Guest post by Michael Dickey (cross posted from his website matus1976.com)
The decline of nuclear power has had a significant effect on global carbon emissions and subsequently any anthropogenic global warming effect. To see the extent of this influence, let us first take a look at total U.S. carbon emissions since 1900.
According to the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, from 1900 to 2006, US carbon emissions rose from 181 MMT (million metric tons) to 1,569 MMT.
Taking a look at US electricity generation by type, according to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. generates 51% of its power from coal, and cumulatively about 71% of its power from fossil fuel sources.
Comparing the energy source to Carbon emissions, the burning of coal to generate electricity alone emits more CO2 than any other single source, about one-third of the total.
As the US Electrical Generation by Type figure shows, about 20% of the U.S. electrical supply comes from nuclear power. Let us now imagine that the U.S. never built any nuclear power plants, but instead built more coal plants to generate the electricity those nuclear plants would have generated.
According to the Energy Information Administration, since 1971, 18.6 billion MW•h (Megawatt hour) of electrical power have been generated by nuclear sources (1). According to the US Department of Energy, every kW•h (kilowatt hour) of electricity generated by coal produces 2.095 lbs of CO2 (2).
As the calculations in the table above show, every MW•h of electricity generated by coal generates 2,095 pounds of carbon dioxide. For 18.6 billion MW•h at 2,095 pounds of CO2 per MW•h, this amounts to 39.0 trillion additional lbs of CO2, or 17.7 billion metric tons. 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.
What all this shows is that had this power been generated by coal plants, an additional 4,842 million metric tons of carbon would have been released into the atmosphere. Breaking this calculation down by year, what would this have made our carbon emissions record look like?
Again in blue we see the real world US carbon emissions, but in green we see what the carbon emissions would have been if all the electricity generated by our nuclear infrastructure had instead been generated by coal power plants.
In all, carbon emissions would have been 14.6% higher, with 1,782 MMT of carbon released without nuclear power plants, while only 1,552 MMT are released with our current nuclear infrastructure. This is why many leading environmentalists, such as James Lovelock (author of the Gaia Hypothesis) are vocal supporters of nuclear power.
But this chart is not entirely fair to nuclear power, because the growth of nuclear power was severely derailed by environmentalist hyperbole and outright scaremongering. Because of the attacks by environmentalists on nuclear power, many planned power plants were cancelled, and many existing plants licenses were not renewed. The result, according to Al Gore himself in “Our Choice” was:
“Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were canceled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage…Thus, only about one-fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating.” (3)
Let us take a look then at U.S. carbon emissions if the U.S. had simply built and operated the power plants that were originally planned.
Yup, that’s right people: if the US had simply built and operated the nuclear power plants it had planned and licensed, it would today be producing not only less carbon emissions than it did in 1972, but would in fact be emitting almost half the carbon emissions it is now.
But let’s not forget that the very planning and licensing of nuclear power plants was drastically affected by the anti-scientific opposition. Looking again at the Energy Information Administrations figures, the average sustained growth for nuclear generating capacity was increasing by about 28.8 million Megawatt hours for a 20 year period from 1971 to 1989
Here we see a chart taken from the EIA data which shows the growth of real nuclear generating capacity in blue, and the projected growth in red, had the growth of the previous 20 year period been sustained (remember, this is still only about one-fourth of the intended capacity). In this graph, any year which produced less than the average of the previous 20 years was increased to that average of 28.8 million MW•h.
Now let’s take this projected growth and imagine the U.S. had actually built a nuclear infrastructure at this level. What would our carbon emissions look like?
Incredibly, U.S. carbon emissions today would be almost one-fourth of what they are currently. These numbers are estimated by taking the average yearly increase from 1971 to 1989 in nuclear generating capacity and projecting it to the current day, and since these numbers are only one-fourth of the original planned capacity, the result is multiplied by four. In case you think my numbers are fanciful, let’s see if there are any countries out there that did not get entirely persuaded by the anti-nuclear hysteria, and how that affected their carbon emissions.
After the energy crisis of the 70s, France, which was highly dependent on imported oil for electricity production, decided to divest themselves of Middle Eastern oil dependence. Lacking significant fossil fuel deposits, they opted for a nuclear infrastructure. Today nuclear power generates about 78% of France’s electrical power supply, and it is today the world’s largest exporter of electrical energy. France alone accounts for 47% of Western Europe’s nuclear generated electricity (3).
While we do not see the production in France dropping to half of its 1970s levels as we would have in the U.S. had it continued the transition to a nuclear infrastructure, nevertheless the 40% reductions are close and tremendously significant.
Consider from the presented information what the total potential nuclear generating capacity for the US would be if it sustained the high level growth and achieved its planned capacity.
By the year 2000, the US nuclear infrastructure could have been generating 100% of the domestic electrical supply. This is not an extraordinary claim considering, again, that France generates 78% of electrical energy from nuclear power.
Extrapolating this to the global climate, let’s take a look at the global carbon emissions levels and compare them against a world where the U.S. sustained the first two decades of its nuclear infrastructure growth perpetually and ultimately achieved the original planned capacity.
In green, we see the existing global carbon emissions levels and in purple is the U.S. carbon emission levels if it continued to adopt a nuclear infrastructure. In red then, as a result, we see the global carbon levels would have been almost 15% lower than current levels.
I invite readers to extrapolate then where the total global carbon emissions would be if all the post-industrialized nations had adopted nuclear power – as their natural technological progressions would have dictated – if it were not for the hijacking of this process by anti-scientific hyperbole by scaremongering environmental activists. Many organizations – such as Green Peace, still ardently oppose nuclear power. And these levels, mind you, are only about one-tenth of what the Atomic Energy Commission was projecting based on demand during the 60s, where at its height 25 new nuclear power plants were being built every year, and the AEC anticipated that by the year 2000 over 1,000 nuclear power plants would be in operation in the U.S.. Today only 104 operate.
Let us project an educated guess as to what the resulting reduction in carbon emissions would have been had the European Union (which in 2005 generated 15% of their electricity with nuclear) Japan (34.5% nuclear) and finally, going into the future China and India as they fully industrialize.
All of these facts lead to one conclusion: if manmade global warming is a real problem, then it was in fact caused by environmental alarmism. That is not to say that some environmentalism has not been good, but this atrocious abandonment of reason hangs as an ominous cloud over everything environmentalists advocate. Rational environmentalists, such as James Lovelock, who want a high standard of living for humans and a clean planet are quick to change their minds about nuclear power. Irrational environmentalists who actually do not desire wealthy, comfortable lives for all people on the planet–as well as a clean planet–actively oppose nuclear power. Nuclear power is a litmus test for integrity within the environmentalist community.
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.
– Sources –
Energy Information Administration – http://www.eia.doe.gov/
US Electrical Generation Sources by Type – http://www.clean-coal.info/drupal/node/164
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) – http://cdiac.ornl.gov/
CDIAC US Carbon Emissions – http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/emissions/usa.dat
CDIAC France Carbon Emissions – http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/fra.html
(1) – “18.6 billion MW•h (Megawatt hours) of electrical power have been generated by nuclear sources” – Energy Information Administration – http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/mer/pdf/pages/sec8_3.pdf
(2) – “every kW•h of electricity generated by coal produces 2.095 lbs of CO2” – US Department of Energy “Carbon Dioxide Emissions from the Generation of Electrical Power in the United States” – http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/environment/co2emiss00.pdf
(3) – Al Gore (2009). Our Choice, Bloomsbury, p. 157.
(4) – “France alone accounts for 47% of western Europe’s nuclear generated electricity” – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2008 World Nuclear Industry Status Report, http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/reports/2008-world-nuclear-industry-status-report/2008-world-nuclear-industry-status-re-1
It increasingly looks like there are serious problems still at Fukushima that the public is not being told about.
Update from yesterday from a Navy nuclear engineer (ret)
27 minute update
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?
Is nuclear power safe? Not according to one former manager at California’s SONGS, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, who filed a wrongful termination lawsuit in which he “alleges retaliation for raising concerns about worker fatigue, [and] overtime.”
From the story: the lawsuit also alleges there were “safety violations and the promotion of a culture of cover-up at the plant, which SCE operates.”
Also, “Paul Diaz, a former plant manager who filed the suit, told those gathered today for a news conference that his concerns about worker fatigue and excessive overtime were ignored or punished.
Diaz, speaking in front of the towering domes of the plant, said that, as a manager, workers came to him with their concerns because they felt other supervisors weren’t listening.”
source:
http://lagunabeach.patch.com/articles/suit-alleges-safety-problems-nuke-plant-officials-say-they-take-concerns-seriously
These places are accidents waiting to happen.
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.
Yes; BORAX I was ‘run until destruction’ intentionally …
Wiki for starters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BORAX_experiments
Waybackmachine for ANL.gov archived material: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20041010094631/http://www.anlw.anl.gov/anlw_history/reactors/borax_i.html
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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?
fukushima is FAR from over.
in my opinion, the Greens are simply pawns of the nuclear industry (think GE in particular) in the CAGW scam.
if the Green alarmists think they can now reap all the CAGW rewards because of Fukushima, they are deluded.
if the nuclear alarmists think they can reap their share (the major share in their minds) from the CAGW scam now that we have the ongoing disaster at Fukushima, including at another site, Daini reactor number 1, which is seven miles from Fukushima Dai-ichi, then they are deluded.
this is what masquerades as a Nuclear Industry:
23 March: The Hindu: Brahma Chellaney: Corrupt means taint the nuclear deal
The new bribery revelations, a rigged process to import reactors and safety-related concerns must lead to the long-blocked scrutiny of the nuclear deal by Parliament.
http://www.hindu.com/2011/03/23/stories/2011032356301200.htm
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:
@ur momisugly Colin says:
March 30, 2011 at 3:37 pm
My apologies to Colin. Now I understand.
Just an impression after reading the thread so far. The misinformation presented in the comments in this thread by those both for and against nuclear power is appalling. Well below the usual standard of discussion. (Not talking to the few who have actually make knowledgeable comments.)
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.
While we are discussing the Fukushima nuclear plants. The two plants at Fukushima are apparently called “number one” and “number two.” In Japanese “Dai” means number and ichi is “one” and “ni” is two. There are six reactors at at Fukushima No. 1, off hand can’t remember how many reactors at Fukushima No. 2.
_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.
It’s amazing to me that the same people who scoff at the idea of this invisible bogeyman Global Warming cower in fear of the invisible bogeyman that is Radiation. I guess all the Cold War propaganda is hard to shake.
I think this simple chart speaks for itself: http://i.min.us/im0DYI.jpg
America is going to look awfully foolish in 20-30 years when China is bringing thorium nuke plants online every year and we are still wedded to coal/oil and having to fight these silly international battles over CO2 emissions.
Nuclear power isn’t THE answer. It’s AN answer. One we need to be using much more than we currently are.
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?
To all the nuclear nay-sayers:
a. Fossil fuels will run out, sometime; it may be 50 years, it may be 100 years, but they will run out sometime. And you will have burned all our chemical feed-stocks too.
b. You cannot power a 24/7 technological civilisation from thousands of windelecs that all stop together under the same anticyclone for weeks on end (see ‘Liverpool Bay’ above). It has been calculated that the energy density of windelecs is so low, that you could only power 30% of the UK from windelecs, even if you plastered all the land and sea with the blighters – and this STILL does not cure the problem of losing all power for two or three weeks at a time due to an anticyclone.
So what do you all suggest?
Go back to our caves? Endure a wild winter, with no heating, with righteous fortitude? Produce just 1% of the current agricultural crop, using shire horses? Relish the Medieval life-span of 35 years? Be proud that 95% of our populations will have to be – err – ‘liquidated’?
You all sound like Jeremiahs – the subversive Old Testament priest who called upon god to destroy his own people, to somehow demonstrate that this same god was really kind and loving, but only if you worshipped him as Jeremiah demanded. With so many Jeremiahs praying for the destruction of the West, through the destruction of energy supplies, the future for our children looks bleak.
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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.
“TEPCO is reportedly offering up to Y400,000 (£2,995) per day for anyone willing to brave the rigours of the plant – with the employees now being described in the media here as modern-day samurai or “suicide squads.”
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8416302/Japan-nuclear-crisis-evacuees-turned-away-from-shelters.html)
This is a good opportunity for all of the nooklar lovers in here to go and do their bit, get paid for it and prove how harmless it is.
Or………are the many forms of radioactive particles only OK for other people to breathe or ingest.
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 says: March 31, 2011 at 2:05 am
>>This is a good opportunity for all of the nooklar lovers in here to go and do
>>their bit, get paid for it and prove how harmless it is.
Would gladly, but don’t have the relevant expertise or language. I am sure they will find sufficient willing engineers in Japan.
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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.
Ralph, I’m sure you could use a mop & bucket, squirt a fire hose, make the peanut butter sandwiches or some other much needed menial task, don’t be shy, there is plenty of work there for you.
I’d be interested to hear in future how this working holiday has affected your much shortened life, I’d also be interested in comparing your potential offspring to those that are affected by the unlawful use of Depleted Uranium.
You see Ralph, there would be many benefits that would come out of you getting nooked.
You might even learn something ?
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.
[…]
Correction: there are six reactors at Dai-ichi, and four at Dai-ni.
Fukashima I (Daiichi) – (site w/ongoing problems)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Fukashima II – (Daini)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_II_Nuclear_Power_Plant
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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?
kbray, it is my understanding that once ‘nuclear reactions’ are commenced it takes some time for the the fissioning process in the fuel rods to ‘finish’ in the fuel material (Uranium) to the point where heat output is brought down to match pre-fissioning reaction heat output … I am no nuclear physicist, but that is my ‘black-box’ understanding …
The ‘water’ as a moderator is used to commence and maintain the chain reaction (continues to operate as a moderator while present), and, is used as the medium for heat removal … removing the water, however, while now absent for moderation purposes (when present the water acts to slow down a number of Neutrons to they may interact with Uranium nuclei) will have little effect on the material (Uranium atoms) _already involved_ in the fissioning process, and that continued fissioning process generates the thermal energy (heat) that must be removed until most all fissioning has ceased.
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