By Mike Smith
There is no question that the events in Japan are ongoing and serious. That said, I believe a lot of people are being misled by much of the news coverage. Take a look at these headlines from the Christian Science Monitor and from Channel News Asia, respectively,
and,
“Three Mile Island” and “Chernobyl” sounds scary, right?
Let me ask a couple of questions? How many were killed by the Three Mile Island incident?
100?
10,000?
100,000?
Answer here
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Deekaman – you take an uneducated swipe at the Precautionary Principle – I spent ten years at UN conventions making sure it became law – and am glad of it. It wa sbrought in primarily with respect to preventing the discharge of toxic wastes to the ocean. Prior to this change in the law, the burden of proof fell to environmental groups and even national (foreign) governments to prove a discharge caused harm – virtually impossible to do. The shift in the law (and the burden of proof) heralded the birth and expansion of Clean Production Strategies (don’t use toxic materials if you can avoid them- and then you don’t need to discharge toxic waste). The PP always had a clause which stated – ‘within reason’ related to economic criteria. For example, many would not consider it reasonable to curtail CO2 (not a ‘toxin’) at enormous cost in order to precautionarily prevent possible future damge – and many would! I am on the side of the former only because I have studied the science and do not think the future damage is properly assessed (i.e. the science does not support alarm).
The Precuationary Principle is not well applied to large aras of technology dealing with essentially non-toxic material (like hydro-dams) where normal common sense should prevail. Lead in petrol was another issue – better to take it out, than risk damage to the brains of young children playing in the street. X-raying pregnant women – better to take note of the studies showing excess leaukaemia in children born to mothers who had been X-rayed, than rely on models of threshold effects for low doses – though it took 15 years to make the decision!
As for the Japanese reactor – the death toll is not the main criteria, as with Chernobyl or TMI, it is how close you come to sterilising millions of acres of productive agricultural land, evacuating cities for a hundred years and losing livelihoods for several hundred thousand of even millions of people. The US came close. Chernobyl vented largely toward Belarus’s empty quarter of swampland. The UK and France have both suffered narrow escapes due to loss of coolant incidents.
And consider this – an 1859 scale EMP from a cornonal mass ejection (super flare) that has a frequency of 200-500 years, would potentially wipe out the electric grid in the northen USA and Europe and leave all nuclear stations (and high level waste storage systems) dependent upon diesel generators for their cooling systems. Diesel back-up does not have a good record. How long would diesel supplies last? Did anyone consider this perfectly natural and common event? No, because the design targets for loss of coolant are not 1/500, but 1/10,000 for each of a dual system. This is a good example of the limited intelligence of the engineering and science community – and by that I mean, not lack of skill, but talking to each other across disciplines. The US National Academy of Sciences cottoned-on somewhat later (in a 2008 report on the Carrington Event) and in the UK a report hit the Prime Minster’s desk two weeks ago.
Re: Volt Aire
The Chernobyl report you link to was authored by Dr Ian Fairle and David Summer, both acting as consultants for greenpeace.
I am a great believer in the Precautionary Principle. Accordingly I think that it would be very sensible for all of those people presently living on the Pacific Rim to move somewhere much geologically safer. I am not absolutely sure where they could all go, and certainly not to my backyard, but somewhere safer than where they are now. To get the ball rolling I could take one, always assuming that I could talk my good lady into the idea. Someone English speaking from California would be nice, preferably not from L.A. or San Francisco, but one of those nicer coastal communities. Let precaution be our watchword and decadence our aim.
@Volt Aire
“COMMISSIONED BY_ Rebecca Harms, MEP, Greens/EFA in the European Parliament
WITH THE SUPPORT OF_ The Altner Combecher Foundation”
Independent unbiased research?
“AUTHORS_ Ian Fairlie, PhD, UK. David Sumner, DPhil, UK
AFTERWORD_ Prof. Angelina Nyagu, Ukraine”
PhDs in what subjects?
I think the main problem with nuclear is the widespread possible detriment a rare event could cause. If a dam split in France it doesn’t really have any chance of affecting me in the UK, could I say the same about their nuclear powerstations?
I remember UK radioactivity went up afer Chernobyl, who knows have many people died in general, it is very hard to measure.
Andy
Volt Aire, Chernobyl didn’t significantly increase cancers, and as far as I know the only thyroid cancer death that occured was because the girl was brought in for treatment years too late. Even among people who refused evacuation from the region, none are dying from radiation, they’re dying from old age.
It must be upsetting to you, but even in the most affected regions Chernobyl hasn’t yet managed to kill as hundredth as many people as vodka.
Volt Aire
Would it help if the original poster had stated, “… 56 countable deaths.”? This is factual. There are a lot of excellent studies on the effects from Chernobyl and except for the possibility of a thyroid cancer increase, which is very treatable, it does appear that overall there has been no increase in cancers. Your point about stress related deaths may have validity. At the time of the accident, the Chernobyl area had a very poor socio-economic status. Health care was poor and statistics on the normal incident of cancer were pretty non-existent. This has had a huge impact on trying to determine the effects of the accident. However, the ruthless way people were removed from the area and dumped elsewhere with little education about the accident and no financial/societal support would more than likely put huge stress on the people. It is well known that the intervenors (those who were forced to go clean the area) went back home and were shunned by their fellow citizens because the USSR did nothing to make them heroes or to educate the public. Reminds me of how I was treated when I came home from Viet Nam. The problem of determining whether or not these stresses have led to a rise in stress related illnesses is hugely complicated by the rampant alcoholism amongst the Russian people and the fact that their socio-economic conditions are not the best.
Ergo, your original statement that “56 deaths is pure BS” is a little over the top, because that is the number of deaths from direct radiation exposure. You may ( or may not, as we really do not know) be correct with regards to stress related illnesses,
but want to bet these would be a lot less if the people were given a decent treatment?
The precautionary principle is neither a principle or precautionary. Taken literally it would never be applied, as a precaution.
We need to live in reality not thinking what could or might happen. This is OK for planning something, to try as best as possible to reduce risk, but you can’t live your life like that. If you did you would stay in bed, which is where most people die by the way.
The Japanese earthquake and tsunami disaster combined into sort of a perfect storm. In multiple reactors, primary and backup cooling systems were either destroyed or failed, and their last ditch cooling systems ran out of power.
There are lessons to be learned, but those lessons should show us how to build safer nukes.
I had to laugh when the press made it a reportable article about one of our (US) aircraft carriers going through a plume of radioactive material and that the sailors might have gotten a month’s worth (compared to normal background radiation dose) of radiation dose. Uh, anyone see the irony – it’s a nuclear powered aircraft carrier. I was a Navy corpsman. I would bet almost every sailor on the ship has had a full chest X-ray set (AP, Lat, posterior) at sometime, which would just about equal a month’s worth of background radiation dose. Their risk from this plume is infinitesimally small compared to being on the flight deck during operations.
The media is sooooo radiophobic – and ignorant.
“As for the Japanese reactor – the death toll is not the main criteria, as with Chernobyl or TMI, it is how close you come to sterilising millions of acres of productive agricultural land, evacuating cities for a hundred years and losing livelihoods for several hundred thousand of even millions of people. The US came close. Chernobyl vented largely toward Belarus’s empty quarter of swampland. The UK and France have both suffered narrow escapes due to loss of coolant incidents.”
This is comic book stuff, do you really believe it?
The reactor problems in Japan have the potential to kill zero people outside the reactors. None. Nada. The Japanese government is being ridiculous evacuating people on this pretext in the middle of that post-tsunami chaos.
The “crisis” never had anything to do with danger to people in the surrounding area. At issue was whether these reactors are temporarily disabled, or damaged so badly they will never produce CO2-free electrical power again.
We SHOULD take Japan’s lesson: no matter how bad the natural disaster, nuclear power remains safe. Safer than any other form of energy, in fact.
Can you tell us there are no health risks from the refinery fires caused by the earthquake?
If a dam failed due to the earthquake, would the death toll be zero?
Did none of the solar photovoltaic fab plants release any toxic chemicals into their neighbors’ yards?
Re Peter Taylor
And so far, despite what the media are saying, it hasn’t even come close.
Really? Do you have any idea on how many computer centres have seamlessly switched to diesel backup without any issues? I have been in 3 different centres that have had to switch to backup power and have done so without an interruption of power to a single server. If I have experienced that three times then how many other centres at how many times have had to do it without any issues? Unlike computer centres nuclear power stations do not need a seamless transition from grid to standby power.
Irrelevant. The question should be be how long do they need to last. The answer is just a few days. Power is only needed to circulate the coolant until the secondary fission materials have decayed and the core has cooled and that should have happened after a few days.
They would not have asked the question “What happens if a CME knocks out all the power grids?” because they would not care what caused the grids to fail. Instead they would have asked the question (or something similar) “What happens if we are running at 100% capacity and we lose all power to and from the grid for more than 7 days?” and have prepared procedures for dealing with it.
the bs 56 up there should be at least replaced by the officially estimated 4000. That still looks whitewashed but is not that much of an insult.
I like the idea of the mini nuclear power plants that Hyperion are building. The company claims they are meltdown proof, easily transportable by truck, quick to build, could meet the needs of up to 20, 000 domestic homes each (well, maybe not Al Gore’s homes, I’m surmising), can be constructed underground away from terrorists etc, etc, and after five years would result in re-usable waste about the volume of a softball.
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/
The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaka were rebuilt after being destroyed by A-bombs. Google them and you’ll see beautiful and healthy cities. No sterilized land. It’s a good thing they didn’t follow the Precautionary Principle.
Chernobyl was running full steam ahead when the accident occurred. The Japanese reactors are off-line and cooling. And essentially that’s a big difference.
However, it takes a little bit of time to cool a reactor down, apparently it has something to do with it being very hot. But maybe they’d ought to focus on engineering an rapid cool down process just so the hippie hysterics can have piece of mind. O_o
Re: Peter Taylor
One other thing about CME’s is that we have advance warning about them. Satellites are moved/shut down to protect them and energy companies prepare the power grids for them.
I dont have the instruction manual for a nuclear power plant at hand but I’m confident that if they knew there was a large CME on the way that might severely disrupt their operations and the grid then they just might prepare for it by, you know, testing the standby generators work and making sure there is enough fuel for them. Mind you its only guess.
I continue to be amused by the people pitching low cost, safe geothermal energy. One look at the results of the attempt by Basel, Switzerland to tap into their “cheap energy,” despite warnings of geologic action. The project leader was sued by Basel following a minor earthquake, subsequently exonerated of any wrongdoing, as the report prior to starting the project covered the seismic risks involved.
It just goes to show there is no free lunch – TANSTAFL.
Suppose that Japan had had offshore wind turbine farms and they had suffered through the 8.9. What would be left of them?
Certainly anything wave based would have had a problem as well.
Thorium anyone? That’s a better bet than boiling water.
Low Energy Nuclear is starting to really look like it’s worth investigating, a lot less likely to go wrong, if the worst case does happen.
You don’t build a nuclear power station FACING a major fault beside the sea in a major constant earthquake area. DUH. I’m sure the west coast of Japan would be adequate? I cannot believe the stupidity of some people/organizations which do not think AHEAD.
http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf / Summary of Wind Turbine Accident data to 31 December 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents
http://www.energyliteracy.com/?p=310 (see pie chart, 8% nuclear, .3% wind)
44 fatal accidents in wind energy, verses 5 in nuclear in the last ten years . In those ten years nuclear provided at least thirty times the energy of wind. 44 x 30 equals 1,320 deaths verses five. In the last decade nuclear has been 265 times safer then wind energy on a energy produced verses fatal accidents basis.
Dave Springer does not like this and points out that this is accidents in the Wind Industry. However, almost 70% of the fatal accidents are on site. The report also says this…”Data in the detailed table is by no means fully comprehensive – CWIF believe that it may only be the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of numbers of accidents and their frequency. However, the data gives an excellent cross-section of the types of accidents which can and do occur, and their consequences.” Additionally environmental costs are not considered… http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
Multiply that by at least 30 times to equal Nuclear energy production. Deaths in China are not part of the study either.
Large scale energy is dangerous. Nuclear has a very good track record, and current technology can make it much safer then what we are seeing in Japan today, as a result of 1960s technology.
I like your site Anthony but hosting this article at the present time is inappropriate. The article states that only 56 people died as a consequence of the Chernobyl accident. This may be the official number but do you really take that seriously?
It’s a bit like when AGW alarmists say how much CO2 is produced by cows. They think it illustrates how dangerous this activity is but we (as skeptics) see how the point illustrates the irrelevance of man-made CO2. Spiders thrash the output of cars and cows combined.
When you post articles about how radioactive bananas are it doesn’t illustrate how safe nuclear power is, but shows how poorly “absorbed dose” measures the true danger of radiation. How would you rather receive your dose: in bananas or plutonium?
I think you should step back and not post this stuff at the present time. As a fan of yours I am disappointed. It feels like the NRA hosting a rally at the site of a recent gun massacre. If you must have this debate now, how about inviting an article from someone at the other end of the opinion spectrum to yourself. I suggest Professor Chris Busby.
Unless we’re talking about a reactor with no containment, bringing up Chernobyl is pure hysteria. Regardless of how many people died because of it. Worst case, this is a Three Mile Island scenario, and that wasn’t all that bad.
Obvious lessons need to be taken from the issues in Japan. I would think the key one would be to make sure your cooling backup power can’t be affected by a tsunami. More broadly, make sure the backup power can’t be affected by the same natural disaster that can take out main power.
As long as no reactors are built or managed like Chernobyl, the risk for events like this (which will become less risks as more lessons are learned) are well worth having power that you control the supply of.
As always, lots of good comments, and lots of crap. Three Mile Island and these Japanese reactors are worst case scenarios. Accidents with these designs cannot get worse. People will not die as a result of these. Minor radiation exposure. That is the result of such extreme catastrophes with “modern” PWR and BWR designs. The economic cost is the problem. We are killing people in blacked-out hospitals. We are killing people because EMSA units cannot afford enough ambulances and fuel. We are killing people because food and transportation costs too much to get the food to them so they can simply eat.
10,000 deaths or more by this one earthquake. As many as 250,000 deaths in the past due to single earthquakes. Something we cannot possibly hope to control. Supposedly a 10.1 is possible. Supposedly that would kill people and cause devastation across continents. That rock is out there. If it is big enough, it will kill us all.
Keep proportion.
Nuclear will win out. We will do it rather than die.
The coal will last for many generations, as will the oil and NG. Solar may prove out, wind will not. Even if solar does become economical, it cannot meet the demand, which runs 24 hours per day, not just 12 hours of daylight. Nuclear will be the last power solution standing.
Chernobyl was different. It was designed to be as bad as it was. And yes, more than 56 deaths are attributable, but study and evaluate that number. It is reasonable. It gets hard to sort out the other factors very quickly. Poverty is the problem near Chernobyl, and alcoholism. The radiation was not as big a problem as the lead poisoning. Yes, the soviets dumped lead on the fire trying to put it out. Those exposed to the radiation and fallout were breathing in lead too. They dumped on rock to ensure the dust and friable fraction would become radioactive and increase the fallout and radioactive contamination. (Of course that was a mistake. They did not do it to harm, but they should have known.)
Poverty. That is the biggest killer. More power means less poverty and less human pain and suffering. Less nuclear power means more poverty and more human pain and suffering.
It is that simple.
Further regarding Chernobyl, all of those style reactors have been taken off line. The West never made any in the first place. They were a bad design with far to few passive defenses designed in. The soviets were smart, and they operated those deathtraps for many safe hours of beneficial power production. Still, the accident was inevitable, and the results were as expected. Given that all are off line now, shows they are not too proud to admit the mistake. Which is better than others…
Mike, the press is saying that this could be like TMI or Chernobyl. You’re saying that’s misleading, but it’s not. What you are saying is that if that happens, it isn’t so bad.
The problem with this spin is that people have had 30 years to digest it, and they haven’t accepted it.
The trouble is that they see pictures like this and wonder if they really want one of those in the neighborhood.
But you might be able to find that a scientist somewhere has deleted an email, so it will be OK.