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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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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.
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.
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.