Comments on: Nuke power not so clean or green
Longtime activist Helen Caldicott sees no silver lining in a nuclear energy renaissance.
Most Popular
Latest tech news headlines
- PC Tools Internet Security 2010 reviewed
December 4, 2009 6:13 PM PST
- Report: MySpace to adopt Facebook Connect
December 4, 2009 4:56 PM PST
- Sources: Apple wants technology from struggling Lala
December 4, 2009 4:25 PM PST
- See all headlines
RSS Feeds
Add headlines from CNET News to your homepage or feedreader.
More feeds available in our RSS feed index.
- Markets
Related quotes
Plutonium has long been falsely characterized by the news media and anti-nuclear activists as "the most toxic material known to man". When ingested, plutonium is about the same toxicity as caffeine.
When inhaled it can actually reduce the amount of lung cancer. A study "PLUTONIUM AND LUNG CANCER" by Gary L. Tietjen reported in Health Physics May 1987, Volume 52, Number 5 gave lung cancer data for 3 federal laboratories using plutonium. At all 3 labs, the lung cancer death rate among workers who had in excess of 2 nanocuries of plutonium in their lungs was about 80% lower than for their fellow workers who did not have plutonium in their lungs. That's right much less than workers who didn't breath plutonium.
Dr. Caldicott's claim that "hypothetically 1 or 2 pounds evenly distributed throughout the world could kill most people on Earth with lung cancer." is very false. If 20% of the 2 pounds of plutonium were to end up equally distributed to the lungs of 6 billion people, the lung burden would be about the same as the lab workers in the above study (by Tietjen) and we should expect an 80% reduction in lung cancer. Dr. Caldicott should stay with pediatrics where I assume she has some expertise.
The Chernobyl plant today (Google Maps)
http://tinyurl.com/2yvlqy
Oh, I know ... new plants are much safer, our technology is so superior, what else could they say ?
One good reason to be glad that our nuclear power plants don't have those design flaws and our engineers would fee free to tell a politician to go @#$%^& themself rather then run an unsafe reactor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Coal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_1952
http://www.cleanwateraction.org/energy/pr-9Jun04-ri.pdf
Geez, even wind turbines have claimed a few victims!
http://www.wind-works.org/articles/BreathLife.html
How that compares to nuclear power depends entirely on who's Chernobyl Disaster numbers you believe. There are 56 more or less confirmed deaths from Chernobyl (28 acute radiation, 19 from radiation-related illness and 9 from Thyroid cancer), however most people figure that there will be some increase in deaths due to radiation. Estimates range from about 2,000 people to 150,000 people, though something in the 10,000-50,000 range would probably be reasonable. These numbers are so high that they completely dominant all calculations on deaths from the nuclear power industry.
The would result in a death rate from nuclear power of somewhere between 0.2 death/TWh to 1.0 deaths/TWh (there has been about 50,000TWh worth of nuke power produced since it's introduction in 1951), putting it in the same ballpark as the 0.4 deaths/TWh from wind power quoted above.
Also, nuclear energy still gives out far less CO2 than any power based on fossil fuels (which she neglects to tell us also have to be mined and crushed) and the new reactors proposed for the UK actually breed more nuclear fuel, the waste of which typically has a halflife of less than a centuary.
The prospect of nuclear fusion is also something she neglects to mention, which can be used to make conventional nuclear waste safe and in the long run will replace nuclear fission altogether.
The article is ridden with fallacies and half-truths. I shall discuss here some of these:
If you take the whole fuel chain as one piece, nuclear power produces large quantities of global warming gases because millions of tons of rock and ore need to be mined to get the uranium out of the ground. And it has to be crushed, using more fossil fuels.
Coal also must be mined. Coal has less energy per ton than Uranium. It is less energy efficient to mine coal than Uranium. The major reason why coal is used rather than nuclear is not the fuel cost: it is because a nuclear power plant is much more expensive to build than a coal power plant, even if it ends up being a wash at plant end of life.
It is also perfectly possible to crush rocks using electric engines, powered by nuclear power. For someone who claims to drive a Prius hybrid electric, she seems remarkably forgetful of this fact. Solar panels, windmills, these all need raw minerals to manufacture as well. Fact is nothing is 100% clean. Nuclear is just better than the alternative: coal.
At the moment, uranium is enriched at Paducah, Ky., where they have two 1,500-megawatt filthy, old, coal-fired plants to produce the electricity to enrich the uranium.
Here she presents half the facts again. Yes, gas diffusion plants such as these require electricity to power them. The electricity may come from coal, nuclear or whatever. In France, they use nuclear electricity to enrich the uranium. Another fact, more recent gas centrifuge technology requires 50 times less energy to enrich the same fuel than such plants. This gas centrifuge technology is so complex, countries like Pakistan and Brazil are using it. The USA still uses its 1970s technology gas diffusion plant and is in the process of transitioning to the newer technology.
The...reactors they're planning...one (is) the AP-1000 by Westinghouse, which is essentially the same as the light water reactors that operate today, but cheaper to build because it has less concrete and steel. It's been nicknamed the eggshell reactor and, as such, it's very dangerous and could incur a major accident or meltdown.
Ask a Japanese auto manufacturer: less parts mean less possible causes for failure, easier inspections, less manufacturing expenses. These reactors do precisely that. They are meant to be manufactured in series production, rather than being crafts works like the old reactors. Simulations show them to be more reliable than the old reactors. In fact, one of the reasons Three Mile Island happened, was the plant was so complex to inspect, they couldn't figure out which widget was malfunctioning. Since then the industry has tried to simplify and make clearer the instrumentation and operator diagnostics in a nuclear power plant.
These people come from the past, they are not seeing the present picture. We are addicted to oil, coal and gas, to break the addiction will take a tremendous effort.
We need everything: nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, etc. None alone will do it with present technology. Each has its own limitations. Nuclear has great potential for replacing coal, the renewables have great potential for replacing the gas fired peaker plants. To break the oil addiction will be the greatest problem of them all: try doing the math on replacing 50% of USA fuel consumption with biofuels. I give you a quote from Wikipedia as an appetizer: It would require twice the land area of the US to be devoted to soybean production, or two-thirds to be devoted to rapeseed production, to meet current US heating and transportation needs.
It is not that there are not other options, just that it is not expected we will be able to develop them in time to minimize misery and pain.
The material by far the most dangerous out of those isn't Plutonium. It's not Uranium. It's (and you can tell because of my subject line!) Cobalt 60, and activated isotope of Cobalt created from neutron activation of Iron 59 (Fe-59+n=Co60 and a few gamma). Cobalt 60 has a half life of 5.26 years. Rules of thumb for handling say that 5 half lives is near complete decay (although to be honest, I feel 10 is closer; 10 leaves .097% of the radioactivity that was there). All other (I repeat ALL OTHER) non FUEL radioactive particles decay in HOURS after plant shutdown, are extremely low level, or are non-gamma and non-neutron producing (Alpha radiation is blocked by clothing; Beta by your skin; you have to actually ingest Alpha to have ANY reasonable effect on you, though if you do, it's potentially the most dangerous).
I worked 5 years in the nuclear industry (work computers now) as a Radiological Control Physicist. I know more about this stuff than Dr. Caldicott, because I worked it, trained it, studied it. Yes, there are some issues with Nuclear, but most of them have NOTHING to do with the science, or engineering... they have to do with the POLITICS. Breeder Reactors would use the long lived Fuel based material for fuel as well; we get LESS radioactivity at the end of the chain. But Dr. Caldicott and her compainions championed outlawing cleaner Nuclear. Now they use the fact that it's not as clean as they wanted against it.
At the rate we, so-called industrialised countries, consume energy, and with lots of other countries developping their energy needs, there, guessing that only renewable energy or nuclear power is THE solution is just stupid.
We need everything where it's available and viable from an economic point of view.
The best we can do is to make all these energy supplies as safe as we can. Because we need them all, whatever some people with agenda might say.
Coal is not the answer either..... clean coal is likewise a polluting, dangerous business which destroys mountains and pollutes rivers for hundreds of years so nothing can live... and this is before it even gets burned "cleanly" and releases CO2....
this leaves us with various methods of solar power generation from steam and photovoltaics as well as wind which is much preferable to nuclear and coal and oil.... the sooner they get deployed, the sooner we can hope to combat increased rates of global warming, air pollution, and cancer....
While in the near term not enough power can be made with these technologies, it will be possible if we work to develop them now.... reducing consumption of electricity in parallel with new power production technology is also a must. banning incandescent bulbs would make a huge difference as the power savings from incandescent and LED become significant....
MAIN problem... the Rooskies used concrete that was NOT RE-
ENFORCED!
Hell, my basement cinder block wall is 23 feet high, SOLID-filled
concrete WITH REBAR steel re-enforced beams.
'Kinda helps to build things correctly!
1. The Russians of that era never built into their reactors many of the safety features that are standard in most of the rest of the world. Similarly, their operating procedures seem to have been sub-standard. This is especially obvious in their nuclear submarine program; people were more expendable than cash.
2. The design was not that of any dedicated power reactor, even of those days. It was graphite moderated, and graphite -- unlike the water moderator in
CNET should have asked some real questions, for example: What's the environmental cost of creating solar cells capable of producing 1 MW?
How much income does a person have to make to 'live by a river to fish and eat vegetables'?
Her attitude of 'holier than thou' really doesn't help her cause at all.
proof alternatives, such as hydrogen, solar, wind, hydro and
geothermal.
Hydrogen is NOT an energy source (except in the case of nuclear fusion), it's an energy carrier. You put energy in and then get less energy back out.
Solar is neat but not very practical in many situations (ie pretty much all of Europe). Wind is practical for some power and we should make a real concentrated effort to reach 10% of worldwide electricity from wind in the next 10-15 years. However the unpredictability of it really complicates things when you move beyond about 10% (unless you're like Denmark and can just import power from other countries to compensate).
Hydro is great where it works, though it's not without it's share of environmental problems including greenhouse gas emissions from decomposing vegetation and leaching heavy metals into the water stream (and eventually our food supply). It also is the most dangerous source of power on the planet in terms of accidents with dams failing.
Geothermal is good for heating and cooling and should be more widely used there, though it's applications for electricity are somewhat unproven. It's sort of like solar in that it's very location dependent. Iceland is the only place where geothermal electricity has been demonstrated in any sort of practical means, and that's partly because all other sources of power are so impractical for them. I would like to see more research in this area though, it does hold some potential.
We need to focus on real and achievable goals, not pie-in-the-sky dreams. I'm all for new renewable energy, but they just aren't going to be a significant part of our electrical grid any time soon no matter how much money we throw at them. Over the next 30 years we're looking at 80%+ of our worldwide electricity coming from hydro, fossil fuels or nuclear.
Umm thinking......
ok so lead absorbs the stuff.
what about if you put the stuff in lead casing and plomp a iceing unit in the center.
this icing unit could fluxuate grounding the materials excessivness down until hey presto no radiation.
Does the earth do this sort of thing?
Bottomline, why is CNet allowing itself to be a mouthpiece for a radical like Dr. Caldicott? Rather than publishing pieces that few aside from extreme left-wingers can take seriously, provide more articles such as the recent example by Vinod Khosla that laid out a case for green energy using logic and economic rationality. To publish an interview such as the one with Dr. Caldicott damages the credibility of CNet news.
- Questions are out of sequence
- by jsong123 June 18, 2007 11:15 PM PDT
- Move the question "Can you talk about your new book" to right after "What moivates you?
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
Showing 3 of 3 pages (183 Comments)