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Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)

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Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)

#101

Post by lotsofmangos »

beloch wrote: post #73

While the article does contain some interesting details, I fundamentally disapprove of it's anti-nuclear moralizing. It's the constant trickle of articles like this that maintain public paranoia about nuclear power. This matters, because nuclear power allows us to meet today's power demands with today's technology without releasing CO2 into the environment. Alternative power sources are still some ways from meeting h…

The elephant's foot exists and writing an article about it isn't fear-mongering. Also writing an article about it does not require the author to write another one about the problems of coal. There are lots of articles about the problems of coal written all the time, there's even something being called "Obama's War on Coal", apparently, although the Wall Street Journal doubts it exists http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2014/11/28/why-the-war-on-coal-.... Sounds like an easy war though. The enemy is incapable of movement and burns readily. Incendiaries should work rather well. Those articles probably get pro-coal people grumbling in the comments that it is downright despicable how everyone focuses on coal.

Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)

#102

Post by mpyne »

plikan13 wrote: post #75
ori_b wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, thanks for pointing that out. Uranium tailings are one of the biggest environmental issues with nuclear power, and one of the ones I never hear anyone mention. The radioactive waste produced by the plants is more of a political issue than a technical one, as is the switch to far safer, more maintainable, non-proliferating reactor designs.

The statement that nowadays reactor engines can be designed that are "far safer" always riles me up a little bit because, of course, a few decades ago the OLD designs were already sold to the general public with the promise that they were "perfectly" safe. And if you had the temerity to question this, you were of course a Luddite.

Even the old Western designs are/were safe within the parameters of their design. Many are running even today because it has proven politically impossible to replace them.

The one major exception is Fukushima Dai-Ichi (which used one of the oldest BWR designs), and even Fukushima Dai-Ichi has not killed anyone from radiation directly.

But just to contrast, the nearby set of operating reactors at Fukushima Dai-Ni (which also used an old BWR design with a minor containment upgrade) both managed to safely achieve cold shutdown even despite getting hit by the exact same tsunami that hit their sister site just a few kilometers up the coast.

Obviously you should always question the safety of a new technology instead of blindly trusting it. The modern reliance on computers and the magic of the Internet seems to come to mind for me as an example of where blind trust leads to problems. But questioning nuclear just because it's nuclear may well have made one a Luddite. The basics of nuclear engineering are not actually as difficult to understand as it's portrayed to be, but people object to the technology without even the slightest attempt to understand it, which may well make one a Luddite as well.

Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)

#103

Post by mpyne »

justatdotin wrote: post #28
ori_b wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fukushima accident was a rare event, dumped a small amount of waste compared to ongoing industrial operations, and the most worrying part of the waste that it dumped decays on the timescale of decades, and not millenia. I don't have stats about what gets directly into the oceans, but when we mine gold, copper, and other ores, we create entire ponds called "tailings ponds" full of arsenic, cyanide, mercury, and al…

like gold and copper, nuclear fuel is also mined. the nuclear industry produces large volumes of finely pulverised long lived low-level radioactive wastes in the form of uranium tailings. Unlike arsenic and cynaide, the hazard posed by uranium is not onyl checmical, but also radioactive. Whereas these chemical pollutants can be neutralised by the right chemical reaction, the radioactive hazard of uranium mining waste…

And yet, the tailings for uranium are much less in volume than the tailings (and eventual processed waste products) from the fuels that would replace it, like coal and oil.

Uranium itself is only weakly radioactive anyways (the kind of uranium you mine has a half life measured in billions of years). You'd be at more danger from radiation from walking out of the mine into the UV-filled sunlight, or from smoking cigarettes (which contain radioactive Po-210) than from working under the earth in a uranium mine (though you would admittedly want to wear a face mask).

In fact Congressional staffers receive more exposure to radiation than U.S. naval nuclear plant operators, because the nice granite-based buildings they work in contain pitchblende impurities (containing uranium), and yet those Congressional staffers are allowed to work in those buildings.

Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)

#104

Post by throwawayaway »

theguycalledtom wrote: post #9

> a testament to the potential dangers of nuclear power. A list to remind us of the real dangers of coal power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_mining_accidents_i...

ah so china has a cavalier attitude to safety in coal mines. this also happens to make up a large percentage of the deaths worldwide attributable to coal. china is now rolling out nuke plants. as we've seen previously with high speed rail and coal mines, there will be a cavalier attitude to safety.

my prediction is the outcome will be an increase in the number of deaths due to nuclear power.

Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)

#105

Post by mpyne »

plikan13 wrote: post #64
icelancer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. The planet's naturally occurring radiation is a hell of a lot stronger and more dangerous.

What people never seem to understand is that the proximity of the source matters. Compare a tiny amount of radiation coming from a long distance (say the core of the earth) and a tiny amount of radiation coming from speck of decaying radioactive material released by Fukushima that is floating around in the air of your office room. You measure the radiation in the room and sure enough the radiation is very weak. You c…

> a tiny amount of radiation coming from speck of decaying radioactive material released by Fukushima that is floating around in the air of your office room.

By that logic, we should panic if we inhale the sweet scent of someone eating a banana, or walk by a soy farm with the obvious smell of fertilizer. What people actually never seem to understand is that you live in a world already filled with natural radionuclides, they are not simply buried deep in the Earth's mantle, they are everywhere around us.

What airborne radioactivity is floating in your office from Fukushima, by the way? And what type of radiation does that radioactive contamination emit; alphas and betas would effect local tissue, but neutrons and the much much more common gammas would have their interactions occur over a much much greater volume (possibly outside the body entirely).

Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)

#106

Post by mikeash »

andyjdavis wrote: post #50
chii wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and freeze to death in winter? not cook your food and eat it raw? walk/cycle for 3 hours to commute to work?

>and freeze to death in winter? This is off topic but I always find statements like the above rather bizarre. Why must humans insist on living in places where the environment is hostile to human life? I guess its because I grew up in a place where heating is very rarely necessary, without cooling of any kind and have spent most of the last three years traveling around countries where you could theoretically walk arou…

Does it matter why? Humans have been living in harsh environments since long before the beginning of written history, and I doubt it'll stop any time soon.

Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)

#107

Post by JonahBraun »

> Particles emitted from radioactive atoms are a form of ionizing radiation—they have enough energy to scramble atoms and molecules they crash into. (This is different from non-ionizing radiation, like the kind emitted by your cell phone, which does not have enough energy to break bonds.)

I think this is a poor explanation. Radiation from your cell phone is electromagnetic radiation. This is far different from a radiated particle, an actual proton or electron flying out.

Essentially a particle vs a wave, which is more of a difference than "not enough energy". Is that correct?

Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)

#108

Post by iolsantr »

JonahBraun wrote: post #107

> Particles emitted from radioactive atoms are a form of ionizing radiation—they have enough energy to scramble atoms and molecules they crash into. (This is different from non-ionizing radiation, like the kind emitted by your cell phone, which does not have enough energy to break bonds.) I think this is a poor explanation. Radiation from your cell phone is electromagnetic radiation. This is far different from a radi…

Gamma radiation (i.e. ionizing radiation) is just a highly energetic photons. Alpha and Beta particles are not photons, and are not referred to as ionizing radiation.

Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)

#109

Post by JonahBraun »

chairleg wrote: post #99

Bit off topic: On the first picture right at the top you can see through the workers. I read that this was caused by radiation, but to me it looks more as if they (or he) was simply moving during a longer exposure?

Agreed. Anyone find an authoritative explanation on the photo? I couldn't.

Re: Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot,” Is Still Lethal (2013)

#110

Post by ddeck »

kabdib wrote: post #91
mohawk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like fear-mongering either. But nuclear only looks cheap because a lot of costs are externalised. Prudent calculation of costs of insurance against accidents and waste storage for centuries make it unprofitable. Improvements in reactor safety often leads to humans behaving more carelessly. It is a penny-wise, pound-foolish technology, especially in densely populated areas.

Many of the existing reactors were designed in the 50s and 60s, and are overly complex; they grew out of designs that were used for production of nuclear material for weapons, and safety features were bolted onto the side (this was an era when seatbelts weren't required on automobiles!). More recent designs are significantly and inherently safer and simply can't get into the same kind of trouble that the older design…

>But anti-nuke makes headlines, and gets people fired up, and is better for the oil and coal industries.

Agreed. Much as routine, daily road deaths don't typically make the headlines, the guy down the road dying of lung cancer is hardly newsworthy. In my experience most people are totally unaware of the enormous number of deaths attributed to coal burning (estimated at ~1 million per year globally by the WHO in 2008 [0])

I don't know the quality of the research, but in the wake of the Fukishima accident, NASA researchers published the following report, which estimated the number of deaths avoided by the use of nuclear power as a substitute of fossil fuel based power generation:

"Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning.

On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420,000-7.04 million deaths and 80-240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces." [1] [2]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_coa...

[1] http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/ (summary)

[2] http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2013/2013_Kharecha_Hansen_1.p... (report)

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