interesting nuke facts & Myths About Nuclear Energy
- From: "JanOrme99@xxxxxxx" <JanOrme99@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 23:12:58 -0700 (PDT)
Myths About Nuclear Energy
By Ed Hiserodt
SOURCE: http://www.jbs.org/node/3481
First shift at Milwaukee’s Falk Corp. began on the morning of December
6, 2006 just like it had for decades at the giant industrial complex.
The company’s skilled workers filed in, replacing the third-shift
workers who were headed home for some well-earned rest after spending
the night at the giant factory building gears for other industrial
consumers. Without a hitch the first-shift crew picked up where third
shift left off and were busily working when some began to notice signs
that something was wrong. Just before 8:00 a.m. the smell of natural
gas began to fill the air, and employees began to evacuate. Minutes
later, at 8:07, the plant was torn apart by a colossal fireball in an
explosion that rocked the city, blowing out windows blocks away. “It
was like a bomb went off or a plane crashed,” said 42-year veteran
Falk machinist David Sternig, describing the blast that left three
dead and 46 injured.
The terrible tragedy in Milwaukee underscored the incredible power
stored in the fuels used to generate power to supply the energy needs
of the modern, industrialized world. In a power plant, the energy
catastrophically released all at once in an explosion of the type that
devastated Falk Corp. is released gradually while under control.
Tamed, it is used to heat water into steam, which in turn spins giant
turbines that power electric generators. The benign and useful power
that flows out of every electrical outlet in your house is the direct
result of mankind’s ability to harness the destructive energies
contained in fuels like natural gas, petroleum, or coal. And it is no
different with nuclear energy. Every fuel that stores the energy we
tap in order to power the modern world has the potential to escape our
control and violently destroy lives and property.
Nuclear, coal, gas: they all have the power to destroy. But of these
three, one has gotten a bad rap. While it is business as usual for
coal and gas, the widespread perception persists that nuclear energy
is fraught with unique and terrifying danger. Say “nuclear” out loud,
and people tend to think of mushroom clouds, radiation, and nuclear
winter. Despite these fears, nuclear energy is clean, reliable, and
safe — more so, in fact, than the alternatives, as an examination of
the myths about nuclear energy reveals.
MYTH: Nuclear plants emit dangerous radiation.
TRUTH: Have you ever known anyone killed in a car accident? I have —
two uncles, a roommate, and a girlfriend from college. How about
anyone killed from radiation, or maybe even injured slightly? If
you’re like me and nearly all other Americans, you can’t name a single
person you know who has been injured by radiation.
The fact is, nuclear power plants emit less radiation during normal
operation than do coal-fired power plants. In an article published in
1993 in Oak Ridge National Laboratory Review, ORNL physicist Alex
Gabbard pointed out “that coal-fired power plants throughout the world
are the major sources of radioactive materials released to the
environment.” According to Gabbard, radiation from coal combustion “is
100 times that from nuclear plants.” Yet even at that level, radiation
from coal is completely negligible. Nuclear reactors emit much less
radiation than coal-fired power plants.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission limits radiation at the plant
boundary to 5 millirems per year. (It seldom gets anywhere near that.)
If you were to stand unclothed at the boundary for 120 years, you
would receive as much radiation as a person living on the Colorado
plateau does in one year from natural background radiation.
Moreover, the U.S. capitol building has long been known to emit too
much radiation to be licensed as a nuclear power plant.
Consider too that unlike coal- or oil-fired plants, nuclear power
plants do not have smokestacks spewing pollutants into the atmosphere.
In the case of nuclear plants, the wastes are contained within the
plant itself. Often mistaken for smokestacks, some nuclear power
plants, like some coal- or oil-fired plants, have cooling towers that
emit water vapor.
Finally, it is important to keep in mind that radiation is all around
us every day. According to the Department of Energy, the average
American receives 300 millirems of radiation each year from natural
sources, but that amount is higher in some places. For instance, in
Denver, Colorado, because of the proximity of the Rocky Mountains and
because there is less atmosphere overhead to protect from cosmic rays,
residents receive almost double the national average background
radiation. I wonder, does the EPA know about this? Perhaps Coloradans
should be evacuated!
MYTH: Radiation, even in small doses, is deadly.
TRUTH: For more than 50 years, government regulators have based
radiation precautions on radiation’s likelihood to cause cancer. In
determining cancer rates and deaths associated with radiation, the
government uses something called Linear No-Threshold Theory (LNT). And
LNT theory has been overstating the risk associated with radiation
exposure.
To illustrate how LNT theory works, think about it this way: if 100
people jump off a 100-foot-tall building, we might expect them all to
die. If they jump off a 50-foot-tall building, perhaps we can expect
50 to die or be seriously injured. To keep following the pattern, if
the same 100 people jump from a height of one foot, under LNT theory,
we would expect one person to die. It’s a linear formula. But do one
out of 100 people die from a one-foot jump? Of course not — there is a
threshold below which death will no longer occur. But the LNT
hypothesis pretends that thresholds like this don’t exist.
The same holds true when LNT theory is applied to radiation. Consider
an exposure of 100 rems of radiation over a short period of time — as
in the case of Japanese bomb survivors. These unfortunates were found
to have a relative risk of cancer death of about 3 percent above their
unexposed peers. Following LNT theory, then someone who had been
exposed to 1 rem (1,000 millirems) would have an increased risk of
0.03 percent. Continuing the linear relationship, an exposure of 100
millirems would result in a 0.003 percent increase, and an exposure of
10 millirems a 0.0003 rise over an unexposed person. To put that in
perspective, 10 millirems is the radiation dose that airline
passengers get from cosmic radiation during a round-trip, coast-to-
coast jet flight. According to the LNT hypothesis, if 100 million
passengers fly from New York to Los Angeles, 300 of them would die
from cancer (0.0003 percent x 100,000,000 = 300 cancer deaths). But as
has been proven, LNT theory does not apply to radiation.
Moreover, not only do the thresholds ignored by LNT theory exist, but
below those thresholds, low-level exposure to otherwise dangerous
substances have proven to be beneficial. We don’t die when we get tiny
amounts of arsenic, selenium, and other poisonous elements — we must
have them to live. Likewise, we must drink water to maintain good
health — but too much water can result in potentially deadly water
intoxication. Similarly, in proper amounts, vitamins are vital to good
health. But even vitamins have a threshold over which they are
harmful. In the case of radiation, even though a massive dose can kill
you, it can benefit you in small amounts. This beneficial effect is
called hormesis. Interestingly, those Japanese at Nagasaki and
Hiroshima who received fewer than 70 rems (about 200 times the average
U.S. background exposure) had less cancer and are outliving those who
were not exposed.
MYTH: We can’t handle all that deadly nuclear waste.
TRUTH: The supposed difficulty presented by nuclear waste has long
been a point of emphasis for environmentalists and other critics of
nuclear power. As far back as 1975, Ralph Nader was warning it would
take an army to guard the nation’s nuclear industry and its waste.
“Some people believe there may be a million people with direct and
backup assignments to guard the nuclear industry by the year 2000,”
Nader warned then. Of course, this army of guards never materialized.
In fact, such wastes as are produced are small in scale. Because very
little fuel is required in the generation of nuclear energy, there is
correspondingly little waste. What wastes are produced, moreover,
aren’t necessarily wastes at all. In the United States we have been
led to believe that spent fuel rods are nuclear wastes. Not so. They
contain valuable uranium, plutonium, and other important medical and
industrial isotopes that we currently spend considerable sums to have
transmuted from other elements. With appropriate reprocessing
facilities, these can be successfully recovered and reused from the
supposed nuclear waste.
Both France and the United Kingdom operate reprocessing facilities.
These take in spent fuel rods and strip away built-up wastes while
recovering the vast majority of the still-useful fuel. In the UK, for
instance, according to BBC News, the Sellafield reprocessing center
“receives waste nuclear fuel from 34 plants around the world. The
metallic outer casing is first stripped away and the spent fuel is
then dissolved in hot nitric acid. This produces three things —
uranium (96%) and plutonium (1%) and highly radioactive waste (3%).”
Both the recovered uranium and plutonium are turned into fuel pellets
that can be used to create more energy in nuclear plants. And it is a
lot of energy. According to the BBC, “each six-gramme [plutonium fuel]
pellet holds the equivalent energy of one tonne of coal.” This from a
process that reduces nuclear waste by a whopping 97 percent!
The United States was to have a commercial reprocessing facility at
Barnwell, South Carolina, but the plant was nixed by the Carter
administration. Had it been built, the amount of spent nuclear fuel
stored by U.S. nuclear power plants could have been reduced by that
same 97 percent. As far as the danger posed by the remaining three
percent is concerned, its disposal is not nearly the problem it has
been portrayed to be (see next myth).
MYTH: Nuclear waste will always be dangerously radioactive.
TRUTH: Shortly after it is produced, high-level nuclear waste is very
toxic, but radioactive waste becomes less toxic over time through the
natural process of radioactive decay. By convention, scientists
measure the rate of this decay in terms of “half-life” — that is, the
amount of time it takes for a radioactive isotope to lose half its
radioactivity. Radioactively “hot” isotopes lose radiation quickly and
so have short half-lives. With half-lives measured in days or less,
they soon emit too little radiation to pose a health threat.
Substances that lose radiation very, very slowly and have
correspondingly long half-lives present little danger to people from
the get-go.
The disposal of wastes from a nuclear power plant has often been
criticized as a gargantuan problem because of the belief that the
waste may be dangerously radioactive for many thousands of years into
the future, but as you can see, after a relatively short “cooling”
time, the waste poses little health threat. For this reason, some
nuclear wastes could even be diluted with water and dumped into the
oceans (oceans are already naturally radioactive!) without causing a
health problem. It sounds outlandish, but it’s something the British
have been doing for years at their Sellafield reprocessing plant.
Compare this to the 1,000 tons per day of ash, including arsenic and
other toxic heavy metals, that are sent to landfills by a 1,000
megawatt coal power plant. Those landfills stay toxic forever.
MYTH: Chernobyl and Three Mile Island proved nuclear energy is unsafe.
TRUTH: The great nightmare associated with nuclear energy is the
“meltdown.” Anti-nuclear activists love to point to a scenario in
which a reactor would lose its coolant allowing the fuel rods to melt
through the reactor vessel, through several feet of high-strength
concrete, and through hundreds of feet of earth till reaching an
aquifer whereupon a steam explosion would ensue. Consequently, they
eagerly seized upon the accident at Three Mile Island as the
embodiment of all their fears — or at least of the fears they wanted
the public to have.
The problem was that Three Mile Island was a demonstration of the
safety of nuclear plants. Beginning at 4:00 a.m. on March 28, 1979, a
series of mishaps resulted in the partial meltdown of the reactor
core. By 7:45 a.m. that morning, according to the Smithsonian
Institute, “a molten mass of metal and fuel — some twenty tons in all
— is spilling into the bottom of the reactor vessel.” Yet that reactor
containment vessel worked as designed and by 9:00 a.m. the danger was
past: “The reactor vessel holds firm, and the molten uranium, immersed
in water, now gradually begins to cool,” the Smithsonian Institute
says in its timeline of events at the damaged reactor. Perhaps the
final word on Three Mile Island comes from Greenpeace co-founder
Patrick Moore. In October 2006, Moore wrote in Popular Mechanics: “At
the time, no one noticed Three Mile Island was a success story; the
concrete containment structure prevented radiation from escaping into
the environment. There was no injury or death among the public or
nuclear workers.”
It is common to mention Chernobyl and Three Mile Island at the same
time in debate over nuclear safety, but the two events are
substantially different. Chernobyl was the feared “worst case
scenario” envisioned by critics of nuclear energy. Whereas at Three
Mile Island the nuclear chain reaction was stopped in the first 10
seconds of the event, at Chernobyl the chain reaction continued well
into the accident. Although there is almost nothing flammable in a
U.S. power reactor, Chernobyl’s was constructed from graphite, a form
of carbon that is difficult to ignite, but burns with a very hot flame
once ignited. Not only that, but Chernobyl did not even have a
containment structure for the reactor, unlike American plants that are
built with containment buildings designed to withstand the impact of a
jumbo jet. Because there was no containment vessel enclosing
Chernobyl’s poorly designed RBMK-type reactors, when the plant
exploded, chunks of radioactive material were ejected from the
annihilated plant and exposed to the environment.
And yet, the aftermath of Chernobyl was not as bad as many expected it
to be. According to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the
Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), “The accident caused the deaths
within a few days or weeks of 30 power plant employees and firemen
(including 28 deaths that were due to radiation exposure).” No one
wants to see loss of life, but as large industrial incidents go, this
was relatively unexceptional. The 1984 gas leak at the Union Carbide
plant in Bhopal, India, killed at least 3,000 people and, according to
some estimates, may have caused the death of 15,000. At Chernobyl, by
contrast, fears of mass casualties from the effects of radiation have
not been realized. According to the UN, “There have been eleven deaths
between 1987 and 1998 among confirmed acute radiation sickness
survivors.... There were three cases of coronary heart disease, two
cases of myelodysplastic syndrome, two cases of liver cirrhosis, and
one death each of lung gangrene, lung tuberculosis and fat embolism.
One patient who had been classified with Grade II acute radiation
sickness died in 1998 from acute myeloid leukaemia.”
Though tragic, these deaths do not amount to the devastation of much
of Russia and Western Europe that was predicted. Among the broader
population, even under the microscope of a media that seeks out
disasters, the only detectable heath effect was an increase in
childhood thyroid cancer. But some have pointed out that this might be
an anomaly caused by extra screening after the accident. If you screen
more children every year, you will detect more cases of thyroid
cancer, Chernobyl notwithstanding. It’s noteworthy that Russia’s
childhood thyroid cancers did not go off the scale. In Finland, 2.4
percent of children had thyroid cancer — 90 times that of all persons
in the Bryansk area of Russia who were less than 18 in 1986 — at the
time of the accident.
The most detrimental effect of Chernobyl was the forced relocation of
residents. Ironically, the fallout from the accident emitted less
radioactivity than the local soil.
MYTH: There are so many critics of nuclear power that there must be
something wrong with the technology.
TRUTH: There have been a lot of critics of nuclear technology, and
many of them, maybe even most of them, have been sincere in their
concerns. After all, if you are a parent and someone builds a massive
power plant somewhere in the region in which you live and you are told
that, in an accident, the plant could wipe out life in the entire
area, you might be willing to conclude that building the plant is not
worth the risk.
But leading critics, those who often have set the terms of the debate,
have, unfortunately, been wrong in their assessments of the risks.
Three Mile Island proved the effectiveness of the safety measures
designed into every Western power plant — and technological advances
make modern designs safer than Three Mile Island. This has been known
to leading critics of nuclear energy. But they oppose nuclear power
not because it is unsafe, but because it is too useful. Cloaked in the
garb of “environmentalism,” they use the anti-nuke movement to promote
big government and harass productive capitalistic enterprises. Among
these is Paul Ehrlich, who is known for his outrageous (and wrong)
doomsday predictions. In the May-June 1975 issue of the Federation of
American Scientists’ Public Interest Report, Ehrlich wrote: “Giving
society cheap, abundant energy … would be the moral equivalent of
giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Amory Lovins, another critic and
one-time British representative of Friends of the Earth, agrees. “If
you ask me,” Lovins said in an interview with Playboy magazine in
1977, “It’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a
source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do
with it.”
Ehrlich, Lovins, and almost all of the “green” leadership rightly
recognize that nuclear energy would lead to prosperity. From their
standpoint, that is the problem. Again quoting Ehrlich: “We’ve already
had too much economic growth in the U.S. Economic growth in rich
countries like ours is the disease, not the cure.”
In fact, to turn our backs on nuclear power may be to court disaster.
With growing demand worldwide for energy, we may suffer supply
disruptions in some of the fossil fuels that currently support our
modern way of life. To fail now to rebuild our nuclear infrastructure
would be to court disaster, something one of the chief scientists
responsible for the development of nuclear technology was already
warning about decades ago.
In 1979, in the wake of the incident at Three Mile Island, famed
nuclear scientist Edward Teller issued a prophetic warning that now
sounds as relevant today as it did then: “The citizens of the United
States have just begun to recognize the impact of the world’s growing
energy shortage. Gasoline lines, electrical brownouts and higher
prices are minor irritants. They are nothing compared to what may lie
ahead. In a struggle for survival, politics, law, religion, and even
humanity may be forgotten. When the objective is to stay alive, the
end may seem to justify the means. In that event, the world may indeed
return to the ‘simpler’ life of the past, but millions of us will not
be alive to discover its disadvantages. When our existence is at
stake, we cannot afford to turn our backs on any source of energy, we
need them all.”
------------------------------------------
Jan Eric Orme
.
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