It pains me to see large parts of the media still hyperventilating over the very modest amounts of radioactive material coming from the Fukushima Daiichi plant on the east coast of Japan.
Nothing has been made more plain that most journalists and editors have no ability to evaluate risk, especially when it comes to radioactive measurements in very unfamiliar units (millisieverts anyone?). Everything they appear to know about radioactivity appears to come from poorly understood science reports and 1950s era B-movies.
You wouldn’t know from the coverage that that very same reactor survived a truly massive earthquake and a towering tsunami with barely a scratch even though it was built around 40 years ago in the expectation of surviving much lesser events.
You wouldn’t know that Japanese people are struggling to survive in the bitter cold, while coming to terms with the loss of family members, friends and entire neighbourhoods. You won’t hear that some survivors are being housed in other nuclear plants, everything else having been washed away.
Witness the BBC reporting today:
Japan nuclear plant: Radioactivity rises in sea nearby
The BBC’s Chris Hogg in Tokyo says the Japanese government has tried to reassure people about the plant’s safety
Levels of radioactive iodine in the sea near the tsunami-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant are 1,250 times higher than the safety limit, officials say.
The readings were taken about 300m (984ft) offshore. It is feared the radiation could be seeping into groundwater from one of the reactors.
But the radiation will no longer be a risk after eight days, officials say.
There are areas of radioactive water in four of the reactors at the plant, and two workers are in hospital.
The plant’s operator says the core of one of the six reactors may have been damaged.
It has announced that fresh water rather than seawater will now be used to cool the damaged reactors, in the hope that this will be more effective.
Why eight days? Because that’s the half-life of radioactive iodine. But that’s not what you find out from the BBC.
What of those two workers in hospital? Sounds serious doesn’t it?
Not all of the media are so poorly informed. The Register’s Louis Page has produced some well-researched articles which go a long way to explaining what is really happening:
The situation at the quake- and tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant in Japan was brought under control days ago. It remains the case as this is written that there have been no measurable radiological health consequences among workers at the plant or anybody else, and all indications are that this will remain the case. And yet media outlets around the world continue with desperate, increasingly hysterical and unscrupulous attempts to frame the situation as a crisis.
Here’s a roundup of the latest facts, accompanied by highlights of the most egregious misreporting.
First up, three technicians working to restore electrical power in the plant’s No 3 reactor building stood in some water while doing so. Their personal dosimetry equipment later showed that they had sustained radiation doses up to 170 millisievert. Under normal rules when dealing with nuclear powerplant incidents, workers at the site are permitted to sustain up to 250 millisievert before being withdrawn. If necessary, this can be extended to 500 millisievert according to World Health Organisation guidance.
None of this involves significant health hazards: actual radiation sickness is not normally seen until a dose of 1,000 millisievert and is not common until 2,000. Additional cancer risk is tiny: huge numbers of people must be subjected to such doses in order to see any measurable health consequences. In decades to come, future investigators will almost certainly be unable to attribute any cases of cancer to service at Fukushima.
Nonetheless, in the hyper-cautious nuclear industry, any dose over 100 millisievert is likely to cause bosses to pull people out at least temporarily. Furthermore, the three workers had sustained slight burns to their legs as a result of standing in the radioactive water – much as one will burn one’s skin by exposing it to the rays of the sun (a tremendously powerful nuclear furnace). They didn’t even notice these burns until after completing their work. Just to be sure, however, the three were sent for medical checks.
So – basically nothing happened. Three people sustained injuries equivalent to a mild case of sunburn. But this was reported around the globe as front-page news under headlines such as “Japanese Workers Hospitalized for Excessive Radiation Exposure”. Just to reiterate: it was not excessive.
The entire article is well worth reading
But panic sells (as readers of WUWT are well aware), and sober analysis of scientific fact is nowhere near as exciting or is likely to spread like wildfire across the Internet.
No-one will die from radiation from Fukushima. No-one will mutate or develop super-powers. Godzilla will not rise from the sea and destroy Tokyo, except in cinemas.
It’s my view that the world deserves better than this. The real plight of the Japanese survivors of the earthquake and tsunami is being forgotten in the service of a bizarre fear about radiation that is more science fiction than science fact.
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Francisco says:
March 29, 2011 at 10:29 am
“Daryl M says:
March 29, 2011 at 8:19 am
There is NO WAY, aside from a bomb being detonated in the pool, for radioactivity in the Fukushima spent fuel pool to be spread in the same manner as Chernobyl.
===========
What it takes for spent fuel in pools to catch fire and start putting stuff in the atmosphere is only enough time being exposed to the air, without water.”
Whether or not spent fuel can overheat to the degree that it could catch fire depends on how old it is. I don’t think enough information has been released to confirm that. Irrespective of that, the likelihood that it will overheat to that degree is another matter. Based on the status reports, all of the spent fuel pools are at least minimally submerged so the possibility of a “Chernobyl-like event” involving the spent fuel is very remote.
“The assumption that removal of that water is a bulletproof impossibility is very silly, and yet it seems to be what drives the nuclear industry to keep piling up this stuff onsite in pools.”
This quotation is a great example of the duplicity of many people who comment on the nuclear industry. Opponents of nuclear power critize the industry for storing spent fuel in pools on one hand and then throw up obstacle after obstacle preventing them from moving the fuel to better long term storage facilities for eventual reprocessing on the other hand. It’s like the only answer they will provide is “no”. This frankly makes me sick and I wish more of the public would become aware of this duplicity and take a more active stand against it. There are a variety of solutions to the problem of storing and reprocessing spent fuel, but opponents of nuclear power seem to be bent on resisting “to the last man” any attempts to resolve this matter because if a solution gets accepted, it will remove a major obstacle to nuclear power being more widely adopted.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-nuclear-power-plants-safe/story?id=13246490&page=1
Records Show 56 Safety Violations at U.S. Nuclear Power Plants in Past 4 Years
Among the litany of violations at U.S. nuclear power plants are missing or mishandled nuclear material, inadequate emergency plans, faulty backup power generators, corroded cooling pipes and even marijuana use inside a nuclear plant, according to an ABC News review of four years of Nuclear Regulatory Commission safety records.
And perhaps most troubling of all, critics say, the commission has failed to correct the violations in a timely fashion.
“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has very good safety regulations but they have very bad enforcement of those regulations,” said David Lochbaum, a nuclear scientist with the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists.
There are 104 U.S. nuclear power plants.
Lochbaum and the Union of Concerned Scientists found 14 “near misses” at nuclear plants in 2010. And there were 56 serious violations at nuclear power plants from 2007 to 2011, according the ABC News review of NRC records.
At the Dresden Nuclear Power Plant in Illinois, for instance, which is located within 50 miles of the 7 million people who live in and around Chicago, nuclear material went missing in 2007. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission fined the operator — Exelon Corp. — after discovering the facility had failed to “keep complete records showing the inventory [and] disposal of all special nuclear material in its possession.”
As a result, two fuel pellets and equipment with nuclear material could not be accounted for.
Two years later, federal regulators cited Dresden for allowing unlicensed operators to work with radioactive control rods. The workers allowed three control rods to be moved out of the core. When alarms went off, workers initially ignored them.
“This event is disturbing,” Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists said. “In August 1997, the NRC issued information … about a reactivity mismanagement problem at Exelon’s Zion nuclear plant,” which was retired the following year.
“It was an epoch event in the industry in that other plants owners noted it and took steps to address [the issue]. Yet, a decade later, Exelon’s Dresden plant experiences an eerily similar repetition of the control-room operator problems.”
The lost material was almost certainly shipped to a licensed, low-level waste disposal site, Lochbaum said.
At the Indian Point nuclear plant just outside New York City, the NRC found that an earthquake safety device has been leaking for 18 years.
In the event of an earthquake, Lochbaum said, the faulty safety device would not help prevent water from leaking out of the reactor. A lack of water to cool the fuel rods has been the most critical problem at the Fukushima plant in Japan after the recent earthquake and tsunami.
“The NRC has known it’s been leaking since 1993,” Lochbaum said, “but they’ve done nothing to fix it.”
While declining to address specific violations, Roger Hanna, a spokesman for the NRC, said “we do require plant to comply, and we do follow up for corrections” when violations are discovered.
But NRC records examined by ABC News show that such incidents are not uncommon: In June 2009, at the Southern Nuclear Operating Co. Inc. in Birmingham, Ala., the emergency diesel generator — which would be used in the event of a disaster — was deemed inoperable, after years of neglect.
“Cracks in the glands of the emergency diesel generator couplings had been observed since 1988, but the licensee did not recognize the cracking was an indication of coupling deterioration,” according to the NRC report. On April 19, 2010, the NRC cited the Tennessee Valley Authority Browns Ferry nuclear plant near Decatur for failing to provide “fire protection features capable of limiting fire damage.”
The NRC fire protection regulations in effect today were developed as a direct result of the Browns Ferry fire on March 22, 1975.
In June 2010, Duke Energy, operators of the William McGuire nuclear plant in Mecklenburg County, N.C., was cited by the NRC after a contract employee was caught using marijuana inside the protected area.
NRC safety records show that inadequate emergency planning was a recurring problem in the industry from 2007 to 2011. Violations included unapproved emergency plans and plan changes, inadequate fire planning and precautions, falsified “fire watch” certification sheets,” inadequate flooding precautions, an insufficient tone alert radio system to notify the populace in a potential emergency and faulty assessment of containment barrier thresholds.
Corroded water pipes and cooling problems were also recurring issues.
@Daryl M you have hit on an important area that should be highlighted by the media, but it won’t because that would require a little more effort than a cut and paste.
It would be a nice change if those who continuously block progress would accept some responsibility for the farce over spent fuel storage. But I guess all we will see the same old bull about operations failures. This event should be the opportunity to make real progress towards improving nuclear safety and operational effectiveness just as for example every mechanical failure in a car is used to improve design and manufacturing processes to improve the product reduce costs and remain competitive. However we will throw all this experience and the hard won lessons of engineering out the door and listen to those who are completely clueless, and more skilled at disinformation and exaggeration. What a mixed up world we have created.
From aletho on March 28, 2011 at 10:00 pm:
“Leave it to the state…”! Just how anti-government are you?
It is not a slur to note a fact, TMI was a very stressful event. Indeed, it would have been negligent to not note the mental health effects. So the Presidential Commission did their duty, reported the truth, and you want to slam them for it?
So what are you saying, they missed a few chunks of plutonium that were littered across the landscape? It was an air dispersal event. Are you expecting some low-lying pockets of radioactive gas to have been hiding somewhere? Hordes of experts descended on the plant, taking many measurements. From those came estimates of the exposure, which is the best you’re going to get since the general population around the plant wasn’t wearing calibrated dosimeters.
“Tiny” was my word, it wasn’t used in the “Health Effects” section of the Findings, thus by your wording I doubt you read that section. So here’s the info:
Within 5 miles, only about 10% of background. And you’re upset they didn’t track and correlate cancers, when there wasn’t enough radiation to cause them? Gee, you might as well be consistent, and demand a federal investigation with tracking and correlating of cancers arising from medical CT scans. Refer to chart. Maximum external dose from TMI over all those days was one-sixth of what a chest CT scan delivers all at once. Now that sounds dangerous!
=====
From aletho on March 29, 2011 at 7:20 am:
Yup, I’m really feeling what it’s like to be facing such nonsense. So, got enough links to your blog posted here to get its stats up, or are you going to hang around here some more?
Re:Doug Badgero says:
March 29, 2011 at 11:01 am
Claude Harvey,
I have been a nuclear plant operator for 25+ years and would go to jail for the actions you describe.
You might go to jail unless the operating force closed ranks and covered for you. Such a cover-up is exactly what I’m told happened in the incident I described (I had moved on by that time). I’m not claiming a duplicate incident in a U.S. nuclear plant where operating retirements and Q/A oversight are so much more stringent would have come out as did this incident in a non-nuke. I’m saying the human inclination is there, especially when years of familiarity within the nuclear operating environment without bad things having happened eases the “fear factor”. The same syndrome occurs in surgery, piloting and many other occupations with deadly potential and is effectively controlled MOST of the time. The difference between those occupations and nuclear plant operation is the scale of the potential consequences of one of those “John Wayne moments” and where MOST of the time simply won’t cut it.
Francisco,
We get it you don’t like nuclear power. It is impossible to make sense of your post or put these violations in context since there is so little technical detail there, but just to provide some likely context for one issue:
“At the Indian Point nuclear plant just outside New York City, the NRC found that an earthquake safety device has been leaking for 18 years.”
What you are almost certainly referring to is a hydraulic snubber. This is a passive safety device, basically a shock absorber installed on plant systems. There are typically many snubbers installed on large components and piping systems when that component or system must be seismically mounted. A leak of hydraulic oil does not mean the snubber is inoperable and just because a single snubber is inoperable doesn’t mean the system it supports would fail due to an earthquake. They were likely cited because they failed to promptly and effectively repair this snubber. And I am sure they deserved the citation.
I’m guessing you have never worked in an industrial environment. Especially one that was subject to the myriad of safety and environmental regulations that US industry is subject to. Take a look at the nrc.gov website some time and see how many violations of NRC requirements are reported in the medical field or other industrial fields. Radioactive materials are everywhere, you shouldn’t have to look very hard to find lots of violations associated with soil moisture gauges, etc. Take a look at safety and environmental violations and reports associated the petrochemical, mining or food processing industry sometime. Given the length of the CFR in this country I think nuclear would compare favorably and I know of few other industries that have federal inspectors on site full time year round.
Claude,
“You might go to jail unless the operating force closed ranks and covered for you.”
Sorry sir, it is obvious you have never worked in this business. If ranks were closed then the “ranks” would go to jail. Management and the NRC would throw them under the bus to protect the integrity of the industry. Culturally, at least in the USA, it would never happen because we ALL understand the consequences. The surest way to get fired from my job is ANY case of a personal integrity issue. I have seen it a handful of times for issues as simple as lying to cover the fact that you made an honest mistake. The honest mistake usually won’t get you fired, unless you are a repeat offender, the lie to cover it up will get you fired in a heartbeat.
I don’t know what the culture is in other countries and that does give me some concern but I also think you give the design features of these plants short shrift. And as I have indicated previously, I believe the common fears of radiation are wildly overblown.
Re:Doug Badgero says:
March 29, 2011 at 4:17 pm
“Sorry sir, it is obvious you have never worked in this business. If ranks were closed then the “ranks” would go to jail. Management and the NRC would throw them under the bus to protect the integrity of the industry.”
I’ve not only worked in “this business”, I’ve designed great chunks of both BWR and
PWR plants in the U.S. and wrote sections of both the PSAR and FSAR (safety analysis documents) for those plants. If “going to jail” were the ultimately effective deterrent to short-cutting safety, two TVA executives and a contract electrician would not currently be under investigation and indictment by the DOJ for purportedly faking safety documents and cable measurements at Watts Bar Unit #2.
I’ve seen too much of human and institutional nature in my lifetime to buy your “we would never do such a thing” contention. Protecting the “perceived” integrity of the industry is sometimes more vital to management and regulatory interests than actual integrity. Self-interest is a powerful motivator and when an act or event will reflect really badly on an entire industry, possibly even become “life threatening” to that industry, natural human forces will often connive to cover up or down play that act or event. That’s the nature of institutions and that’s the nature of groups of individuals.
I hope that your personal integrity is never tested against the vested interests of your operating peers or the management and institutions to whom you report, because on that sad day you will become sorely disillusioned over the purity of “group integrity”.
For all your great technical enthusiasm, what most of you big fans of nuclear energy have in common is a remarkable inability to understand why it is that people of all types, including highly competent scientists, have such deeply-set misgivings about things nuclear. In your shortsightedness you attribute it all to some kind superstitious fear of what they don’t understand, and you forget that many of them do understand quite well the technical details, and that all of them understand the dismal history of this force of nature and its relation with us since we began tinkering with it some 70 years ago. Some still remember how it started, with huge open explosions in deserts and oceans, followed by the anihilation of two cities, followed by more explosions and radiations all over the place for decades to come, evacuations, poisoning, sickness, then expanding over to “peaceful” tasks and leading to the mess in Chernobyl.
You also show an incomprehensibly selfish lack of concern for how much we may litter the Park for the next round of picnickers, and the next, and the next…
You know, this is no silly CO2-based fear mongering fairy tale here. Notice that in order to turn CO2 into a bogeyman, an enormous, sustained effort of propaganda, coupled with the shameless bribing of large swaths of academia through the fund system, was needed, and yet the result is not that spectacular. In spite of such phenomenal efforts, and all the “scientific consensus,” more than half the people fail to be properly scared by CO2 and “climate change”. They sense it’s contrived, even when not understanding the details very well. Note that the propaganda effort for this idea is top down, it is pushed and financed from above.
Well, I don’t see any similar source, or history, in the popular opposition to nuclear power. It’s has mostly emerged from below, by people simply putting 2 and 2 together: “this stuff is a killer”.
So when you wring your hands in despair at the spectacle of people refusing to accept the disposal of nuclear waste in their backyard (using the word backyard in an extended sense that may include your whole state, or even your whole country) you are not understanding the full reasons for their refusal. These reasons do include also a concern about what kind of state we leave this Park in when we depart. Your imagination appears very very stunted at times to me. You conveniently forget that every time you spill some of this stuff, the mess never really goes away. Imagine a world gone merrily nuclear, tens of thousands of nuclear plants everywhere. Mere statistical expectations would suggest accidents of all kinds would have to become more frequent. Add to this the very real possibility that social order continues to erode gradually as the decades go by. Regulations become laxer, or increasingly more difficult to enforce, aging facilities that should be shut down, aren’t shut down, until a mess occurs; storage becomes looser, acts of sabotage are also perfectly conceivable… imagine all this in the context of a kind of poisoning that never goes away once it poisons an area.
I’ve just read a comment on a NYT piece on the “elephant’s foot” of Chernobyl:
***quote***
“Water cannot be allowed to touch the thing that is deep inside the reactor: about 200 tons of melted nuclear fuel and debris, which burned through the floor and hardened, in one spot, into the shape of an elephant’s foot. This mass remains so highly radioactive that scientists cannot approach it.”
“This abstract ‘thing that is deep inside the reactor’ is thus held outside of human contact, separated from experience by a provisional monument: the sarcophagus shell. Sheltered there, precisely because of its temporal excess, in a state of near-immortality, capable of interacting mutationally with living matter for up to a million years—the ‘thing’ enters into a timeframe more appropriate for mythology.”
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/elephants-foot.html
***end of quote***
My general impression sometimes is that you are a bit like a group of small children playing around with a sleepy tiger, an animal they had never seen and have just discovered lying on the back yard, trying to ride him, prodding him with sticks, to see if they can get him to carry them somewhere for free.
Risk cannot be assessed only on odds. As I read on another blog a few days ago: if I tell you that in crossing a certain grass field you have a 1 in 100 chance of being bitten by a mosquito, you may not give it much thought. But if I give you the same odds for being bitten by a deadly viper, you’ll probably think of it differently. In fact you should.
Are you really, really, unable to see the possible long term consequences of betting our future as a species on something like this?
phlogiston says:
March 28, 2011 at 4:10 pm
But things changed completely within a few short years of the Chernobyl accident in April 1986. The era of Gorbachev, glasnost etc, while imperfect, suddenly made possible open and honest reporting of facts in a way previously unthinkable.
The cover up began immediately, most of the real information was lost in the “official” Soviet recording of the effects. The cover up continued. It is quite absurd to believe that these things changed in the ‘new Glastnost’ era, Gorbachev was a die-hard Communist all through, the same people stayed in power and in the political apparat, if anything, their strength is increased because they now play the West at its own game too. What happened to the free press there…?
Anyway, they don’t care about the few real voices heard about a subject inimical to them because as is fully practised in the West, the meme that hardly anyone died or was affected is now fully backed by “official science” and these voices are swamped by the brainwashed believers produced; because Governments everywhere running nuclear reactors for their still prime purpose, weapons, are like AGWScience, backing it to the hilt right up to global UN level. You and others still believing Soviet Speak can’t tell the difference. Reading your (generic) posts is just like reading Gavin et al, so seriously producing crap scientific reasons to back up the meme regardless that it actually is obviously nonsense, from real observation. And as I’ve said before, even pointing out how this ‘science’ is created doesn’t bother, just another excuse is found to continue justifying believing in it. You, generic, have been thoroughly re-educated.
For example, I give you an example and you completely ignore that the 35 dead were described as being in the prime of life, you come back with a story of the elderly traumatised by being moved.. And then you finish with a real cracker – you say: “Remember that in the 80’s and 90’s life expectancy in the former USSR dipped into the fifties. Radiation of no radiation”. But you’ve excluded radiation.
And you come back with this paragraph giving information from “a radiation scientists at the Ukrainian Radiation Protection service” in answering something I asked you to read carefully. In which deceit is explained as being in the order of the system, that even when people gave true accounts through interpreters, the interpreters would change it. Listen to me carefully, I know and grew up with a large mixed community of survivors from the Second World War, mainly Ukrainians, of those who lived in the Soviet countries and were taken as slave labour to be starved for years and worked to death in Germany after Hitler invaded and forced them to walk to Germany, that was trauma. They lived to ripe old ages, three score and 10+ the norm. So carry on believing that all these old uns after Chernobyl were just sooooo traumatised by moving to less contaminated areas they died because they were unhappy – it’s patent, observable in humanity generally, bullshit. That you, generic, can so readily swallow such nonsense, shows how very efficiently it’s been organised. Please, think about it.
But the rigorous scientific studies aimed at quantifying the radiation carcinogenesis find much less than the extravagantly quoted figures of hundreds of thousands of deaths.
See end of this post.
###
Marje Hecht says:
March 29, 2011 at 1:47 pm
For a useful perspective on Chernobyl radiation and radiophobia, see Zbigniew Jaworowski’s article… etc.
This is a classic example of the manipulation of thinking in the Soviet era that even someone with an otherwise excellent capacity for analytical thought can believe the nonsense he writes. As above my reply to phlogiston. Think about it. Traumatised by “Radiophobia”, or traumatised by seeing the effects of radiation? What would traumatise you more? Seeing members of your family, friends, community die in great numbers, getting horrible cancers and giving birth to physically and mentally deformed children, or traumatised by “the idea” of radiation while seeing no real effects around them? The orphanages in Belarus were full of such children whose parents had died unusually young.. Get in touch with the charities from the West who began helping these early on, ask them what they observed.
###
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
March 28, 2011 at 5:03 pm
Your post is full of the same lame excuses and everything is a cause except radiation. Thank you. It’s because I’ve read such that I’m taking an interest here.
Cancer arises from genetic changes (carcinogenesis). A major source of genetic damage is oxidative damage from Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS.
Your link takes me from ROS’s “ROS are also generated by exogenous sources such as ionizing radiation,”to “Ionizing Radiation – The degree and nature of such ionization depends on the energy of the individual particles (including photons), not on their number (intensity). ….Conversely, even very low-intensity radiation will ionize, if the individual particles carry enough energy (e.g., a low-powered X-ray beam).”
Why the great rise in lung cancers when figures show no correlation between high smoking and lung cancers? So let’s make up “passive smoking” to account for it shall we? Just as we dismiss the extraordinary rise in diabetes as “over indulgence of carbohydrates” rather than the rise in auto-immune diseases from ionizing radiation, and the totally off the wall, “because we’re too clean now”, rather than the breakdown of DNA. All the while COMPLETELY ignoring the tremendously extradordinarily huge amounts of nuclear ionizing radiation bombarding us for all the decades we see these rises, from which these are its known effects.
All:
Re: phlogiston’s “rigorous scientific studies”…
I’ve posted these examples before on:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/20/someone-is-wrong-in-the-msm-about-radiation/
This from March 20, 2011 at 6:30 pm, (please also read the other links I posted here).
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/HoloVsNoProb.html
For an example of how such “rigorous scientific studies” by the official bodies are manipulated to produce the statistics required to down play the real effects of radiation. Again, please, read this carefully, by choosing these particular groups the results are guaranteed. Extrapolating from them is excluding the hundreds of thousands who died and the millions still suffering from the effects. Excluding reality. Observable reality. As the example I gave of the doctor who never had any cases of cancer before Chernobyl, now common. Extrapolate from that!
I also gave a link later to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/samuel-s-epstein/nuclear-power-causes-canc_b_251057.html of yet another planned whitewash rigorous scientific study, my posterior.
Everything you’re regurgitating here has been from the same high powered political/industry governments cover-ups. They’ve got better at it over the decades. Look how successful the AGW brainwashing has been. These nuclear reactors only exist because of their use for producing materials for mass destruction, they don’t give a damn about people…
Please see the other links I posted in that discussion. Until you do, until you, generic, actually make the effort to read and think about what I’m saying as I’ve read and thought about what you’ve said, then we’ll continue to not communicate, to talk past each other.
In summary. Your examples are nonsense because they IGNORE the nuclear elephant in the room in the rise of cancers and diabetes and other auto-immune breakdowns over the last decades, your rigorous scientific studies are nonsense because they make no medical sense. These are clear manipulations of statistics and minds, your minds.
Perhaps my statement that it could never happen was too strong but I have worked in this culture all of my adult life and I do not consider the willful bypassing of safety features to be a credible threat in the USA. The real threats just as WASH 1400 and everything that came after it indicate are common mode failures such as fires and floods.
Regarding your cited TVA case:
A contract electrician was charged TVA was not. “Prosecutors said an investigation that led to the indictment began in August 2010 after TVA inspectors found problems with the wiring.” It seems the story proves my point.
Re:Doug Badgero says:
March 29, 2011 at 6:26 pm
Regarding your cited TVA case:
A contract electrician was charged TVA was not. “Prosecutors said an investigation that led to the indictment began in August 2010 after TVA inspectors found problems with the wiring.” It seems the story proves my point.
Doug:
I guess I writing wasn’t very clear. There are two cases pending. You correctly cite the electrician case. The second most certainly is against TVA. The DOJ is filing charges as reported in the Knoxville News Sentinel (see below). It has been reported elsewhere that the charges include fraudulent technical submissions to the NRC by TVA executives:
KNOXVILLE, Tenn.– Federal prosecutors are filing charges against the Tennessee Valley Authority over the only U.S. site where a nuclear reactor is under construction.
TVA spokesman Scott Brooks says the charges relate to the Watts Bar facility in Spring City, north of Chattanooga. He said he didn’t know the specifics.
Francisco says:
March 29, 2011 at 6:07 pm
[lengthy anti-nuclear diatribe deleted]
“Are you really, really, unable to see the possible long term consequences of betting our future as a species on something like this?”
My first reaction after reading your emotional diatribe was to wonder who you think you are to talk down everyone like this? Did someone appoint you to the task of setting everyone straight? What are your credentials, other than, I suspect, being a left-leaning environmental activist?
For your self-assessed wisdom, you seem remarkably blind to the fact that not everyone sees this issue in the same way as you do. You need to realize that you don’t speak for everyone and you don’t get to appoint yourself as the voice of reason. Speaking only for myself, you might find a more sympathetic audience for this sort of viewpoint elsewhere.
“In summary. Your examples are nonsense because they IGNORE the nuclear elephant in the room in the rise of cancers and diabetes and other auto-immune breakdowns over the last decades, your rigorous scientific studies are nonsense because they make no medical sense. These are clear manipulations of statistics and minds, your minds.”
You mean the “rise of cancers and diabetes and other auto-immune breakdowns” that have coincided with a continuously rising life expectancy? I really do not know what your hypothesis is. Do you believe we receive no background radiation? Do you believe background radiation is somehow less dangerous than man made radiation? I honestly do not know how you reach your conclusions that ANY radiation is so very dangerous.
Claude,
I searched for that story and all I can find is a reference from 5 days ago that charges would be filed regarding Watts Bar. It doesn’t matter much to our points of disagreement but I think the charges were against the electrician. I can find no record of any charges filed against TVA only the electrician. Perhaps just poor choice of words in the earlier article.
Daryl M says:
March 29, 2011 at 7:03 pm
“you seem remarkably blind to the fact that not everyone sees this issue in the same way as you do. You need to realize that you don’t speak for everyone and you don’t get to appoint yourself as the voice of reason. Speaking only for myself, you might find a more sympathetic audience for this sort of viewpoint elsewhere.”
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None of the things you say above make any sense to me.
If I were “remarkably blind” to the fact that not everyone sees this the same way as I do, then I wouldn’t have bothered writing a “diatribe” insisting on my *opposition* to their view. Do you follow that? If I needed to “realize that I don’t speak for everyone,” then I wouldn’t have bothered speaking, because anybody else’s speech would already carry my point of view. If I had “appointed myself as the voice of reason,” then I would have said so. And if I had wanted “sympathy,” then I would have gone preach to the converted elsewhere, as you suggest. But because I didn’t, I haven’t.
Re: Doug Badgero says:
March 29, 2011 at 7:28 pm
“I can find no record of any charges filed against TVA only the electrician. Perhaps just poor choice of words in the earlier article.”
You may be right about that, but I received the news on different days from different sources and both quoting the Knoxville News Sentinel. The following is an AP release that was picked up by Fox referencing the charges against TVA.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/03/24/officials-tva-faces-charges-tied-nuclear-site/?cmpid=cmty_email_Gigya_Officials%3A_TVA_Faces_Charges_Tied_to_Nuclear_Site
In any event, I’ve made my point as well as I can and you have defended the integrity of the nuclear industry ably. I admire your “power plant operator” profession above most others and have always felt a close affinity to plant operators in general, creating most of my designs with their perspective at the forefront. It has been my observations of group and institutional dynamics over the years that have led to much of my skepticism of nuclear safety. I can’t shake the belief that a statistically inevitable “black swan” appearing on the horizon will periodically undo your efforts to keep us all safe from unacceptable consequences.
Claude Harvey
It has been my observations of group and institutional dynamics over the years that have led to much of my skepticism of nuclear safety. I can’t shake the belief that a statistically inevitable “black swan” appearing on the horizon…..
Thank you. I have been paying attention to your comments. I do believe in humankind, I do believe people generally have the best intentions. We would like to believe all nuclear plants around the world will be well watched over. But people are not vigilant 24 hours of the day. And many people don’t think redundancy in safety means a lot, even to some who are educated. After reading your story it only confirmed to me how even intelligent people can be foolish. I wish nuclear power had never been conceived. But that horse is out of the barn. There will be more terrible breakdowns. I cannot believe there are people that actually feel none will happen again. But there were people that actually thought the Titanic was unsinkable. Apparently some in charge on board the night it went down didn’t even believe it either. But a few did know it would. Nothing built by humankind is impervious to disaster. This is why I want the world to head in the direction of coal, but I’m not holding my breath. If there is a coal mining disaster, or if an accident happens at a coal fire power plant, only a few people are affected. It is a sad event. But it does not put an entire hemisphere on alert, waiting and wondering if nuclear fallout will hit where they live.
I am glad to see your viewpoint. Actually, I’m relieved.
Doug Badgero says:
March 29, 2011 at 7:09 pm
Do you believe background radiation is somehow less dangerous than man made radiation?
? At the risk of getting into another long explation about the difference between Light and Heat…, for example, Visible Light is not hot, it doesn’t burn, it doesn’t penetrate the skin to any great depth, but, if it is concentrated artificially it can burn matter because of its high energy, frequency. Like a drill bit, you can turn it gently and tickle the skin, or you can intensify it and drill through stone.
If the Microwave radiation we have as background was as concentrated as we have it artifically in our ovens, we’d all be cooked.
Do you see the difference? Nuclear energy produced in reactors and bombs is highly concentrated, the effects are lethal short and long term. They were designed to be lethal, to kill people in great numbers. The people who designed them to be lethal and want to keep building nuclear reactors to keep producing lethal grade components for weapons, do not give a damn about the people they kill, not directly and not in the fall out, neither in numbers nor in effects.
Any psychologists here? Are sociopaths unable to understand they are included in the cardboard cut-out world view they have of others? It’s a strange kind of insanity, Doug, around 6% of the population is estimated sociopaths. They have no ability to naturally empathise with the problems of others and if this is combined with position of authority and the right programming it can go bad very quickly. Those in financial control of most currencies are particularly adept at choosing such to do their dirty work for them, for example, the glassy eyed Blair a prime one, actually believed that he had been voted into power to rule over the people.. In the end, it appears to me, those who have no concept of self in the other, shouldn’t be encouraged.
Look at the pictures of the deformed babies in Iraq, do you really equate these effects with ‘background’ radiation? Really think a banana can do this? These results are from the depleted uranium manufactured by nuclear reactors, electricity for the oiks is an insignificant by-product to the main reason for these reactors, power and control.
Gorbachev said in 1988 in addressing the UN: “Further global progress is now possible only through a quest for universal consensus in the movement towards a new world order.” Two years later President Bush said before leaving for a meeting in Helsinki with Gorbachev re the Persian Gulf ‘crisis’: “the foundation for the new world order would be laid in Helsinki”, to be established under the United Nations. Now, if you really want to see something funny, try to find the video of Gordon Brown’s speech in Australia not long after he managed to get rid of Blair and take over. He used the phrase “new world order” several times and several variations on that theme, all in about the space of five minutes – not one mention of anything like this in all his time before, no record in Hansard. But in Australia, there he was, the glassy eyed newby full of self-importance spouting the ruling party line. He burned out quickly..
So, there are different aspects to take into consideration in this, but the most important, is to see that the meme this radiation had little effect even from such a great disaster like Chernobyl and can therefore be ignored as a cause when trying to understand the reasons for the rise of its known effects in the general health of populations is deliberate policy, because, downplaying its effects, and now even claiming it’s good for you, is a weapon being used against you. That’s how cons operate, by giving a bit of truth so you don’t see the lie in the next clause. The amount we get from bananas or from flying in aeroplanes over a lifetime is not at all the same as this all in one hit in a few minutes or hours, or even days and weeks and months from it remaining in the physical world around us. Francisco has explained this really clearly. That’s why nurses and doctors and dentists leave the room when they give you an x-ray.
I’m no expert on nuclear power, but I did take university courses about it during the Chernobyl disaster, and toured Hanford Washington and was fed all their lectures about how wonderful nuclear power is and how they had the best designs. During those times, I felt that alot of the so-called experts were in a state of denial. I wish people would stop comparing a nuclear disasters to being an airpilot, getting excessive chest x-rays or living near a uranium deposit. Getting exposed to unnecessary radiation is unnecessary. There is no safe level.
Nuclear meltdown oozing onto cement apparently causes a chemical reaction with radioactive smoke. A layer of water probably adds to the undesirable fumes. That’s poor planning and design.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/29/japan-lost-race-save-nuclear-reactor
Glass is successfully used to encapsulate spent nuclear waste, therefore:
As a defensive meltdown design, I suggest a DEEP pit filled with alternating layers of dry sand and boron. After the first few feet of that there is a thick solid slightly concave disk of corning glass with tubes embedded in the outer area in a coil leaving the center free to allow a melt through by the radioactive lava. The glass disk could be made of segments to allow for stress cracks. Liquid nitrogen is pumped through the tubes circulating through the glass torus, removing heat, and slowing the growing lava blob of radioactive melt that is also accumulating glass and boron. If it melts past the first glass disk, it continues through more alternating layers of sand and boron. The glowing lava then hits several other solid glass torus disks also cooled by liquid nitrogen and separated by more layers of sand and boron. Nitrogen cooling continues in all disks becoming cumulative. The blob will eventually stabilize into a ball or disk coated with glass and boron, and will slowly stop descending as it cools enough. This technique should keep fumes and radioactivity dispersion at a minimum, simplifying control and clean-up.
Water cooling works well for the fuel rods when the plant is operating normally, and under control. But when it overheats and melts, water cooling appears dangerous with generation of explosive Hydrogen and radioactive steam releases. Heat management must shift to a dry method to avoid release of this steam and fumes that spread radioactive debris. A drain at the bottom of the pit would release any reactor coolant spilling into it to keep the pit dry. Manage the heat and you manage the radioactivity.
There is always room in any product for an improved and safer design… especially when the current faulty design results in scaring people to death, warranted or not. It’s our fault to fix… we designed them.
“”PeZzy says:
March 29, 2011 at 9:45 pm
I’m no expert on nuclear power, but I did take university courses about it during the Chernobyl disaster, and toured Hanford Washington and was fed all their lectures about how wonderful nuclear power is and how they had the best designs. During those times, I felt that alot of the so-called experts were in a state of denial. I wish people would stop comparing a nuclear disasters to being an airpilot, getting excessive chest x-rays or living near a uranium deposit. Getting exposed to unnecessary radiation is unnecessary. There is no safe level.””
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You are 100% wrong with your last statement. You are being bombarded as you read this with all manner of radiation. Some of it from radioactive material around you, some from the sun, muons from old supernova are penetrating you continuously. What is missing is education and acceptance of much quality research that has been done in the wake of the 3 big nuclear events of our time, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl.
I quote from an article I posted in a link above:
“The real-life studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors indicate that radiation affects the human body much as arsenic, sodium and many other substances do — they are beneficial in small doses, but can be harmful in overdoses. Yet the conventional scientific wisdom rejects these studies, and a multitude of other real-life studies, in favour of what is known as the Linear No-Threshold Assumption. Under this assumption, all exposure to radiation, no matter how small, is harmful in direct proportion to the dose. It is called an assumption because there is no proof of its validity. In fact, the scientists who espouse it freely admit that no proof for their assumption can ever be had because the risk is too small to measure statistically. In the absence of proof, they say, the only safe course is to assume danger”
Now I just ask you to think about where you are living in the Cosmos. Life could not have evolved without a defense mechanism against radiation, or to put it another way perhaps life has evolved to make use of the low doses of radiation that is about. Perhaps the current background level is historically low. What is likely to happen when our magnetic field flips? What are going to be the effects of both the earth’s magnetic field weakening and that of the Suns? The only sure thing in all of this is we don’t know, and that your statement just could not be true or we would already all be dead. Remember “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”
Since the core of reactor 2 is now in meltdown. Looks like we might have a bit to worry about. Of course, we can sit here from our black rotating computer chairs in our offices or from our over sized fluffy couches, cracks stuffed full of change and remnants of football game snacks and declare that radiation isn’t so bad. Our media is more of an entertainment industry anyway, writing articles loosely based on facts full of assumptions, opinions and hyperbole. We are used to that.
So judge and squabble all you want. Would anyone of you set foot within 30km of that plant to test your theories. If given the option would you eat fish or produce from that prefecture.
Would you voluntarily take your kids into an area that has higher than normal amounts of radiation, if given the choice.
Now Japan has announced that plutonium has been found near the plant. Meltdowns occurred. Just how safe is nuclear power?