Anti-Nuclear Power Hysteria and its Significant Contribution to Global Warming

Godzilla smash you!

So now we have come full circle for Marget Thatcher’s “CO2 is bad” science funding.

I did a different write up about the cost difference if we dropped nuclear for green alternatives.
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/2011/01/nuclear-power-if-you-really-care-about-co2/
The result is the same. As long as people want electricity without CO2 emissions, then nuclear is the only answer.

At the moment the terminally stupid UK government are to demand safety standards on new Nuclear plants in the UK to adhear to irrationally high safety standards thus making them uneconomical to build and run.
It’s obviously just a knee jerk reaction to a forty year old power plant in 9.0 earthquake !
How foolish is that ?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/nuclearpower/8415028/Nick-Clegg-Britains-proposed-nuclear-plants-may-not-be-built.html

No mention of the fact the the military demands for plutonium steered the technology in the 50’s and 60’s away from much safer nuclear power generation methods, such as thorium-based reactors.
So while it may be true that the greens prevented nuclear growth, it is equally true that the military prevented safe nuclear in the first place – without that the greens would have had little grounds to object.

Fail. When the author has graphs that purportedly represent carbon dioxide but have titles saying “carbon emissions,” I get the impression the author is ignorant (at best) or deliberately deceptive (at worst). Anyway, since any warming signal from CO2 is drowned out by the noise from natural variation, the article fails in its premise. How can a colorless gas that is food for plants be considered a pollutant that dirties the planet? Unless a barren world bereft of flora is the author’s ideal planet?

Ursula von den Laien says:
March 30, 2011 at 12:26 am

“[…] Amid increasing fears of workers being exposed to high levels of radiation at the plant, hospitals in Tokyo called on the workers to provide samples of their blood-forming hematopoietic stem cells ahead of possible massive exposure.

Seems like a pretty sensible risk mitigation strategy to me. I would want some kind of insurance if there was even a slight risk of harm from radiation. could you tell us what you point actually was?
If it was that there are risks in nuclear power, you miss the point that the fears appear to be unfounded, and the mitigation is a cheap and effective one that will allay fears in the main. If we did the same for every coal miner, what would we have to do?
How many nuclear power workers have died from their job, and how many coal miners? How many people have died because of hydro-electric dams? Get some perspective!

“Finally, converting the 17.7 billion metric tons of CO2 to carbon results in 4.842 billion, or 4,842 million metric tons of carbon.”
That may be true, but carbon emission isn’t carbon, it’s carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
So the 17.7 billion metric tons should applied to graph not 4.842 billion metric tons

For the record, my opinion on Global Warming can be found here
http://matus1976.blogsome.com/2008/10/24/global-warming-primer-solutions-and-complications-and-my-position/
In short it is that while AGW might plausible it is unproven and is being used by power mongers tapping into our collective remnant of original sin to concentrate even more power into wannabe tyrants while curtailing industrial growth and putting us at a dangerous risk to the numerous other REAL threats to human life, civilization, and all life that only rapid and extensive industrialization can combat.

—Oh goody! More carbon, more plants growing!

I have noted that the Chernobyl disaster has in fact not yet been resolved. It needs to be re-encapsulated but they don’t have the money for it. I would have thought that after the Japan disaster, which, in severity, is beginning to look as bad as the Chernobyl disaster, nobody in their right mind would still want to propogate nuclear energy. Rather stick to using natural gas. The extra carbon dioxide is just fine!
A bigger carbon footprint is better!
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok

Sometimes ignorance and superstition beats logic and reason. Good post.

Really no comparison here. CO2 is as risk-free as any substance can be, while nuclear power is demonstrably not so.

Is anyone who is pro-nuclear actually aware that accidents like the one in Fukishima are supposedly happening every 17000 years, according to Official Doctrine, and that we have already witnessed 4 (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Mayak, Fukushima) over the last 42 years, not to mention a far larger number of near-accidents?
That means that the statistics are wrong and misguiding. Let’s assume more realistically with a maximum likelihood approach on the basis of the empirical data we have now that roughly every 15 years (if we optimistially assume that 3 Mile Island wasn’t too bad in its consequences), we will render large areas of our planet uninhabitable, and then have to guard these areas for centuries, and they still cause nasty disease and genetic defects in the population. Every 15 years on average. Now, do you still like the nuclear option?
This analysis doesn’t even mention yet the invisible costs of safety management, and waste processing.
Cheers,
JP

C777 says:
March 30, 2011 at 1:38 am
At the moment the terminally stupid UK government are to demand safety standards on new Nuclear plants in the UK to adhear to irrationally high safety standards thus making them uneconomical to build and run.
It’s obviously just a knee jerk reaction to a forty year old power plant in 9.0 earthquake !
How foolish is that ?
====================
This attitude is discouraging. There is no such thing as”irrationally high safety standards” when the objective is trying to ensure that someting as uniquely nasty as a major nuclear plant accident occurs. If you are going to have nuclear plants, the standards have to be high, sky high, to ensure at all costs that these messes cannot happen. If our current technology does not allow us to ensure this, then we wait until it does.
The 40-year old bit and the 9.0 earthquake bit don’t make sense either. There are many old nuclear plants in the world. And as for big earthquakes, they are also part of our world — we cannot legislate them out of existence.
This kind of stuff needs to be prevented at all costs:
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/elephants-foot.html
And until someone demonstrates that CO2 can accomplish anything remotely similar, carbon emissions should be left out of the discussion.

Great graphs!
Another factor that happened at roughly the same time for roughly the same reason: we stopped building hydroelectric dams around 1970. Part of the reason at that point was just good old NIMBY. Later the Greens enforced the ban with the anti-scientific and anti-Darwinian Endangered Species Act. But more dams wouldn’t help nearly as much as more nukes, because (as Patrick Moore points out) the biggest and best hydro rivers in North America are already dammed.

Jer0me says:
March 30, 2011 at 2:38 am
“How many nuclear power workers have died from their job, and how many coal miners?”
The salient question would be how many uranium miners have died from their jobs.
You people seem to think uranium fuel rods grow in trees. One might also inquire about how many nuclear weapons there would be on this planet if there weren’t any nuclear power plants churning out the fissionable materials required to make them.
Once one rightly eliminates lower carbon emission as a virture then nuclear power is all downside and no upside.

Don’t me wrong though. If nuclear power were cheaper than coal I’d be singing a different tune. I’m all for cheap, renewable, abundant, clean energy with my priorities in that order. If it isn’t first and foremost less expensive than extant sources then I’m not going to get very excited about it. Energy cost is a major component in just about everything that raises living standards. Higher cost means lowered living standards and vice versa. My interest is in continued rise of living standards i.e. the greatest good for the greatest number. Increasing the cost of energy and lowering the amount of atmospheric CO2 are both counter-productive to rising standard of living.

Carbon is not Carbon Dioxide. I wish the experts would get that straight.

I am generally pro-nuclear power. I took physics classes in a lecture hall on top of one. However, I have always found it odd that the right was pro-nuclear as nuclear power involves big government subsides and protections. Ironic? It is indeed tragic that the left became so invested in being anti-nuclear power. Of course, there are real risks and legitimate fears and I am leery that a right leaning administration would be negligent in enforcing safety. I’d prefer the approval process was easier but the inspection and enforcement was very tough.
Today many environmental activists are pro-nuclear power but many are not. It seems the current administration will continue to push for nuclear with Republican support. For a pro-nuclear power pro-climate change mitigation site see: http://bravenewclimate.com/

Chris Wright says:
March 30, 2011 at 3:31 am
“This is where I part company with the author. Almost certainly the mild global warming we experienced in the last century was of vast benefit for the world. History shows that the world is stormier when it’s cold (during the Little Ice Age there were storms in Europe that individually killed around 100,000 people), and that mankind has prospered when the world was warmer. Almost certainly AGW is wrong and CO2 has very little effect on the climate, as demonstrated by the ice cores.”
Right on.
“Over the next few decades nuclear and coal are the best options. Hopefully by around 2050 fusion will become viable. It promises an abundant source of cheap and clean energy.”
Fusion isn’t going to be viable until materials are invented that can withstand for long the intense environment of the reaction chamber. So far there is nothing conceivable that can do it. And that’s just one hurdle albeit the worst one IMO – a real show stopper. “Abundant source of cheap and clean energy”… where I have I heard that before? Oh yeah, back in the 1960’s they were saying that about nuclear power. That didn’t pan out either due to the same class of problems – initial capital cost and ongoing maintenance expense. At least nuclear fission reactors were known to be possible and practical at the time which is more than you can say for fusion even after 50 years of R&D.
Synthetic biology is the next revolutionary technology. It’s imminent. Mark my words.

@C777 says: March 30, 2011 at 1:38 am
“At the moment the terminally stupid UK government are to demand safety standards on new Nuclear plants in the UK to adhear to irrationally high safety standards thus making them uneconomical to build and run.
It’s obviously just a knee jerk reaction to a forty year old power plant in 9.0 earthquake !
How foolish is that ?”
As foolish as you might expect from the Coalition (or the Tories, or the Dims, or Labour, or the Greens).
Don’t forget that the LibDem Election 2010 manifesto promised 100% carbon emission cuts by 2050 without nuclear.
Don’t forget both Clegg & Cameron have direct personal financial interests (through spouse / spouse’s father) in BigWind.
From the Telegraph piece you quote:-
“They [the next generation power stations] have to be safe, and we cannot let the taxpayer be ripped off, which is what they always have been in the past.”
Which is why they like BigWind? No rip-off there, surely?
Lastly, a superb piece from The Register:-
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/28/osbourne_new_green_elite/
Truly, we are governed by a bunch of greedy, dogmatic incompetents.
And as Roy Spencer has pointed out, the war on Global Warming is, in reality, a war on the poor.

Highly interersting reading about electrical energy basics here:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/10/18/tcase4/
Brgds/TJ

“If you want to spur the economy, stop global warming, and undermine the oil-fueled, terrorist-breeding, murderous theocracies of the world, the solution is simple: build nuclear power plants.”
———-
Building nuclear plants will have no effect on despots and terrorist theocracies—oil is used primarily for transportation not electrical generation. Only increasing domestic production will put the squeeze on the Middle East, Venezuela et al.

RobB says:
March 30, 2011 at 12:44 am

Couldn’t agree more. Question is, how do we change attitudes now?

The solution: http://pesn.com/2011/02/28/9501774_Future_Impact_of_Rossis_Cold_Fusion/

While this article is bright and well-written, it misses the point trying to show reason to the econuts. Their real objective is to take us back to preindustrial times. Coal is evil, so is nuclear, and comparing them is irrelevant for them, except as the argument of the moment. Imagine you managed to switch from coal to nuclear, decreasing CO2 emissions by 50%. The econuts would at once start attacking nuclear plants for being extremely dangerous. And so on and on. To the paleolithic and far beyond.

Nuclear is only our best route IF the effects of more CO2 emissions are as risky as the inevitable occasional releases of radioactive material.
It seems increasingly likely that the effects of CO2 emissions have been grossly overstated.
So the Law of Unintended Consequences applies. In an effort to avoid unproven risks we are now being pushed in a demonstrably riskier direction by many of those who profess to be supporting risk reduction.
In the meantime there are new technologies being researched that could greatly help to reduce reliance both on fossil fuels and nuclear energy.
We should stick with fossil fuels and use them freely but invest heavily in research into sensible non nuclear alternatives. Solar and windpower are NOT sensible alternatives.
On the basis that CO2 is not as problematic as first thought we should be looking at timescales of a century or two to stabilise global population and find more sustainable energy production systems.
Time for all policy makers to take a deep breath and to take stock.

I work at a nuclear plant. Carbon/CO2 emissions are irrelevent other pollutants from fossil fuels are relevent but should not turn us completely away from fossel fuels. The legitimate economic benefit of nuclear is it provides some price stability to changing fossil fuel prices. If you believe nat gas will stay cheap for at least the next 60 years then we should build NOTHING but combined cycle nat gas plants. If you would like to buy some of tomorrow’s electricity generation with today’s dollars then nuclear has some merit. Existing nuclear plants are some of the cheapest generation on the grid because they have low O&M costs. The only source that is consistently cheaper is hydro when available.

Well Patrick You are making a bad choice. I will take Nuclear over absolutely any other source for long term safety and environmental impact. Even the primitive plants affected by the earthquake in Japan are hugely safer and cleaner than any possible alternative.
Think about it, If they had been top of the line coal plants wouldn’t the ground water be permanently polluted for many miles around? Wouldn’t everyone working at the plant be dead already? In fact wouldn’t the radiation released into the environment be higher? The answer is, of course, yes to all of these questions.

Dave Springer says:
March 30, 2011 at 5:36 am

Increasing the cost of energy and lowering the amount of atmospheric CO2 are both counter-productive to rising standard of living.

I would suggest that were nuclear power generation more widely accepted and used the cost would naturally be significantly lower. That’s just how economics works. Add an hysterical fear of radiation, and various “social” priorities to the mix, then it starts getting expensive.
Radiophobia — or an irrational fear of radiation — is, in my half-wit opinion, the sole reason for the ridiculous cost of nuclear power generation. Far, far more people die from skin cancer caused by the sun, yet there is no rush to ban daylight.

Supercritical carbon dioxide (S-CO2) is, I believe, used as an extraction solvent for decaffeinating coffee, dry cleaning, extracting hash oil ( from cannabis), determining PAH levels and, by drug companies, in the production of nano particles .
Now researchers at Sandia National Laboratories are shortly hoping to be able to demonstrate vastly improved power generation using S-CO2 Brayton-cycle turbines.
They hope to demonstrate that thermal-to-electric conversion efficiency will be increased by 50 percent for nuclear power stations equipped with steam turbines, or 40 percent for gas turbines.
https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/brayton-cycle-turbines/

I note that virtually none of the advocates of increased
use of fission reactors will discuss accelerated
additional research funding for fusion reactors.
Fusion reactions don’t require uranium or plutonium for
fuel. They don’t generate the cesium, iodine, strontium
or other isotopes that come with fission reactions.
If you advocate nuclear and mean fusion for power
generation in the future, I’m right there with you.
Otherwise, I’ll go with “clean coal” technologies.

OT but WUWT might want to “nail” this webpage for posterity just in case they remove it (which will of course happen soon)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200506/s1389858.htm

With nuclear, gas, coal and oil power all being attacked by irrationality beyond reason, I shall take note of likely future trends and get “ahead of the wave” in selecting a nice, natural cave to live in and try to corner the market in stone age tools ahead of the “green” idiots forcing us all to live like stone age cavemen!

Someone commented on “land will never be inhabitable again”.
This is simply not true. Chernobyl is nearing normal levels (you can visit, but I wouldn’t recommend living there for a year), and I guess all those people currently living in Hiroshima are just figments of our collective imagination?
@ “How about all the uranium miners who have been killed” – a simple price floor on uranium (doubling it) would make it economically feasible to extract it from seawater with virtually no increase in the cost of actual nuclear power plants. This would also solve any “we’ll run out in 50 years!” nonsense doomsayers.
@ “BUT CO2 IS NOT BAD” – CO2 is not the only bad thing produced by fossil-fuel burning plants. I challenge you to inhale burning coal straight into your lungs.
Yes, nuclear is a much worse option if a bunch of random fears you learned from movies about it were true. Luckily, they aren’t.

Do you really expect people to be logical and consistent? Particularly the anti-nuke and anti-fossil fuel people whose zealotry is driven by feelings and not facts? Dealing with the real-world, and the messy trade-offs it entails, is not one of their key strengths.

It’s not about CO2.
It’s about a new totalitarian doctrine.
http://green-agenda.com

May I remind those who think coal is cheap that this cost kept cheap by miners paying with their blood.
Emotional twaddle? Not at all:
“The Senghenydd Colliery Disaster, also known as the Senghenydd Explosion, occurred in Senghenydd [1], near Caerphilly, Glamorgan, South Wales on 14 October 1913, killing 439 miners. It is the worst Mining accident in the United Kingdom, and one of the most serious in terms of loss of life globally since.”
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senghenydd_Colliery_Disaster
And that doesn’t take the long-lasting diseases into account which affet miners (google ‘black lung disease ..’)
So think before you condemn more generations to such a dangerous life – and think how ‘cheap’ coal will suddenly become if miners were paid the danger geld they surely deserve.
Or are you planning to go down the mines to hew coal yourselves?

i think we need a real BIG north american nuclear disaster before people finally understand that Nuclear Power in the way of Uranium and Plutonium is NOT the way of the future. It’s unfortunate that with the Chernobyl disaster and the ever evolving Fukushima disaster, people still don’t quite grasp the instability of Nuclear Power and the deadly consequences should something go wrong.
Watts. I would appreciate it if this site could publish an article on the subject of Thorium since little is known about it. If one already exists, is there a link to it?

Michio Kaku is a co-author on string theory. I have been trying to chew my way through a book on string theory but after watching Michio Kaku on the news about the Japanese nuke issue me thinks I will add the book to my garage sale.

This article is bunk! The AGW theory is dead and I’m not happy you even posted this weak and hysterical screed here. Our nuclear plants and our NRC are poorly run and the NRC itself is incompetent. We need a massive scientific effort on the scale of the Manhattan Project to power this country. We can build the sodium tank farm solar project outlined in Scientific American 3 years ago and that would provide a great deal of energy. there are also other areas to explore that never get mentioned.

Still no solution for storing spent fuel safely. There is no Nuclear plant that a private insurance company will insure. The results of radiation exposure take 20-30 years to become fully obvious (of which makes it difficult to isolate as the direct cause).
So the true costs of Nuclear power (most of which are being pushed into the future) do not make it a viable option. You can see when a disaster strikes, just like war, the first casualty is the truth. We can’t have a technology where you get BS when something goes wrong.

TheFlyingOrc … tell that to the kids with deformities, leukemia etc. etc.

Look at all that O2 in CO2. I think O2 is being given a free pass in this issue.
It occurred to me that if we got rid of all the O2, it would prevent any more CO2 from forming. That would mitigate the warming and save the planet… taa daa !
Sometimes my insight is truly “breath-taking”… just as it would be in having success with this scenario. /sarc.

What’s a pound?

I would take nuke power even at the cost of wind or solar.
At least I know the nuke will give constant electrons to run my stuff.
Not so with wind or solar.
Raise the construction and operational safety standards and it will still be cheaper and better than green machines.

Dave Springer,
Actually only breeder reactors produce plutonium, the stuff nuclear arms are made of. Almost all commercial nuclear reactors for power generation are PWR’sand BWR’s which don’t produce plutonium.
Navy Bob,
There is the Boone Pickens solution: convert to natural gas for transportation, use other, in this case nuclear, for electrical generation. For the US this would result in a reduction in petroleum consumption.

What a pathetic text. So we are seeing in WUWT the same tricks we are seeing in G.Warming sites and MSM media. Wonderful…

Francisco says:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/30/anti-nuclear-power-hysteria-and-it%e2%80%99s-significant-contribution-to-global-warming/#comment-632638
I knew nuclear was not safe – there are just too many things that can go wrong, especially with the waste.
in fact, one of the reasons why I started to study “global warming” was people starting to push for nuclear as the best possible ” alternative” for fossil fuel.
I am afraid we have not seen the end of Fukishima yet- the worst is still to come.
The whole plant needs to be encapsulated but you cannot go near. I think the helicopter pilots who threw that water on already got too much radiation. The poor workers at Chernobyl had the same problem. They did their best to encapsulate it and have all died since. Unfortunately they failed – it now still needs to be re-encapsulated but the country does not have the money for it.
Better stick to natural gas, or, like you suggest, use coal and then remove the heavy metals, CO and SO2.
We agree on the fact that more CO2 is just fine! The bigger your carbon footprint the better it is for nature.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok

Nomen Nescio:
I think more specifically, the solution is best defined by Robert Bryce — Natural gas (short term) to nuclear, preferably Gen IV design (longer term). See his book, Power Hungry. http://robertbryce.com/node/343

@Norman Nescio (con’t)
Light water reactors (LWR) are said to be “proliferation resistant”. This is because an LWR must be shut down to remove the fuel. If a gigawatt LWR reactor producing electricity commercially is shut down after just 4 months of operation it is difficult to impossible to hide the early shutdown from the IEAA. PWR and BWR reactors can have fuel rods surreptitiously removed early without shutting down the reactor and thus it is far more difficult for the IEAA to detect that activity.
FWIW now you know and hopefully won’t the mistake of thinking that only specialized nuclear reactors can be used to generate weapons grade plutonium.

[[[Ralph says:
March 30, 2011 at 12:40 pm ]]]
Ralph, a lot of those fireballs look just like the surface of the sun.
It’s not ironic that the sun is where all that energy originally came from… combined with life itself. All fossil fuels are a gift from the sun, a nuclear furnace.
We could not have developed our civilizations without fossil fuels, and we still need them in large quantities, even to transition to alternate sources of energy. They are a blessing.
We must respect any form of energy’s power and toxicity. At breakfast, I never drink a glass of gasoline to get me started… I know it would kill me, but it’s great for the car. Good judgment and operational designs of systems rule the day here.

vboring says:
March 30, 2011 at 12:16 pm
“There are also second order effects because energy prices would be lower – the existing fleet of nuclear power plants in the US produces power for 2c/kWh.”
That’s nonsense. Combined cycle natural gas produces electricity for close to half the price of nuclear ($0.69/mwh vs. $1.14/mwh). Conventional coal comes in at $0.95/mwh. I don’t know what costs you’re leaving out but they must be huge. You’re probably only comparing the cost of the fuel which is a large fraction of the cost of running a gas or coal plant and only a small fraction of a nuclear plant. The capital, maintenance, and decommissioning costs are what drives up the price of nuclear generated electricity.

KLA says:
March 30, 2011 at 1:08 pm
Plutonium usable for nuclear weapons is ONLY produced in specialized plutonium generator reactors. The reason is the high purity required for weaponizable Pu. It has to be better than 99% pure Pu239

Oh I see, so “proliferation risk” is just a fairy tale.
Not.
93% Pu-239 is the magic number for bomb making although the plutonium weapon dropped on Japan in WWII was less than 90% Pu-239 and it worked well enough.
I do need to correct a mistake I made. PWR and BWR reactors are sub-types of light water reactors and must be shut down to remove the fuel. Thus it’s easy for the IEAA to determine that PWR and BWR reactors have been shut down early when the fuel has a high percentage of weapons grade plutonium. After operating for four continuous months enough Pu-240 has accumulated to make it unsuitable for reliable high yield weapons. However even the normal spent fuel from an LWR (30% Pu-240) makes a jim dandy dirty bomb that will do greater harm from poisoning the air and land with plutonium particles (Pu-240 is just as toxic as Pu-239) than a clean bomb would do from blast radius alone. The greater the concentration of Pu-239 the less plutonium is left over after the bomb detonates.

Lady Life Grows says:
March 30, 2011 at 11:11 am
“All this assumes the nuke industry is telling the truth about risks and deaths.”
Tobacco and nuclear power industry boffins appear to be indistinguishable in this regard. Follow the money.

Some responses to some of my responses:
Apparently there is a problem with the concrete sarcophagus around Chernobyl. They’re working on re-sealing it. This isn’t that bad.
And at the person who said “look at all the children with the deformities” – I specifically said you can visit but you wouldn’t want to live there for a year. And yes, you CAN visit the area. You can even pay for a guided tour. Also, all birth defects in the area are attributed to Chernobyl (even though, y’know, birth defects happen everywhere sometimes), and the majority of the damage from the blast comes from Radiated Iodine getting into milk, which then caused Thyroid cancer in children (this is luckily one of the easiest types of cancer to treat).
Chernobyl was awful, let’s not mince words. It was, however, not as bad as we thought it was going to be, and it doesn’t even compare to the worst hydroelectric disaster in terms of loss of life/damage.
And Fukushima is so far removed from that that it’s laughable. Fukushima cannot generate the continuous graphite fire that caused the radiation from Chernobyl to spread so badly.
And, of course, coal kills thousands every year, even if you’re a climate change skeptic. Coal miners get crushed, plants explode, and lots of things other than CO2 are released into the atmosphere. Nuclear isn’t a magic bullet, but it’s the best weapon in our arsenal by a long shot.

Does anyone know what a mound of nuclear fuel pellets (no zirconium cladding, but enough to start a reaction) piled on a sand dune in the dry desert would do?
Does it just keep getting hotter and hotter until it vaporizes and creates uranium gas?
Is that the end result of an unimpeded meltdown… radioactive gas… ?
or don’t we know?
I know that silica has a boiling point, that seems to indicate a gaseous state for silica.
Thinking of glass boiling away is difficult to visualize…
Did the US or anyone else ever conduct a nuclear “meltdown” experiment ?
At the time, I probably would have done that if I were boss during the 50’s or 60’s just out of curiosity. I can’t imagine them not having done that.
I can’t imagine the residual effects of that being any worse than the thousands of nuclear bombs that we set off…
Enquiring minds want to know…

Dave Springer says:
March 30, 2011 at 5:15 am
Jer0me says:
March 30, 2011 at 2:38 am
“How many nuclear power workers have died from their job, and how many coal miners?”
The salient question would be how many uranium miners have died from their jobs.
And the salient answer to your salient question is a bloody site fewer. Hundreds die every month worldwide in coal mines, a tiny fraction of this in uranium mines. Since nuclear power is much more concentrated in a smaller volume of ore than the chemical energy in coal, less mining is needed, so less deaths. Mine deaths are all tragic even if they are Chinese.
You people seem to think uranium fuel rods grow in trees. One might also inquire about how many nuclear weapons there would be on this planet if there weren’t any nuclear power plants churning out the fissionable materials required to make them.
And it is questionable whether “you person” have even come down out of your tree. Strange – on other questions here about climate here on WUWT you seem knowledgable and balanced, but on the nuclear question you are irrationally hysterical and delusional. What happened to unhinge your views on this subject?
What is wrong with nuclear weapons? Cant be un-invented. What would you like, for the USA and NATO to unilaterally disarm? The nation making nuclear weapons the fastest today is Pakistan. Go and spend a few months there haranguing them to stop making nukes – and while you’re at it, throw in a few insults against the prophet Muhammed.
Once one rightly eliminates lower carbon emission as a virture then nuclear power is all downside and no upside.
Please list for us the litany of deaths and disasters that have befallen the nation of France as a result of having derived 80% of their electricity from nuclear power for the last few decades. By your “logic”, there cant be many of them left by now. But then again, maybe they’re no better than the Chinese.

kbray, in the absence of a moderator, it does nothing, and there is no nuclear reaction. It simply radiates.
Yes, there was indeed a nuclear meltdown experiment. It’s called Three Mile Island. As the fuel melted, it flowed down the sides of the vessel. As such, the surface area increased, thus increasing the rate of cooling, and it solidified into a solid mass at the bottom. What TMI demonstrated is that the China Syndrome is in fact impossible for power reactors, because the fuel doesn’t have enough thermal energy to melt through the vessel.
The consequence of all melting of nuclear fuel is a solidified mass in the bottom of the vessel as long as the vessel has not been breached by some external force. It may be radioactive, but there’s no nuclear chain reaction in the absence of a moderator.
Under more controlled conditions, all nuclear fuel is tested for its consequences under destruction so that the effects are known. Please try to understand this; no nuclear reactor can explode like a nuclear bomb. It is literally impossible because the quantity of fissile material is far too low.

@Bob sykes
“We have some 300 reactors or so in service. So the likelihood of a single reactor of all these having an accident in 40 years is more like 70%.”
For your probability calculations to begin to work you have to disregard the fact that the Fukushima nuclear power plants didn’t have any accidents what so ever. It was mother nature that had an upheaval and that’s not an accident but a natural disaster.

Nuclear Power gets CO2 taxed and demonised in the UK…

UK government introduces carbon floor price
The UK has become the first country in the world to introduce a carbon price floor for the power generation sector. Chancellor George Osborne announced in his budget speech today that the government will introduce a floor price for carbon from 1 April 2013, aimed at “driving investment in the low-carbon power sector.” He said that the price floor will start at around £16 ($26) per tonne of carbon dioxide and follow a linear path to £30 ($49) per tonne in 2020. Osborne said that the government intends to introduce relief for carbon capture and storage and combined heat and power (CHP), and remove an existing exemption in the climate change levy for electricity CHP plants supply indirectly to an energy consumer. The carbon floor is expected to generate revenues of £740 million ($1.2 billion) in 2013-14, £1.07 billion ($1.74 billion) in 2014-15, and £1.41 billion ($2.29 billion) in 2015-16. Vincent de Rivaz, CEO of EDF Energy, commented: “It is important that the UK maintains momentum for investment in secure, low-carbon and affordable energy including nuclear, renewables and carbon capture and storage.” He added, “Investment in low carbon energy will provide a massive boost to the UK economy, creating billions of pounds of business opportunities and thousands of jobs.” De Rivaz noted, “For nuclear, helping to restore the carbon price to what was originally intended is important to encourage investment in existing plants and in new build.”
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/indtalk.aspx

While nature and reality responds at Fukushima in Japan…

Japan Weighs Entombing Nuclear Plant in Bid to Halt Radiation
Japan will consider pouring concrete into its crippled Fukushima atomic plant to reduce radiation and contain the worst nuclear disaster in 25 years.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano yesterday ruled out the possibility that the two undamaged reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s six-unit Dai-Ichi plant would be salvaged. Units 1 through 4 suffered from explosions, presumed meltdowns and corrosion from seawater sprayed on radioactive fuel rods after a March 11 earthquake and tsunami cut power to reactor cooling systems.
Workers have averted the threat of a total meltdown by injecting water into the damaged reactors for the past two weeks. The complex’s six units are connected with the power grid and two are using temporary motor-driven pumps. Work to repair the plant’s monitoring and cooling systems has been hampered by discoveries of hazardous radioactive water.
The risk to workers might be greater than previously thought because melted fuel in the No. 1 reactor building may be causing isolated, uncontrolled nuclear chain reactions, Denis Flory, nuclear safety director for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said at a press conference in Vienna.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-30/record-high-levels-of-radiation-found-in-sea-near-crippled-nuclear-reactor.html

The Fukushima-Daiichi Incident, Dr. Matthias Braun, AREVA, March 29, 2011
http://energyfromthorium.com/pps/FukushimaDaiichiAREVA.pps

[[[ brackets for Colin ]]] ( for kbray )
[[[ Colin says:
March 30, 2011 at 3:37 pm
kbray, in the absence of a moderator, it does nothing, and there is no nuclear reaction. It simply radiates. ]]]
kbray (I am not convinced of what you say because within the reactor, the correct number of fuel rods are close enough together to hit each other with neutrons, causing an excitement reaction and the release of heat. Boron control rods can be inserted between the fuel rod clusters to halt the reaction. Putting that same quantity of nuclear fuel pellets in a pile on the sand would allow an identical reaction to occur as is inside the reactor, but no way to stop it. It is a proximity event.)
[[[ Yes, there was indeed a nuclear meltdown experiment. It’s called Three Mile Island. As the fuel melted, it flowed down the sides of the vessel. As such, the surface area increased, thus increasing the rate of cooling, and it solidified into a solid mass at the bottom. What TMI demonstrated is that the China Syndrome is in fact impossible for power reactors, because the fuel doesn’t have enough thermal energy to melt through the vessel.]]]
kbray ( T-M-I does not qual-i-fy.) (there was probably water in the reactor, there was zirconium, and it was not an experiment, it was a mistake. Plus everything was done to stop it. Sorry. I want to eliminate most of those variables in my setup.)
[[[ The consequence of all melting of nuclear fuel is a solidified mass in the bottom of the vessel as long as the vessel has not been breached by some external force. It may be radioactive, but there’s no nuclear chain reaction in the absence of a moderator.]]]
kbray ( what moderator are you speaking of…? a WUWT moderator ? … you must mean like boron…? A nuclear bomb explosion needs exacting conditions. It needs the right kind of fuel, and it needs a spherical compressive explosion to slam the molecules together to create the fission. Of course, that cannot occur in a meltdown, even with a hydrogen bang. The problem is that the nuclear fuel can boil a lot of water during its lifetime and that energy has to be dissipated over time somehow or the reaction needs to be slowed by interference from a neutron absorber.)
[[[ Under more controlled conditions, all nuclear fuel is tested for its consequences under destruction so that the effects are known. Please try to understand this; no nuclear reactor can explode like a nuclear bomb. It is literally impossible because the quantity of fissile material is far too low. ]]]
[[[ controlled conditions ? tested for its consequences ? under destruction ? effects are known ?]]] kbray ( What are you talking about ? and I never implied it could explode.)
kbray ( Colin, suppose a nuclear fuel rod was traveling into earth’s atmosphere from outer space at the speed of a meteor say 50,000 mph… Most meteors burn up in the atmosphere and vaporize before they hit earth. This radioactive fuel rod will also vaporize as it hits the atmosphere, unless uranium behaves in some different manner than I know of.
As it vaporizes, it must be leaving a radioactive trail of oxidized ash. But in the end, alas, it is gone… vanished. The uranium has to be somewhere, where does it go ? And is it still radioactive ?)

Malaga View says:
March 30, 2011 at 5:13 am
Rational minds can understand easily that nuclear powered electricity generation is the sensible path to follow provided you don’t disclose the true costs
No, no, nuclear is great. No such thing as cost not talked about. Nuclear is cheaper than coal.
Rational minds can understand easily that nuclear powered electricity generation is the sensible path to follow provided future generations keep paying your nuclear waste disposal bills
No, no, no such thing as depleted rods problem. Nuclear is safe. Nuclear is great.
/sarc/

[[[ harrywr2 says:
March 30, 2011 at 4:24 pm
kbray in California says:
March 30, 2011 at 2:47 pm
Does anyone know what a mound of nuclear fuel pellets (no zirconium cladding, but enough to start a reaction) piled on a sand dune in the dry desert would do?
If someone could start a nuclear reaction by just piling a mound of uranium pellets in the desert we would have a lot to worry about. How many old nuclear bombs do you think are sitting somewhere ‘out in the desert’? ]]]
kbray ( I see there is big confusion here between a slow nuclear reaction ( a power plant) and a nuclear chain reaction (a bomb). The reaction in a nuclear power plant can be started and stopped at will. It is one type of nuclear reaction. Think of it like lying down on a tanning bed and turning the tanning lights on…. fairly harmless. The reaction in an atom bomb is an “out of control” nuclear chain reaction happening all at once with a tremendous release of energy. It is also a type of nuclear reaction but it cannot be stopped, and is finished in fractions of a second. Think of it like…. well… a big mushroom cloud..!!!! Please stay away from those and don’t do this at home !! That can never happen at a power plant. There is no comparison between the two.) ( I’m also certain one can start a little “glowing campfire” in the desert, if the pile of radioactive pellets, that is what is inside a fuel rod, is large enough. It would glow and get hot…. but to what natural end result ? That is my unanswered question.)

Pamela Gray:
So which country is rich in rocks that can be used as nuclear fuel? Could the US just be exchanging one form of dependence for another?
The worldwide production of uranium in 2009 amounted to 50,572 tonnes, of which 27% was mined in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan, Canada, and Australia are the top three producers and together account for 63% of world uranium production. Other important uranium producing countries in excess of 1000 tonnes per year are Namibia, Russia, Niger, Uzbekistan, and the United States. (Uranium mining in Wikipedia)

1DandyTroll says:
March 30, 2011 at 4:09 pm
For your probability calculations to begin to work you have to disregard the fact that the Fukushima nuclear power plants didn’t have any accidents what so ever. It was mother nature that had an upheaval and that’s not an accident but a natural disaster.
==================
This kind of reasoning is apt for vaudeville, and there is a lot of it here. The cause of an accident does not eliminate the accident. All accidents have some cause or other. There was a nuclear accident that was caused by a natural disaster. The natural disaster did not erase the nuclear accident by causing it. Quite the opposite: it brought it into existence. By bringing it into existence, nature proved that the accident was possible, and it proved it beyond all doubt. And if it was possible, then it must be part of probability calculations.
Note that your reasoning, if it were valid, could be extended to any cause you happen to dislike. If a plant operator receives the wrong medication from his psychiatrist and sabotages the nuclear plant in the middle of the night, you could say it wasn’t an accident, it was just a crazy operator gone wild, or an incompetent psychiatrist…and so on with any cause you care to imagine.
Believe me: there was a nuclear accident in Japan recently.

Perhaps the title should be changed to:
Anti-Nuclear Power Hysteria and its Significant Contribution to Panic Among Blog Commentors
Seriously, this is quite amazing!
I stand in awe at the sheer misinformation, parading around as TRUE FACTS. Is it Nuke0phobia? Atomiphobia? Irrational bogeyman fears? Blind terror?

kbray,
A pile of new nuclear fuel will produce negligible amounts of heat and can not go critical without a moderator present since uranium is a thermal neutron fuel. That is, it absorbs neutrons that are at thermal equilibrium with their surroundings. The moderator is what thermalizes the neutrons in a reactor. In a typical US reactor the moderator is light water, at Chernobyl it was graphite, at CANDU plants it is heavy water.
Spent nuclear fuel produces heat but not from fission. It produces heat due to the decay of the radioactive elements that are produced in an operating reactor. As a source of heat it is just like any other source of heat. How hot it gets will be dependent on how much energy it is producing and how much energy is being removed from it via thermodynamic processes; heat transfer via convection, conduction and radiation. The amount of heat produced by the fuel would be dependent on the power history of the reactor it came from and time since shutdown. The rate of heat transfer away from the spent fuel would depend on the same things heat transfer always depends on………….insulation, fluid flow (liquids and gasses) around the “pile”, and the temperature of its surroundings, etc. Fuel pellets are ceramic and melt at about 5000F. At these temperatures, especially in a desert, I think uninsulated pellets would never melt because they would reach equilibrium due to radiation heat transfer. A big enough pile would be self insulating and might melt in its interior but it still ain’t a reactor. Its just a really hot pile of radioactive spent fuel. If you stand next to an unshielded pile of spent fuel your dead though so I wouldn’t plan on roasting marshmallows.

I’d still like to see a thread dissecting the pros/cons of Thorium reactors.
I have a big gripe with spent fuel rods containing 95% unreacted UO2 lying around in pools of water looking for an excuse to have an accident. I have an even bigger gripe with Plutonium being generated, which is highly poisonous stuff that kills in the ppb range.
So, can we replace current reactors with Thorium/Uranium salt solutions and avoid having spent fuel rods littering the plants? And what about the Plutonium?

Doug Badgero says:
March 30, 2011 at 8:02 pm
Thanks Doug,
It was confusing me that the reactor core needs water (the moderator) in order to initiate the thermal reaction, but yet overheats and melts when it runs out of water. One would logically wonder that if the reactor were to be drained during an active thermal reaction, and it needs the water to make it work, why doesn’t it just stop? I made the assumption that water was only needed for cooling and as a steam transfer medium. I see now that it is required for the reaction as well… surprise! That changes the whole concept. The Wikipedia article I read was not clear on those “minor” details for me….
So again, why doesn’t the reactor just stop dead by draining out the core water if it needs the water to produce the reaction? That relationship is not clear to me yet. And why does it keep melting down after it runs dry of water?
I see that the spent fuel will not react the same as when it was in the reactor. It seemed counter-intuitive, but I get it now. I can see why there is a lot of misunderstanding and misconception about nuclear issues. I thought I had a good handle on it but my visual concept was quite flawed. Thanks for the clarification. And of course, no marshmallows for me… the pile of fuel in the desert was just to clarify the science. It worked. Thanks again.
As a side note:
@ Colin says:
March 30, 2011 at 3:37 pm
My apologies to Colin. Now I understand.

Everything at Fukushima is under control. To say there are continuing problems is just pure hysteria:
Elevated radiation detected in ocean: “A reading of 3355 times the legal limit”
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-03/30/c_13804933.htm
Unless they got it wrong again and another correction is coming.

_Jim says:
March 30, 2011 at 9:05 pm
kbray in California, March 30, 2011 at 2:47 pm :
…
Did the US or anyone else ever conduct a nuclear “meltdown” experiment ?
Yes; BORAX I was ‘run until destruction’ intentionally …
kbray says: thanks Jim. I knew they had to have done this. The mess does not sound that bad…
…Cleanup
When BORAX-I was intentionally destroyed, the reactor breached containment, causing the “aerial distribution of contaminants resulting from the final experiment of the BORAX-I reactor” and the likely contamination of the topmost 1 foot of soil over about 2 acres in the vicinity….
kbray says: that sounds only like a medium hassle. That’s manageable for a major failure. A meltdown should be much less contamination than that intentional dynamite explosion made. I can live with those results.

Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
March 30, 2011 at 10:37 pm
Everything at Fukushima is under control. To say there are continuing problems is just pure hysteria:
Elevated radiation detected in ocean: “A reading of 3355 times the legal limit”
This is a classic media trick, “x times the background / legal limit”. Usually the background or legal limit is so negligible that activities many orders of magnitude greater are still not an objective hazard.
Activities should be related to something more meaningful, such as an LD50 – dose needed to kill half of some test organism such as a cell culture or marine plankton or copepod or suchlike. Some isotopes released from reactors are totally absent in the environment. So does this allow the media to express environmental amounts as a multiple of zero?

Alarmist belief in radiation risk (carcinogenesis) at low doses has this in common with alarmist belief in global warming from human CO2 emissions: neither are derived from direct experimental observations, but both are constructed inductively from arcane statistics and mathematical treatment of large, sparse, noisy and untidy sets of raw data which is susceptible to being massaged – and all raw data BTW in the custody of organisations / institutions with an overwhelming vested interest in the acceptance of belief in these two alarmist theories.
The official Radiophobia at the heart of radiation protection practice is based on the notorious LNT hypotheses – linear no threshold. This was originally formulated from the Japan bomb survivor data. They carefully reconstructed the gamma dose received from survivors based on where they were standing at the time fo the bomb detonation, together with reconstruction of the bomb cartesian coordinates (spatial location) at detonation. They found clearly measureable increased cancer risk in the high dose catogories, in the hundreds of milligrays to grays. But in the low doses, below 60-100 mGy, they found nothing.
However this did not deter them from extrapolating a straight line o cancer risk from the high dose measurements all the way down to zero. The assumption was that at low doses the risk must be there, but it cant be detected statistically.
However there are sound scientific reasons to assert that there is an actual THRESHOLD below which ionising radiation does not increase risk at all (may even decrease it). They are summarised in this paper by Bernard Cohen:
http://www.jpands.org/vol13no3/cohen.pdf
The existence of a threshold or not is fundamental to the whole radiation risk question. There is an exponential, power law distribution of radiation doses from any major nuclear incident such as Chernobyl or Fukushima:
millions get dose in micro-Gy range
a few thousand in mGy range
a few hundred in tens of mGy
a few dozen maybe in hundreds of mGy – usually nuclear workers, firemen etc.
an unfortunate handful maybe Gy level and lethal doses
So the vast majority of dose is up to tens or single digit mGy. So for there to be any problem with radiation for the general population, the LNT hypothesis must be true.
It is not. This is as big a political con-trick as CAGW. The psycological / socio-political driving force is the same – hatred and rejection by a dominant societal sub-culture of technology, industry, science and scientists.

Latest: Anti-nuclear terrorism
Anti-nuclear hysteria stoked by Fukushima is starting to take on a violent form, as in this incident reported today in Switzerland:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12917960

Sunspot, you are being struck by ionizing radiation everywhere you go and every day you live, so what’s the difference? As long as it’s under the regulatory limit it’s fine. As for volunteering, what’s the point of that if you’re not qualified to do the work required? I have no doubt that you’re not qualified to do anything.
Old Engineer, there are four reactors at Dai-ichi, and six and Dai-ini.
Kbray, all nuclear reactors need a moderator. Think of it as filling the role of a copper wire in an electric circuit. Without the moderator, the neutrons cannot flow freely and are readily absorbed by surrounding materials. Now, at one time it was believed that the most serious possible reactor accident was a reactor runaway chain reaction. The safety system devised was to empty the moderator out of the reactor, thus stopping all nuclear fission.
However, in the wake of TMI and other unrelated research, it was realized that in fact this possibility did not really exist. What was a significant concern was a loss of coolant accident. Under such a condition, the decay heat from the fuel would simply continue to heat up, melting the fuel. This was seen to a small extent with the events at Fermi 1. By emptying the moderator to shut the reactor down, the operators would be doing exactly the wrong thing for an LOC event, because all that water serves as a large heat sink. Nothing can happen until it’s all boiled off.
There are three kinds of moderators used by reactors: light water, heavy water, and lead graphite. The problem with lead graphite is that it’s flammable, which was a serious problem at Chernobyl after the steam explosion. The problem with water is that it is explosive when it goes through a state change rapidly (converting from liquid to gas). In the case of light water reactors, the moderator and the heat transport system are one and the same. In CANDUs they are separate systems.
Now the problem with light water reactors is that their high power densities mean there’s relatively little water inventory in them. The boiling off time is several hours or so. For CANDUs with much larger water inventories, it takes several days to boil off all the water in the core, not counting the huge volume in the shield tank (the moderator temperature in a CANDU is only about 70 C, so it’s a huge heat sink). I repeat, as long as there’s water in the core, the system temperature is limited. The trouble starts when the water is boiled off and the fuel starts to become exposed to air. That’s when the fuel can continue to heat up and release fission products.
One last technical point. The speed of a nuclear reaction is entirely determined by the proportion of fissile material in the fuel. A nuclear weapon is 99 per cent pure fissile material, usually Pu-239. At that concentration, the fission reaction occurs in micro-seconds. For a nuclear reactor, the concentration of fissile material is only about 4-5 per cent U-235, all the rest being non-fissile U-238. So, the reactor cannot explode in a nuclear explosion. The fissile content is simply too low; it would be like trying to fly to the Moon in an airplane.
Finally, radioactivity and half life are usually in an inverse relationship. That means that something that is highly radioactive has a very short half life, and vice versa. There has been a great deal of hysteria about the hazards of plutonium, which has a half life of a half a million years or so. That means that its radiation is trivial, not to mention the fact that it’s an alpha emitter so its external dose is negligible. In the case of Fukushima, nearly all of the radiation outside the plant is coming from Iodine-131. It has a half life of eight days. So in a year or so, there will be no trace of it, just as a year after Chernobyl there was no trace of its Iodine plume.

I continue to see no attempt at distinguishing between internal and external radiation in all these references to background radiation, chest x-rays and so on.
You don’t eat radioactive matter or breathe radioactive dust when you get a chest x-ray or receive normal background radiation. Once an area becomes contaminated through radioactive water spilling into the ground, or radioactive matter dispersed through smoke particles in the air, it can get into you, and once it does it stays there and keeps radiating until it decays.
The damage potential of internal radiation from ingested or inhaled radioactive matter cannot be compared in any way to external radiation. As Burby puts it:
http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/deconstructing-nuclear-experts/
[…]
“A milliSievert is one milliJoule of energy diluted into one kilogram of tissue. ***As such it would not distinguish between warming yourself in front of a fire and eating a red hot coal.*** It is the local distribution of energy that is the problem. The dose from a single internal alpha particle track to a single cell is 500mSv! The dose to the whole body from the same alpha track is 5 x 10-11 mSv. That is 0.000000000005mSv. But it is the dose to the cell that causes the genetic damage and the ultimate cancer. The cancer yield per unit dose employed by ICRP is based entirely on external acute high dose radiation at Hiroshima, where the average dose to a cell was the same for all cells.”
The red hot coal comparison is apt. You will get more heat by standing in front of a hot fire for a while, than by swallowing one single red hot coal, and measuring the damage in terms of the amount of heat received is absurd, yet this is what many of you keep doing over and over.
See also:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/03/radioactivity-sieverts-and-other-units.html
[…]
In reactors, one creates lots of other messy stuff. Plutonium-239 has half-life of 24 thousand years and another isotope, uranium-233, has half-life of 160 thousand years. Those things decay much more quickly than the uranium isotopes. One typically gets lung cancer from this kind of junk and we will discuss similar issues momentarily.
However, the nuclear reactors produce a lot of radioactive material whose lifetime is much shorter than those thousands of years. Let’s jump to the opposite extreme, the short-lived nuclei, and discuss the health effects at the same time.
[…]
You often encounter iodine-131 whose half-life is just 8 days. That means that it decays mercifully quickly. What about the animals like us? We have the thyroid gland somewhere in the neck and you know that “iodine is healthy”. So this element is being stored and used over there. The thyroids can’t really tell the difference between iodine-127 which is completely stable and healthy and the radioactive iodine-131 – their chemical properties are pretty much identical because they only depend on the number of protons, not neutrons.
So the thyroids just absorb the radioactive eight-day iodine-131 if there’s a lot of it around. It decays in your body and typically causes thyroid cancer, a frequent diseases around Chernobyl. A way to fight this threat is to eat lots of ordinary healthy iodine-127 (in iodide tablets) and put the imported radioactive iodine-131 into a comparative disadvantage (an overcrowded market).
Strontium-90 is another bastard that emerges from such nuclear reactions. Its half-life is 29 years. If you eat it or absorb it, only 3/4 of it are excreted. The rest is searching for your bones – because it has similar chemical properties as calcium – and because it may stay there for quite some time, it is somewhat likely to cause things like bone cancer or leukemia (some blood cells are produced by bones etc.).
Similarly, caesium-137 has lifetime of 30 years. It’s similar to strontium-90 but their fate in the body is very different. This caesium nucleus imitates potassium which is why it spreads across the muscles of your body. It stays in your body for 70 days or so. A treatment is a chemical called Prussian blue with the idealized formula Fe7(CN)18⋅14H2O. Whatever is the reason, this compound may bind to the caesium nuclei and help you to remove it from your body soon.
Again, plutonium-239 has half-life of 24 thousand years. It is really a primary “fuel”, playing a similar role to uranium-235 (the thing whose concentration you or Mahmoud increase if you or he “enriches” the uranium). It causes lung cancer but fortunately, those things have only been tested at the end of the war and shortly afterwards.
[…]

phlogiston says:
March 31, 2011 at 12:57 am
This is a classic media trick
I’m sure they have a bag of nuclear power tricks.
I said this before, if you want to be heard you have to be careful with exaggeration. The radiation there is way too high. Why don’t you guys just admit that?

Colin says:
March 31, 2011 at 4:55 am
When I went to school in the 1960’s I was taught: critical mass = nuclear explosion.
We used to hide under the tables… “duck and cover”…. a big fear as a child.
As I update my knowledge I see my science teacher’s lesson from that era was incomplete. People remember what they were taught. This nuclear thread really shows the depth of misconception that is present in the general knowledge base. This must clearly be what is adding to the polarized attitudes. But some of us were taught wrongly and even some current explanations in the media are clearly wrong.
I asked the questions because I didn’t understand. This blog helps correct the misconceptions. Brutal frankness is great as long as it’s the truth. But when information is contradictory, somebody must be wrong. Truth trumps.
Colin, some Questions for Clarity….
So once the Reactor + Moderator has reached critical mass, it stays at critical mass even with the loss of the moderator ? And that is why it melts ? Because it doesn’t need the moderator any longer except for cooling ? And when it melts into a glowing blob, does it stay at critical mass ?
also back to the pile of nuclear pellets in the desert… I put a tub of water on top of that sand dune and used my robot to fill the tub with those loose new fuel pellets.
Now what happens…?

_Jim says:
March 31, 2011 at 7:28 am
So the fuel rods “ignite” and “start burning” when they reach critical mass using the water and then are self sustaining without it….? like a house is OK until a fire starts then it’s hard to put out… the house has reached “critical mass” and the fire is self sustaining until the fuel is exhausted… Is it like that?

kbray:
I have worked in nuclear power all of my life. Spent fuel produces heat but NOT due to fission. The heat is produced due to the radioactive decay of products of fission………the fission fragments. When a U-235 atom fissions it splits in two, this results in two atoms with smaller atomic numbers and masses. The decay of these elements and their daughters is what results in the “decay heat” after shutdown. Two of the elements in this decay chain are Cs-137 and I-131 they are typically the elements that cause the problems when a Fukishima or Chernobyl occur. This decay heat is produced whether a moderator is present or not.

Dear 1DandyTroll,
I don’t know the source of the 1 in 17,000 year probability. However, if it restricted to the plant’s machinery itself, then an event like the Fukuyama earthquake/tsunami would be another independent cause of failure, and the 70% estimate would have to be increased.
Also, it is likely that the 1/17000 probability is an a priori engineering estimate. As such, it would be based on some known equipment failure rates and some guesses. It would not be based on actual failure rates.
The important point is that we have experienced four significant failure in 40-50 years, so we know that with the existing stock of reactors we can expect a significant failure every 10 years or so. If the the planned/suggested reactors were built, the time between failures might become smaller. It depends on the design. Some of the newer designs have much smaller failure probabilities than our existing reactors.
That said, two of the four failures (TMI and Chernobyl) were due to human error, and Fukuyama was due to a very large earthquake. Human error can be reduced by clever engineering (human factors stuff) but not eliminated. Earthquakes on the scale of 8 to 9 occur on the Pacific rim every ten years or so. But good siting can reduce the problem there. But what about New Madrid? So, I think that once every 10 years or so will be the normal rate of failure of nuclear power plants for long into the future
Anyway, probabilities are not the real issue. The real issue is “risk.” This is the “product” of the probability of an accident and the severity of its impact. In the case of nuclear power, the probability of any single plant experiencing a failure during its service life (40 years or so) is small: 0.235% for an annual rate of 1/17000. However, the impact is severe. Any utility considering a nuclear power plant will focus its attention on the impact. This will likely prevent it from building such plants. One failure would bankrupt the company and destroy its share holders equity.
As many people here have commented, fear of nuclear power is also an issue. But this fear drives the politics. And regardless of what engineering fixes are proposed, the fear/politics will not allow the plants to be built. The relatively benign accident at TMI (no deaths, no injuries, trace levels of emissions) killed nuclear power in the US for a generation.
Nuclear power is effectively dead.
Unfortunately, for a modern (as opposed to medieval) civilization, that leaves only fossil fuels. Solar, wind and wave power have surprisingly small capacity factors; wind is on line only about 10% of the time (Texas’ experience). This means that each wind/solar installation needs 1 kW of standby generating capacity for each kW of wind/solar. Since wind/solar is so much more expensive and used so little, there is no point to building it. Present day wind/solar/wave installations are parasitic on the existing capacity surpluses.
So, regardless of whether you believe in AGW and CO2, the industrial world will continue its CO2 emissions, and the developing world will greatly add to it. AGW, Climategate, deniers, etc et al, all irrelevant.
Charles Perrow’s book “Normal Accidents” (Basic Books, 1984) is still relevant to this discussion. He addresses TMI in some detail.

Gail Combs says:
March 31, 2011 at 10:03 am
I get so sick of the blasted hysteria. …
Sounds like your pining for the good old blow-em-up days.
Well, lucky for us, high altitude tests were not conducted off the coast of California.
Johnston Island is a low sand and coral island, 717 miles W.S.W. of Honolulu.
Doug Badgero says:
March 31, 2011 at 10:11 am
I have worked in nuclear power all of my life. Spent fuel produces heat but NOT due to fission. The heat is produced due to the radioactive decay of products of fission………the fission fragments.
No, spent fuel still contains uranium, just not enough to be as efficient as new fuel rods.
“Any utility considering a nuclear power plant will focus its attention on the impact. This will likely prevent it from building such plants. One failure would bankrupt the company and destroy its share holders equity.”
Which is why in the US Congress exempted the plants from required insurance. There is a pool to cover the first, I think $12 billion, then the US taxpayer picks up any damages above that.

Video interview with Chris Busby, Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk
http://lightonhawaii.com/2011/03/30/fukushima-worse-than-chernobyl-expect-large-exclusion-zone-in-northern-japan/
And the following article by Dr Tom Burnett on March 27 is something else. Burnett insists, in the comments section to his own article, that he is a big proponent of nuclear power, but only “safe nuclear” power. He also insists that the situation in Fukushima is going to dwarf Chrenobyl, that the meltdown cannot be stopped at this point, and describes what he suposes will happen when/if it reaches the water table below.
When the Fukushima Meltdown Hits Groundwater
http://hawaiinewsdaily.com/2011/03/when-the-fukushima-meltdown-hits-groundwater/
In the comments to that article, Burnett gives the following replies regarding moderators and other topics.
“The problem here, and at Chernobyl, and in most of the reactors currently in use and in production, is that they are not CANDU or PWR reactors. They are Generation I and II BWR reactors. They don’t work the way you describe.”
And later:
To address your point directly: moderators only work on non-critical fuel piles. Once criticality is reached no moderator can physically contact it without burning or vaporizing. At that point human-induced moderation becomes impossible and the pile must reach equilibrium with the earth through processes of which we really know virtually nothing.
But we do know, from 2.000+ nuclear tests, and hundreds of active reactors, that the world is not going to end because one, or all four F-D-I reactors melt down.
We also know that s critical fuel pile at 5,000 degrees C is impervious to everything except something hotter – a supercritical fusion device – or the center of the earth – or an eventual self-entombment in it’s own lava cyst inside the lithosphere unless the pressures become so great, or some other natural reaction occurs which causes it to go supercritical and detonate as a thermonuclear device – I do not believe that is possible.
Back in the Hyman Rickover days you had to be a nuclear physicist to run a nuclear reactor. Now you don’t. You can go to any of several schools which teach you how to control what you CAN control – and each lesson invariably ends with: “But this can’t happen because……..”
If you ask “What would happen if a MAG9.0 EQ hits my 6.9 containment and then my aux power goes out?”, you get one of two answers (1) that will never happen, or (2) You are fvcked.
I believe the instructors who answered truthfully are in a tiny minority – because it serves no purpose to train operators to try to deal with events they cannot deal with.
There is a line – it is dictated by profit vs risk. Anything which passes that line is neither planned for, nor considered in ANY phase of the plant operation. That is why Tokyo Power seems helpless. They are. This contingency was not part of their plan and they have no way to adapt to it.
Blaming them is useless. They did not approve the plant design. Blaming GE is pointless. Their containments are designed for MAG6.9EQ events. The plant – and ALL gen I and II AND III plants are designed to withstand a MAG6.9EQ. No planning for a subsequent tsunami which might be generated over a 6.9 is required. In California, NO requirements exist – but the Gen 1 and II GE containments are still manufactured to 6.9 standards. But so are the new GEH (GE-Hitachi) and the Westinghouse Gen III+ containments.
They will ALL fall to shit in a MAG9.0EQ event. Fuhgeddaboudit.
So what do we have? We have a situation. We started it but we can’t stop it. However, the earth can stop it and will at some point. We simply have to live with the consequences of our actions until that time. Did we learn anything? Yep. Put nuclear reactors on ships. Is that a good idea in the long run? No. Since when has that deterred us?

Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
March 31, 2011 at 7:24 am
phlogiston says:
March 31, 2011 at 12:57 am
This is a classic media trick
I’m sure they have a bag of nuclear power tricks.
I said this before, if you want to be heard you have to be careful with exaggeration. The radiation there is way too high. Why don’t you guys just admit that?
The radioactivity in the sea off Fukushima is from two isotopes of iodine, I-131 (8 day half life) and I-133 (20 hour half life). It follows from this that they will be a source of marine contamination worldwide for thousands of years.

Francisco says:
March 31, 2011 at 1:25 pm
Blaming them is useless. They did not approve the plant design. Blaming GE is pointless. Their containments are designed for MAG6.9EQ events. The plant – and ALL gen I and II AND III plants are designed to withstand a MAG6.9EQ. No planning for a subsequent tsunami which might be generated over a 6.9 is required. In California, NO requirements exist – but the Gen 1 and II GE containments are still manufactured to 6.9 standards. But so are the new GEH (GE-Hitachi) and the Westinghouse Gen III+ containments.
They will ALL fall to shit in a MAG9.0EQ event. Fuhgeddaboudit.
So what do we have? We have a situation. We started it but we can’t stop it. However, the earth can stop it and will at some point.
It must be a big disappointment for people with your agenda, that a force 9.0 earthquake, near the surface a few km from several half-century old first generation nuclear power stations, and followed by a tsunami that took out the auxiliary power of these power stations, has produced such a minor catastrophe – relative to the potential nuclear meltdown about which you anti-nukes no doubt endlessly fantasize. Where are the thousands of deaths? Where are the vast tracts of uninhabitable land. Where is your dreamed-of apocalypse?
The same thing happenned after Chernobyl – the catastrophe to which the eco-apparatchiks become instantly emotionally wedded, turns out to be so disappointingly trivial in the cold light of day that they have to strive to find ways of amplifying the perception of disaster – evacuating citizens from regions of ever lower and lower measured radiation levels until they reach the variation range of background radiation. Broadcasting as scientific fact idiotic peasant folklore about depression and toothaches and varicose veins being caused by radiation.
If the Japanese are rational about the real radiological and radiobiological situation, life will be pretty well back to normal around Fukushima after 18 months.
You wont get another chance like this one so you had better milk it for all its worth.

Colin says:
March 31, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Bob Sykes, please stop spreading misinformation. Chernobyl failed because of a critical design flaw in which the shutdown system initiated the steam explosion. The operators may have created the situation, but at no time were they violating their operating requirements and instructions. The RBMK was a fatally flawed reactor design.
Colin I agree with everything in your last post except the conclusion that the RBMK was grossly flawed and unsafe in design. Although there is inherent danger in using a graphite moderator in the RBMK (the most efficient moderator and resulting in the best plutonium yield), the design is basically sound. However there was flagrant and catastrophic human error which led to the explosion.
The accident began 3 years before April 1986, when the reactor was commissioned. Big bonusses and promotions and other Soviet governmental perks were on offer if the Chernobyl station was completed on time – in time for the May day communist jamboree of 1983. But one thing was not ready in time – the inertial power backup system needed in case of power failure. So it was swept under th carpet – not completed, and the fact concealed. The reactor opened on time, everyone got their bonuses and perks.
Three years later and a Moscow manager finds out that the inertial power backup is still not installed. He goes ballistic and demands that the backup system is put in place immediately. The plant operators explain that the reactor is near the end of its 3 year cycle and soon to be refuelled, so better wait till after refuelling. (An accident just before refuelling results in the maximum release of radioactivity). Moscow Murdock will have none of it – “dont care – do it now”. So the order is given for the inertial power backup system to be installed and tested – 3 years after it should have been in place, and just before refuelling with a maximum load of radioactive decay products in the reactor.
For the installation and test it was necessary to power down the reactor to simulate a loss of power. But a nuclear reactor doesnt like having its power level changed (this is why nuclear power is ideal for baseline electricity, not peak). So it turns out to be difficult to get the reactor to reduce power to the necessary low level. But we’ll return to this later. First – the intransigent, impatient and irresponsible order to go ahead immeiately with the inertial system istallation came near the end of the month of April. In the Soviet union, economic activity was run on the basis of “normi” or targets – 5 year targets, year targets, month targets. The end of every month was a hectic pressured time for managers to attain their targets. So when the Chernobyl station chief informs the localpower users that, on the day of April 25, power availability will be reduced due to the procedure, all hell breaks loose. Irate managers demand that maximum power is maintained all day to allow them to meet their targets for April.
So the installation and test are postponed to the night. The experienced and competent day shift, who had originally been designated to conduct the risky and delicate operation, go home. They are replaced by the night shift – a much less qualified and competent bunch. So – back to the power down. First the power output has to be reduced to a low level. Again – not what a reactor likes. As the power is reduced it falls to far to a very low level – much lower than planned. (The operators were I believe comrades Bevisich and Buttheddovich). This causes the problem of xenon poisoning – buildup of xenon 135 which efficiently absorbs neutrons, slowing the nuclear reaction and making it hard to restart the reactor. A fw hours wait and the problem would resolve itself. But the operators either did not uderstand xenon poisoning, or were driven by apopleptic managers who would not take no for an answer, so the reactor had to be powered back up to full power. The new day and full industrial end-of-month demand were waiting. So the operators put the accellerator to the floor – so to speak – and removed all the control rods of the reactor. To do this they had to physically disable the reactor’s safety lock – they did this.
The result is that power returned rapidly leading to voids in the coolant and a criticality based catastrophic explosion.
But it was maniacally idiotic management, incompetent operators and Soviet industrial oplitics that combined to cause the accident. Not a design flaw of the RBMK. Other RBMKs have run safely for decades in Russia and eastern Europe.
For more on the xenon poisoning at Chernobyl:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/xenon.html

phlogiston says:
March 31, 2011 at 3:29 pm
“It must be a big disappointment for people with your agenda, that a force 9.0 earthquake, near the surface a few km from several half-century old first generation nuclear power stations, and followed by a tsunami that took out the auxiliary power of these power stations, has produced such a minor catastrophe – relative to the potential nuclear meltdown about which you anti-nukes no doubt endlessly fantasize. Where are the thousands of deaths? Where are the vast tracts of uninhabitable land. Where is your dreamed-of apocalypse?
The same thing happenned after Chernobyl – the catastrophe to which the eco-apparatchiks become instantly emotionally wedded, turns out to be so disappointingly trivial in the cold light of day that they have to strive to find ways of amplifying the perception of disaster – evacuating citizens from regions of ever lower and lower measured radiation levels until they reach the variation range of background radiation. Broadcasting as scientific fact idiotic peasant folklore about depression and toothaches and varicose veins being caused by radiation.”
======================
You are presuming apocalyptic wishes I’ve never had. What I wish for is that this thing could go away *immediately*, better yet, that it had never happened at all. I wasn’t even giving much thought to nuclear power until this prompted me to start looking.
What is a “big disappointment” to me is the vast choir of meretricious or deluded louts like you trying frantically to minimize a very grave mess, caused by an industry you swear is extremely safe, but which simultaneously no entity on this planet will insure, except tax payers, who are never asked. And who go on drivelling endlessly about how Chernobyl was just a “trivial” non-event who killed only a few people and all the rest of the claptrap you keep jiving about.
Maybe you could engage Tom Burnett in the comments section. He is answering anyone who posts reasonable comments or questions. I certainly hope his “best case scenario” comes to pass. He describes it as follows:
“No one has ever asked me for the BEST possible scenario, but you are pushing the boundary. Best case: all the reactors and buildings and fuel rods melt together and sink 100 kilometers into the lithosphere. Problem solved.”
http://hawaiinewsdaily.com/2011/03/when-the-fukushima-meltdown-hits-groundwater/

@_Jim
March 31, 2011 at 4:30 pm
=============
I haven’t seen any maps. Aparently there is a water table not too deep below the plant. If the thing stops in the rock underneath before it gets to the water table, that won’t stop the problem but it would be a fairly good outcome. If it gets to the water table, the assumption seems to be it would create a fairly large explosion.
Well, at least according to Burnett, in one of his comments:
***quote**
I would have to see the blueprints, but at least one containment is breached and it’s not going to be fixed. IF that blob of critical mass makes it to the water table, the reaction will not be to cool off the core – it will be to convert water to H and O2 – which will explode. Period. And that process may well continue multiple times and could easily draw in the other three damaged fuel cores and the ~600,000 depleted fuel cells laying around.
This is still not an apocalyptic event.
IF, however, the core stops before it hits the water table, it will probably encase itself in a molten ball and remain in that state without exploding – however, as water seeps in, it will flash to steam and continue ejecting particulate matter into the atmosphere – and water (no one is quite sure how at the moment, but it is happening).
I would not like to be the person who takes the job of mitigating the problem. Unless the reaction is stopped, there is no short-term solution and there is no long-term solution. So WORST CASE, NOT MY PREDICTION, is a million pound blob of fissile material sitting in a fissure in the water table ejecting Hydrogen particulate matter.
***end of quote***
http://hawaiinewsdaily.com/2011/03/when-the-fukushima-meltdown-hits-groundwater/

Francisco,
They all “count”, but they all occurred just as you sarcastically described. TMI had no health consequences to anyone. Chernobyl was about as bad as it could ever get since the reactor core was dispersed into the atmosphere almost immediately. And Japan is not as bad as Chernobyl but worse than TMI. This is not a new technology and the effects of radiation exposure are pretty well understood. You can like this reality or not but it is still reality.
You are certainly entitled to your own opinions based on reality but you are not entitled to your own reality.

Doug: “…since the reactor core was dispersed into the atmosphere almost immediately.”
No it was not. The source term for Chernobyl unit 4 is that about 90 per cent of the Iodine 131 was released. About half the Cesium and Strontium was released. About 5% of the uranium and plutonium was released. All of the rest remains in the reactor core to this day. These were confirmed by an independent UNSCEAR review in 2000.
I agree entirely with your comments re. Francisco. The antinuclear industry salivates with glee over the prospect of any nuclear disaster. They are going to have some trouble with Fukushima. At this point, the fatality count is one, a crane operator at the time of the quake. It has also not quite dawned on the media yet that nearly everything in the surrounding countryside has been leveled to the ground. Even an old nuclear plant is still standing and its containment still largely intact despite every possible system failure.

Quite right, Doug. A steam blast of that magnitude is the most effective way to disperse it. Particularly since RBMKs have no upper containment. And what is more, virtually all the U and Pu fell out within 2 km. Not surprising given its weight.
One of the interesting results of Chernobyl is that a surprising amount of I-131 residue was found on what little was left of the upper building structure. Because of the readiness of I to bond with most anything, some of it plated out on structures. For a reactor with full containment which is breached it suggests that a lot of it will still not escape the plant.

For those that are interested, here is a paper that tells of the real consequence’s of Chernobyl. The past, present and ongoing !
Chernobyl
Consequences of the Catastrophe for People
and the Environment
ALEXEY V. YABLOKOV, VASSILY B. NESTERENKO, AND ALEXEY V. NESTERENKO
Consulting Editor
JANETTE D. SHERMAN-NEVINGER
CONTENTS
Foreword. By Prof. Dr. Biol. DimitroM. Grodzinsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Preface. By Alexey V. Yablokov and Vassily B. Nesterenko . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiv
Introduction: The Difficult Truth about Chernobyl. By Alexey V. Nesterenko,
Vassily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Yablokov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter I. Chernobyl Contamination: An Overview
1. Chernobyl Contamination through Time and Space. By Alexey V. Yablokov
and Vassily B. Nesterenko . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Chapter II. Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe
for Public Health
2. Chernobyl’s Public Health Consequences: Some Methodological Problems.
By Alexey V. Yablokov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3. General Morbidity, Impairment, and Disability after the Chernobyl
Catastrophe. By Alexey V. Yablokov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
4. Accelerated Aging as a Consequence of the Chernobyl Catastrophe. By Alexey
V. Yablokov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
5. Nonmalignant Diseases after the Chernobyl Catastrophe. By Alexey V.
Yablokov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
6. Oncological Diseases after the Chernobyl Catastrophe. By Alexey V.
Yablokov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
7. Mortality after the Chernobyl Catastrophe. By Alexey V. Yablokov . . . . . . . . . . 192
Conclusion to Chapter II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
v
vi Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Chapter III. Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe
for the Environment
8. Atmospheric, Water, and Soil Contamination after Chernobyl. By Alexey V.
Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Nesterenko . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
9. Chernobyl’s Radioactive Impact on Flora. By Alexey V. Yablokov . . . . . . . . . . . 237
10. Chernobyl’s Radioactive Impact on Fauna. By Alexey V. Yablokov . . . . . . . . . . 255
11. Chernobyl’s Radioactive Impact on Microbial Biota. By Alexey V.
Yablokov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
Conclusion to Chapter III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
Chapter IV. Radiation Protection after the Chernobyl Catastrophe
12. Chernobyl’s Radioactive Contamination of Food and People. By Alexey V.
Nesterenko, Vassily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Yablokov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
13. Decorporation of Chernobyl Radionuclides. By Vassily B. Nesterenko and
Alexey V. Nesterenko . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
14. Protective Measures for Activities in Chernobyl’s Radioactively Contaminated
Territories. By Alexey V. Nesterenko and Vassily B. Nesterenko . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
15. Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe for Public Health and the
Environment 23 Years Later. By Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko,
and Alexey V. Nesterenko . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318
Conclusion to Chapter IV
(http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf)