The Bulletin used to be good, and it used to be really meaningful and respectable back in the day of legends like Bethe, who were passionately interested in working towards a world free of nuclear weapons, but who tempered that passion with pragmatism and political realism, an understanding that nuclear power is not the same thing as nuclear weapons, and a thorough technical literacy in nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
Today, though, it has gone disappointingly downhill, and every other thing it publishes seems to be a weak, rhetoric-packed attack on civil nuclear power written by an author who usually has something like a background in political science without experience in nuclear science or engineering.
Bloom Energy's fuel cells run on methane (natural gas) drilled and/or hydrofractured out of the ground, and they react this methane with atmospheric oxygen to yield carbon dioxide which they vent to the atmosphere. The system's thermodynamic efficiency is scarcely higher than a conventional Brayton-cycle gas turbine. As with the rest of the natural gas industry, they've been quite successful in greenwashing their fossil fuel industry.
So, how is it exactly that this is "renewable energy"?
Anyway, I wouldn't pay attention to any circus of Greenpeace activists outside Apple headquarters. They are science and engineering illiterate neo-luddites.
"just days after Greenpeace protested at Apple headquarters over the firm’s use of coal and nuclear-powered electricity at the site."
Apple's NC data centre is powered, at least in part, by nuclear energy? That's great news. Now you're really talking about sustainable, scalable, high-capacity-factor, fossil-fuel-replacing, environmentally friendly energy supply.
Uranium release from the UO2 fuel?
So what? Uranium is harmless, it's hardly radioactive at all, it's abundant throughout nature, and it's naturally present in seawater.
Surely any such analysis of the radiochemistry consequences of adding seawater to the BWR's coolant should focus on the fission products and their radiochemical mobility and transport, not on harmless, insignificant, uranium.
This reminds me of an interesting anecdote from Patrick Moore:
"When I left Greenpeace it was in the midst of them adopting a campaign to ban chlorine worldwide. Like I said, ‘you guys, this is one of the elements in the periodic table, you know; I mean, I’m not sure if it’s in our jurisdiction to be banning a whole element."
There is no government in the world that could possibly introduce legislation that says "ban mercury" without details, caveats and exemptions. That would be like saying "ban dihydrogen monoxide".
Let's look at the RoHS legislation, for example. RoHS says that lead, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, mercury, PBBs and PBDEs are restricted.
But RoHS has - and it needs to have - a list of exemptions as long as your arm. For example, suppose you have a solar cell based on cadmium telluride or a light-dependent resistor based on cadmium sulfide or a piezoelectric transducer based on lead zirconate titanate. These technologies have no realistic lead-free or cadmium-free replacements, so they're exempted from RoHS.
They don't just say "these elements are banned, period"... that would not be realistic at all.
Look at the Montreal protocol, for example - it certainly does not just say "CFCs are banned, period."
If we said "Mercury is banned in manmade technology, period", that would mean banning mercury-vapor discharge ultraviolet lamps used to erase EPROMs, for tanning, and for sterilisation in medical facilities and microbiology laboratories. It would ban essentially all fluorescent lightbulbs.
It would ban all high-pressure sodium lamps and the like that contain mercury.
It would ban all coal-fired power generation, since this is responsible for by far the largest share of man-made mercury emission into the environment.
And presumably it would ban tuna products, too.
It would ban the use of thiomersal as a bacteriostatic preservative in mascara, eyedrops, contact lens solution, antivenoms, immunoglobulins and other drugs, not just vaccines (most vaccines don't even contain thiomersal, anyway.)
It would ban the use of mercuric acetate and aluminium amalgam, etc, as catalysts and chemical reagents, both in industry and in the research laboratory.
It would ban the use of mercury standards for mercury analysis by analytical technologies such as atomic absorption spectroscopy. It would ban the use of mercury compounds for calibration of NMR spectrometers for Hg-199 NMR.
It would ban all use of HgCdTe and HgZnTe in infrared detectors for IR spectroscopy, IR astronomy, various types of sensors, FLIR imagers, night vision, military technologies and so forth.
http://www.da-entertainment.de/casio%20beamer/thumb.html
About 24 of them per projector.
Anyway...
I really don't like the fact that this device exists at all. I'm a laser fan, but I think Wicked Lasers has crossed the line this time.
They continue to market these things like they're toys - it is even styled, deliberately, to look like a lightsaber. I think they're being reckless, and they have to start self-regulating.
If you used a 1 W Class IV laser in a lab, you would have it bolted to an optical bench with the beam plane fixed well below head height, automatically interlocked to the door of the laser room, with laser safety signs and an illuminated laser-in-use warning lamp posted outside the door, with a lockout keyswitch on the power supply, which only authorised trained persons are allowed access to the key for, with the beam path enclosed, with a proper beam dump to terminate the beam, with proper goggles mandatory for everyone in the room, and everyone trained properly.... and on and on and on to make sure that it's used safely.
But anyone can simply buy this laser pointer, which is an order of magnitude more dangerous and an order of magnitude cheaper than most other comparable laser pointers on the market, and wave it around freely with no engineered controls at all.
Dr. Helen Caldicott, (MD, not Ph.D, not that I don't respect the MD) is <b>not</b> a Nobel peace prize laureate.
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, but it is no more valid to say that Dr. Caldicott won the Nobel prize than it is for the 200,000 other IPPNW members to say they won it. Everybody agrees that there aren't 200,000 Nobel laureates out there as a result of the prize being awarded to IPPNW.
Dr. Caldicott, and others like her, do a lot of very good, admirable work with regards to nuclear disarmament - and I've got a lot of respect for that. That's what IPPNW's Nobel Prize was for - these things are very admirable, but they've got absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power, which is a distinct issue.
For all their very admirable work with regards to nuclear disarmament and the prevention of nuclear war, my respect for people like Dr. Caldicott is completely offset by my complete lack of respect for the things that they claim and say with regards to nuclear power, and peaceful, civilian nuclear science and technology.
Anyway, back to the topic.
With regards to the cancer risk from the tritium - you may not have known, but I did quantify it for you in the above post - it's nothing.
The questions that you consider under "Engineering" - those are of course scientific questions. With regards to the net energy yield from nuclear power - that's a scientific question, too. And, yes, there's plenty of energy gain.
All these issues and questions have been asked, and answered, before.
The subsidies are not significant. They're comparable to the subsidies given to other sustainable energy systems. Nuclear electricity generation in the United States is an economically viable, successful commercial business. Yes, the energy companies are in it to make money, and nuclear power makes them money easily.
Yes, it's a for-profit commercial business - but all industry is overseen by the government to make sure that they don't endanger the environment or people. Nuclear power is too, especially so.
Would it make you feel more comfortable if all nuclear power related industry was government owned, like in France, so that no corporations are making money off it? I don't see why that can't be done, if it makes nuclear energy more acceptable because of people's distrust of the big scary corporations - it works fine in France.
A nuclear power reactor is absolutely nothing at all like a "stationary nuclear bomb", that's just emotional rhetoric with no basis in real world physical facts. They're sufficiently secure, and not targets that terrorists could attack to cause widespread devastation. What exactly might the terrorists actually do?
Fossil fuel facilities and chemical facilities are much easier targets for terrorists, and would be much more likely to be the basis for real destruction.
The reason that nuclear power is so closely associated with terrorism is that terrorism can be accomplished without actually hurting or killing anybody - it's really all in the heads of the victims where terrorism occurs, and enough people let themselves be terrorized by nuclear power, and especially by those that use fear, emotion and rhetoric to campaign against it, that nuclear power is associated with terrorism - because people are scared of it, even though it's the safest form of electricity generation known, and one of the safest commercial industries in existence. Nuclear power has never hurt or killed a single person in the United States.
Social and political systems aren't required to perpetuate the integrity of long-term disposal or storage of radioactive wastes in a deep geological repository - the longevity of that isolation is perpetuated by hundreds of meters of rock, mineral and metal, and by science and engineering today. Once the geological repository is sealed, that's it - it's a solved problem and requires no interference or maintainence by future generations - that's how those deep geological repositories are designed.
"cumulative effects of tritium in the local food chain, thats right boys and girls tritium is one of those 'bio-concentrating' isotopes care of Pickering."
Here - I wrote a blog post on this exact subject...
http://enochthered.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/bioconcentration-and-biomagnification-of-radionuclides-of-biochemically-significant-elements/
"I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out which element tritium analogue's"
Don't you mean which element tritium is?
"And how is Lake Ontario this time of year, I bet it's beautiful. Is it still where you get your drinking water from,,mmmmmmmmmm, 50 trillion curies of tritium in your drinking water has been Pickering's gift to you so far, I wonder what else it has in store for you."
Like Helen Caldicott, you wouldn't know the difference between a Becquerel and a curie, and you don't even care.
Elemental tritium has a specific activity of 9650 Ci/g, or 2700 Ci/g for tritiated water. Therefore, 5 * 10^13 Ci of tritium, assuming it is all present as T2O, corresponds to 1.85 * 10^7 L.
Would a leak of 18.5 million liters of water from a nuclear power plant go unnoticed? How many nuclear plants even contain such a volume of water?
Clearly, something is amiss with this figure.
A little research shows that the 1996 heavy water leak at Pickering released 5 * 10^13 Bq of tritium - recall that one curie is 3.7 * 10^10 Bq. Therefore, about 1350 Ci of tritium was in fact released.
Natural surface water and ground water in the environment typically contains H-3 at a concentration of about 30-40 pCi/L in northern New Mexico surface water and rainwater, as a typical example. In surface water in Poland, H-3 concentrations of around 40-60 pCi/L have been reported in the literature as typical values. US federal standards for safe drinking water impose a limit on H-3 concentration of 20 nCi/L.
The 1350 Ci of H-3 released into the 1.639 * 10^15 L volume of Lake Ontario would thusly increase the H-3 concentration by 0.82 pCi/L, or a 2.7% increase over natural background concentrations.
Thusly, assuming a natural cosmogenic H-3 concentration in the lake of about 40 pCi/L, this is just 0.2% of the US federal guideline for drinking water, and the addition of 0.82 pCi/L does not make any significant increase to that figure.
For every picocurie of tritium consumed by an average person, her risk of cancer increases by a factor of 4.4 * 10^-10, assuming the linear no-threshold hypothesis as true.
Thus, as a result of the tritium release into Lake Ontario, if a person consumed two litres of water from the lake, their risk of cancer will have increased by
7.2 * 10^-10 - 72 billionths.
Generates more used fuel than a LWR? So what? Recycle it.
Generates large amounts of tritium? So what?
Collect it - we're going to need a fair bit of it to start up ITER and DEMO.
It's very valuable stuff - the fuel of the future!
Tritium expelled into the biosphere?
*How much* tritium? What dose has the community received as a result of that? How does it compare to naturally occurring tritium?
Generates *used* fuel containing Pu-239? So what? It's fantastic fuel - recycle it back into the reactors!
CANDU reactors can burn up so-called "spent" fuel from the US's LWRs, too, you know.
"Dirty bombs" create paranoia, fear, terror and disruption - mainly because the public is totally and utterly ignorant about radioactivity and health physics.
A "dirty bomb" is unlikely to hurt or kill anyone as a result of ionising radiation.
Handling a few smoke detectors doesn't do that to you... dismantling a smoke detector doesn't do that to you.
Handling an Americium-241 sealed source a few thousand times bigger than the one in a smoke detector doesn't do that to you - at least not in my experience.
Those lesions on his face look like those usually seen in crystal meth addicts.
The problems are purely political. Not scientific and technological.
If scientists were given a blank cheque, and allowed to build the thing anywhere they see fit, without the political bullshit, then I'm quite sure we'd see it solved quite quickly.
Have a look at the Swedish geological repository effort, being implemented by SKB - http://www.skb.se/ - which is usually considered World's Best Practice, with regards to designing, researching and implementing a geological repository, based on the observations of the geophysical characteristics of nature, over the time scales required.
Because the used fuel - or vitrified HLW from reprocessing, preferably, - needs to be stored for a decade or so to cool, and it can be stored on site in casks for anywhere up to 100 years or so quite practically, we do have the time needed to implement a repository, and get it right.
So, we'll pave over tens of thousands of square kilometers of the Earth's land surface with solar cells?
People, and plants and animals, live on that land, you know.
So, we get 150,000 TW across the total surface of the Earth. That's 43500 TW from the land area.
Assuming 20% cell efficiency, we need 110 TW hitting the cells, therefore we need to cover 0.25% of the total land area of the Earth with solar cells?
Dozens of easier ways to boil water? My Helen-Caldicott-bullshit-o-meter just went up to about 20,000 counts per minute.
Like what? Goddamn fossil fuels?
They mean a possible eventual maximum of 4000 deaths, eventually, in the future, possibly.
24,000 people die prematurely in the US every year as a result of air pollution caused by fossil fuels.
There is sufficient uranium and thorium on earth, if it's used efficiently, meaning sensible efficient fuel cycles and Generation IV reactors, to provide the energy needs of an advanced civilisation for every person on the earth for no less than one million years.
Nuclear fission will last for *thousands of millennia*, at least. With nuclear fission, D-T and maybe D-D when we run out of Lithium, you're talking *billions of years*.
The radioactive products from the 16 nuclear reactors at Oklo have successfully been contained in the geology there, ever since it was created and put there two billion years ago.
This time scale is far more than enough for even the very longest lived radioactive products to decay completely.
This is direct, simple empirical proof that geological disposal of radioactive waste is practical.
Assuming that 100,000 years corresponds to 10 half-lives, which radionuclides that comprise the radioactive waste from nuclear reactors have a half-life of 10,000 years? Name the nuclides. Are they really waste? Are they fertile or fissile? If they're fission products, what are their fission yields? What are their neutron capture cross sections?
In 1997, the USA generated 1800 TWh of electrical energy from coal combustion, and generated 95 million tons of coal ash-type waste in the process. Assuming 180 ppm Uranium in that material, thats 17100 tons of Uranium, or enough uranium to fuel current technology, inefficient, Generation-II, uranium- 235-fueled light-water-moderated nuclear power reactors for 86 GW-years, or 749 TWh, 42% of the energy output that was originally released in burning the coal. When the Thorium content is considered, Generation IV or breeder reactors, the Uranium-238 content, or reprocessing are considered, the this coal ash waste contains more accessible energy than is generated burning the coal in the first place, with none of the environmental devastation. Personally, I'd much rather see that the coal is left in the ground, but the use of existing coal ash dumps as a source of nuclear fuel is arguably better, from an environmental perspective, than mining more uranium, particularly if it means that mining in particularly environmentally sensitive areas can be minimized. The same can be said of Uranium extraction from seawater.
That's basically the argument that deuterium, usually in the form of heavy water, is poisonous.
For deuterium poisoning to occur, around 25 to 50 percent of all water in the body needs to be replaced by heavy water, and this would take about a week of drinking nothing but heavy water. For Tritium, that's an enormous amount of tritium - at least 30kg or so of pure tritiated water, or 81 million curies!. World civilian demand for Tritium is less than 500g per year, IIRC - that's a fantastically large amount.
You'd see radioactivity effects before you got even remotely close to having that much tritium in the body.
Bremsstrahlung x-ray radiation is a problem working around high-energy beta emitting radioisotopes, such as Phosphorus-32, but not Tritium, which is a very low energy beta emitter.
Betavoltaics are real, workable technology; not science fiction or junk science. Cardiac pacemakers using Plutonium-238 Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators are also a proven, decades old technology, too, for example.
Tritium is an extremely low energy beta emitter. Given this, and the very short biological half-life of water in the body, it is one of the least harmful radioisotopes around.
It occurs to a very small degree in nature, and is already used in radioluminescent watches, exit signs, gunsights, keyrings, compasses and such forth.
The beta emission from Tritium is so low in energy that most radiation detection instruments will not detect it - only mixing the radioactive material with the scintillation cocktail in a liquid scintillation counter is sensitive enough to detect it. A gamma spectrometer, scintillation counter, geiger counter, ion chamber counter or detector won't even notice it.
Price-Anderson has never paid out one single cent of government money.
Every claim against the nuclear energy industry, ever, has been paid out of the funds that are paid into by the industry.
A radiological "dirty bomb" using a large industrial radioactive source is one thing, but a nuclear power plant, with the nuclear reactor surrounded by an essentially impregnable containment building, is an entirely different thing.
Slashdot Mirror
The Bulletin used to be good, and it used to be really meaningful and respectable back in the day of legends like Bethe, who were passionately interested in working towards a world free of nuclear weapons, but who tempered that passion with pragmatism and political realism, an understanding that nuclear power is not the same thing as nuclear weapons, and a thorough technical literacy in nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
Today, though, it has gone disappointingly downhill, and every other thing it publishes seems to be a weak, rhetoric-packed attack on civil nuclear power written by an author who usually has something like a background in political science without experience in nuclear science or engineering.
Bloom Energy's fuel cells run on methane (natural gas) drilled and/or hydrofractured out of the ground, and they react this methane with atmospheric oxygen to yield carbon dioxide which they vent to the atmosphere. The system's thermodynamic efficiency is scarcely higher than a conventional Brayton-cycle gas turbine. As with the rest of the natural gas industry, they've been quite successful in greenwashing their fossil fuel industry. So, how is it exactly that this is "renewable energy"? Anyway, I wouldn't pay attention to any circus of Greenpeace activists outside Apple headquarters. They are science and engineering illiterate neo-luddites. "just days after Greenpeace protested at Apple headquarters over the firm’s use of coal and nuclear-powered electricity at the site." Apple's NC data centre is powered, at least in part, by nuclear energy? That's great news. Now you're really talking about sustainable, scalable, high-capacity-factor, fossil-fuel-replacing, environmentally friendly energy supply.
Uranium release from the UO2 fuel? So what? Uranium is harmless, it's hardly radioactive at all, it's abundant throughout nature, and it's naturally present in seawater. Surely any such analysis of the radiochemistry consequences of adding seawater to the BWR's coolant should focus on the fission products and their radiochemical mobility and transport, not on harmless, insignificant, uranium.
There is no government in the world that could possibly introduce legislation that says "ban mercury" without details, caveats and exemptions. That would be like saying "ban dihydrogen monoxide".
Let's look at the RoHS legislation, for example. RoHS says that lead, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, mercury, PBBs and PBDEs are restricted. But RoHS has - and it needs to have - a list of exemptions as long as your arm. For example, suppose you have a solar cell based on cadmium telluride or a light-dependent resistor based on cadmium sulfide or a piezoelectric transducer based on lead zirconate titanate. These technologies have no realistic lead-free or cadmium-free replacements, so they're exempted from RoHS.
They don't just say "these elements are banned, period"... that would not be realistic at all.
Look at the Montreal protocol, for example - it certainly does not just say "CFCs are banned, period."
If we said "Mercury is banned in manmade technology, period", that would mean banning mercury-vapor discharge ultraviolet lamps used to erase EPROMs, for tanning, and for sterilisation in medical facilities and microbiology laboratories. It would ban essentially all fluorescent lightbulbs.
It would ban all high-pressure sodium lamps and the like that contain mercury.
It would ban all coal-fired power generation, since this is responsible for by far the largest share of man-made mercury emission into the environment. And presumably it would ban tuna products, too.
It would ban the use of thiomersal as a bacteriostatic preservative in mascara, eyedrops, contact lens solution, antivenoms, immunoglobulins and other drugs, not just vaccines (most vaccines don't even contain thiomersal, anyway.)
It would ban the use of mercuric acetate and aluminium amalgam, etc, as catalysts and chemical reagents, both in industry and in the research laboratory.
It would ban the use of mercury standards for mercury analysis by analytical technologies such as atomic absorption spectroscopy. It would ban the use of mercury compounds for calibration of NMR spectrometers for Hg-199 NMR.
It would ban all use of HgCdTe and HgZnTe in infrared detectors for IR spectroscopy, IR astronomy, various types of sensors, FLIR imagers, night vision, military technologies and so forth.
Obviously it's nonsense.
http://www.da-entertainment.de/casio%20beamer/thumb.html
About 24 of them per projector.
Anyway...
I really don't like the fact that this device exists at all. I'm a laser fan, but I think Wicked Lasers has crossed the line this time.
They continue to market these things like they're toys - it is even styled, deliberately, to look like a lightsaber. I think they're being reckless, and they have to start self-regulating.
If you used a 1 W Class IV laser in a lab, you would have it bolted to an optical bench with the beam plane fixed well below head height, automatically interlocked to the door of the laser room, with laser safety signs and an illuminated laser-in-use warning lamp posted outside the door, with a lockout keyswitch on the power supply, which only authorised trained persons are allowed access to the key for, with the beam path enclosed, with a proper beam dump to terminate the beam, with proper goggles mandatory for everyone in the room, and everyone trained properly.... and on and on and on to make sure that it's used safely.
But anyone can simply buy this laser pointer, which is an order of magnitude more dangerous and an order of magnitude cheaper than most other comparable laser pointers on the market, and wave it around freely with no engineered controls at all.
Dr. Helen Caldicott, (MD, not Ph.D, not that I don't respect the MD) is <b>not</b> a Nobel peace prize laureate.
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, but it is no more valid to say that Dr. Caldicott won the Nobel prize than it is for the 200,000 other IPPNW members to say they won it. Everybody agrees that there aren't 200,000 Nobel laureates out there as a result of the prize being awarded to IPPNW.
Dr. Caldicott, and others like her, do a lot of very good, admirable work with regards to nuclear disarmament - and I've got a lot of respect for that. That's what IPPNW's Nobel Prize was for - these things are very admirable, but they've got absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power, which is a distinct issue.
For all their very admirable work with regards to nuclear disarmament and the prevention of nuclear war, my respect for people like Dr. Caldicott is completely offset by my complete lack of respect for the things that they claim and say with regards to nuclear power, and peaceful, civilian nuclear science and technology.
Anyway, back to the topic.
With regards to the cancer risk from the tritium - you may not have known, but I did quantify it for you in the above post - it's nothing.
The questions that you consider under "Engineering" - those are of course scientific questions. With regards to the net energy yield from nuclear power - that's a scientific question, too. And, yes, there's plenty of energy gain.
All these issues and questions have been asked, and answered, before.
The subsidies are not significant. They're comparable to the subsidies given to other sustainable energy systems. Nuclear electricity generation in the United States is an economically viable, successful commercial business. Yes, the energy companies are in it to make money, and nuclear power makes them money easily.
Yes, it's a for-profit commercial business - but all industry is overseen by the government to make sure that they don't endanger the environment or people.
Nuclear power is too, especially so.
Would it make you feel more comfortable if all nuclear power related industry was government owned, like in France, so that no corporations are making money off it? I don't see why that can't be done, if it makes nuclear energy more acceptable because of people's distrust of the big scary corporations - it works fine in France.
A nuclear power reactor is absolutely nothing at all like a "stationary nuclear bomb", that's just emotional rhetoric with no basis in real world physical facts. They're sufficiently secure, and not targets that terrorists could attack to cause widespread devastation. What exactly might the terrorists actually do?
Fossil fuel facilities and chemical facilities are much easier targets for terrorists, and would be much more likely to be the basis for real destruction.
The reason that nuclear power is so closely associated with terrorism is that terrorism can be accomplished without actually hurting or killing anybody - it's really all in the heads of the victims where terrorism occurs, and enough people let themselves be terrorized by nuclear power, and especially by those that use fear, emotion and rhetoric to campaign against it, that nuclear power is associated with terrorism - because people are scared of it, even though it's the safest form of electricity generation known, and one of the safest commercial industries in existence. Nuclear power has never hurt or killed a single person in the United States.
Social and political systems aren't required to perpetuate the integrity of long-term disposal or storage of radioactive wastes in a deep geological repository - the longevity of that isolation is perpetuated by hundreds of meters of rock, mineral and metal, and by science and engineering today. Once the geological repository is sealed, that's it - it's a solved problem and requires no interference or maintainence by future generations - that's how those deep geological repositories are designed.
What a load of crap.
You don't see CANDU reactors, moderated by very highly deuterium enriched heavy water, exploding like H-bombs, do you?
All water contains some deuterium in it naturally, as does seawater.
"how do you think they made the hydrogen bomb in the First place? put a lot of heavy water next to a fission reaction..."
Actually, they put a whole lot of pure liquid deuterium right next to a *fission bomb*.
"cumulative effects of tritium in the local food chain, thats right boys and girls tritium is one of those 'bio-concentrating' isotopes care of Pickering."
Here - I wrote a blog post on this exact subject...
http://enochthered.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/bioconcentration-and-biomagnification-of-radionuclides-of-biochemically-significant-elements/
"I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out which element tritium analogue's"
Don't you mean which element tritium is?
"And how is Lake Ontario this time of year, I bet it's beautiful. Is it still where you get your drinking water from,,mmmmmmmmmm, 50 trillion curies of tritium in your drinking water has been Pickering's gift to you so far, I wonder what else it has in store for you."
Like Helen Caldicott, you wouldn't know the difference between a Becquerel and a curie, and you don't even care.
Elemental tritium has a specific activity of 9650 Ci/g, or 2700 Ci/g for tritiated water. Therefore, 5 * 10^13 Ci of tritium, assuming it is all present as T2O, corresponds to 1.85 * 10^7 L. Would a leak of 18.5 million liters of water from a nuclear power plant go unnoticed? How many nuclear plants even contain such a volume of water? Clearly, something is amiss with this figure. A little research shows that the 1996 heavy water leak at Pickering released 5 * 10^13 Bq of tritium - recall that one curie is 3.7 * 10^10 Bq. Therefore, about 1350 Ci of tritium was in fact released. Natural surface water and ground water in the environment typically contains H-3 at a concentration of about 30-40 pCi/L in northern New Mexico surface water and rainwater, as a typical example. In surface water in Poland, H-3 concentrations of around 40-60 pCi/L have been reported in the literature as typical values. US federal standards for safe drinking water impose a limit on H-3 concentration of 20 nCi/L. The 1350 Ci of H-3 released into the 1.639 * 10^15 L volume of Lake Ontario would thusly increase the H-3 concentration by 0.82 pCi/L, or a 2.7% increase over natural background concentrations. Thusly, assuming a natural cosmogenic H-3 concentration in the lake of about 40 pCi/L, this is just 0.2% of the US federal guideline for drinking water, and the addition of 0.82 pCi/L does not make any significant increase to that figure. For every picocurie of tritium consumed by an average person, her risk of cancer increases by a factor of 4.4 * 10^-10, assuming the linear no-threshold hypothesis as true. Thus, as a result of the tritium release into Lake Ontario, if a person consumed two litres of water from the lake, their risk of cancer will have increased by 7.2 * 10^-10 - 72 billionths.
Generates more used fuel than a LWR? So what? Recycle it. Generates large amounts of tritium? So what? Collect it - we're going to need a fair bit of it to start up ITER and DEMO. It's very valuable stuff - the fuel of the future! Tritium expelled into the biosphere? *How much* tritium? What dose has the community received as a result of that? How does it compare to naturally occurring tritium? Generates *used* fuel containing Pu-239? So what? It's fantastic fuel - recycle it back into the reactors! CANDU reactors can burn up so-called "spent" fuel from the US's LWRs, too, you know.
"Dirty bombs" create paranoia, fear, terror and disruption - mainly because the public is totally and utterly ignorant about radioactivity and health physics. A "dirty bomb" is unlikely to hurt or kill anyone as a result of ionising radiation.
Handling a few smoke detectors doesn't do that to you... dismantling a smoke detector doesn't do that to you. Handling an Americium-241 sealed source a few thousand times bigger than the one in a smoke detector doesn't do that to you - at least not in my experience. Those lesions on his face look like those usually seen in crystal meth addicts.
Uranium is natural. It comes out of the ground, from rocks. You can hold it in your hand, quite safely.
The problems are purely political. Not scientific and technological. If scientists were given a blank cheque, and allowed to build the thing anywhere they see fit, without the political bullshit, then I'm quite sure we'd see it solved quite quickly. Have a look at the Swedish geological repository effort, being implemented by SKB - http://www.skb.se/ - which is usually considered World's Best Practice, with regards to designing, researching and implementing a geological repository, based on the observations of the geophysical characteristics of nature, over the time scales required. Because the used fuel - or vitrified HLW from reprocessing, preferably, - needs to be stored for a decade or so to cool, and it can be stored on site in casks for anywhere up to 100 years or so quite practically, we do have the time needed to implement a repository, and get it right.
So, we'll pave over tens of thousands of square kilometers of the Earth's land surface with solar cells? People, and plants and animals, live on that land, you know. So, we get 150,000 TW across the total surface of the Earth. That's 43500 TW from the land area. Assuming 20% cell efficiency, we need 110 TW hitting the cells, therefore we need to cover 0.25% of the total land area of the Earth with solar cells?
Dozens of easier ways to boil water? My Helen-Caldicott-bullshit-o-meter just went up to about 20,000 counts per minute. Like what? Goddamn fossil fuels?
They mean a possible eventual maximum of 4000 deaths, eventually, in the future, possibly. 24,000 people die prematurely in the US every year as a result of air pollution caused by fossil fuels.
There is sufficient uranium and thorium on earth, if it's used efficiently, meaning sensible efficient fuel cycles and Generation IV reactors, to provide the energy needs of an advanced civilisation for every person on the earth for no less than one million years. Nuclear fission will last for *thousands of millennia*, at least. With nuclear fission, D-T and maybe D-D when we run out of Lithium, you're talking *billions of years*.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html Bernard L. Cohen is the source of the 5 billion years figure.
The radioactive products from the 16 nuclear reactors at Oklo have successfully been contained in the geology there, ever since it was created and put there two billion years ago. This time scale is far more than enough for even the very longest lived radioactive products to decay completely. This is direct, simple empirical proof that geological disposal of radioactive waste is practical.
Assuming that 100,000 years corresponds to 10 half-lives, which radionuclides that comprise the radioactive waste from nuclear reactors have a half-life of 10,000 years? Name the nuclides. Are they really waste? Are they fertile or fissile? If they're fission products, what are their fission yields? What are their neutron capture cross sections?
In 1997, the USA generated 1800 TWh of electrical energy from coal combustion,
and generated 95 million tons of coal ash-type waste in the process.
Assuming 180 ppm Uranium in that material, thats 17100 tons of Uranium, or
enough uranium to fuel current technology, inefficient, Generation-II, uranium-
235-fueled light-water-moderated nuclear power reactors for 86 GW-years, or
749 TWh, 42% of the energy output that was originally released in burning the
coal.
When the Thorium content is considered, Generation IV or breeder reactors,
the Uranium-238 content, or reprocessing are considered, the this coal ash waste
contains more accessible energy than is generated burning the coal in the first
place, with none of the environmental devastation.
Personally, I'd much rather see that the coal is left in the ground, but the use of
existing coal ash dumps as a source of nuclear fuel is arguably better, from an
environmental perspective, than mining more uranium, particularly if it means
that mining in particularly environmentally sensitive areas can be minimized.
The same can be said of Uranium extraction from seawater.
That's basically the argument that deuterium, usually in the form of heavy water, is poisonous.
For deuterium poisoning to occur, around 25 to 50 percent of all water in the body needs to be replaced by heavy water, and this would take about a week of drinking nothing but heavy water. For Tritium, that's an enormous amount of tritium - at least 30kg or so of pure tritiated water, or 81 million curies!. World civilian demand for Tritium is less than 500g per year, IIRC - that's a fantastically large amount.
You'd see radioactivity effects before you got even remotely close to having that much tritium in the body.
Bremsstrahlung x-ray radiation is a problem working around high-energy beta emitting radioisotopes, such as Phosphorus-32, but not Tritium, which is a very low energy beta emitter. Betavoltaics are real, workable technology; not science fiction or junk science. Cardiac pacemakers using Plutonium-238 Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators are also a proven, decades old technology, too, for example. Tritium is an extremely low energy beta emitter. Given this, and the very short biological half-life of water in the body, it is one of the least harmful radioisotopes around. It occurs to a very small degree in nature, and is already used in radioluminescent watches, exit signs, gunsights, keyrings, compasses and such forth. The beta emission from Tritium is so low in energy that most radiation detection instruments will not detect it - only mixing the radioactive material with the scintillation cocktail in a liquid scintillation counter is sensitive enough to detect it. A gamma spectrometer, scintillation counter, geiger counter, ion chamber counter or detector won't even notice it.
Price-Anderson has never paid out one single cent of government money. Every claim against the nuclear energy industry, ever, has been paid out of the funds that are paid into by the industry.
A radiological "dirty bomb" using a large industrial radioactive source is one thing, but a nuclear power plant, with the nuclear reactor surrounded by an essentially impregnable containment building, is an entirely different thing.