I get mail:
German physicist Peter Heller wrote a passionate plea for a return to science on the nuclear power issue, published in German here: http://www.science-skeptical.de/blog/fukushima/004149/
With Dr. Heller’s permission, I’ve translated it in English. But having gone over the content, I think his plea is worthy of a much wider audience – more than what NTZ can offer. So I send this to you with the kind request that you consider publishing it at WUWT.
Best regards,
P Gosselin
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German physicist Peter Heller makes a passionate plea for a return to science on the nuclear energy issue. He wonders if ignorance and fear will cause us to abandon the legacies of Einstein, Heisenberg and others.
Fukushima
By Dr Peter Heller, http://www.science-skeptical.de
Astronomer, Physicist
There’s no place on earth I would rather be right now than at Fukushima – right in the atomic power plant, at the centre of the event. I say this because I am a physicist and there is no other place that could be more exciting and interesting for a physicist. The same goes for many, if not most physicists and engineers, on the planet.
Already at a young age I knew one day I would study physics. As a boy, I received a telescope for Christmas, and from that point on my view was fixed on the night sky; gazing at star clusters, nebula and galaxies was my favourite preoccupation. It was only later that I learned that these lights and the twinkling in eyepiece were actually the expressions of a chaotic and violent force of nature – the direct conversion of matter into energy during the fusion of an atomic nucleus.
My curiosity carried me, as if on a high, through 10 semesters of study and subsequent graduation. It was a time of discovery that involved the tedious task of understanding. At times I felt exasperation and self doubt with respect to the sheer complexity and breadth of what there was to learn. Yet, there were times of joy whenever the fog lifted and the clarity and beauty of physical descriptions of natural phenomena moved in its place. It was a time that, unfortunately, passed all too quickly and is now some years in the past.
The great minds that accompanied me through my studies were Planck, Sommerfeld, Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, and a host of others who, for us physicists, are still very much alive today. They are great thinkers who contributed to unravelling the puzzles of nature and the forces which keep the world together through the most minute structures. I devoured the stories of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, of Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller – to name a few – and on how they created completely new technologies from theoretical concepts, how the energy stored in the nucleus of an atom could be used for the good of man and how it became possible in a single process to tap into this source of affordable, clean and plentiful energy on a large scale as never seen by man. Electricity illuminates our world, drives our machines, allow us to communicate over great distances, thus making our lives easier and more comfortable. It is a source of energy that staves off poverty and enables prosperity.
Electricity: manufactured by splitting atomic nuclei with neutrons, gained through the direct conversion of mass into energy. It is the principle by which (via the reverse process of fusion) the stars twinkle in the night sky, a principle by which our sun enables life on our planet.
As a physicist it fills me with great joy and pride to see how man is able to rouse this force of nature at the most minute structural level, then amplify, control, and use it for our benefit. As a physicist I have the fundamental understanding of the processes – I can imagine them and describe them. As a physicist I have neither fear of an atomic power plant nor of radioactivity. Ultimately I know that it is a natural phenomenon that is always around us, one we can never escape – and one that we never need to escape. And I know the first as a symbol of man’s capability to steer the forces of nature. As a physicist I have no fear of what nature has to offer. Rather I have respect. And this respect beckons us to seize the chances like those offered by neutrons, which can split nuclei and thus convert matter into energy. Anything else would be ignorance and cowardice.
Dark times in history
There were times in history when ignorance and cowardice overshadowed human life. It was a time when our ancestors were forced to lead a life filled with superstition and fear because it was forbidden to use creativity and fantasy. Religious dogma, like the earth being the centre of the universe, or creationism, forbade people to question. The forbiddance of opening a human body and examining it prevented questions from being answered. Today these medieval rules appear backwards and close-minded. We simply cannot imagine this way of thinking could have any acceptance.
But over the recent days I have grown concerned that we are headed again for such dark times. Hysterical and sensationalist media reporting, paired with a remarkably stark display of ignorance of technical and scientific interrelations, and the attempt by a vast majority of journalists to fan the public’s angst and opposition to nuclear energy – pure witch-burning disguised as modernity.
Freedom of research
So it fills me with sadness and anger on how the work of the above mentioned giants of physics is now being dragged through the mud, how the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century are being redefined and criminalized. The current debate in Germany is also a debate on freedom of research. The stigmatization and ostracism of nuclear energy, the demand for an immediate stop of its use, is also the demand for the end of its research and development. No job possibilities also means no students, which means no faculty, which then means the end of the growth of our knowledge. Stopping nuclear energy is nothing less than rejecting the legacy of Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and all others. It is tantamount to scrapping it, labelling it as dangerous – all in a fit of ignorance. And just as creationists attempt to ban the theory of evolution from the school books, it almost seems as if every factual and neutral explanation in Germany is now in the process of being deleted.
The media suggests a nuclear catastrophe, a mega-meltdown, and that the apocalypse has already begun. It is almost as if the 10,000 deaths in Japan were actually victims of nuclear energy, and not the earthquake or the tsunami. Here again one has to remind us that Fukushima was first hit by an unimaginable 9.0 earthquake and then by a massive 10-meter wave of water just an hour later. As a result, the facility no longer found itself in a highly technological area, but surrounded by a desert of rubble. All around the power plant the infrastructure, residential areas, traffic routes, energy and communication networks are simply no longer there. They were wiped out. Yet, after an entire week, the apocalypse still has not come to pass. Only relatively small amounts of radioactive materials have leaked out and have had only a local impact. If one considers the pure facts exclusively, i.e. only the things we really know, then it exposes the unfounded interpretations of scientific illiterates in the media. One can only arrive to one conclusion: This sorrowful state will remain so.
In truth, this does not show that the ideologically motivated, fear-laden admonitions and warnings were correct. Fukushima illustrates that we are indeed able to control atomic energy. Fukushima shows that we can master it even when natural disasters beyond planning befall us. Still, at Fukushima the conflict between human creativity/competence continues to clamour against the bond energy in atomic nuclei. It’s a struggle that that shows what human intelligence, knowledge gained, passion, boldness, respect, and capability to learn allow us to do. Personally this does not fill me with apprehension, but with hope. Man can meet this challenge not only because he has to, but most of all because he wants to.
Even though I have not practiced physics for some time now, I will never be anything other than a scientist and researcher, and there would be no other place I would rather be than on site at Fukushima. There is no other place at the moment where so much can be learned about atomic energy, which keeps our world together deep inside, and the technical possibilities to benefit from it. Do we have the courage to learn? Do we accept – with respect and confidence – the opportunities we are confronted with? Fukushima will show us possibilities on how to use the direct conversion of matter into energy in a better and safer way, something that Einstein and others could have only dreamed of.
I am a physicist. My wish is to live in a world that is willing to learn and to improve whatever is good. I would only like to live in a world where great strides in physics are viewed with fascination, pride, and hope because they show us the way to a better future. I would only like to live in a world that has the courage for a better world. Any other world for me is unacceptable. Never. That’s why I am going to fight for this world, without ever relenting.
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Translated from the German, with the permission of Peter Heller, by Bernd Felsche and Pierre Gosselin. Original text appeared here: http://www.science-skeptical.de/blog/fukushima/004149/
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The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
March 20, 2011 at 1:59 pm
“Okay, I’ve heard enough. Picture this; the 9/11 planes didn’t fly into the WTC, instead they were flown directly into nuclear power plants. ”
It would have been very hard for them to hit the rather small reactor core – even the Pentagon did not take a direct hit. The reactor core is hidden in a rather stable containment, made to withstand enormous pressure. Try to hit a small ground target with a commercial airliner going at 800 km/h…
They could have taken out a turbine house, i grant you that.
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
March 20, 2011 at 1:59 pm
[Okay, I’ve heard enough. Picture this; the 9/11 planes didn’t fly into the WTC, instead they were flown directly into nuclear power plants. —————————–
Fusion? Great. But don’t tell me that we’re perfectly safe with nuclear power, because we ain’t. We could invest all those billions in hot-rock geothermal, or hydro, or tidal. We could. Instead people want to continue on a path thats always walked a fine line.]
——————————————————————————–
Ghost: nobody’s safe from F-wits that fly into things to destroy them. That is the way of the world. We have f-wits – they cause problems – but the way of the world is that you deal with it – we learn from it – invariably AFTER the event.
Douglas
I notice that the failure modes with the pumps is similar to New Orleans where the pumps were below sea level to begin with. Once flooded they were of no use.
Any system that depends on an active shutdown is going to have a failure mode. Even storing cooling water uphill can fail if the ground shifts enough to damage to piping. As I understand it, the reactors SCRAMMED correctly but still required cooling till the fuel cooled down. Seems to be a stupid design to require a system in a failure mode to continue operating for a safe shutdown.
OT – but explains why I don’t have much faith in the future due to our education system.
NEWSWEEK gave 1,000 Americans the U.S. Citizenship Test–38 percent failed. The country’s future is imperiled by our ignorance.
(two questions that really are troubling)
During the Cold War, what was the main concern of the United States?
Communism.
Correct: 27%
Incorrect: 73%
What is the economic system in the United States?
Capitalist or market economy.
Correct: 33%
Incorrect: 67%
Some one has created a web site for all those journalists you mention.
http://jpquake.wikispaces.com/Journalist+Wall+of+Shame
Here’s an excellent article in this morning’s Age Newspaper comparing nuclear to hydro power on safety.
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/dont-fall-victim-to-nuclear-phobia-20110320-1c24t.html
Talking about German Angst, well, we have a tiny state to the left called Belgium sans government for like 300 days now… they have an interesting research program (obviously funded with
GermanEU money) where they approach fast spectrum transmutation… this could solve the nuclear waste problem.As all media in Europe ignore everything behind the respective national border, the German Greens of course completely ignore that. So… as a German nuclear physicist, maybe instead of driving to work in Aachen i could drive a 100km further to Mol…
http://www.sckcen.be/en/Our-Research/Scientific-Institutes-Expert-Groups/Advanced-Nuclear-Systems
Can we say ROTFLMAO now? 😉
http://www.bing.com/maps/#Y3A9NTAuOTgxODQzODgzODE2NTZ+NS42MDE5MDAxNDU0MTE0OTEmbHZsPTkmZGlyPTAmc3R5PXImcnRwPXBvcy41MC43NzgxMjQ2MzA0NTEyXzYuMDg4NDcwMjk1MDcxNjAyX0FhY2hlbiUyQyUyME5XJTJDJTIwRGV1dHNjaGxhbmRfX19lX35wb3MuNTEuMTg0MDYzNTUzODEwMTJfNS4xMTUzMjk5OTU3NTEzODFfTW9sJTJDJTIwQmVsZ2llbl9fX2VfJm1vZGU9RCZydG9wPTB+MH4wfg==
So it turns out that nuclear fission reactors are dangerous when hit by huge tsunamis, Wind & solar power has been proven effectively useless, too expensive and impractical, Hydro-power & thermal power are too geographically Dependant, fossil fuels are cheap, efficient and a proven source of power generation but have become the focus of anthropogenic political wrangling to monitor & tax every last soul on this planet.
Ask the question if we should fire up a few nuclear fusion reactors to generate electrical power? In fact ask Joe public, “Mr green” or your politicians if we should start building them immediately?
It has the demonized word “Nuclear” in the question so Joe public will immediately wet him self and become frightened, “Mr Green” will campaign, lobby & protest against the idea of cheap and abundant energy as this suggests more people living longer and over populating the planet, destroying the environment through Co2 pollution and what ever anthropogenic disaster spin-off is popular.
And what about the politicians, wealthy elites & corporations? Well… the realities of creating heavy duty power generation will always be dangerous so long as there is greed in the expensive bureaucracies through which the funding of major engineering projects have to filter down through to begin with, especially if they are publicly funded by the tax payer then privatized by politicians, effectively handing a public utility over to corporations owned by wealthy elites who then drive up prices for their stock investors who make a killing of the consumer.
I’m just an engineer/technician “type” so my opinion is worthless too apparently!
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley
Fly a plane into a hydro/electric and you break a dam and cause thousands of deaths. In Fukushima Prefecture that’s exactly what happened – A dam in NE fukushima burst and 1500 houses destroyed including most of the occupants.
The land area around Chernobyl has been locked up as you say – a biologist was given permission to enter and check it out. She found thriving animal life more diverse and greater numbers than before Chernobyl.
Onion says:
March 20, 2011 at 12:36 pm
“I’ve observed a lot of good as well as very poor MSM journalism over this story. Frankly, it feels like you’ve created a really good straw man to beat up to cheers from an echo chamber.”
Which broadcast company did not scream nuclear disaster? Even Fox News could not resist. It was a bonfire of hysteria from the first report. There is no justification whatsoever for a news reporter or broadcast company to engage in hysteria.
Ted says:
March 20, 2011 at 12:34 pm
…”Hyperion Mini Power Reactor.
THIS SEEMS TO BE THE WAY A SMALL INEXPENSIVE NUCLEAR POWER MODULES THAT DOESN’T NEED HUGE EXPENSIVE INFRASTRUCTURE, OR LARGE SCALE TRANSMISSION LINES. THE MODULES CAN BE PIGGY BACKED FOR LARGER POWER REQUIREMENTS. CAN BE QUICKLY BUILT ON AN ASSEMBLY LINE BASIS, INSTALLED AND RUNNING IN A SHORT TIME FRAME. – What’s not to like?…”
============
Some of my concerns:
I assume the “plants” will have 24/7 security lest some fool drops some C-4 or a hand grenade into the vault. Imagine the media hype.
NIMBY may be a problem.
Are the “plants” fail-safe, or do they need to be monitored by tech’s? They do need a reliable cooling source, I assume?
I say, it will never happen.
Dr. Dave says:
March 20, 2011 at 12:56 pm
“To be fair, there’s much better empirical evidence to support evolution than there is Creationism. At the same time there’s better empiric evidence to support UFOs and extraterrestrials than there is to support AGW.”
Just because you mentioned me in this context, I will say that I have found nothing interesting in Creationist writings. However, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is as close to real science as a Model T Ford is to a BMW. But we are forbidden to discuss anything that might be taken as critical of Darwin. That Political Correctness is immoral, unscientific, and un-American.
@rbateman says:
March 20, 2011 at 11:45 am
Thanks, there is quite a bit being written about storage in the USA. Chicago Tribune posted a decent article here:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-0320-spent-fuel-20110319,0,5809639.story
Dry cask storage sounds like a good interim between temporary pool storage and long-term disposal. I always preferred recycling if possible, as these elements are rare in nature and may yet have useful properties besides weapons & power generation. With vitrification or repository solutions (the now-dead Yucca Mountain), the waste is lost forever.
The sad truth is that nuclear power is dead. The politics alone have killed it. Safety and efficiency have nothing to do with it.
A review of construction costs some years ago discovered that most utilities had not fully factored decommissioning costs into their rate structures. These amounted to $2B (1970s dollars) per reactor. The cleanup costs of an accident are so huge, so much greater than mere decommissioning, that no public utility will risk it. That’s it. Politics plus economic risk means no nuclear power.
And don’t talk to me about fusion. Fusion is outright criminal fraud. Physicists have been playing with their tokamak machines for 40 years and have made literally no progress to self-sustaining fusion. None. Absolutely none. No other fusion technology (other than bombs) works either. The fusion researchers have lied repeatedy about the prospects, and they have wasted no only billions of dollars but the entire professional careers of two whole generations of young physicists.
Back in the 1970s, engineers pointed out that the capital costs of fusion were at least a full order of magnitude greater than fission reactors. So even if we drink the KoolAid and believe in fairies, fusion reactors would be so large and their costs so high that even the military wouldn’t build them.
So, we are stuck with natural gas (huge deposits, especially clathrates), coal (very large deposits), petroleum, natural gas and small amounts of hydro.
I would like to thank Dr Peter Heller for his essay. It describes perfectly the “modern” retreat from scientific reality.
There can be no advancement in any field of human endeavour without some element of risk. Today this element of risk is deemed to be unacceptable. This means that human endeavour must cease lest it threatens those involved.
This is tantamount to becoming Oroboros, the serpent consuming its own tail. It requires the end of all human exploration and exploitation of the space which we all inhabit.
What a brilliant synopsis Dr. Heller. Written to the point, simply and easily understandable.
I put up a comment on a previous post on WUWT, which I think may be relevant…
“I apologise if I am stepping on anyone’s toes, as I admit to not reading all the comments above.
The major factor that the MSM have omitted in their ignorance and doom-mongering, is that spent fuel rods were the cause of all the local radiation, simply because the Japanese back-up cooling water pump supplies failed – no electricity – even though they are doing a sterling job of containment.
urtailment. Without constant water cooling, any spent fuel rods in storage continue to rise in temperature as low level nuclear reaction continues.
I have often wondered why the design engineers involved have never bothered to utilise this heat energy, e.g. as in second or third stage compound steam engines, or latterly in second stage turbo-charging on large 2-stroke engines…”
One of the major problems that I have, personally, is trying to make my friends and family aware of what is really happening in the world of weather, climate and energy; all related, but with a woeful ignorance of the facts.
And there we have the dilemma, or a better word may be ‘bugbear’, because the more difficult the subject matter, then the harder it is to understand. So it is with climate and energy, more especially with the former.
There are not many ‘climate’ scientists that I (personally) would trust, but one that I would, on every turn, is Bob Carter. He is one of those lucky few who can explain something that is obviously complex, in a logical and reasoned manner, leaving one with the impression that the subject was not so difficult after all.
Then you have the sincere and rather avid folk on the ‘other side’, who still insist that any more man-made CO2 increase will be the end of the world.
It is about time these mostly ill-informed remarks were put to rest. If only it were that simple! However, there are good people in this world, who do not necessarily believe in hobgoblins, spirits (apart from vodka), or, indeed, propaganda; people like Willis, Judith, Christopher… I was going to carry on with many names, but I find, much to my delight, that they are too numerous to name.
Having said that, I must not omit your name, Anthony, for without your website I would have been unable to post this.
Several random questions/thoughts:
1. To what extent is our planet’s temperature gradient due to the decay of radioactive elements? Tell the ecotards that we sit atop a giant spent nuclear rod that happens to be spherical and watch them try to clean up that problem!
2. Are there any easy-to-understand formulas (like the Kelly Formula in gambling) that capture what is involved in the engineering quantitative analysis of something complex like a nuclear power plant?
3. The scientific community should be gearing up for the next onslaught from the doomsayers. According to the most recent National Geographic Magazine: By 2050 the oceans will have turned into carbonic acid so rapidly from man-made CO2 that much of sea life will have no time to adapt.
Tom in Texas says:
March 20, 2011 at 11:56 am
…placing spent (dry?) fuel rods on the roof.
I’m not an expert but as I understand it…
If you look at page 19 of the link below you will see that in order to refuel the BWR reactor it is necessary to flood the top of the reactor in order to keep the spent fuel shielded (by the water) while it is removed from the core. The spent fuel pool holds the removed fuel in a shielded environment (under water) until it is decayed enough to be transferred to dry storage.
http://www.ati.ac.at/fileadmin/files/research_areas/ssnm/nmkt/06_BWR.pdf
Thank you for a well written article! Seems there is always a large contingent that get stirred to oppose everything new that’s cost effective! If they have their way we’ll go back to a life style and population mirroring the middle ages! It will get pretty ugly!
The fear associated with all things nuclear (CO2, etc) is not evidence of knowledge.
Fear is used as a tool by media and interest groups and others.
I lay the blame for such fear in the lack of spirit of discovery and pioneering within a paternalistic/maternalistic society.
John
I fear Dr Heller is addressing the wrong problem.
The issue is not science or the desire to relinquish the legacy of Planck or Heisenberg.
The problem is the steady erosion of trust by the nuclear industry and its political proponents, which has persistently obfuscated or denied its problems, rather than to address them openly.
The long search for a nuclear waste repository in Germany is a case in point.
After a long search, the choice fell on a salt mine, which of course has the advantage that the very existence of the salt proves that the environment is dry and has been so for multiple millennia. The expectation even was the wastes stored there could eventually be retrieved once technology had reached the point where the fuel could be reprocessed for further use.
Trouble was that the mine was in fact leaking, which was known but was hushed up. So now the wastes have disappeared into a wet and salty grave, no one knows for how long. The effect on German public confidence in the country’s nuclear program has been hugely damaging.
The combination of dishonesty and very long lived hazards is doing this industry in, not the anti science sentiment.
It is interesting to me that many on this forum have learned to be properly skeptical of politically charged scientific findings on AGW.
It would perhaps be useful to reflect on whether that same attitude should be applied to the nuclear industry and its political sponsors.
bob sykes says:
March 20, 2011 at 3:06 pm
I would not say “stuck with” oil, coal, gas. There are hundreds of years left, if it is not inexhaustible (q.v. abiogenic oil), until we need to get to other sources, like nuclear energy (superior fission design, like thorium, then fusion) that will satisfy cost and safety. No reason to panic. But for now, drill, baby, drill!
But to overcome the myriad possibilities of natural disaster events, we need a strong, electricity rich economy, to help those suffering and in need.
As for radiation, anyone born in or before the 1950s has, as just one example, millions of radioactive strontium molecules still tied up in their bones from the hundreds of aerial nuclear tests conducted by USA, France, China, USSR, and Great Britain, and also 14C background is higher today as a result. One USSR aerial bomb approached 100 Megatons. Many gigatons of nukes were tested in the atmosphere, and yet our life spans are up 10-15 years on average worldwide since then.
So let’s keep a wholesome, scientific perspective, and keep on keepin’ on.
Hey Ghost,
After 9/11 nuclear power operators looked very seriously into the deliberate aircraft crashing problem and measures were taken at nuclear plants worldwide. Unfortunately, they didn’t have your email address to inform you personally about it.
All forms of energy production have risks. They also produce considerable benefits for people on a very wide scale. You have to balance the one against the other before you reach any conclusions.
Begin here: Transposons and genome evolution in plants
This kind of argumentation falls in what is called the Sorites paradox: a grain of wheat is not a pile. Nor 2. Nor 3, nor 4. But there exists piles of wheat. Where do you place the limit? This is the same reasoning with “adaptive response” and “evolution”.
Bravo!
I know a person, he was born in 1920 and is still around kicking, and as it happens he usually spend his days surfing the net.
When I was eight I built my first model airplane, a spitfire, when he was eight he didn’t even know there was such a thing as airplanes. He didn’t have running water or a house connected to the sewer, since there wasn’t any sewer lines. The telephone didn’t exist in his mind yet neither.
But consider the flying apparatus. A machine that could take people up into the blue, to fly, and back safely again.
1928, your eight, and your world doesn’t include the flying machine, it doesn’t exist, but in 17 years there was jets, and in 41 years a man on the moon.
Imagine if they’d said back then, when the eugenics were all the rage, that, hey them flying apparatus’s are true and real dangerous, people go missing or, worse, die every year from accidents so how are those supposed to be good for us in the future?
What happened after 9/11 when planes couldn’t leave the ground?
What happens when planes can’t leave the ground due to volcanic outgassing problems?
And even what happens when really squeezing diamond uptight bureaucratic national security personal gets scared out of their pants from all the maybes and if’s and ban flight due to baby muffler capped milk cans?
Do we dismantle the aircraft industry or do we just make changes, up the security, and adapt and refine the technology one more time?
We would probably not have come as far had that world not let the aircraft industry been allowed to go through all the refinements through the years. An aircraft is just the same now as it was, almost a 110 years ago, way before they even existed in an eight year old old farts reality. The only thing that has changed, really, is that the design has been refined numerous generations, yet, still, accidents happens, terrorists happens, and they’r still used to slaughter thousands of people each year.
Although the main point is that in one persons mind it only took 41 years from the advent of flying machines to moon rockets landing on the moon. And I wonder how far along would we have come in the last 25 to 30 years had the green loonies not imposed a de facto ban on nuclear R&D, such bans were imposed in countries in Europe even before Chernobyl happened. The loss of knowledge, and larger nuclear waste heaps, are evident compared to France (that produce 80% of electricity from nuclear power), who, today even, manage to recycle about 10% of their nuclear waste.