s psychological. It was, after all, one of the reasons why the Cold War didn’t result in the use of nuclear weapons against an “enemy”.
It is very important that people understand that there are risks from all types of energy production. The potential for things to go wrong increases somewhat with the density of energy production, but the risks, because the energy production is more concentrated, are reduced. i.e. fewer people and less volume/area of environment are involved in producing a specific amount of energy. The reduction in size makes it (substantially) easier to manage. But the importance of management increases.
Bernd, you could be reading from the WHO/ IAEA rulebook there… if you read the Doomsday Machine I do summarise their position, and then, I think, unlike you, I do a ‘compare and contrast’ with the views of other specialists – notably toxicologists working with people dying of radiation-related illnesses.
Even with my limited grasp of the subject, your suggestion that the limited life of the radioactivity is a great reassurance seems off the mark. If we take these Japanese recent clouds of Caesium-137, this is radioactive at the time that the material is ‘loose’ in the environment – and I suppose for several human generations on too. Actually, that time is substantial, isn’t it, as plants recycle radioactivity in the soil.
I do agree with you that all energy supplies have downsides – people seem to have forgotten what a menace to the environment hydro is in the rush to ‘renewables’, for instance.
I’m not sure which part of the WHO/IEAE rulebook Bernd is alleged to be parroting, because I’m not that familiar with it. But I agree with him. Fear dominates a significant fraction of the population when the subject of radioactivity ‘raises it’s ugly head’. The fact that radiation is so easily detected has allowed a lot of half-baked science to see the light of day, and a lot of unbridled words to be said and written.
I would be interested to know precisely how many people there are that are dying from what Martin describes as “radiation-related illnesses”, and what the diagnoses were. Did he of learn these from his communications with toxicologists? How many of these “dying” people worked in the civilian nuclear industry?
I don’t take radiation-related illnesses lightly.
I know there are probably plenty of people dying right now from what might be radiation-related illnesses, not least because they may have received radio-therapy for very serious medical conditions. I wish I could help them.
In fact, I did try to help such people:
Bioconjug Chem. 2003 Sep-Oct;14(5):927-33.
Conditionally cleavable radioimmunoconjugates: a novel approach for the release of radioisotopes from radioimmunoconjugates.
Beeson C, Butrynski JE, Hart MJ, Nourigat C, Matthews DC, Press OW, Senter PD, Bernstein ID.
I was salaried during part of my Ph.D. studies to develop a way of reducing “collateral damage” in radio-therapy of B-cell lymphomas with radioactive Iodine isotopes. It is also presented as an additional chapter in my Ph.D. thesis [ And a good one too, I think. But I may be biased 🙂 ]. The research didn’t stop because it didn’t work, but because of lack of funding.
I hope that may persuade that I am not a ‘shill’ of the nuclear industry.
Nor is supporting the nuclear industry part of my job description, because I don’t have a job at the moment. [Details available upon request to any bona-fide potential employers. Coal and nuclear power industries are not excluded.]