Once they've solved that tiny transmission and storage issue. Until then they can only work in conjunction with fossil fuel plants and play a minor role, so much so in fact that building wind today equals cementing coal & gas into the mix.
The original nuclear pioneers never thought of LWRs and enriched uranium being anything more than a stop-gap solution. They were very clear about the need for breeder reactors which would eventually consume the waste from LWRs.
There is at least one Gen IV reactor design pretty much ready to go today, but which was halted in the 90s by Clinton and Al Gore: the Integral Fast Reactor. It can eat the waste from current day LWRs and reduce it much less dangerous fission product waste.
France's overall price of electricity with tax is lower than Denmark's untaxed price, meanwhile emitting >30% less CO2 per capita with a very similar GDP per capita (to within 5%). If we limit our consideration to electricity, France has ~75% lower emissions per MWh generated than Denmark; and over 80% lower than Germany, the renewable powerhouse of the continent. In fact, they have so much zero-CO2 electricity that they can afford to offset the CO2 emissions from many of their neighbors via transmission. Also keep in mind that France has had this CO2 per kWh value for the better part of two decades because its power mix has always been ~70-80% nuclear and ~15% hydro (the rest being filled in with things like gas, hence why this CO2/kWh number isn't a flat zero).
The OECD average is so high mostly because of heavy polluters like the US, being the about 1/4 of the population of the entire OECD (not just the high-income bracket), but twice the per capita CO2 emissions of, say, Germany.
To preemptively dispense with the "we can't build it fast enough" criticism of nuclear, I again present the example of... France. They initially started construction in 1974 and finished installing >50 reactors, hitting over 70% of generation capacity, within 15 years. So don't believe the renewable industry talking points of "it can't be done on time". It has been done before and it can be done again. If it had the political and popular will, Denmark could hit its CO2-reduction targets for electricity for 2050 some 20 years earlier.
I'm aware of this idea and that it requires as yet purely hypothetical forms of matter that have negative mass. Just because you can contrive GR's equations to allow for all manner of things, such as wormholes and time-travel, does not mean that those things actually exist, or that there's any practical way for them to exist. Meanwhile, nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei is a very well known and observed process. A Bussard ramjet scoop, meanwhile, also doesn't require any kind of exotic new physics, just lots of large-scale engineering. That was my point.
Aside from the warp drive, which is currently from a physics stand point pure gobbledygook, the sub-luminal "impulse drive" of the Enterprise was a classical nuclear fusion plasma engine fueled by interstellar hydrogen gas (that's why those red things on the front of the Enterprise's warp drive nacelles were called Bussard collectors). It is technologically speaking far in excess of what we can do today, but nonetheless theoretically permitted by known laws of physics.
And that's not what I claimed. Here, read again what I said:
Cosmic rays can cause DNA defects and, as best as we know, can cause cancers
Which was in response to your statement of:
Point is: they don't really cause a genetic defect that is spread due to multiplication
I challenged you to provide evidence of this, as I can't find any research supporting this in the scientific literature. You're essentially claiming that Linear Energy Transfer works in the opposite way that it does, depositing more energy per unit distance travelled as particle energy increases, which presumably should lead to more damage per unit of distance travelled and hence a higher proportion of cells killed right away. Unfortunately for you, however, LET works in the opposite way. LET quite neatly explains why cosmic rays have deeper penetration and irradiate more cells in their path. We're not coming at this blind, you know, we use this for targeting tumors during radiation therapy. However, this is just an argument from physical theories that, although they may work well in most areas of ionizing radiation, may for some inexplicable reason be inaccurate when applied to cosmic rays. The real meat is in the health effects studies and I've yet to see any epidemiological studies that can differentiate between the ionizing effects of cosmic rays vs. fission product radionuclides at similar dose levels and seeing as you don't seem to be able to produce any either, I'm going to have to dismiss your claim of a difference between them as pure unsubstantiated speculation.
Perhaps you should try not to switch or twist always what I say.
Where did I do that?
I pointed out that they kill the cells more or less right away
Can you demonstrate that? Additional oxidative stress and/or DNA single and double strand breaks are not necessarily fatal - cells are capable of withstanding a certain amount of both.
Point is: they don't really cause a genetic defect that is spread due to multiplication, in contrast to radioactive elements that get incorporated into the body and may damage surrounding cells DNA for/over a long time.
And that's exactly where you are wrong. Cosmic rays cancauseDNA defects and, as best as we know, can cause cancers (assuming LNT). It really doesn't matter if the source of a high-energy particle sits right next to the cell, or is billions of miles away. Also once a radioactive nucleus has decayed, it's done, no more danger from it for that particular cell, assuming there aren't many more nearby (this can happen with concentration, but not everything concentrates - that's what the tissue and radionuclide weighting factors in calculating risk values is used for). In short, from a biological perspective, the source of the high-energy particles is more or less irrelevant as to their effects on living cells. If you claim there to be a fundamental distinction, you must have access to information that the medical and health physics societies don't have and I'd appreciate if you could cite sources for your claims.
Hence IMHO
Again, your humble opinion doesn't equal research.
even if the 'Sievert norming groups' try hard to find 'equivalent' formulas.
I trust the experts in the field more than your unsubstantiated opinion. You can claim "common knowledge" all day long, but things asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
That is what I pointed out: they kill most cells they "touch" right away.
That is not how radiotoxicity works. Quantum particles aren't really like bullets and targets (even though in the popular media it's often simplified to that). They don't "shoot the cell dead". Instead what happens is they transfer energy to the particles that make up the cells and do so rather sporadically (not every particle in the path gets this energy contribution and not always in equal proportions). This can lead to particles ejecting from their molecular structures and changing their chemical properties. In ~30% of the time we observe this radiotoxicity manifesting in mechanical damage to DNA and ~70% of the time the particles never hit the DNA itself, but instead cause the creation of OH- radicals in the water inside cells (by essentially ejecting one of the hydrogen atoms from an H2O molecule), which then increase the oxidative stress on the cells.
Now each of these interactions causes the high-energy particle to lose a bit of energy, but in most cases it doesn't stop right away. It keeps going, plowing through cell after cell until all of its energy is depleted or it comes out the other end. The distance it travels is described as the mean free path, which depends on a product of its energy and strength of interaction with surrounding atoms. Electrons interact a lot more than photons, hence why photons of the same energy can shoot straight through tissue without losing much energy and so causing much less harm, while an electron will deposit its energy much faster in a shorter distance. Now consider cosmic rays - they consist of mostly similar stuff (electrons, protons, gammas), but at much, much higher energies (on order of >1000x). Thus an electron from Cs-137 (~500 KeV) has the capability of breaking ~100000 covalent atomic bonds (~5 eV each). By comparison, a cosmic ray photon, even though it interacts 1000x less strongly, has >1000x the energy (1 GeV or more), so it acts mostly similarly, if not worse. And let's not get into cosmic ray electrons and protons, those are real beasts.
So I hope you see that it's not that easy.
[Cosmic rays] are less dangerous as they don't "accumulate" in the body and don't continiously bombard the DNA.
I think you misunderstand the difference between radiation and radioactivity. A radioactive nucleus doesn't "keep intoxicating you" by its mere presence. It's like a grenade, it goes "pop" once or twice, emitting one or two particles of radiation (which really aren't that distinct from cosmic rays - high-energy particles either way) and it's done - no more danger from that one guy. Meanwhile cosmic rays keep on coming non-stop at a more-or-less constant rate. You can imagine it like being surrounded by radioactive nuclei, day in, day out, with the notable distinction that these guys never stop giving off radiation. They keep going forever.
A cosmic ray is like a bullet, it goes in and goes out...
And then the next one comes, and the next one, etc. forever. It never stops. Moreover the mean free path of 500 KeV electrons (most of the "dangerous" emissions from fission products) is a few milimeters at best. A cosmic ray, however, at >1 GeV (i.e. 2000x the energy of the electron) doesn't stop after a few milimeters, it keeps going, irradiating many more cells and potentially breaking many more bonds.
but they where for years... seems you forgot that
They weren't, people lived there continuously since the dropping of the bombs until today. Yeah, lots of people got sick in the initial aftermath and some sizable portion died (though by far nowhere near the amount that died from the initial blast and searing heat), but that effect subsided rather quickly. While terrible, we mustn't forget that it was war back then and fire bombings of Tokyo killed comparable numbers of people to Hiroshima and Nagasa
If something is a magnitude higher (factor 10x - 30x, as you pointed out), it is not 'comparable' in its effect to the 'original' thing.
It is quite a difference whether I drink *one* beer or 10 - 30.
Except that here we're talking about far smaller effects, more in line with 1 drop vs 10-30 drops of beer. Stick to facts and not analogies.
You try to compare stuff that can't be compared. A cosmic ray, a high energy ion, is crossing my body. Along its path it destroys a DNA strand here and there and kills some cells completely. Incorporating a radioactive element into your body is a bit different.
In what significant capacity? Radioactive element decay produces exactly the same kind of particles (high-energy electrons & gammas; high-energy ions being notably absent in fission product decay and mind you, high-energy ions are much more dangerous, so cosmic rays might even win from a danger perspective particle-by-particle).
Yes the 'Sievert modeling guys' try to 'compensate' the different effects to get a 'uniform' threat indicator.
Makes no sense IMHO, as all those slightly different forms of radiation have completely different effects.
Your humble opinion on the matter is your right to have, but dismissing the work of researchers and professionals in the field without evidence would at best net you a label of science denier. Unless you can produce good research to substantiate your opinion, it'll remain just that - opinion.
Plutonium e.g. settles in the bone marrow... the deadly dose for a human is something like 50 nano grams, perhaps 100, don't remember.
This is the problem when you listen to non-scientists like Ralph Nader and even a cursory read of the Wikipedia article on Plutonium's toxicity would have given you tons of references to studies, research and experiments done which essentially debunks this. Plutonium is toxic for sure, but it's nowhere near the levels you assume it is.
Iodine accumulates mainly in the thyroid, causing cancer there. It seems you can prevent that with high doses of Iodine intake, and Thyroid cancer seems relatively easy to treat and surviving rates are high.
I-131 is the primary problem child in inadvertent radiation releases, since there's plenty of it (~3% fission yield), it's highly mobile, it's intensely radioactive and easily bioaccumulates as you describe. After a few weeks, though, it decays away completely into stable Xe-131. There is also I-129, however its radiotoxicity is billions of times lower than I-131, so it's not really much of a problem once diluted.
Cesium accumulates in bones and sinew... I assume in muscles as well.
Correct. Add Sr-90 to that.
So, your 10x - 30x increase of radiation versus 'normal' background level still simply measures what you can count with a geiger counter. It does not take into account what happens if you inhale some dust on a dry summer day... perhaps working in a field with your shirt of covert with sweat when the dust accumulates on your skin.
Not correct. Sieverts are units of committed dose and all of the factors you mention have been considered in its calculation. Geiger counters just measure counts - disintegrations per second. To get a Sievert measurement what we do is we measure counts, then we take samples and employ systems such as mass spectrometry and gamma ray spectrometry to measure the exact radionuclides present and their proportions. These are then combined wit
What about the majority of people who live in dense cities in apartment buildings without private driveways and/or parking spaces that are simply not practical to electrify. You know, it's easy to solve the problem for relatively rich folks, but most people in the world live more like this or this (myself included). We park our cars out on the streets, drive around mostly in or near the city and fill up perhaps once a month. Are we supposed to go charge our cars once or twice a week for a few hours at some remote location?
Comparing the 'natural' intake of C14 and other elements 'in a normal' amount with the levels in Fukushima makes you a moron. Not C14 or other minimal intake.
Contrary to your quite uneducated assertion that background radiation in a "normal" amount is somehow inconsequential compared with the radiation levels at Fukushima, they are rather comparable. We have quantified these things quite accurately. Terrestrial background is anywhere from 0.1 uSv/h (Japan) to 0.3 uSv/h (USA) in most places on the planet, ignoring outliers. By comparison, the Fukushima exclusion zone typically ranges from 0.1 uSv/h to ~15 uSv/h with the median being somewhere close to 3 uSv/h or about 10-30x background. This is comparable to radiation exposure on a long-haul flight, as I've shown you, and that has so far not been shown to result in any increased risk, even in people who work for the airline industry and spend a sizable amount of their lives in this environment.
Cosmic Ray != radioactive iod or caesium
From a radiotoxicity standpoint, they are in fact not really distinct. You may recall that Sievert is a unit of committed dose, so it expresses biological effects, not just raw counts, and is capable of accounting for the differences between internal and external emitters. Now you could argue that whole-body exposure numbers are too simplistic to accurately asses ionizing radiation impact, and I'd agree (for certain radionuclides), but this has been considered and more accurate models are available, they're just not used very often in discussions, because they're too complex to easily wrap your mind around. For a first-degree approximation, though, whole-body exposure numbers seem to be quite a good rule of thumb.
Natural radioactivity is mainly something that hits you from the 'outside'... it hits your skin
Except for the ~5kBq of K-40 in your nerves. And the C-14 in all of your tissues. Also, cosmic radiation doesn't stop on your skin - it's comprised of extremely high energy particles at 1 GeV or more. Those sort of energies make the radiation from nuclear reactors seem like child's play. That is not to say that you'd rather be inside of a nuclear reactor - most definitely not, the flux there is many orders of magnitude larger - but it does show that cosmic rays don't just "hit your skin", but instead fire right through you and irradiate your internals quite easily.
First of all a healthy person has no Uranium or Thorium in his body.
I'd be careful with throwing around superlatives like "none", but it's probably fair to say that the abundance of actinides in most humans would be classed as "trace" at best.
you are again mixing up external radiation by natural sources with radioactive elements incorporated into the body
Except that both K-40 and C-14 are both natural and inside your body. In fact, we use C-14 abundance in tissues to date when organisms died. Whether something is or isn't natural has no bearing on where it is harmful.
The fallout is measurable every where in north Japan.
This statement, while true, is misleading, or at the very least oversimplified. We have extremely sensitive measurement equipment, but the mere detection of the presence of a radionuclide does not in itself imply any danger from it. What needs to be assessed is the particular type of radionuclide, its abundance and sample distribution, in order to be able to at least roughly assess the potential biological impacts. In pretty much any scoop e.g. topsoil you'd be able to find all manner of toxic stuff, from mercury through arsenic, lead and even to uranium - this is simply a consequence of the magnitude of Avogadro's number.
I'll leave you with just one tiny factiod: long-haul flights are associated with elevated exposure to cosmic rays, easily 20-30x sea-level background and comparable to some of the hotter parts of the Fukushima exclusion zone. This has been repeatedly assessed and demonstrated. As such, one would expect to find radiation-related cancer clusters among airline crew, who spend a sizable amount of their lives in this elevated radiation environment. And yet, no reliable evidence for this has been found so far.
While true, it is quite an oversimplification. Japan is very mountainous even near the shores, in some places, and it would not have been impossible to place the plant a little further "uphill" to prevent this from happening. There are several reason they placed it right on the shore, one of them being construction purposes. LWRs consist of some very heavy single-piece components and it's much easier to ship them in via boat than it is to transport them over the road. In addition, you have a readily available source of large amounts of cooling water in the world's largest heatsink.
However, had TEPCO not been a bunch of colossal asshats and not skimped on the construction and piping costs, they could have just as easily placed the thing a few miles inland and at higher elevation and none of this would have happened. In fact, if Japan ever decides to build liquid-metal cooled fast breeder reactors, it is absolutely imperative they place it somewhere it can't ever get flooded. If OTOH they decide to go with molten-salt reactors (and they should!), they could place them pretty much where ever they want, because fluoride salts don't react with water, aren't water-soluble, don't operate under high pressure and their large liquid range allows for high temperature of operation, which in turn means that passive air cooling in the event of a plant blackout is far easier to do.
what? I thought dam technology was already here. Are you telling me I get to invent pumping water into a reservoirs to store potential energy and the release it when the is a higher demand?
Dam hydroelectric power is already pretty much maxed out globally, since there's only limited numbers of suitable sites and flows.
Pumped hydro, meanwhile, cannot scale to the required energy volumes and is excessively expensive (despite being the cheapest storage option yet). It really falls apart when you consider the problem quantitatively (using Germany as an example here):
Germany averages ~60GW of power use over the course of a day.
They have 36 pumped storage plants with a total capacity of ~37.7GWh, which means they could power their existing grid for ~30 minutes before running out of water.
Variability in wind & solar resources means that in order to approach a 100% renewable grid you'll need at least 1-2 week's worth of storage, but at 60GW average per day, this means ~20000TWh total storage capacity. So far, they've got ~1/500th of that, so they'd need to build ~18000 new pumped hydro plants. This is quite simply not going to happen (there aren't that many sites or that much money in their economy to do that).
Aha! But wind & solar will cover each other and with smart grids & stuff we can lower the energy storage demand dramatically! Right? Well, no. To reliably back up 4GW even taking wind & solar complements into account would require ~440 pumped hydro plants, which when extrapolated out to 60GW still boosts this number back ~7000 and a rough cost of 1.44 trillion Euros (about 1/2 of Germany's yearly 2.73 trillion Euro GDP, or ~5x the German federal budget of $250 billion Euros) - and keep in mind this is without any transmission upgrades and without putting a single kW of generation capacity on the grid, just the storage to solve the intermittency problem.
Really? Solar is being mentioned a lot in the report with respect to Apple. So I presume, their datacenters have "cut the cord" and run completely off of their rooftop solar installations? Or is it simply installing solar panels offsite and doing net metering, "100% renewable" being hit when their grid feed-in is equivalent to their consumption? If so, then this is pure greenwashing, since they're still using the external electrical grid, which is most notably nowhere near 100% renewable, because it needs to be reliable. It's classic externalizing of the storage cost to somebody else and ignoring it, while feeling good about oneself.
"Dirty" is a very loose term without a rigorous definition, so you can make it be pretty much anything you like. For example, both wind and solar PV have a pretty serious environmental impact just from a raw materials mining perspective, only you don't see it, because most of it happens in places populated by people of a different skin color. Regardless, compared to fossil fuels (mostly coal), it's impact is pretty reserved, so I'm willing to give it a pass. Nuclear is similar, unless something goes really wrong, and even then the impacted areas are mostly deserted of people, not nature (which quite happily trades that niche in exchange for being pushed out of their natural habitats by people).
As for lethality, that is actually an understood and quantifiable factor and indeed nuclear comes out on top and that's even assuming the worst-case deaths from Chernobyl (4000 excess deaths over the next 25 years, 50 confirmed so far) and the linear-no-threshold model of radiation exposure risks. How can renewables be worse? Quite simply because wind and solar are extremely diffuse power sources, so they require lots of manpower to install. This typically takes place at elevated places and a non-trivial amount of people fall to their deaths.
For example, when there's an excess of power being produced, utilise some of it to do stuff like cracking water into hydrogen, etc. for use in cars; then when the wind drops just cut production of hydrogen rather than having to deal with a shortfall on the grid at large.
Good luck with that. Wind has been shown to vary by at least 30x on a day-to-day basis even at national scale(*) (and much more on an hour-by-hour or minute-by-minute scale) and solar obviously varies by infinity (zero output at night). There's two solutions: either massive energy storage on a scale not seen before, or never let intermittent power sources climb over some small percentage of supply (~25%-30% seems to be the threshold). The former requires fundamental breakthroughs which have yet to materialize and may never arrive. The latter requires deployment of nuclear to offset the CO2 emissions from the remaining 3/4 of the power mix and has already been done (France's grid is ~3/4 nuclear). Greenpeace - a religious cult at this point - prefers the former. Pragmatic environmentalists - such as George Monbiot and James Hansen - prefer the latter.
(*) In case you don't speak german, this graph shows german wind power production at daily resolution for 2011. Nameplate installed capacity: 29GW. Maximum output with 99% availability: 0.9GW.
Before I sign off from this thread: Do you know of a good, authoritative account of the Fukushima event?
I don't, sorry. I find that there's tons of misinformation and downright falsehood about the event out there, both by tepco and anti-nuke activists, and I'm not gonna waste my time plowing through it and fact-checking every single line. I'm a technologist and as such much rather concern myself with the technology of newer safer and cleaner nuclear power than with politics.
Surface reservoirs are being depleted as well, but regardless, taking for Oregon, 946km^2, how much would so much building space cost? Remember, this 946km^2 is just the collection area, not the whole thing, but let's have a look at the cost of materials. You'll need a transparent roof for which the article you linked suggests glass. Cost: $10/ft^2, or about $100/m^2. Multiply 946km^2 and you get $94 billion just for the glass, or about 1.5x the size of the entire Oregon state budget. This is just not workable.
Can you provide some figures as to the land use and cost of such a system? The best I could find were pretty depressive numbers. The average US household of three uses ~1000L/d and there are ~115.2 million households. Using solar PV and reverse osmosis one sq meter of solar panel can produce around 200L/d, so ~5sqm per household and 576 sq km of total panel area - just on this alone it's a total non-starter before we even get to the costs of the RO plants, transmission lines, storage systems, etc.
By "a mess" I meant the fact that what was supposed to be inside the fuel rods came to the outside. That's plenty of a mess for me;-)
Agreed, but that's because of the incident, siting and management of the plant, not the cleanup. I'd hang those tepco management fuckers by the balls for mismanaging the plant so badly.
It is already in the form of HTO.
Right, that's what I forgot. You're correct that Tritium originates from reactor operations, not radioactive decay after the accident had occurred, but in LWRs it appears to be a by-product of fission reactions (1 in 10000). The neutron absorption pathway is mainly present in HWRs. There is one more Tritium generation path, but it doesn't happen in LWRs (Lithium-6 neutron capture). According to some TEPCO report, Tritium in the cooling water at Fukushima is currently being produced at a rate of ~0.64g per year - how exactly that happens, I'm not sure, since there's no neutron source present at this point. The only explanation I can come up with is that a small portion of the corium is in such a configuration that some low level of neutron moderation is going on, given that moderator (water) is present, but this is pure speculation. Overall the whole of the Fukushima accident shows what a lousy coolant and moderator water is. It works fine for a submarine, I guess, but it's ludicrous to use for gigawatt-scale reactors.
Oh, I wrote Sr-99 above where I meant -90 and Cs-133 where I should have written -137.
Slashdot Mirror
Once they've solved that tiny transmission and storage issue. Until then they can only work in conjunction with fossil fuel plants and play a minor role, so much so in fact that building wind today equals cementing coal & gas into the mix.
France's overall price of electricity with tax is lower than Denmark's untaxed price, meanwhile emitting >30% less CO2 per capita with a very similar GDP per capita (to within 5%). If we limit our consideration to electricity, France has ~75% lower emissions per MWh generated than Denmark; and over 80% lower than Germany, the renewable powerhouse of the continent. In fact, they have so much zero-CO2 electricity that they can afford to offset the CO2 emissions from many of their neighbors via transmission. Also keep in mind that France has had this CO2 per kWh value for the better part of two decades because its power mix has always been ~70-80% nuclear and ~15% hydro (the rest being filled in with things like gas, hence why this CO2/kWh number isn't a flat zero).
The OECD average is so high mostly because of heavy polluters like the US, being the about 1/4 of the population of the entire OECD (not just the high-income bracket), but twice the per capita CO2 emissions of, say, Germany.
To preemptively dispense with the "we can't build it fast enough" criticism of nuclear, I again present the example of ... France. They initially started construction in 1974 and finished installing >50 reactors, hitting over 70% of generation capacity, within 15 years. So don't believe the renewable industry talking points of "it can't be done on time". It has been done before and it can be done again. If it had the political and popular will, Denmark could hit its CO2-reduction targets for electricity for 2050 some 20 years earlier.
Or goddamn expensive all the while taking a nice steaming dump on the environment.
Wonderful! I await your complete theory of dark energy with baited breath. Or maybe I don't.
I'm aware of this idea and that it requires as yet purely hypothetical forms of matter that have negative mass. Just because you can contrive GR's equations to allow for all manner of things, such as wormholes and time-travel, does not mean that those things actually exist, or that there's any practical way for them to exist. Meanwhile, nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei is a very well known and observed process. A Bussard ramjet scoop, meanwhile, also doesn't require any kind of exotic new physics, just lots of large-scale engineering. That was my point.
Aside from the warp drive, which is currently from a physics stand point pure gobbledygook, the sub-luminal "impulse drive" of the Enterprise was a classical nuclear fusion plasma engine fueled by interstellar hydrogen gas (that's why those red things on the front of the Enterprise's warp drive nacelles were called Bussard collectors). It is technologically speaking far in excess of what we can do today, but nonetheless theoretically permitted by known laws of physics.
I did not say cosmic rays can't cause DNA defects
And that's not what I claimed. Here, read again what I said:
Cosmic rays can cause DNA defects and, as best as we know, can cause cancers
Which was in response to your statement of:
Point is: they don't really cause a genetic defect that is spread due to multiplication
I challenged you to provide evidence of this, as I can't find any research supporting this in the scientific literature. You're essentially claiming that Linear Energy Transfer works in the opposite way that it does, depositing more energy per unit distance travelled as particle energy increases, which presumably should lead to more damage per unit of distance travelled and hence a higher proportion of cells killed right away. Unfortunately for you, however, LET works in the opposite way. LET quite neatly explains why cosmic rays have deeper penetration and irradiate more cells in their path. We're not coming at this blind, you know, we use this for targeting tumors during radiation therapy. However, this is just an argument from physical theories that, although they may work well in most areas of ionizing radiation, may for some inexplicable reason be inaccurate when applied to cosmic rays. The real meat is in the health effects studies and I've yet to see any epidemiological studies that can differentiate between the ionizing effects of cosmic rays vs. fission product radionuclides at similar dose levels and seeing as you don't seem to be able to produce any either, I'm going to have to dismiss your claim of a difference between them as pure unsubstantiated speculation.
Perhaps you should try not to switch or twist always what I say.
Where did I do that?
I pointed out that they kill the cells more or less right away
Can you demonstrate that? Additional oxidative stress and/or DNA single and double strand breaks are not necessarily fatal - cells are capable of withstanding a certain amount of both.
Point is: they don't really cause a genetic defect that is spread due to multiplication, in contrast to radioactive elements that get incorporated into the body and may damage surrounding cells DNA for/over a long time.
And that's exactly where you are wrong. Cosmic rays can cause DNA defects and, as best as we know, can cause cancers (assuming LNT). It really doesn't matter if the source of a high-energy particle sits right next to the cell, or is billions of miles away. Also once a radioactive nucleus has decayed, it's done, no more danger from it for that particular cell, assuming there aren't many more nearby (this can happen with concentration, but not everything concentrates - that's what the tissue and radionuclide weighting factors in calculating risk values is used for). In short, from a biological perspective, the source of the high-energy particles is more or less irrelevant as to their effects on living cells. If you claim there to be a fundamental distinction, you must have access to information that the medical and health physics societies don't have and I'd appreciate if you could cite sources for your claims.
Hence IMHO
Again, your humble opinion doesn't equal research.
even if the 'Sievert norming groups' try hard to find 'equivalent' formulas.
I trust the experts in the field more than your unsubstantiated opinion. You can claim "common knowledge" all day long, but things asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
That is what I pointed out: they kill most cells they "touch" right away.
That is not how radiotoxicity works. Quantum particles aren't really like bullets and targets (even though in the popular media it's often simplified to that). They don't "shoot the cell dead". Instead what happens is they transfer energy to the particles that make up the cells and do so rather sporadically (not every particle in the path gets this energy contribution and not always in equal proportions). This can lead to particles ejecting from their molecular structures and changing their chemical properties. In ~30% of the time we observe this radiotoxicity manifesting in mechanical damage to DNA and ~70% of the time the particles never hit the DNA itself, but instead cause the creation of OH- radicals in the water inside cells (by essentially ejecting one of the hydrogen atoms from an H2O molecule), which then increase the oxidative stress on the cells.
Now each of these interactions causes the high-energy particle to lose a bit of energy, but in most cases it doesn't stop right away. It keeps going, plowing through cell after cell until all of its energy is depleted or it comes out the other end. The distance it travels is described as the mean free path, which depends on a product of its energy and strength of interaction with surrounding atoms. Electrons interact a lot more than photons, hence why photons of the same energy can shoot straight through tissue without losing much energy and so causing much less harm, while an electron will deposit its energy much faster in a shorter distance. Now consider cosmic rays - they consist of mostly similar stuff (electrons, protons, gammas), but at much, much higher energies (on order of >1000x). Thus an electron from Cs-137 (~500 KeV) has the capability of breaking ~100000 covalent atomic bonds (~5 eV each). By comparison, a cosmic ray photon, even though it interacts 1000x less strongly, has >1000x the energy (1 GeV or more), so it acts mostly similarly, if not worse. And let's not get into cosmic ray electrons and protons, those are real beasts.
So I hope you see that it's not that easy.
[Cosmic rays] are less dangerous as they don't "accumulate" in the body and don't continiously bombard the DNA.
I think you misunderstand the difference between radiation and radioactivity. A radioactive nucleus doesn't "keep intoxicating you" by its mere presence. It's like a grenade, it goes "pop" once or twice, emitting one or two particles of radiation (which really aren't that distinct from cosmic rays - high-energy particles either way) and it's done - no more danger from that one guy. Meanwhile cosmic rays keep on coming non-stop at a more-or-less constant rate. You can imagine it like being surrounded by radioactive nuclei, day in, day out, with the notable distinction that these guys never stop giving off radiation. They keep going forever.
A cosmic ray is like a bullet, it goes in and goes out ...
And then the next one comes, and the next one, etc. forever. It never stops. Moreover the mean free path of 500 KeV electrons (most of the "dangerous" emissions from fission products) is a few milimeters at best. A cosmic ray, however, at >1 GeV (i.e. 2000x the energy of the electron) doesn't stop after a few milimeters, it keeps going, irradiating many more cells and potentially breaking many more bonds.
but they where for years ... seems you forgot that
They weren't, people lived there continuously since the dropping of the bombs until today. Yeah, lots of people got sick in the initial aftermath and some sizable portion died (though by far nowhere near the amount that died from the initial blast and searing heat), but that effect subsided rather quickly. While terrible, we mustn't forget that it was war back then and fire bombings of Tokyo killed comparable numbers of people to Hiroshima and Nagasa
If something is a magnitude higher (factor 10x - 30x, as you pointed out), it is not 'comparable' in its effect to the 'original' thing. It is quite a difference whether I drink *one* beer or 10 - 30.
Except that here we're talking about far smaller effects, more in line with 1 drop vs 10-30 drops of beer. Stick to facts and not analogies.
You try to compare stuff that can't be compared. A cosmic ray, a high energy ion, is crossing my body. Along its path it destroys a DNA strand here and there and kills some cells completely. Incorporating a radioactive element into your body is a bit different.
In what significant capacity? Radioactive element decay produces exactly the same kind of particles (high-energy electrons & gammas; high-energy ions being notably absent in fission product decay and mind you, high-energy ions are much more dangerous, so cosmic rays might even win from a danger perspective particle-by-particle).
Yes the 'Sievert modeling guys' try to 'compensate' the different effects to get a 'uniform' threat indicator. Makes no sense IMHO, as all those slightly different forms of radiation have completely different effects.
Your humble opinion on the matter is your right to have, but dismissing the work of researchers and professionals in the field without evidence would at best net you a label of science denier. Unless you can produce good research to substantiate your opinion, it'll remain just that - opinion.
Plutonium e.g. settles in the bone marrow ... the deadly dose for a human is something like 50 nano grams, perhaps 100, don't remember.
This is the problem when you listen to non-scientists like Ralph Nader and even a cursory read of the Wikipedia article on Plutonium's toxicity would have given you tons of references to studies, research and experiments done which essentially debunks this. Plutonium is toxic for sure, but it's nowhere near the levels you assume it is.
Iodine accumulates mainly in the thyroid, causing cancer there. It seems you can prevent that with high doses of Iodine intake, and Thyroid cancer seems relatively easy to treat and surviving rates are high.
I-131 is the primary problem child in inadvertent radiation releases, since there's plenty of it (~3% fission yield), it's highly mobile, it's intensely radioactive and easily bioaccumulates as you describe. After a few weeks, though, it decays away completely into stable Xe-131. There is also I-129, however its radiotoxicity is billions of times lower than I-131, so it's not really much of a problem once diluted.
Cesium accumulates in bones and sinew ... I assume in muscles as well.
Correct. Add Sr-90 to that.
So, your 10x - 30x increase of radiation versus 'normal' background level still simply measures what you can count with a geiger counter. It does not take into account what happens if you inhale some dust on a dry summer day ... perhaps working in a field with your shirt of covert with sweat when the dust accumulates on your skin.
Not correct. Sieverts are units of committed dose and all of the factors you mention have been considered in its calculation. Geiger counters just measure counts - disintegrations per second. To get a Sievert measurement what we do is we measure counts, then we take samples and employ systems such as mass spectrometry and gamma ray spectrometry to measure the exact radionuclides present and their proportions. These are then combined wit
What about the majority of people who live in dense cities in apartment buildings without private driveways and/or parking spaces that are simply not practical to electrify. You know, it's easy to solve the problem for relatively rich folks, but most people in the world live more like this or this (myself included). We park our cars out on the streets, drive around mostly in or near the city and fill up perhaps once a month. Are we supposed to go charge our cars once or twice a week for a few hours at some remote location?
Comparing the 'natural' intake of C14 and other elements 'in a normal' amount with the levels in Fukushima makes you a moron. Not C14 or other minimal intake.
Contrary to your quite uneducated assertion that background radiation in a "normal" amount is somehow inconsequential compared with the radiation levels at Fukushima, they are rather comparable. We have quantified these things quite accurately. Terrestrial background is anywhere from 0.1 uSv/h (Japan) to 0.3 uSv/h (USA) in most places on the planet, ignoring outliers. By comparison, the Fukushima exclusion zone typically ranges from 0.1 uSv/h to ~15 uSv/h with the median being somewhere close to 3 uSv/h or about 10-30x background. This is comparable to radiation exposure on a long-haul flight, as I've shown you, and that has so far not been shown to result in any increased risk, even in people who work for the airline industry and spend a sizable amount of their lives in this environment.
Cosmic Ray != radioactive iod or caesium
From a radiotoxicity standpoint, they are in fact not really distinct. You may recall that Sievert is a unit of committed dose, so it expresses biological effects, not just raw counts, and is capable of accounting for the differences between internal and external emitters. Now you could argue that whole-body exposure numbers are too simplistic to accurately asses ionizing radiation impact, and I'd agree (for certain radionuclides), but this has been considered and more accurate models are available, they're just not used very often in discussions, because they're too complex to easily wrap your mind around. For a first-degree approximation, though, whole-body exposure numbers seem to be quite a good rule of thumb.
Natural radioactivity is mainly something that hits you from the 'outside'... it hits your skin
Except for the ~5kBq of K-40 in your nerves. And the C-14 in all of your tissues. Also, cosmic radiation doesn't stop on your skin - it's comprised of extremely high energy particles at 1 GeV or more. Those sort of energies make the radiation from nuclear reactors seem like child's play. That is not to say that you'd rather be inside of a nuclear reactor - most definitely not, the flux there is many orders of magnitude larger - but it does show that cosmic rays don't just "hit your skin", but instead fire right through you and irradiate your internals quite easily.
First of all a healthy person has no Uranium or Thorium in his body.
I'd be careful with throwing around superlatives like "none", but it's probably fair to say that the abundance of actinides in most humans would be classed as "trace" at best.
you are again mixing up external radiation by natural sources with radioactive elements incorporated into the body
Except that both K-40 and C-14 are both natural and inside your body. In fact, we use C-14 abundance in tissues to date when organisms died. Whether something is or isn't natural has no bearing on where it is harmful.
The fallout is measurable every where in north Japan.
This statement, while true, is misleading, or at the very least oversimplified. We have extremely sensitive measurement equipment, but the mere detection of the presence of a radionuclide does not in itself imply any danger from it. What needs to be assessed is the particular type of radionuclide, its abundance and sample distribution, in order to be able to at least roughly assess the potential biological impacts. In pretty much any scoop e.g. topsoil you'd be able to find all manner of toxic stuff, from mercury through arsenic, lead and even to uranium - this is simply a consequence of the magnitude of Avogadro's number.
I'll leave you with just one tiny factiod: long-haul flights are associated with elevated exposure to cosmic rays, easily 20-30x sea-level background and comparable to some of the hotter parts of the Fukushima exclusion zone. This has been repeatedly assessed and demonstrated. As such, one would expect to find radiation-related cancer clusters among airline crew, who spend a sizable amount of their lives in this elevated radiation environment. And yet, no reliable evidence for this has been found so far.
Japan is a bunch of islands for crying out loud.
While true, it is quite an oversimplification. Japan is very mountainous even near the shores, in some places, and it would not have been impossible to place the plant a little further "uphill" to prevent this from happening. There are several reason they placed it right on the shore, one of them being construction purposes. LWRs consist of some very heavy single-piece components and it's much easier to ship them in via boat than it is to transport them over the road. In addition, you have a readily available source of large amounts of cooling water in the world's largest heatsink.
However, had TEPCO not been a bunch of colossal asshats and not skimped on the construction and piping costs, they could have just as easily placed the thing a few miles inland and at higher elevation and none of this would have happened. In fact, if Japan ever decides to build liquid-metal cooled fast breeder reactors, it is absolutely imperative they place it somewhere it can't ever get flooded. If OTOH they decide to go with molten-salt reactors (and they should!), they could place them pretty much where ever they want, because fluoride salts don't react with water, aren't water-soluble, don't operate under high pressure and their large liquid range allows for high temperature of operation, which in turn means that passive air cooling in the event of a plant blackout is far easier to do.
And yet we know how to engineer such systems. That having been said, Fukushima clearly demonstrated how poorly water performs as a coolant in nuclear power plants.
what? I thought dam technology was already here. Are you telling me I get to invent pumping water into a reservoirs to store potential energy and the release it when the is a higher demand?
Dam hydroelectric power is already pretty much maxed out globally, since there's only limited numbers of suitable sites and flows.
Pumped hydro, meanwhile, cannot scale to the required energy volumes and is excessively expensive (despite being the cheapest storage option yet). It really falls apart when you consider the problem quantitatively (using Germany as an example here):
Put simply, this cannot and will not be built.
How so?
Really? Solar is being mentioned a lot in the report with respect to Apple. So I presume, their datacenters have "cut the cord" and run completely off of their rooftop solar installations? Or is it simply installing solar panels offsite and doing net metering, "100% renewable" being hit when their grid feed-in is equivalent to their consumption? If so, then this is pure greenwashing, since they're still using the external electrical grid, which is most notably nowhere near 100% renewable, because it needs to be reliable. It's classic externalizing of the storage cost to somebody else and ignoring it, while feeling good about oneself.
"Dirty" is a very loose term without a rigorous definition, so you can make it be pretty much anything you like. For example, both wind and solar PV have a pretty serious environmental impact just from a raw materials mining perspective, only you don't see it, because most of it happens in places populated by people of a different skin color. Regardless, compared to fossil fuels (mostly coal), it's impact is pretty reserved, so I'm willing to give it a pass. Nuclear is similar, unless something goes really wrong, and even then the impacted areas are mostly deserted of people, not nature (which quite happily trades that niche in exchange for being pushed out of their natural habitats by people).
As for lethality, that is actually an understood and quantifiable factor and indeed nuclear comes out on top and that's even assuming the worst-case deaths from Chernobyl (4000 excess deaths over the next 25 years, 50 confirmed so far) and the linear-no-threshold model of radiation exposure risks. How can renewables be worse? Quite simply because wind and solar are extremely diffuse power sources, so they require lots of manpower to install. This typically takes place at elevated places and a non-trivial amount of people fall to their deaths.
For example, when there's an excess of power being produced, utilise some of it to do stuff like cracking water into hydrogen, etc. for use in cars; then when the wind drops just cut production of hydrogen rather than having to deal with a shortfall on the grid at large.
Good luck with that. Wind has been shown to vary by at least 30x on a day-to-day basis even at national scale(*) (and much more on an hour-by-hour or minute-by-minute scale) and solar obviously varies by infinity (zero output at night). There's two solutions: either massive energy storage on a scale not seen before, or never let intermittent power sources climb over some small percentage of supply (~25%-30% seems to be the threshold). The former requires fundamental breakthroughs which have yet to materialize and may never arrive. The latter requires deployment of nuclear to offset the CO2 emissions from the remaining 3/4 of the power mix and has already been done (France's grid is ~3/4 nuclear). Greenpeace - a religious cult at this point - prefers the former. Pragmatic environmentalists - such as George Monbiot and James Hansen - prefer the latter.
(*) In case you don't speak german, this graph shows german wind power production at daily resolution for 2011. Nameplate installed capacity: 29GW. Maximum output with 99% availability: 0.9GW.
Before I sign off from this thread: Do you know of a good, authoritative account of the Fukushima event?
I don't, sorry. I find that there's tons of misinformation and downright falsehood about the event out there, both by tepco and anti-nuke activists, and I'm not gonna waste my time plowing through it and fact-checking every single line. I'm a technologist and as such much rather concern myself with the technology of newer safer and cleaner nuclear power than with politics.
Surface reservoirs are being depleted as well, but regardless, taking for Oregon, 946km^2, how much would so much building space cost? Remember, this 946km^2 is just the collection area, not the whole thing, but let's have a look at the cost of materials. You'll need a transparent roof for which the article you linked suggests glass. Cost: $10/ft^2, or about $100/m^2. Multiply 946km^2 and you get $94 billion just for the glass, or about 1.5x the size of the entire Oregon state budget. This is just not workable.
Can you provide some figures as to the land use and cost of such a system? The best I could find were pretty depressive numbers. The average US household of three uses ~1000L/d and there are ~115.2 million households. Using solar PV and reverse osmosis one sq meter of solar panel can produce around 200L/d, so ~5sqm per household and 576 sq km of total panel area - just on this alone it's a total non-starter before we even get to the costs of the RO plants, transmission lines, storage systems, etc.
By "a mess" I meant the fact that what was supposed to be inside the fuel rods came to the outside. That's plenty of a mess for me ;-)
Agreed, but that's because of the incident, siting and management of the plant, not the cleanup. I'd hang those tepco management fuckers by the balls for mismanaging the plant so badly.
It is already in the form of HTO.
Right, that's what I forgot. You're correct that Tritium originates from reactor operations, not radioactive decay after the accident had occurred, but in LWRs it appears to be a by-product of fission reactions (1 in 10000). The neutron absorption pathway is mainly present in HWRs. There is one more Tritium generation path, but it doesn't happen in LWRs (Lithium-6 neutron capture). According to some TEPCO report, Tritium in the cooling water at Fukushima is currently being produced at a rate of ~0.64g per year - how exactly that happens, I'm not sure, since there's no neutron source present at this point. The only explanation I can come up with is that a small portion of the corium is in such a configuration that some low level of neutron moderation is going on, given that moderator (water) is present, but this is pure speculation. Overall the whole of the Fukushima accident shows what a lousy coolant and moderator water is. It works fine for a submarine, I guess, but it's ludicrous to use for gigawatt-scale reactors.
Oh, I wrote Sr-99 above where I meant -90 and Cs-133 where I should have written -137.
I understood what you meant, don't worry.