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Soaring, Cryptography, and Nuclear Weapons
Martin Hellman sends in a pointer to his essay that uses analogies from cryptography and the sport of soaring in an attempt to draw people in to thinking about the risks of nuclear weapons. Quoting: "... I did a preliminary risk analysis which indicates that relying on nuclear weapons for our security is thousands of times more dangerous than having a nuclear power plant built next to your home." Hellman is best known as co-inventor (with Diffie and Merkle) of public key cryptography, and has worked for over twenty-five years to reduce the threat posed by nuclear weapons. He is also a glider pilot with over 2,600 logged hours. Hellman adds, "Readers needing a break can go to some photos of the Sierra Nevada mountains taken from my glider."
Not really. That's why we SHOULD be reprocessing that stuff and burning it in reactors. Yet the powers that be feel reprocessing increases the risk of nameless Bad Guys(TM) getting their hands on fissionable materials. Never mind that the Uranium slugs used in regular reactors are far more useful to Bad Guys(TM) than reprocessed Plutonium. (If you have limited resources, a gun-type bomb is infinitely easier to create than an implosion device.)
The thing is, the nuclear waste issue has been incredibly overblown by environmentalists and government alike. We have solutions. It's just a matter of getting this regulatory ship realigned to meet the modern world.
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Will you stop spreading FUD?
So is burning coal, operating a steel plant, manufacturing dangerous chemicals, and driving a race car. Yet we do all those things on a regular basis!
That's why there are 3 columns of stealth troopers protecting each plant from invasion by the Slitheen.
Or in other words, [Citation Needed].
Um... it DID ignite. Several times. Ignition of hydrogen in the reactor core only complicated a difficult situation. However, the reactor operated more or less as intended in that situation and the risk to the surrounding area was minimal. Certainly not anywhere near Chernobyl levels. (Chernobyl ran into a lack of shielding against a boiler explosion. So all those materials were spread around surrounding areas rather than being contained by three feet of concrete.)
That's a terrible analogy. Nuclear power is just fine. Most of the hot stuff is gone within days to months. That's why reactors can be serviced and/or dismantled within a few months to a few years of being shut down. If anything, we're leaving our kids a nasty power crisis and dirty air because we refuse to build more nuclear plants!
I am being completely serious here. Any materials that last that long are more than safe enough. Heck, anything with a nuclear lifetime that long is safer than the Potassium stored in your body*.
Think about it. Radiation is a process whereby mass is converted into energetic particles. Thus the mass itself is the fuel for the radioactivity. The more radiation produced, the faster the mass is converted into that radiation. In result, the mass will burn itself out in a short period of time. Materials with 10,000 year lifespans convert their mass to radiation so slowly that you can count each particle as it is produced. Compared to cosmic radiation, that's a zero risk.
Furthermore, there are different types of radiation. A great deal of radiation (e.g. alpha and beta) can't even penetrate the dead layer of cells on our skin!
In effect, the situation with nuclear radiation has been overblown. Read up on radioactivity if you want to understand the true dangers of working with the material. Once you understand things better, you may start demanding that your local coal plant be replaced with a nuclear plant! (Did you know that coal plants disperse more radioactive material into the environment than any other power-producing technology?)
* In a human body of 70 kg mass, about 4,400 nuclei of 40K decay per second.
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Complete and utter nonsense caused by a misreading of early safety reports. Allow me to inject some real information:
Rather, waste management [from reprocessing] is made very much easier. The decree that Yucca Mountain must isolate the waste for more than 10,000 years is due primarily to the presence of long-lived transuranic elements. Appropriate reprocessing will allow those troublemakers to be consumed in fast reactors, leaving only the real waste--the fission products--to be disposed of, and their radioactive toxicity fall below that of the original uranium ore after less than 500 years. Effective waste management becomes a slam dunk.
Are you aware that reprocessed Plutonium isn't bomb grade?*
Both would require significant reprocessing to be made into weapons. If you must do it, it's much easier to reprocess Uranium. At least then you'll be ready to build your bomb. With Plutonium, you're not even half-way there.
* http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/2006/april/article2.html
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And neither will external materials that have low-level radioactivity for 10,000 years.
Let's be clear for a moment: Litvinenko was poisoned. He didn't accidentally ingest 10 micrograms of Polonium 210 any more than you or I have accidentally ingested 5 mg of Pu-238. With a half-life of about 1/3yr, a temperature that easily exceeds 500C, and a heavy weight that prevents it from becoming airborne, Polonium poses little risk outside the laboratory or industrial environments where it is used. In addition, Polonium is a highly stable heavy metal that is unlikely to chemically bond to common materials and/or make it into the water or food supply like the more concerning Su-90 or I-131.
The greatest concern with Polonium-210 is that tobacco fertilizers contain the material, probably from natural Uranium decay in the soil. The tobacco plant absorbs the chemical and thus it gets into cigarettes. The quantities are miniscule, even by Polonium-210 standards (partially owing to the short half-life), but enough to eventually lead to lung cancer.
Let's count up the deaths, shall we?
Three Mile Island: 0 deaths
Chernobyl: 47 deaths (there were also 4,000 cases of Thyroid cancer that were successfully treated)
London Great Smog: 12,000 deaths
That last one was caused by burning coal. 12,000 deaths from a disaster caused by burning coal. Versus a maximum impact from nuclear power of ~4,050 people. (Only a small handful of who directly lost their lives.) And that's DESPITE the USSR building a sub-standard facility, DESPITE the USSR requiring untrained personal to safety test the facility, DESPITE the lousy and late evacuation job, and DESPITE the massive release of radioactive materials.
If that's not sinking in, read it again. Coal is MASSIVELY more dangerous than nuclear power plants. Period, end of story. If you have your brain even half-way engaged, you should be demanding that every one of our coal plants be ripped out.
(The 125,000 death figure, BTW, is a myth.)
TMI was not a "bad" design for its time. By modern standards it is, but then it was acceptable. And guess what? NOBODY DIED. Chernobyl on the other hand lacked BASIC safety measures. Like concrete for example. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that putting a solid concrete bunker around a super-heated boiler is a good idea in case it should explode. (Boiler explosions are a VERY common industrial accident, regardless of nuclear materials.) For some stupid reason, the bunker wasn't there. Furthermore, the untrained techs who performed the tests actually DISABLED the shutdown systems by cutting wires so that the reactor could not auto-sc
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