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The Panic Over Fukushima
An anonymous reader points out an article in the Wall Street Journal about how irrational fear of nuclear reactors made people worry much more about last year's incident at Fukushima than they should have. Quoting:
"Denver has particularly high natural radioactivity. It comes primarily from radioactive radon gas, emitted from tiny concentrations of uranium found in local granite. If you live there, you get, on average, an extra dose of .3 rem of radiation per year (on top of the .62 rem that the average American absorbs annually from various sources). A rem is the unit of measure used to gauge radiation damage to human tissue. ... Now consider the most famous victim of the March 2011 tsunami in Japan: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Two workers at the reactor were killed by the tsunami, which is believed to have been 50 feet high at the site. But over the following weeks and months, the fear grew that the ultimate victims of this damaged nuke would number in the thousands or tens of thousands. The 'hot spots' in Japan that frightened many people showed radiation at the level of .1 rem, a number quite small compared with the average excess dose that people happily live with in Denver. What explains the disparity? Why this enormous difference in what is considered an acceptable level of exposure to radiation?"
Not by the Fukushima thing - but by the fact that the tsunami was 50 feet high at the plant. I understand how it can happen; but that is truly awesome (in the literal sense of the word).
#DeleteChrome
Fukushima wasn't scary because of what happened. It was scary because one of the most developped countries in the world had absolutly no control over what happened.
Untill now everybody was reassured that these things only happened to old sovjet reactors.
Fukushima learnt the ignorant masses that when nuclear shit hits the fan it doesn't matter much which country the fan is located in.
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I always find it funny that the generations of people who grew up living in absolute terror of all things nuclear are the same generations that believed hiding under a piece of furniture would protect them from all things nuclear.
This is just crap. Nuclear power is a silly remainder of the cold war: the power output was just too big for one faction not to have it. In a world where one as to balance reasonable risk against reasonable gain, nuclear power is just a no go. Get over it.
Where things get hairy is when dealing with various isotopes and how they do(or don't) get picked up by biological systems or absorbed by humans.
It is certainly possible to be injured or killed(horribly) by direct, penetrating exposure to a source of ionizing radiation; but that's pretty rare. The Therac-25 cases, that physicist who accidentally stuck his head in a particle accelerator, shoe salesmen from the good old days, the occasional poor bastard who gets caught in a criticality accident, that sort of thing.
Much more dangerous, at a population level, is absorbing a zesty isotope that, although too scarce in the environment, or not sufficient to penetrate skin(as with alpha emitters), can build up in specific tissues and irradiate them over time.
The trouble is that the risk presented by these sorts of sources depends a lot on biochemistry, lifestyle factors, and other annoying-to-measure stuff.
It's worse than that. Coal plants on average emit more radiation per kWh than nuclear plants. Including all the disasters of the past few decades.
This has already been debunked. Due to nuclear accidents coal can never catch up to the radiation emissions from nuclear plants, even if all of the coal in the world was burned.
This is actually the huge issue that is completely missed - probably deliberately - in the article. Radioactive iodine is absorbed by plants and fish, and bioconcentrates in humans in the thyroid gland where it causes thyroid cancer. Over 30% of Fukushima schoolchildren show thyroid irregularities already. Cesium isotopes are likewise bioactive, being taken up as if they were calcium in bones. This leads to Leukemia, Lymphoma, and Myeloma. Cesium is particularly pernicious because it is retained by the body permanently.
The article pooh-poohs radiation exposure as not as threatening as people think, without considering these quite serious contaminant issues.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I wonder if the mutated insects around Fukushima know that the radiation is only increased by 0.1 rem ... ...
Especialy if you consider that insects can stand roughly 100 times the radiation a human can
You must have missed this in TFA:
A recent study of butterflies near Fukushima confirms the well-known fact that radiation leads to mutations in insects and other simple life-forms. Research on those exposed to the atomic bombs shows, however, no similar mutations in higher species such as humans.
That goes to his credit. He reviewed the research, came to conclusions, and bit the hand that feeds him.
There's a big difference between
(1) a scientist who is a contrarian who tries to debunk the conventional wisdom and pick fights (and is maybe a pain in the ass sometimes) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Muller and
(2) a scientist who is a hired gun and makes a case for whoever is paying the bill. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Milloy#Links_to_tobacco_industry
You choose this post, which reveals your bias
Actually it reflects my understanding, which is backed by scientific evidence, that particulates spewed into the air by coal plants as far away as mainland China are more likely to end up in my body than emissions from the damaged containment structures at Fukushima or Chernobyl.
Do you have evidence to the contrary that you'd like to share with the class?
The official tallies still only count the firemen and control room staff.. The 600,000 'liquidators' are not. With this kind of behavior, the IAEA does a better job of toppling public trust in nuclear power than greenpeace.
... don't undersell the very real risk of idiots in charge of large dangerous equipment.
Indeed, no argument there.
But at least the potentially-dangerous incidents you mention were documented by someone, even if they ended up buried in an obscure NRC report. These reports don't always make the five o'clock news, but they are certainly useful to the regulators, engineers, and environmental scientists involved with designing the next generation of nuclear power plants.
On the other hand, nobody is documenting what happens when you and I inhale radionuclides that were released into the atmosphere by fossil-fuel combustion, potentially thousands of miles away from us. We can draw general conclusions about pollution levels and trends, but at the point where the damage is actually done, it always goes unnoticed. The prevailing attitude in the media is, "Hey, nobody saw it. It must not be a problem, right?"
That's the point that has to be made in threads like this one, over and over, to keep everyone honest.
Never been to Denver, eh? They not only use those radioactive blocks for foundations and basements, they also build walls out of them. So, when you spend 8 hours a night in bed trying to get some sleep, you're breathing in that lovely radon gas. And air, as you might know, goes readily into the bloodstream in your lungs. Biology 101. When I was a teenager on the Western Slope of Colorado back in the lat e60's, the hype was that those radioactive cinderblocks would cause cancer, mutations, and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Didn't happen. You get a much higher dose from cosmic radiation in Denver every year due to the thin air.
As far as mutations go, it usually takes a few years for them to show up. Most mutations are not viable, so they die shortly after birth and don't reproduce. End of problem.
Ignore the hype from places like rt.com which claims that Fukishima 'has nuked Kalamazoo, MI' and 'thousands of Russian troops have died trying to cover Chernobyl'. Even Greenpeace admits the radiation is only 70 times background level, at 5.7 becquerels and they have a vested interest in hyping everything out of proportion, so take their numbers with a grain of salt until you see a peer-reviewed report by a PhD. . When it's all said and done, though, even at Greepeace's probably highly inflated numbers, it's still about 1/50th of what's allowed for a nuclear reactor worker in the US to recieve per year. The radiation absorbed from a week at Chernobyl was less than a chest CT scan. A 2 week stay in the Fukishima exclusion zone would give you a quarter of the average yearly background radiation exposure. At the Fukishima town hall, you'd get about a quarter of the radiation you'd get from your yearly potassium decay in your own body, in a two week period, roughly equivilent to 20 dental xrays over 2 weeks.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Thank you. I really don't mean to sound like a dick but if you are worried about this I just want to ask these questions rather than spending the time to seek out the data myself. I have no opinion either way on nuclear power. Once again I completely realize repeatedly asking these questions is making me seem hostile, but I am not trying to be like that.
It is common for definitions of vague concepts like "irregular" to change over time. Has that occurred in this case? Why have the researchers failed to use a parametric approach (ie quantify "how irregular")? Why is the term used "irregular" rather than one that more strongly implies damaging to health?
How does the sampling strategy of children's thyroid glands differ between before fukushima and after?
Near me a sand mining company got in a bit of trouble after they donated some of the waste sand at the end of their process (simple gravity separation) to parks for children's sandpits. It turns out that by removing all the saleable material in the mineral sands they had unknowingly concentrated radioactive sand to a point where it could expose the children in the sandpits to about thirty times normal background radiation.
A lot of that mildly radioactive granite eventually ends up as sand and just water and gravity is enough to concentrate it a lot, so some of that beach sand might be irradiating people more than in Denver.
While the author concedes that 1500 deaths will be the long term impact of this accident, I love that he maintains that Nuclear power is safe and clean.
3000 died in the Twin Towers. Something like 50000 die every year in the US due to auto accidents. There are 7 BILLION people on Earth. 1600 people of a pool of 7 billion really isn't statistically significant. Hell, you take your life in your own hands when you get out of bed in the morning. You DO get out of bed in the morning, don't you?? Do you know how many people die in bed every year???
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
No there's not.
Actually, during the 1960's Oak Ridge National Laboratory built a small 5 MW reactor based on what we call molten-salt reactor (MSR) design, using thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel. The design actually worked quite well, but was discontinued because it didn't produce uranium-235 and plutonium-239, the two main fissile materials for nuclear weapons.
But now, they're dusting off the old research and studying the idea of scaling up this MSR design (best known today by the name Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR) for a new generation of extremely safe nuclear reactors that offer these advantages of conventional uranium-fueled reactors:
1. Uses a cheaply-made form of nuclear fuel, and thorium-232 is widely more abundant than uranium.
2. Doesn't need an expensive pressurized reactor vessel.
3. Reactor shutdown happens in only a few minutes just by dumping the fuel from the reactor.
4. By using closed-loop Brayton turbines, eliminates the need for expensive cooling towers or locating the reactor near a big source of cooling water such as a lake, fast-flowing river or ocean.
5. Can even use spent uranium fuel rods or plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as reactor fuel.
6. The amount of radioactive waste generated is tiny compared to a uranium-fueled reactor, and more importantly, the radioactive half-life is under 300 years, which means very cheap waste disposal (it can be dumped into any disused salt mine or salt dome). Mind you, the nuclear medicine industry wants that "waste," since the byproduct of an MSR has enormous medical uses.