Nuclear Power

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

I think NP is a potentially wonderful thing. I like to joke about how I will never be satisfied with my cordless drill until it’s powered by antimatter, and only needs to be recharged once every 1,000 years.

Okay, that said, it seems to me the ‘trouble’ with NP is indeed the public perception of it and its difficulties. In a very general sense, it might be compared with development of rockets or high performance military planes, where accidents can be spectacular, and observers go “Wow! Sure am glad I wasn’t on board that thing.”

Meanwhile the engineers are saying, “Aha…now we can fix that on the next model”. I’m sure that one day there will be secure power plants that go for a much longer time than they do now with no trouble at all.

The problem, though, is that it’s not very politically sustainable to expect the average Mr. & Ms. Citizen to go along with this sort of trial and error process…and who can blame them, really? To them radiation is an invisible, insidious force that can’t be perceived (without instruments) until it bites you on the butt.

If there were a sudden bad leak at, say, Indian Point NY, we might have the entire NY City area population trying to remove itself in a hurry. Now that would likely be the REAL disaster…

2

Kneejerk Skeptic, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, we’re glad you found us. When you start a thread, it’s helpful to other readers if you provide a link to the column in question. Saves searching time, and helps keep us all on the same page. Yes, it’s today’s column on the front page, but in a few weeks it will sink into the abyss of the Archives, while the discussion might go on.

I’m assuming that you’re referring to today’s column: Is nuclear power safe? - The Straight Dope

If you meant something different, please let me know and I’ll change this link. Otherwise, no biggie, you’ll know for next time. And, as I say, welcome!

3

Is nuclear power safe?

Short answer: No.

Slightly longer answer: Neither is anything else.

There is no such thing as perfectly safe ANYTHING. It’s always a matter of weighing the costs vs. the benefits. The fundamental rule of analysis is always to ask “Compared to what?”.

Notice that, for all the attention paid to the Fukushima Daiichi reactor, hardly anybody at all noticed the earthquake-induced dam collapse, with the resultant downstream devastation caused when all the pent-up water went rushing to the sea. That was something that ACTUALLY HAPPENED with supposedly “safe” hydroelectric power, not something that MIGHT YET HAPPEN with nuclear.

4

“Slightly longer answer: Neither is anything else.”

Not sure a lot of people die from Solar or Wind power… Perhaps some from the pollution associated with the manufacture of the materials.

Aside from the “acceptable” death count, lets not forget other factors. The mining and processing of uranium and associated energy costs/pollution with that, the tons of waste sitting around the planet which we haven’t figured out what to do with, the uninhabitable areas around sites that have had “incidents”, and the cumulative effect of a meltdown here, a radioactive release there, spilled wastewater, steam releases, etc. The story in Japan is still unfinished, we haven’t seen a truly catastrophic meltdown scenario which may yet unfold. And if not there this time, in another event.

Man is prone to mistakes and taking short cuts for short term gain. As long as that and the profit motive is involved there will be many more accidents at nuke plants.

We could easily develop solar power to supply the entire planet’s needs within the foreseeable future if we put the kind of resources behind it that are behind nuclear, coal and oil. But that would take strong leadership, some sacrifice and restructuring of our energy model.

5

From the column:

That’s an amazing statistic.

Is that one coal power plant v. one nuclear power plant that produces the same amount of power? Or is that total radiation from all coal plants worldwide v. all nuclear plants worldwide (> 50,000 against 442)?

And does ‘release’ mean ‘produce’ or does it mean ‘expose the general public to’? In other words, if coal plants had containment buildings, would they drop below nukes again?

Finally, is it apples-to-apples radiation - gamma to gamma? Or alpha radiation against gamma radiation? It must be gamma to gamma, right? Or else that would be incredibly misleading, along the lines of ‘more people die in California every day than soldiers in Iraq, an area of comparable size.’

6

All coal is contaminated with trace amounts of radioactive material such as radium(note he said radioactivity, not radiation). When the coal is burned it is released into the atmosphere. I don’t recall the exact numbers, but if I remember correctly, but because so much more coal coal is required per unit of energy, more radioactivity is produced in total by coal than nuclear. The difference is two fold:

1)Nuclear waste is much more heavily concentrated. You would need to capture all the radioactivity released by the coal plant over a long period to get the same immediate health threat that is posed by nuclear waste.

2)The radioactivity in coal is naturally produced and therefore unregulated. The law is funny on how it treats radiation. Pilots get more ionizing radiation exposure than most nuclear workers, yet they do not need to be monitored or tracked because it is naturally occurring radiation.

Also, most of the radioactivity in coal would be alpha emitters. These are actually fairly safe normally because alpha particles will not penetrate the dead outer layers of your skin. They are only harmful if inhaled or ingested, say after being turned into smoke in a coal fired power plant.

7

The radiation contained in coal ash is both significant and insignificant, depending upon how you look at it.

The issue is that coal, like most rocks, contains natural radioactive elements. Uranium, thorium, radium, and some radon is captured as well. This is typically in the parts per million range, or less. The problem is - we burn roughly a billion tons of coal per year in this country alone, and even at 1 ppm of radioactive elements, that equates to 1,000 tons of radioactive material per year:

1,000,000,000 tons * 1 parts/1,000,000 total = 1,000 tons

However, much of the radioactive material is not released into the air - a significant portion is captured in the ash. How much is captured in the ash depends upon the type of coal, the combustion technology used, and many other factors which keep people like me very busy when we do these studies. So the amount of ash capture could range from 10% to nearly 100%. I suppose it’s academic in one way whether it is captured in the ash or released into the air, as it all “enters the environment”, but it does matter with respect to how you track it and what the long-term health effects could be.

There have been several scare stories in the press, sadly including Scientific American, where their wording has implied that coal ash is akin to nuclear waste. This is patently ridiculous on inspection by anyone with a brain, and I did write a very pointed letter to SA under my IRL professional credentials with 2 PhD co-authors, and their response was basically “our reporter sticks to their story, thanks for reading.” I own a Geiger counter, and I also own a significant amount of coal and coal ash, and there is absolutely no perceivable difference in gamma which can be detected from either compared to background radiation. Since the primary elements are uranium 238, thorium, radium, and radon, most of the radiation would be alpha, which would be mainly hazardous if inhaled or ingested.

But before someone jumps in after reading half my post, coal combustion nonetheless does represent a net increase in the overall background radiation (so does wood combustion, FTR, just not as much). ORNL estimated that looking at the total net fuel cycle of uranium and coal, from mining to final disposition, that uranium’s net radiation input was 28% of coal’s. Their data seems reasonable, although it has a large amount of error bars around all of their inputs, and that come up to just over a 3:1 ratio. Thus Cecil’s number.

8

When you say ‘total,’ do you mean worldwide, or total meaning ‘all things considered,’ for producing an equal amount of power?

I guess from your response, ‘release’ means ‘expose the general public to.’

And how long is the alpha radiation a concern? IOW, uranium’s gamma radiation is a concern for thousands of years - is airborne coal ash’s alpha radiation a concern until it rains? Or for a few months? Or years?

Thanks.

9

See A Summary of Fatal Accidents in Wind Energy.

I haven’t found anything as specific from solar but here is a LA Times article on a solar plant accident. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there are many solar accidents where home users suffer falls while servicing rooftop units (I shudder to think how bad things would be if there were home nuclear units)

10

I have to say, I kinna miss the Anthracite persona.

11

I notice there’s no mention in the article whatsoever regarding the Fukushima disaster. Is there really that much lead time for these? Was the timing of this coincidental?

12

Cecil said at the end of his article:

For those interested here is a lengthy run down that seems well cited:

http://www.marklynas.org/2011/03/the-dangers-of-nuclear-power-in-light-of-fukushima/#more-197

13

It was mentioned:

14

He did mention Japan in the opening paragraph of his reply. Mind you it was fairly generic in scope, not mentioning Fukushima or the Dai-Ichi plant specifically. But given that later he compares Chernobyl as releasing far more radiation than Hiroshima & Nagasaki combined; I’d conclude the master was, in fact, referring to recent events.

That said, I do believe among the concerns brought up already about nuclear power–among them, the cost, radioactive waste, accidents, and elevated cancer risks, what really drives the public’s fear is of the scope that a radiation release could affect them personally and extensively.

Consider mine disasters. Generally they involve a few workers (in some cases a lot of them) but for more than 99% of the population who isn’t a miner or close relative to one, it’s easy to distance yourself from the terrible tragedy these families occasionally endure. Barring incidents of groundwater contamination, very few people outside the mining industry can cite tangible health problems related to coal mining operations.

Compare that to nuclear, in which a full core meltdown whether caused by human error, mechanical failure, earthquake, or terrorism will abruptly and extensively change many thousands of lives overnight–even if they don’t die, or become sick or cancerous as a result.

Mass evacuations, radiation screenings, having to permanently resettle without any of one’s possessions, and living in fear that you may develop health problems further down the road as a result to the exposure.

It’s similar why many people are terrified to fly, even if it is statistically safer than driving. Their life is literally in the hands of someone they’ve never met before, and while most car crashes are survivable, few plane crashes are.

15

Is radiation sickness or cancer a horrible way to die? Yeah. So is black lung.

Came in here to respond to that, but it would have read a lot like what enmity01 wrote. Coal mining is scary only to coal miners, but radiation is scary to the general public.

That’s not neccessarily a rational risk calculation-- 30 dead miners vs. 30 dead cancer victims is 30 dead people either way-- but when those cancer victims could be children, grandparents, etc. far removed from the plant, i.e. people who didn’t sign up for this kind of thing, it changes public perception dramatically.

Me, I know the power to run this computer has to come from somewhere, and I’d rather it came from clean and reliable nuclear power than dirty carbon fuels or unreliable/inefficient/unaffordable “green” energy. But I know that the price for nuclear power is the occasionally inevitable nuclear disaster that will ruin the day for the locals (potentially even me). I sleep soundly at night knowing about this risk, but many people don’t.

We live in a world where parents fear pedophiles more than they fear the pool in their backyard, so rational risk calculation is NOT a common virtue.

16

Bwa, ha, ha! That was funny.

17

Did you know that coal power plants actually produce emissions that you breathe? Leaving aside that CO2 stuff, thousands of Americans die each year due to respiratory causes, a large percentage of which are caused by the stuff the coal plants toss out when they burn the coal that gives us all electricity. How many American citizens die per year from radiation tossed out by nuclear plants again? Zero?

Of course, children, grandparents, baby seals and cute puppies also breathe air…air which has contaminants from coal burning power plants. Contaminants that cause deaths every year. Verse how many deaths from radiation poisoning per year in the US? Zero? If you go with the dim mak deaths…5? 50? 100? 1000?

It IS a risk analysis, but the public sucks at making comparative risk calculations. They are invariably scared of low probability events over stuff they just take for granted…such as your blithe acceptance of 1000’s of deaths a year due to coal power generation while frantically worrying about the zero or few deaths a year the general public suffers due to mysterious radiation. How many folks have died in Japan thus far due to this disaster? How many from radiation, even counting the workers there on site?

But you sleep soundly in ignorance, seemingly, of the OTHER risks you get every day from the non-nuclear methods used to power that computer. You are orders of magnitude much more likely to die or become sick from a coal plant, even if you don’t live next to one, than you are if you live right next to a nuclear power plant. In the 60 odd years we’ve had nuclear power, care to take a guess as to how many people have died? Even including disasters like Chernobyl (easy question since Cecil answered it in the article this thread is about)? Add them all up. Now…how many people die each and every year due to air pollution in the US? 22,000 based on a cite in another thread. Even if you go with the wild assertions of mass death at Chernobyl and the dim mak deaths from something like TMI, plus all of the (so far non-existent) deaths from the nuclear disaster in Japan and all of the resultant dim mak deaths from that, then you look at it over a 60 year period…well, what do you suppose is the bigger actual or potential threat to public health?

Yet people live in fear of low probability events. I know folks who are afraid to fly (more so now, since compounding their fear of the plane crashing they are afraid terrorists will hijack it and crash it into Disneyland or something). Yet they blithely drive to work every day, chatting on their cell phones and munching on an Egg McMuffin, with extra bacon and 3 sides of hashbrowns, coffee with extra cream and sugar and possibly a pastry.

-XT

18

Some misconceptions here. Uranium does not gamma decay. It undergoes alpha decay. The decay chain also includes some beta decays, but no gamma decays. This is the same type of decay pattern as seen in the radioactivity in coal (which would be mostly radium, uranium, and thorium). The gamma producers are things like Cobolt-60 which beta decays to excited nickle-60 which then gamma decays and plutonium which spontaneously fissions and then the daughter products gamma and beta decay.

What is really of concern is where the radioactivity goes in what concentration. Coal smoke and ash has a relatively low concentration. You aren’t going to get radiation poisoning from standing on top of tons of the stuff. It is just that we release so much of it over time. Nuclear waste has a smaller foot print per unit of energy, but all the waste is concentrated.

19

Of course, the waste being concentrated is a good thing, since that makes it much easier to deal with. We could, if we wanted, dilute nuclear waste until it was as dispersed as coal waste, and it’d be fairly easy to do so. But that’d be a bad idea, since then we couldn’t just stuff it into a fairly small cave in Yucca Mountain and be done with it. We can’t, however, gather up all of the coal waste into a nice compact package we can easily seal away.

20

Good point. I actually meant to address the second part of my statement about where it goes. Nuclear waste gets stored in secure locations (or at least it can and should be) while coal waste is mostly released into the environment.

Of course it would be even better if we could reprocess the spent nuclear fuel and keep using it. But that is just too scary.