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EPA Mulling Relaxed Radiation Protections For Nuclear Power
mdsolar sends this news from Forbes:
Both proponents and opponents of nuclear power expect the Environmental Protection Agency in coming months to relax its rules restricting radiation emissions from reactors and other nuclear facilities. EPA officials say they have no such intention, but they are willing to reconsider the method they use to limit public exposure—and the public's level of risk.
At issue is a 1977 rule that limits the total whole-body radiation dose to any member of the public from the normal operation of the uranium fuel cycle—fuel processing, reactors, storage, reprocessing or disposal—to 0.25 millisieverts per year. (This rule, known as 40 CFR part 190, is different from other EPA regulations that restrict radionuclides in drinking water and that limit public exposure during emergencies. Those are also due for revision.) "We have not made any decisions or determined any specifics on how to move forward with any of these issues. We do, however, believe the regulation uses outdated science, and we are thinking about how to bring the regulation more in line with current thinking," said Brian Littleton, a chemical engineer with EPA's Office of Radiation and Indoor Air."
At issue is a 1977 rule that limits the total whole-body radiation dose to any member of the public from the normal operation of the uranium fuel cycle—fuel processing, reactors, storage, reprocessing or disposal—to 0.25 millisieverts per year. (This rule, known as 40 CFR part 190, is different from other EPA regulations that restrict radionuclides in drinking water and that limit public exposure during emergencies. Those are also due for revision.) "We have not made any decisions or determined any specifics on how to move forward with any of these issues. We do, however, believe the regulation uses outdated science, and we are thinking about how to bring the regulation more in line with current thinking," said Brian Littleton, a chemical engineer with EPA's Office of Radiation and Indoor Air."
It's good to see the EPA finally considering relaxing some of its uptight, business-hostile regulations. No wonder the US is losing ground to the developing world when for a few decades it has pushed this regulatory regime that holds industry back and has really harmed wider adoption of nuclear energy. As the case of China shows, the population is willing to accept an increase in pollution as long as the country sees strong economic growth and (something to think of after the "Obamacare" wrangling) advanced and affordable health services are available to somewhat make up for the possible decrease in life expectancy that said pollution might entail.
it is the common view of medical and general science during the century-odd that we have discovered and been able to document radiation and its effects... that no amount is "generally recognized as safe" and standards need to be tightened. that radiation damage is cumulative. and that normal diagnostic x-rays and so forth approach the line of cellular damage over a lifetime.
so a comprehensive review based on science would move the decimal point to the left, at least to .025 mS/year, and perhaps .0025 mS.
certainly, radon exposure in homes has been trending that way, much to the chagrin of some homeowners who would also pass off arcwelder power panels because they haven't had a fire yet.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I'm sick and tired of the notion that it's OK to pollute, as long as you don't pollute "too much."
It's pretty straightforward actually. We do valuable things and sometimes they cause pollution, sometimes minor sometimes massive. Instead of being "sick and tired" about the non problem of minute pollution (especially given that there is actual large scale, heavy, life-threatening pollution out there), do a cost/benefits analysis instead.
Cleanup regs require local radiation to be BELOW natural average flux.
While the EPA is thinking about raising limits on how much radioactive material nuclear power plants can release into the environment there are no limits on what coal plants can release. The radioactive material in coal is considered "naturally occurring" since it was dug out of the ground. However thorium is not naturally occurring radioactive material because it is... also dug out of the ground.
The federal regulations on radioactive materials and pollution have little relation to reason. This nonsense is holding up research in nuclear power. If our "carbon footprint" is an issue then it does not look to me like the government cares a whole lot. They'll toss money at coal powered "electric" cars but not allow a nuclear power plant to get built in four decades.
What happens to our carbon footprint with all those electric cars powered from coal and natural gas? Oh, we power our cars from wind and solar? That's laughable. No one has yet made a solar panel that can make a profit. Wind power might make a profit but it relies on natural gas turbines to make up for when the wind does not blow. Wind power actually increases carbon output because instead of using efficient boilers they have to use inefficient turbines.
Getting back to the radiation aspect the burning of natural gas releases radon into the air. Is there any regulations on that? No, because that is "naturally occurring", as if because it's "natural" radiation it does us no harm. What we need to do is hold up fossil fuels to the same standard as nuclear power. We'd switch over to nuclear power on that aspect alone.
All power sources release radiation into the environment. We're disturbing the earth as we dig for coal, uranium, silicon, or hydro electric basins. Even bio-fuels release radiation because we dig up the earth to plant the crops.
Nuclear power has the lowest carbon footprint of any power source we know of. Solar and wind cannot even compete because of all the concrete needed to hold up the structures. I'd suspect that if anyone did an honest assessment of the radiation released then it'd probably do better than the rest there as well.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Yep, I think we can all agree that it's worth a few punkin' headed babies and/or a couple of deaths so the rest of us can have brighter colors and whiter whites.
I know you're trying to be sarcastic, but yes, that is right. A small or even non-existent harm for vast benefit to many people justifies the harm. Given that we know there are far more serious problems, not just environmental, but of the human condition, this is a strong indication that we should be bothering with those big problems rather than obsessing over the small or non-existent ones.
I am not impressed with the state of coal fired emissions regulation (sulfur compounds are down; but fly ash certainly isn't something that cures what ails you, and the general 'Eh, old stuff just gets grandfathered because we can't fight the incumbents' model of regulation is broken); but your snarking about the poor reactors being treated as unnatural is rather flawed.
The further your coal gets from being pure carbon, the more dire some of the potential aerosolized-and-spread-hither-and-yon materials are; but the process is just conventional chemistry, you aren't going to emit anything you didn't dig up(except the added oxygen). A nuclear reactor; shockingly enough, is not subject to this limitation, and fairly aggressively shoves assorted fissionables down the decay chain.
Aside from the one (known) incident at Oklo, the crust isn't seeing much in the way of activity above background decay rates, and it follows that anything with a short half life is going to be extremely scarce. Something that's been dug up, concentrated, and carefully stewed in its own neutrons, by contrast, will have a very different collection of isotopes, some remarkably scarce anywhere else.
This doesn't mean that coal power is good for you, or restricted in what it contributes to our air supply; because that is very unlikely; but it's just silly to pretend that reactor products are isotopically similar to what you'll find in the ground; the 'power' in 'nuclear power' is only there because they aren't.
The Fukushima exclusion zone will shrink with time as the site is cleaned up. Meanwhile, the German Greens have replaced nuclear with the world's largest strip mine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garzweiler_surface_mine), which is about to be supplemented by a pit twice its size (Tagebau Hambach). Who can't love the smell of smoldering lignite in the morning!
Fukishima killed 1,000 people, which is really sad. 230,000 were killed by the Banquiao hydroelectric dam disaster. Even if the worst nuclear accident in history happened EVERY YEAR, it would still be safer than hydroelectric.
Let's look at US safety standards. The one accident at a US nuclear utility which some find concerning occurred in 1979, at Three Mile Island. Fatalities linked to the Three Mile Island incident total zero, as shown by Hatch, Beyea, Nieves, and Susser (1990) and many other studies. The same year, in 1979, 1,800 people were killed in the Morvi hydroelectric plant failure (Noorani 1984). Also the same year, 130 people were killed in coal mining accidents as shown by Mine Safety and Health Administration reports (2010). This shows that even in the worst year for US nuclear power, the alternatives were infinitely more hazardous. Internationally, Fukushima and Chernobyl later grabbed headlines. While the failure of the old Russian reactor at Chernobyl did kill an estimated 4,000 people (Sovacool 2008), this pales in comparison to the 230,000 killed in the Banqiao hydroelectric disaster (Pisaniello 2009). Fukushima caused the loss of 1,000 lives (von Hippel 2011), yet more were killed in Jesse oil pipeline explosion (Sovacool 2008). Sovacool calculates that in total, energy accidents killed 182,156 people from 1907-2007 and all nuclear accidents in history represent just 2% of those fatalities. Nothing is perfectly safe, but energy must come from somewhere and nuclear has proven to be far safer than the alternatives for large-scale power production.
230,000 were killed by the Banquiao hydroelectric dam disaster.
Not quite. 20,000 were killed in the immediate flooding. The rest were killed in the epidemics, famines, etc that followed.
Even if the worst nuclear accident in history happened EVERY YEAR, it would still be safer than hydroelectric.
If you're going to claim indirect deaths as you did above, then I'm going to claim indirect deaths too.
http://www.who.int/ionizing_ra...
Chernobyl didn't kill that many people directly/immediately, but it has impacted the health of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. It will continue to do so, for generations. Nuclear disasters never go away.
Where X is 10-100 times larger than Y: Increasing the cancer risks for X people isn't 'better' than immediately wiping Y people off the map.
Please help metamoderate.
Yes, all kinds of interesting things can come from nuclear fission. Some of them very valuable precisely because of their interesting radioactive properties.
What's happening here is that the EPA is considering lifting some of the restrictions on some of the radioactive gasses that are difficult to contain and have half lives that are too short or too long to radiate humans in any statistically significant manner. They are not considering changes to the radioactive solids, the stuff that can affect human health.
Calling radiation that has been released from human activity as "natural" does not follow. That radon or other radioactive material from mining would not be in the atmosphere it it was not disturbed. It would have decayed underground where no human would have been exposed. Now that the gasses have been released by mining people have been exposed to increased radiation. But the EPA ignores it because they feel like it.
Point is that nothing exists in a vacuum, and there is no such thing as a free lunch. We can develop nuclear power and reap the rewards it offers, we can keep digging up coal, or we can revert to a nearly cave man existence of wind and solar power. Humans lived on wind, solar, and bio fuels for thousands of years. Much of that supported by slavery. I suspect if we abandon nuclear and fossil power we will revert to things like slavery. We didn't escape from such poverty until we found fossil fuels and made carbon our slave. Unless something better comes along we have a choice, nuclear power, fossil fuels, or Little House on the Prairie.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Never mind that, even were all nuclear power stations (and their accumulated waste waste), and the effects of every nuclear test in history to disappear from the planet TODAY, you'd STILL be living in an environment FILLED with radiation.
And how do you explain places like Guarapari Brazil, with its naturally radioactive beaches? Where the average exposure a year is 175 mS? Yet they don't have higher instances of cancer and radiation-related disease?
I'm sorry, your views of radiation, and its place in nature are uneducated, fear-driven and have no real basis in "science".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I'm sick and tired of the notion that it's OK to pollute, as long as you don't pollute "too much."
Agreed in principal, although I am sure even you pollute. Thankfully we have had nuclear plants that don't pollute the air or emit contaminants that wind up in anyone's blood. Too bad that damn sun is beaming us with radiation all the time, while almost nobody except those that enter reactor buildings gets any comparatively measurable exposure to radiation from the plant itself.
So merely having an opinion can make other people total tools and idiots? Yea right. Save the amateur psychology for someone who cares.
Fukishima killed 1,000 people, which is really sad.
Nobody was killed from the nuclear accident at Fukushima. Some were killed by the Tsunami, of course. Workers have been injured from construction type activities, but it is nowhere near 1,000.
Not to mention, most of the exclusion zone is perfectly safe right now, just precautionary and logistics reasons are keeping much of that area in the zone.
Sorry, but YES.
This isn't about "brighter colors" and "whiter whites".
It's about providing for the world's energy needs WITHOUT massive greenhouse gas pollution, whose effects could kill off significant chunks of life on this planet.
Unless YOU want to be one of the unlucky 99% who is volunteering to go shiver and starve in a cave someplace.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I've heard of two workers killed in industrial accidents on the Fukushima site after the accident started. But that does seem a rather smaller number than 1,000. Maybe this was a really big value of 2?
While the EPA is thinking about raising limits on how much radioactive material nuclear power plants can release into the environment there are no limits on what coal plants can release.
"But Teacher! Billy is punching people, so why can't I punch people?!?"
If you have empirical data to present on the risk of the current levels of radiation exposure measured in QALYs, and an argument for adjusting the current regulated level, present it. But saying that we should ease our regulation on this form of harm, merely because you assert that another form of harm is insufficiently regulated, is manipulative and irrational.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I'm sick and tired of the notion that it's OK to pollute, as long as you don't pollute "too much."
If it isn't "too much", it isn't pollution.
In a sense, breathing and pissing are polluting but as long as the ecosystem can handle it you are in a sustainable pattern.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Relaxed Radiation? Good. I don't want ANYthing stressed out around nuclear power -- the pipes, the operators, OR the radiation.
;-) is fine with me.
Anything that keeps them all mellow and not blowing up to bits
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
These scientific studies are on the effects of tritium on living beings.
Some of them show that Triated water's effect is biologically mutagenic *because* it's a low energy emitter and it's characteristics makes readily absorbed by surrounding cells. The available evidence from studies conducted journal a list of effects. From those works;
Tritium can be inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through skin. Eating food containing 3H can be even more damaging than drinking 3H bound in water. Consequently, an estimated radiation dose based only on ingestion of tritiated water may underestimate the health effects if the person has also consumed food contaminated with tritium. (Komatsu)
Studies indicate that lower doses of tritium can cause more cell death (Dobson, 1976), mutations (Ito) and chromosome damage (Hori) per dose than higher tritium doses. Tritium can impart damage which is two or more times greater per dose than either x-rays or gamma rays.
(Straume) (Dobson, 1976) There is no evidence of a threshold for damage from 3H exposure; even the smallest amount of tritium can have negative health impacts. (Dobson, 1974) Organically bound tritium (tritium bound in animal or plant tissue) can stay in the body for 10 years or more.
It's often said "of all the elements in nuclear waste tritium is one of the more harmless ones" and while it's more benign than most other radioactive effluents it's toxicity should not be under-estimated.
Tritium can cause mutations, tumors and cell death. (Rytomaa) Tritiated water is associated with significantly decreased weight of brain and genital tract organs in mice (Torok) and can cause irreversible loss of female germ cells in both mice and monkeys even at low concentrations. (Dobson, 1979) (Laskey) Tritium from tritiated water can become incorporated into DNA, the molecular basis of heredity for living organisms. DNA is especially sensitive to radiation. (Hori) A cell's exposure to tritium bound in DNA can be even more toxic than its exposure to tritium in water. (Straume)(Carr)
First, as an isotope of hydrogen (the cell's most ubiquitous element), tritium can be incorporated into essentially all portions of the living machinery; and it is not innocuous -- deaths have occurred in industry from occupational overexposure. R. Lowry Dobson, MD, PhD. (1979)
References;
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Wow, you haters really have got to hate.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"Johns Hopkins scientists report that rats exposed to high-energy particles, simulating conditions astronauts would face on a long-term deep space mission, show lapses in attention and slower reaction times, even when the radiation exposure is in extremely low dose ranges. The cognitive impairments — which affected a large subset, but far from all, of the animals — appear to be linked to protein changes in the brain, the scientists say." http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org...
Holy shit, CHEMICALS! RUN FOR THE HILLS! The dihydrogen monoxide is going to kill you!
Just because you disagree doesn't mean it's not true.
Coal ash is old soil. It screens radiation just as much as soil. There is no increase in radiation. In fact, dilution of carbon-14 in the atmosphere (and thus food) leads to reduced radiation exposure as a result of fossil fuel use.
There's no such thing as "zero" radiation.
You'd DIE in a zero-radiation environment, as your body and its symbionts are accustomed to certain levels of naturally occurring radiation in the background.
Also, contrary to your assertion, there's no such thing as a linear progression of exposure levels to cancer.
Average background radiation is usually between 1-3 mS. But there are places like Guarapari, Brazil, where the background radiation is something in excess of 175 mS.
But you do NOT find 175x the instances of cancer there.
Try again.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
...that this story carefully avoids the two fairly recent experiments which are critical to the understanding of the effects of low-dose radiation. These are:
Smith, Geoffrey Battle; Grof, Yair; Navarrette, Adrianne; Guilmette, Raymond A. (2011). "Exploring Biological Effects of Low Level Radiation from the Other Side of Background". Health Physics 100 (3): 263Ã"5. doi:10.1097/HP.0b013e318208cd44. PMID 21595063.
Capece, D.; Fratini, E. (2012). "The use of pKZ1 mouse chromosomal inversion assay to study biological effects of environmental background radiation". The European Physical Journal Plus 127 (4): 37. Bibcode:2012EPJP..127...37C. doi:10.1140/epjp/i2012-12037-7.
Everyone is well aware that the hysteria about radiation dose -so regularly stoked up by the green activists - depends on the adoption of a linear no-threshold model. This assumes that there is NO level of radiation which is not harmful, and ignores the fact that people in high natural radiation spots do not exhibit increased levels of radiation damage which the LNTM predicts.
Both the referenced papers above describe experiments where cells were exposed to environments where ionising radiation had been carefully excluded, in underground Ultra-low Radiation labs. In all cases the cells became unhealthy and growth-inhibited.
Don't just keep reinforcing green prejudice. Read them.
At least your opinion is backed up by facts and reasoning, unlike the AC's.
Fact: Humans today, on the whole, live better lives than they ever have before.
Brighter colors and whiter whites is only a small fraction of what makes our quality of life so much better. For example, modern medical care has prevented far more death, retardation, and disabilities than modern industry has created short of the sheer population increases it's enabled.
I don't read AC A human right
Strip mines do get returned to grade and much faster than exclusion zones can be re-inhabited. So, you don't really have a point here. Turns out Germany is managing much butter than Japan. http://www.forbes.com/sites/am...
Standards for small reactors should be stronger to avoid greater exposure for the public. Replacing one large reactor with fifty smaller reactors increases public exposure by a factor of fifty unless the standard is strengthened by a factor of fifty for the small reactors.
I work in a facility where there are government inspectors on site 24/7 and the things we get away with are absurd. From my own personal experience regulations are already barely even payed lip service as it is.
Point is that nothing exists in a vacuum, and there is no such thing as a free lunch. We can develop nuclear power and reap the rewards it offers, we can keep digging up coal, or we can revert to a nearly cave man existence of wind and solar power.
Are you an idiot or a liar? There's no third way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Some higher altitude cities in the US show lower average performance in Luminosity's tests. http://www.dailytech.com/Lumos... Though Provo and Ft. Collins are doing OK.
You use this phrase but don't seem to understand what is means, "significant associations" is the opposite of what you are saying.
Many were killed by the evacuation.
Part of the EPA's instructions are to consider the costs of regulations. Since new reactors are supposed to be safer, it should be free of cost to tighten regulations. This would be the time to tighten rather than loosen regulations.
Care to provide a number?
That's the tradeoff we make with vaccination programs. A small percentage of kids who are vaccinated get sick, and a few of them die every year. But we still vaccinate everyone because the benefits far outweigh those costs.
The flaw in your reasoning (it's a pretty common flawed line of reasoning, not just yours, so I'm not picking on you) is that you're trying to compare against a nonexistent zero state. Radiation can cause death. If there were no radiation, there would be no deaths. Therefore we must avoid radiation. Likewise, if we didn't vaccinate, those kids who died from vaccination wouldn't die. Therefore we shouldn't vaccinate.
To do a correct comparison, you can't compare to a zero state. You must take into account opportunity costs; you have to compare with alternative equivalent states. Without vaccination, far more people would die from the diseases we're vaccinating against. Without nuclear power, the world loses 13% of its electricity. The harm from that far exceeds the few deaths from even Fukushima-level accidents. Or if you replaced that nuclear generation with the next most-viable alternative (coal/gas), the emissions from those are far more harmful than the radiation hazards from nuclear. Even if you managed to replace them with wind and solar, the number of deaths installing and maintaining all those turbines and rooftop panels (roughly 11,000 turbines for a Fukushima-level plant, or 4.8 million homes with 40 m^2 of panels installed on each of their roofs) far exceeds the number that nuclear has killed.*
* Math for the wind/solar comparison:
No grandparent really does have a point, what you aren't taking account of is all the pollutants that burning lignite spreads across the environment, including radioactive materials. Burning coal and coal like substances is the most polluting way we generate electricity at the moment by far, any thing else we use is far far better.
Thus they've swapped out low pollution for very high pollution. Which means in principle the Greens failed at their mission statement.
This is an article by Amory Lovins, a well known axe-grinder from the darkest days of the Seventies, not by a nuclear expert. Forbes is run by Wall Street lunkheads who don't know the difference. When Germany turned off the first half of its nuclear plants in its panic after Fukushima, it had the fallback of being able to buy power from France while it shifts its own generation baseload to brown coal.
Japan has no adjacent nuclear country to get transitional power from (Korea is too far away and is too busy smelting the steel that Germany no longer can) and being a totally igneous country has no domestic coal supply to transition to. Japan is limping along right now on a power grid whose shortfall is being made up by hastily reactivated old coal and natural gas plants that had been mothballed for years. The fuel for these plants all has to be imported at great expense, which is why Japan is restarting its nuclear plants after a series of post-Fukushima safety tests. Something tells me that Germany never will turn off the second half of its nuclear plants as scheduled in 2022, especially if science gives additional support to the AGW hypothesis and/or if low-cost standardized reactors start pouring off Chinese assembly lines.
The nice thing about the radioactive releases from reactors is that they *DO* go away.
Unlike most of those chemicals, we do have a reasonable understanding of radiation's effects.
1,000 is the estimate from increased cancer risk. If anything else in my post is unclear, you can check the reference I listed for each number. For example, that one says (von Hippel 2011), meaning if you Google von Hippel 2011 you can see exactly where I got that number.
The key stat though is the radiation released. Coal plants release far more than nuclear plants. It really is silly to treat that emission with less care than emissions from a nuclear plant.
> but it has impacted the health of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.
Try 4,00. I gave you references for every single number in my post. Are you SO lazy you'd rather make shit up out of whole cloth rather than spend two seconds to look at the real numbers?
> It will continue to do so, for generations. Nuclear disasters never go away.
The half-life of cesium-137 is 30 years.
Radioactive substances can be classified by their halflife, which is the amount of time required for half of the radiation to be emitted. A common use
of a material with a long half-life is carbon-14 dating, used by archaeologists to measure the age
of a plant or animal specimen. Archaeologists calculated that Ötzi the Iceman was about 5,000
years old because the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730 years and Ötzi emitted about half as much
radiation as a person alive today (South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology 2013). Plants and
animals are not considered to be a radiation risk because the half-life of C-14 and other
components of our bodies is so long, meaning it takes thousands of years to emit appreciable
amounts of radiation. Other substances such as iodine-131 have a short half-life, meaning they
release radiation quickly. Handling iodine-131 is dangerous because it releases half of its
radiation in just eight days (U.S. Environmental Department Protection Agency, 2013).
Protection is simple, however, as the EPA advised “iodine-131's short half-life of 8 days means
that it will decay away completely” in a few weeks. The difference can be visualized by
comparing a household candle, which releases energy slowly, to gunpowder, which releases
energy quickly. Gunpowder is dangerous because the energy is released quickly. A candle is
safe to have around the house because the energy is released slowly. Radioactive substances can
be viewed in a similar way - waste that takes thousands of years to release its energy is not
particularly dangerous to have around.
The 1,000 figure is based on increased cancer risk. See von Hippel 2011 for details.
Sorry but your body (and the things living in it) are used to certain levels of radiation. With ZERO radiation (which is pretty much impossible as the entire biosphere is at least marginally radioactive), you'd get a canary in the coal mine effect with your body's symbionts. Which would initially make you very ill, and you likely wouldn't recover as you wouldn't acquire new ones and your body wouldn't function well without them.
Don't take my word for it through. Talk to a real medical doctor about it.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The difficulty being, your references are estimates based on what dose threshold?
Well, you have to go three citations deep to reach the original model they're working off of. Which turns out to be a conservative application of Linear No Threshold. Which... isn't actually testable for any reasonable value of statistical significance over the populations they're attempting to apply it to.
The BEIR VII risk models are a combination of excess relative risk (ERR) and excess absolute risk (EAR) models, both of which are written as a linear function of dose, depending on sex, age at exposure and attained age. The BEIR VII risk models were derived from analyses of data on the Japanese atomic bomb survivors for all cancer sites except breast and thyroid; for the latter, they were based on published combined analyses of data on the atomic bomb survivors and medically exposed cohorts.40, 41 To estimate risks from exposure at low doses and dose rates, a dose and dose-rate effectiveness factor (DDREF) of 1.5 was used for all outcomes except leukemia.
The biological effects of acute radiation exposure >1 Gy are reasonably well-known, are the basis for the linear-no-threshold model, and completely inapplicable to this sitation, as even the most-exposed workers at the Fukushima accident site did even approach this dose, despite the multiple situations where workers were exposed to doses in excess of legal limits.
The biological effects of short term dose less than 0.05 Gy or low-dose long-term exposure are also reasonably well-known, in that there is no statistically significant effect.
Unless you're dealing with the aftermath of a global thermonuclear war, the linear-no-threshold model is nearly useless from an epidemiological perspective, and so are conclusions reached using it.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
RTFA
You are mistaken. Uranium in coal ash is in the same concentration as in soil. There is no increase in background when the screening is the same. Fossil fuels do dilute carbon-14 in the atmosphere so our food is less radioactive as a result.
I can't comment on the applicability of that particular model, but I did note that estimates using various models ranged from a few hundred to around five thousand. To a person wanting to reach useful conclusions, from unbiased information to the extent possible, the 1,000 estimate is therefore a reasonable estimate to reason from. To compare nuclear to coal, hydroelectric, etc. we really only need an "order of magnitude" estimate and a survey of all available models indicates that 1,000 is the right order of magnitude.
If your purpose is advocacy, you can of course choose the highest or lowest estimate, whichever suits your agenda. However, doing that carries significant risk. Cherry-picking your data and models can put you in the same position that environmentalists were in during the 1970s - vigorously advocating for a policy that is detrimental to your goals. In the seventies and eighties, environmentalists chose the numbers they liked to suggest that nuclear is "bad". By doing so, they insured that the US would be powered primarily by burning fossil fuels for the forty years since. Had they tried to be objective in their analysis, they probably would have become supporters of nuclear as an alternative to fossil fuels forty years sooner, and we might not have any coal-fired plants today.
You first have to show there's a problem with that.
we really only need an "order of magnitude" estimate and a survey of all available models indicates that 1,000 is the right order of magnitude.
That's boilerplate for "I feel like 1,000 today". There's no reason to expect any of these models to be applicable. My view is that if your estimate is below any detectable threshold, then zero is as good a number as any.
> What happens to our carbon footprint with all those electric cars powered from coal and natural gas?
It goes down by about half. Even if the mix gets more CO2 intensive.
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/
Don't wonder, educate yourself.
Those homes would have to be made of carefully chosen materials not to emit radiation themselves (no granite countertops, too) and, of course, no sleeping with a spouse or a baby in the same bed - human body is naturally radioactive, which brings us to the last point - we would have to be fed with isotopically purified food to get rid of all the K-40 and in the long run, maybe replace all the carbon in our bodies with a purified carbon than doesn't consist partially of radioactive C-14.
Also, you missed a decimal, it's 2.4 mSv, not that the average means much, it's counted from about half mSv in some places and tens in others.
Troll 2.0 Fear my asocial networking!
It probably means that the maximum possible lifetime energy production of a photovoltaic panel is less than the energy required to manufacture and deploy it.
I have no idea whether that is true, but I believe it is GP's meaning.