[pp.int.general] Don't roast our planet

Sat May 19 17:15:31 CEST 2012

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On 5/19/2012 8:18 AM, Charly Pache wrote:
> Interesting point Antonio.
> 
> Jan, thanks for the study, interesting as well, reminds me a
> comparison between how many people get killed by terrorists and by
> other causes

I've written a fair bit on that too

http://www.ktetch.co.uk/2009/09/as-we-come-up-on-8th-anniversary-of-911.html
http://www.ktetch.co.uk/2010/01/terrorism-how-not-to-deal-with-it.html
http://www.ktetch.co.uk/2011/02/america-fighting-terrorism-with.html

> [1].. but even if nuclear energy kills less people than other
> energy sources in normal operations, i would oppose it first
> because of the waste problematic, second about the impossible risk
> assessment of a nuclear accident, cos there, even if an accident
> has a small probability of happening, if it happens, it could have
> devastating consequences.

Let me say now, I am NOT a nuclear expert. Nuclear and particle
physics WAS my specialty when I studied physics (but astrophysics was
my preferred field, and the one I was going to continue with) but my
main degree is in robotics. That and having been trained as a Health
and Safety incident investigator was why I was working at a nuclear
facility 10 years ago, designing nuclear-suitable investigative tools
(RV etc). On the other hand, I do have several friends who ARE (former
us navy Nuc engineer, another friend who's due to get his own nuclear
sub in the RN this summer, and of course, my boss at my particle
accelerator job (yes, "I design particle accelerators in my spare
time" (TM), who has a whole Research lab (the Rutherford-Appleton) to
call on for scientific backup if needed (and I know there's at least
one nuclear physicist on here as well, so sorry to that person if I
make you wince). With that out the way....

When you bore for a geothermal plant, there's a small probability that
you could miss-drill and cause a manual volcano which could obliterate
a major landmass. It has a small probability of happening, but could
have devastating consequences. Or it could cause an earthquake as a
second-order event, which would generate a tsunami in an area not
prepped for it, and cause real devastation.

The fact is, Chernobyl had ONE poorly designed reactor (barely above
an early 1950s design) that was being used for an experiment, in a
manner that could only have happened in the soviet state. (Chernobyl's
fascinated me for about 20 years)

- From what I remember, the radiation levels for tourists who go into
the Chernobyl exclusion zone, are not that much higher than the
exposure for a transatlantic flight (but with an 8:1 timescale
difference). Strangely enough, most of the figures which say Eleventy
Billion have died of cancer because of it, tend to be organizations
who oppose nuclear power in general (sensing there might be a bias
there) or looking for a profit (Belorussia, I'm looking at you)
Objective investigations by those with little direct involvement (or
rather, with an independent point of view) have found things to be
much less.

Or let's look at fukushima. DESPITE a massive tsunami hitting the
country, and wiping out most of the safety support, DESPITE Fukushima
Dachi still being operated beyond it's planned end of life, and
DESPITE being in the planning stages for a shut down and
decommissioning, It never went super-critical, like Chernobyl.

It was not a failure of a nuclear plant that caused things. It was the
Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. And in spite of that, it kept mostly
contained, despite conditions that killed over 15,000 people. In fact,
what most people don't have, is a sense of perspective on this. They
focus on fukushima as if it was the only thing, and the tsunami was a
little bit of a high tide. The earthquake had a surface energy of
around 1.9xx10^19 Joules of energy, or roughly the annual energy
output of ALL the affected reactors. It's always a failure of
perspective in these things. And while people say 'It'll cost $40B to
clean up fukushima', what they omit is 'it'll cost $120B to clean up
everything the tsunami did'. Sure it's a proportionally higher amount,
BUT It's not even half the total amount.

As for waste, oh boy. People will say it's dangerous, and say it lasts
for tens of thousands of years. Fact is, radioactive decay is not a
straight line. There's a fixed number of atoms to decay, and the
half-life is a statistical probability that half of them will decay.
So if you have a half life of 8 days, then after a month, you've got
1/16th of what you started with (32 days = 4 half lifes) While if it's
1400 years, you've barely made a dent. BUT, one decay is one 'count'
of radiation. They don't give it off constantly, it's not like 'blue',
where over time it fades, but it's always giving off 'blueness'. Maybe
an example will help. If you had 6 million atoms of Iodine-131 put in
your mouth, you'd better hope you'd taken your iodine pills, or you
might end up with a greater chance of getting thyroid cancer. Yet
people regularly put 6 Million atoms of Carbon 14 (which like I-131
undergoes beta decay, with similar decay energy (~0.15MeV) and feel
nothing - you'd know it best as a pencil. That's the difference.
Energetic stuff is dangerous, but short-lived, long lived stuff isn't
that dangerous, as the decay is spread over so much more time.

It seems silly, but so many people don't get that.

The sad fact is, when it comes to nuclear waste, people focus on the
extremes, and in doing so, ignore the facts. It's EXACTLY like the
rest of the pirate struggles, where hypothetical 'what-ifs' are
constructed and used to justify things. "What if someone constructed a
bomb that would take out an airliner with 4 fluid ounces of liquid"
"What if someone is going to plan a terrorist attack by taking some
photos first". If radiological scaremongering and the resultant
actions that engender OK, is the same true about terrorist
scaremongering? After all, terrorists have killed more people, has
happened more often, and is a direct affirmative action with intent.

That's about it for this science lecture. For homework I want a 500
word essay on 'why nuclear hysteria is considered acceptable' to be
handed in on Wednesday. Class dismissed.

> 
> [1]
> http://megmclain.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/terror-risk.jpg
> 
> On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Antonio Garcia
> <ningunotro at hotmail.com <mailto:ningunotro at hotmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> Nuclear raises an institutionalized paranoia that ranges on the 
> obscene, yes, definitely.
> 
> And what causes that paranoia is nothing else but the fact that... 
> you can not hide military nuclear facilities if it is not behind
> the radiation background of civil nuclear facilities. That is the
> only reason why Germany can agree to dismantle civil nuclear
> facilities (because they have no military nuclear facilities of
> their own to hide) and no other country (USA, GB, IL, FR, RU, ...)
> is anyway near considering it possible.
> 
> The rest of the story is a plain propaganda smokescreen to hide 
> behind conveniently.
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 
Date: Sat, 19 May 2012 12:46:21 +0200
> From: charly.pache at gmail.com <mailto:charly.pache at gmail.com> To:
> pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net 
> <mailto:pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net> Subject: Re:
> [pp.int.general] Don't roast our planet
> 
> 
> Andrew, thanks for your input, I read once 'nuclear' electricity
> was cheaper because the costs of the storage and re-treatment were
> not included in the electricity bill but were paid by the states,
> is it true?
> 
> About the deaths/serious injuries after a major nuclear incident,
> i guess you should consider the higher number of people who get
> cancer and die from it into the figures. And the population is
> still contaminated many decades after the accident, like in
> Tshernobyl. The worst report talks about '985,000 deaths as a
> result of the radioactivity released' [1]. Fukushima consequences
> will be probably terrible as well and it's no wonder they stopped
> all their nuclear plants in Japan. In my opinion, the risk is to
> high. Better a life with less confort than a life with cancer.
> 
> But you're right about the wind energy, i heard that the big 
> companies just do it to to make money with public subventions,
> they don't really care about being green or efficient.
> 
> [1] 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster_effects#New_York_Academy_of_Sciences_publication
>
>  On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 9:47 PM, Andrew Norton <ktetch at gmail.com 
> <mailto:ktetch at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> On 5/18/2012 5:49 AM, Kenneth Peiruza wrote:
> 
>> Right now, Spain is producing 10% of it's energy with
> renewable sources,
>> and 11% of its electricity with wind power. Wind power is (as
> stated by
>> US dpt. of Energy) significantly cheaper than nuclear power,
> and below
>> market-prices. The cheapest source is advanced combined cycle,
> which
>> will increase its price in the next years, as it's based in
> fossil fuels.
> 
> 
> Ooh boy. You combined the W and the N in a statement, and oh
> boy...
> 
> First, Nuclear is expensive, yes, why? Because of an 
> institutionalized paranoia that ranges on the obscene. Were we to
> submit any other form of electricity generation to it, nuclear
> would be the cheapest.
> 
> We had a major nuclear incident last year. Despite that, the 
> deaths/serious injuries at nuclear power locations remains? Oh, 
> Zero. How many fatalities have there been at wind power sites in,
> say, 2011? ELEVEN! Oh my.
> 
> Do you know what constitutes a 'leak' at a nuclear power station?
> If you take a smoke detector in, it will flag a leak alarm. If you
> carry a bunch of bananas, it will trigger a leak alarm, you have a 
> handful of brazilnuts? leak alarm... I haven't actually checked
> this but some very rough calculations indicate to me that if you
> take a wind power turbine, and put it in a nuclear power site, it
> will set off the leak alarms. THIS IS WHY IT'S SO EXPENSIVE.
> 
> When you have people making policy that don't understand the 
> science, then you have serious problems. I live in Georgia. We're
> actually getting a new nuclear plant built here (albeit many many
> miles from me). There's lots of nuclear protesters around there.
> About 20-25 miles away is a coal plant (one of the biggest in the
> US - Georgia Power's plant Scherer) and there's NO nuclear
> protesters there. Obvious you might think. Just one problem -
> residents around plant Scherer, are starting to suffer from Uranium
> poisoning, as the ash pool leeches into groundwater.
> 
> I have no worries about nuclear power. Perhaps because about 10 
> years ago, i did some design work at a nuclear power 
> plant+reprocessor. Last September, I sat next to (or withing 5
> meters of, at all times) a nuclear reactor. Not just ANY reactor
> though, but one a 17yo kid had built himself. here it is - 
> http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d32/ktetch/0903011932a.jpg (that 
> bright spot on the left side of the pic is from my laptop, which
> is where I was sitting, working the mixer desk) and here's a video 
> of it in action, showing it's radiation output with a Geiger-Muller
> counter http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrbgIQ8X3uc
> 
> Of course, all this is because I understand radiation, and nuclear
> power (really, it's not that hard. and the day before, I'd led a
> panel on a particle accelerator that has uses including dealing
> with nuclear waste)
> 
> But Wind? Wind scares the crap out of me. If there's no wind, it 
> generates nothing. If there's too much wind, it generates nothing 
> because they have to stop it so it doesn't break. If the brakes 
> fail, it catches fire, and spews huge amounts of toxic smoke. These
> fires are usually left to burn because they're incredibly difficult
> to put out, and very high up (and fanned by the high winds that
> started it). And if the fire spreads it can be VERY nasty; one
> wind-turbine wildfire in Australia torched an area of national park
> roughly the same size as the Fukushima exclusion zone. Then there's
> the blades - In Germany it's been shown that bits of blades can
> embed themselves in house roofs kilometers away. If it gets cold,
> they can throw big ice chunks just as far.
> 
> then there's effectiveness. A study by the UK National Grid found
> that wind turbines provided only an average around 23% of their
> rated generation capacity. So you have to build even MORE. That's
> more expense, and of course, that's not usable all the time.
> 
> The UK was also looking at, I believe, cutting the heavy subsidies
> paid to wind generators, who were being paid even if they were
> generating NOTHING. 
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9076458/Wind-industrys-extensive-lobbying-to-preserve-subsidies-and-defeat-local-resistance-to-turbines.html
>
>  But seriously, if you want to talk about cost, make sure you 
> understand ALL the facts, especially those facts which drive the
> costs. Know your facts, know your science, know that nuclear is the
> best option at present.
> 
> 
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- --
> 
Andrew Norton
http://ktetch.co.uk
Tel: +1(352)6-KTETCH [+1-352-658-3824]
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