Since I’ve been incautious enough to mention the N-word in the previous post, I’ll open another sandpit specifically devoted to discussions of the merits, and otherwise, of nuclear power. Any mention of this topic on other threads will be deleted and will risk bans or restrictions on the offender
Update Since it’s still going, I’ve moved it up, which should reopen comments
John Quiggin 
Quakka, can you develop your argument a little further. For instance, I’ve already pointed out that
http://www.ehjournal.net/content/8/1/43
Also,
Thus I can’t see the basis for your claim that:
It also means the papers you cite don’t address the concerns raised in the KiKK study. Nor do Studies on adults address the concerns of increased cancer in children.
@Tom Bond
Recycling water and other physical resources is a good idea. Recycling your posts is not.
You (or a mate of yours) have (has) posted a version of your post @41, p8, before. Please see my reply to your earlier post. My reply to your earlier post contains a link to data on Germany’s emissions relative to Kyoto targets. They are on track. You are providing misleading information regarding emissions.
Yes I know about google. Where is the reference which contains your understanding of ‘net present value’?
With reference to my later post regarding NPV, please provide the theoretical assumptions underlying the NPV (net present value) formula you might have looked up on google.
In contrast to silly people who do not know the theoretical assumptions underlying a NPV formula which they look up on google.
@Ernestine Gross
Then why don’t you google net present value and read the first entry?
@Ernestine Gross
Another ad hom from an arrogant ignoramus.
The basic problem is this – the radiation exposure from proximity to NPPs is too small to produce detectable ill health effects if the linear no threshold dose response model is correct. In The exposure due to tritium in the vicinity of Canadian NPPs is put at 0.00001 to 0.0145 mSv/year. The regulatory limit is 1 mSv/year and the average background radiation exposure is 2 mSv/year. The problem is that if there is any harm due to tritium, it is likely to be undetectable. Even if for some reason, ill effects from tritium were 100 times greater than equivalent dosage from other sources of ionizing radiation, ill effects most likely should still be undetectable. Tritium release from CANDU reactors in Canada is higher than light water reactors in the US and Germany.
Some scientists may “worry” about long term effects of extremely low dosage from internal radiation sources, but LNT still remains the accepted standard for radiation safety guidelines. One may theorize that LNT is not valid for extremely low dosage and underestimates the risk but substantial studies also suggest that LNT overestimates the risk for dosages below 100 mSv.
See this study commissioned by the French National Academy: http://www.radscihealth.org/rsh/Papers/FrenchAcadsFinal07_04_05.pdf
LNT may be conservative for very low dosages.
The Canadian assessment of the health effects of tritium released from NPPs is here:
http://www.nuclearsafety.gc.ca//pubs_catalogue/uploads/CNSC_Health_Effects_Eng-web.pdf .
It does review the literature relating to childhood cancers.
@Chris O’Neill
Chris O’Neill says:
“Adding a new facility every 30 years at a discount rate of 7% per annum increases the net present cost by a factor of 1.14 compared with the cost of the first facility on its own.”
This is exactly your statement which made me ask you to reference a text which contains your understanding of net present value.
I don’t believe you have an understanding of the theoretical conditions underlying the idea of ‘net present value’.
By theoretical conditions I mean a fully specified theoretical model of an economy.
Without an understanding of the theoretical conditions, applications of a formula may lead to outcomes that later on are described as ‘unintended negative consequences’. But ignorance is no excuse.
Please provide a reference (other than a link to google) which contains the theoretical model you wish to use.
PS:
You wrote another silly statement on an earlier post. In reply to me providing a reference where the private owner of a named nuclear power plant (Isar I) states that its operation heats the river Isar by about 2.5 degrees C, you wrote that I don’t understand anything about electricity generation.
I suppose you wanted to say that there are coal fired electricity plants which also use river water for cooling. But you totally missed the points that:
a) you did not name one coal power plant where its operation ‘heats’ river water
b) you did not provide data on the extent of river water heating if any
c) you totally missed the point that I mentioned the non-trivial water river heating of the nuclear power plant, Isar I, because it is an negative environmental impact which the silly nuke promoters (ie the non-nuclear scientists) omit to mention.
@Chris O’Neill
As for your post @3, p 9, please take up the offer to prove me wrong when I say you don’t know what your are talking about.
@BilB
BilB, regarding the Whyalla SolarOasis plant, which you referenced on the previous page, do you happen to have information on:
a) whether the plant is fully insured for operating, workers compensation, public liability by private insurance companies;
b) the life expectancy of the plant (ignoring the expansion plans and maintenance).
Question to quokka, Fran Barlow, Chris O’Neill and any other pro-nuke advocate:
Please provide exact data and reference on all nuclear power plants in the so-called western world(1) which is fully insured by private insurance companies for
a) operating risk
b) workers compensation
c) public liability
d) long term storage of radioactive waste
(1) ‘western world’ stands for all countries that have a version of a market economy such that private insurance companies can operate.
@Ernestine Gross
Who cares? If a feasible solution to the climate/energy problem means the state assumes some risk for the operation of any electricity generation facility, why should I be concerned?
Do we want to seriously address the climate/energy energy problem or worry about the fate of markets where your categorization of markets is based on the operation of privately owned insurance companies?
This argument is about as ridiculous as the Monktons and their socialist one world government being an outcome of collective action to mitigate AGW.
If Martians want to insure NPPs, then bring it on!
Quakka:
This study calls the current dose models into question, particular in the way they do not differentiate adequately for children. And in the way they fail to differentiate dose of instantaneous blast of high energy neutrons and gamma rays compared to chronic, slow, internal exposures from the low-range alpha and beta radiation from most environmental releases.
What you claims as an accepted standard has many reasons now to be the highly questionable standard, and even the inapproproately undifferentiated standard. Evidence changes our knowledge.
It is proper to adjust the theory and standards in response to evidence rather than the other way around.
Here is some of the evidence in Frend Acadamy review:
In reply to my question @8,p 9 :
Please provide exact data and reference on all nuclear power plants in the so-called western world(1) which is fully insured by private insurance companies for
a) operating risk
b) workers compensation
c) public liability
d) long term storage of radioactive waste
(1) ‘western world’ stands for all countries that have a version of a market economy such that private insurance companies can operate.
quokka @9, p 9 writes:
“Who cares? If a feasible solution to the climate/energy problem means the state assumes some risk for the operation of any electricity generation facility, why should I be concerned?
Do we want to seriously address the climate/energy energy problem or worry about the fate of markets where your categorization of markets is based on the operation of privately owned insurance companies?
This argument is about as ridiculous as the Monktons and their socialist one world government being an outcome of collective action to mitigate AGW.
If Martians want to insure NPPs, then bring it on!”
.
Here are some observations:
1. quokka, the word you are looking for in your line 2, paragraph 3 is characterisation and not categorisation.
2. I understand quokka does not not of any nuclear power plant which is fully privately insured.
3. quokka says ‘the state’ should carry some risk. Interesting. ‘The state’ is a name for an institution which has taxing power. If one says ‘the state’ carries some risk then one says tax payers are carrying the risk.
4. Incidentally, the French people were not asked if they want nuclear power plants.
5. ‘who cares?’ asks guokka and answers his own question by saying quokka doesn’t care Fair enough that quokka doesn’t care but what if the majority of people care?
6. Moreover, anybody who knows the theoretical conditions under which the net present value formula can be applied, knows right away that if private insurance is not possible then the formula is not obviously applicable.
quokka, thank you for saying so much even though you imbedded it in a bit of verbal fog.
@Ernestine Gross
Please replace the line
“I understand quokka does not not of any nuclear power plant which is fully privately insured.”
with
“I understand quokka does not know of any nuclear power plant which is fully privately insured.”
Thank you.
Anticipating that the thread will stray into risk indemnity by governments it could be pointed this is no longer unique to nuclear. In Australia the WA and Federal governments have said Chevron is off the hook if any of the anticipated 120 million tonnes of CO2 escapes from underneath Barrow Island. Some recent solar project in Australia got a loan guarantee from the Feds, not sure which project though.
The Price Anderson Act in the US obliges the govt to provide loan guarantees to nuclear builds. However they wanted an $800m fee for a well advanced project, Calvert Cliffs I think it was called. Then the US govt gave a guarantee to a solar project that uses gas backup (Bright something) but with no fee. In the US there is also a decommissioning and waste disposal levy of 0.1c per kwh of nuclear electricity. In Australia the stationary generation sector spews a mere 200 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year at a cleanup cost of 0c for the lot.
It seems to me what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Treat all low carbon projects the same w.r.t. quotas, subsidies, guarantees and indemnities. The solar project at Whyalla is a good example of selected focus. OneSteel ships in coking coal from Newcastle and the ovens produce massive CO2 along with ammonia and other nasties. All eyes are on solar however. How about solar powered steel smelting? It looks like the 42 MW desal plant just outside Whyalla to serve Roxby Downs 300km away won’t proceed. Hey but the solar project might produce 20 MW some of the time (if it works) so let’s not concern ourselves with the reality of huge mining and steel industries.
@Hermit
Hermit, it is fair enough argue to treat all low carbon emission power generation technologies the same with respect to low carbon emission. But it is not fair to treat technologies differently with respect to other significant negative environmental externalities. This is my point. If we have a price on carbon, we also need a price on radioactive waste.
Not sure whether this is crucial but it seems to me you are conflating development assistance with insurance.
@Ernestine Gross
Do I have to do the arithmetic for you? The net present cost of the second facility is 1/(1.07)^30 or 0.13 times the first (I used a mental arithmetic approximate value of 1/8 or 1/(three doublings)). The net present cost of the third is 0.13^2 etc. The total net present cost of all facilities stretching to infinity comes to 1.15 (my approximation was 1.14) times the cost of the first one.
That’s because you’re arrogant.
So you want me to do your homework for you. You’re not very good at using google are you?
c) you totally missed the point that I mentioned the non-trivial water river heating of the nuclear power plant, Isar I, because it is an negative environmental impact which the silly nuke promoters (ie the non-nuclear scientists) omit to mention.
I never said it was non-trivial. Why do you need to put words in my mouth? What is the point of singling out a nuclear plant for its environmental heating when coal-fired plants produce comparable heating. Why do you mention one but not the other? The only explanation I can think of is blatant anti-nuclear bias.
Should be: I never said it was trivial.
@Ernestine Gross
I repeat. Who cares? There is an immediate and urgent imperative to initiate a program of reduction of GHG emissions that has a decent chance of avoiding dangerous climate change. No such program is currently in existence. In this context, whether insurance for electricity generating plants is wholly private or partially private is trivial in the extreme. I can only conclude that you have far more interest in pursuing a course of anti-nuclear activism than mitigating climate change when you wish to embroil discussions of energy options in this sort of at very most marginally relevant distraction.
I might add that public liability and workers comp insurance for water moderated commercial power reactors, based on historical performance, would seem to be a pretty good business to be in. The Three Mile Island incident is by a long way the most serious incident involving such reactors and while the destroyed reactor core was certainly an expensive item, there is no convincing evidence that anybody was actually harmed – workers or the public.
Nuclear power in OECD countries has been one of the safest means of generating electricity – comparable to renewables. In non-OECD countries, in terms of fatalities it has also been one of the safest methods of generating electricity, though I would agree that fatalities are not the only relevant metric.
I am far more interested the scientific basis of nuclear safety than engaging in ridiculous arguments about private/public insurance.
By the way, using “once-through” water for thermal power station cooling is entirely optional depending on circumstances. The ISAR 2 power station, much bigger than ISAR 1, uses a cooling tower.
@Ernestine Gross
I should clarify that insurance and loan guarantees are separate pieces of US legislation, the Price Anderson Act and the Energy Policy Act. A subsidy equivalent can be estimated for both but those estimates differ widely. There has not been a loan default yet to my knowledge.
Just to be clear what you seem to have agreed to
1) nuclear power should get a feed-in tariff just like solar panels
2) no more chimneys on power stations since CO2 must be removed at source.
Is one Sievert the same as another?
Click to access FrenchAcadsFinal07_04_05.pdf
So 1 Sv could be a dose of x alpha particals or 20x photons. But is the biological response to these events the same? We ough not assume equivalent biological response to 20 photo and 20 electrons or 1 alpha partical, surely?
I can jump off a roof house roof (2.5 meters tall) 20 times without injury but I wouldnn’t assume equivalent harm from one 50 meter fall. Or I can bench 20 kg for 20 reps, but I can’t press 400kg.
@Chris O’Neill
1. Your ability to do a simple arithmetic calculation was and is not the issue (nor is an approximation). I asked for you to identify the theoretical model in economics which provides the conditions under which your calculations make sense. I am still waiting for the answer.
2. Maybe I should leave it up to you to replace your second comment with one that is more appropriate in the sense of reflecting your state of affairs.
3. Please re-read what I wrote. Nowhere did I say that you said “it is non-trivial” (or, as per your correction on the subsequent post, that you said “it is trivial”).
@quokka
Yes, quokka, I understand that your post contains the message you want to get across. Repeating it over and over again might catch a few fools but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Yes, I know that the river water heating associated with the nuclear power plant Isar I is not a necessary feature of all nuclear power stations. This is why I named the nuclear power station and I provided the link to the reference paper.
The fact that it is not a necessary featue does not negate the fact I have stated. And this fact concerns a negative environmental externality.
By contrast you countered with a generalised suggestion regarding coal power stations. .
@Hermit
1. Perhaps I have not been precise enough in my first post. Let me start off with a simple example, the risk of having a car accident with property damage (setting loss of life apart for the time being). In Australia (and the rest of ‘western world’ as I characterised it) it is possible to buy insurance in a (more or less) ‘competitive market’ (setting illegal behaviour such as HIH). This works because insurance companies can calculate premiums (and make a profit). Now we have to distinguish between who buys the insurance and who pays for it. Suppose middle aged Johnny buys a car insurance but his retired father pays the bill. Johnny has received a (private) subsidy equivalent to the cost of the insurance premium.
Now lets introduce third party liability insurance (ie payments for loss of life or personal harm). With car insurance, the system works as described above. This works because only the present generation(s) are involved.
Now lets introduce loans and loan guarantees. Suppose Johnny takes out a loan to buy a car. Although Johnny is already middle aged, his aspirational life-style resulted in him not getting a loan from a bank unless his retired father provides a guarantee. Suppose Johnny’s father hasn’t given up hope on his son becoming frugal, he agrees to giving the loan guarantee only if Johnny deposits x% of the loan guarantee in his (father) account after 1 year.
Now we have all the elements: insurance, subsidy for the cost of the insurance, loan for the acquisition of an asset and loan guarantee and a fee for the loan gurantee.
I understand that a private electricity generation company isn’t all that concerned about the category under which it gets ‘money’ from the government and I don’t see anything wrong with this. However, not all problems can be adequately addressed from the perspective of a private electricity generation company. Economics, as I understand it, is concerned with the material welfare of humans under alternative institutional environments. My question was posed from the perspective of economics.
My question is: Do you, or anybody else, know of nuclear power plants which have all risks to life and property associated with it (including long term storage) fully insured by private companies. (I don’t know of one but I don’t claim to have full information. So, before I want to make a point I wanted to check with those who say they are knowledgeable about the nuclear electricity generation industry.)
I’d appreciate getting replies that focus on this question. Other matters can be taken up separately.
@Hermit
You say:
2. “Just to be clear what you seem to have agreed to
1) nuclear power should get a feed-in tariff just like solar panels
2) no more chimneys on power stations since CO2 must be removed at source.”
No, your two conditions do not correspond to what I have said.
@Ernestine Gross
It’s called future cost discounting. You are so ignorant.
It just means it is a red herring that is no more relevant to nuclear than other heat sources. Red herrings are something you have a penchant for.
@Ernestine Gross
I admire you for your patience with these pro nuclear fanatics (fanatics the appropriate word). I fail to see whats in it for them or the rest of us to perpetuate such spin.
Im amazed at the Professors tolerance to pemit this thread to continue way past the point of absolute catatonic boredom. Im amazed at your ability to call the spin merchants to account. Im amazed at the way they continue to disparage you with insults, put downs and blatant lies. Im amazed you have the character and resilience to keep calling them to account for their blatantly false statements.
Ernestine they are on a mission to convert. Facts only get in the way.
@Chris O’Neill
No, Chris O’Null, the name of, x = 1/(1.07)^30, is a discount formula, with 2 givens, d=.07, and n = 30. It belongs to what is known as financial mathematics.
I have clearly over-estimated your prior education.
Now, I doubt you know the meaning of ‘red herring’.
Interesting discussion. But the formula 1/(1.07)^30 is not relevant to a compounding quantity like waste.
You need a superannuation contributions growth formula.
ErnestineG (and earlier writers) is right.
Chris O’Neill is out of his depth.
ditto EG
@jakerman
I really don’t disagree with anything you have written here. But exposure due to release of tritium and C14 from NPPs is vastly less than the 5 mSv recommended limit for children in the French study. It seems the Canadian legal limit is 1 mSv and background radiation is 2 mSv. There is still an “orders of magnitude” problem in attributing the cancer clusters to radiation doses due to NPP operation. The author of the comment gets around this by supposing that environmental release from NPPs is much higher than official figures – basically by casting doubt on models – but providing nothing quantitative. Where have I heard that before?
As for the different biological effects of different sources of radiation, from memory the Canadian studies put tritium at ~ 2x the effects of medical X-rays.
As I said before, there is clearly a case for further study, but it is obviously very difficult to attribute the cancer clusters to radiation dosage that is orders of magnitude less than natural background radiation – even taking into account that it is from internal sources and higher risk for children.
What would make everyone sit up and take notice is if the radiation exposure due to NPPs was shown to be much higher than official figures – as the author hints at. I doubt that such a thing is going to happen given the amount of scrutiny and study of these things, but I am open minded.
Quokka, why the focus on tritium?
“My question is: Do you, or anybody else, know of nuclear power plants which have all risks to life and property associated with it (including long term storage) fully insured by private companies.”
There are none.
As I said many months ago, the only morally acceptable way for nuclear power (or any other form) to be generated is if those who benefit are responsible for the risk. That means no public subsidies, no government guarantees, no public insurance, etc. If nuclear power providers can’t make a business case under those conditions, then they should seek a return on their capital in some other endeavour.
A carbon tax, being a Pigouvian correction of a market failure, does not qualify as a subsidy or penalty. That’s why I think we should have one, on the order of $20-$50 a tonne (depending on a range of factors). Under some models, that would be enough to allow nuclear power to be generated without government insurance etc.
Quakka, I should be clearer and ask why limit your discussion to the effects of tritium? It is just one of many sources of radiation routinely released from NPP to the surrounding. See from pg 53 to 60.
Click to access chapter3.pdf
@Jarrah
While in general I agree with your parameters Jarrah I suspect in practice they don’t work all that well for extremely remote but catastrophic risk events.
No significant industry is utterly free from the notional risk of causing a catastrophic harm. In cases where the risk factors are tiny and hard to quantify and like to change over the period of the insurance, you do get close to a GIGO-like situation. You think you are covering catastrophic risk but really you aren’t and if one arose you’d only be guessing over its costs. Catastrophic events are very hard to model. Even things within the scope of our common usages — like the GFC — have huge amounts of uncertainty in them. Nobody could know for sure how much the US escalation in Iraq or the US-led attack on Afghanistan was going to cost.
In such circumstances there are really only two options that are the beginning of being rational — you prohibit the activity or the state absorbs everything above a realistic excess for things that are capable of being modelled with confidence.
@jakerman
Because the comment piece you refer to focuses on tritium and C14. Because tritium is currently the latest fad of anti nuclear campaigners in North America.
Here are some dose figures for German NPPs:
http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/r/radiation-exposure-npp.htm
It’s an oldie but still a goodie that coal fired power plants release more radiation into the environment than nuclear due to radon going up the stack and uranium, thorium and a radioisotope of potassium in the fly ash. As far as I am aware this has never been categorized as a health risk. Yes, it’s not necessarily the same because of different radioisotopes.
If there was one beneficial outcome of Chernobyl, it was the opportunity to study the health effects of low level radiation exposure. The 2005 Chernobyl Forum report says that somewhat unexpectedly, leukemia rates have not detectably risen. They should have after 20 years or so. Neither have the rates of solid cancer incidence, though there is still time for that as they take longer to develop. This is for doees vastly in excess of anything from normally operating NPPs. The number one direct health consequence for the general population has been the higher incidence of thyroid cancer due to the uptake of radioactive iodine.
There is a lot a questions to be answered, and what makes me a bit cranky is the fervor of some of the anti-nukes who seize upon just about anything without any concern for a balanced or science based perspective. As John Cook points out repeatedly on Skeptical Science it’s the whole body of evidence that counts and not just one paper that has just come out.
There is very good reason to believe that renewables alone are just not going to cut it in a world of rising energy demand and even more rapidly rising electricity demand if we want to substitute electricity for burning stuff in transport, industrial processes etc. Suggesting that energy demand will be reduced is just nonsense.
It is just folly to discount the importance of nuclear power based on other than the most rigorous and honest examination of the issues involved. Such an honest assessment is not forthcoming from the ant-nukes.
@jakerman: You’re citing Helen Caldicott’s book as your damning scientific evidence!? LOL, what a joke.
Caldicott is basically the nuclear engineering and health physics equivalent of a fanatical anti-science creationist.
Luke Weston, what is missing is your citation on any any errors in the material I cite from page 53-60. Without that your comment in an empty ad hom.
quakka:
The concerns about NPP effects on children do not relate to just one paper. There is a long list of studies. Even in your French National Academy review. The KiKK paper was also supported by a meta analysis.
@Jarrah
Thank you, Jarrah.
Who knows, maybe the following might be useful in reading some texts.
1. A catastrophic event refers to a biforcation point. As such a divorce can be represented as a catastropic event.
2. The GFC is an example of non-existence of a market segment for some period of time due to a problem in the institutional design. The role of practitioners in the institutional design problem is, I believe, a fruitful research area.
3. The role of pratitioners of “socio-mathematical theorem” talk is, I believe, also a fruitful research area.
@Ernestine Gross
And believe it or not, financial mathematics is relevant to the concept of cost, something that plainly escapes you.
You have clearly over-estimated your prior education.
You clearly don’t know the meaning of ‘red herring’. Pointing out that one old nuclear power station out of many uses once-through water cooling does not in any way show that nuclear energy is any worse than non-nuclear energy as regards environmental warming. Even concentrated solar can use once-through water cooling. Is this an anti-nuclear thread or an anti-thermal-power-stations-in-general thread? Since you have difficulty using google, I’ll point out one coal-burning power station that uses once-through cooling here.
Life on earth benefits from the low CO2 emissions and in general low environmental footprint of nuclear power. And humans also benefit from the lower cost of nuclear power compared to renewables.
@Dingo
Amazing, some people seem to think that rather than undergoing exponential decay, radioactive material undergoes exponential growth!
Oh the irony.
But surely waste piles up on itself?????
How can the total amount of radiation decay if new waste is piled up faster ???????
I have read much of the stuff above.
A belief that the doubling GHG concentrations above pre industrialisation levels will not significantly affect the viability of human civilisation is based on hope not scientific data and logic.
The UK Hadley Centre’s paper “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Changes” warns that a continuation of BAU for another 40 years is likely to result in global temperature rises of between 4 and 7 degrees C by the end of this century. This model has been criticised as conservative as it predicts that an ice free summer Arctic Ocean will not occur until 2060 and does not include the release of GHG from the melting of the Arctic tundra.
These conclusions are supported by the Treasury Report – Australia’s Low Pollution Future which also states that BAU will result in GHG concentrations of about 1500ppm by 2100, about 5 times greater than pre industrialisation levels. This report also predicts that by 2050, renewable energy wind and solar will only contribute 2% to global electricity production with nuclear at about 11%.
Jim Hansen, James Lovelock and Barry Brook are very aware of the severe impacts that temperature rises of this magnitude will be on the future of human civilisation. For this reason they recommend nuclear power as the only real chance of reducing GHG emissions to “safe” levels by mid century as demonstrated by France.
France replaced almost all their fossil fuel generation is just 10 years by constructing 35 nuclear reactors. In 2008 the per capita CO2 emissions for France is 6T, the lowest of all the large developed economies.
By contrast 10 years ago, Germany chose the renewable energy route and gave this initiative massive political and financial support. The result is disappointing with per capita CO2 emissions of 12T in 1990, dropping to 10T in 1995 and flat lining ever since. See IEA 2010 Energy Report. Not only has Germany failed to replace any fossil fuel power stations, it is now planning another 20 new coal fired power stations, which will emit a further 130 million tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. See the Greenpeace article- the case against coal’ April 15th 2010.
The belief that renewables alone can reduce GHG concentrations is based on ideology, not real world engineering evidence and only gives politicians and vested interests like the gas industry, the excuse to continue BAU. The biggest beneficiary of a Government’s renewable policy is the gas industry, It is interesting to note that the former German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, who led the green coalition which implemented the move to a renewable energy future 10 years ago, is now working in private industry, gas not renewables.
OK, fair enough. Let’s have a look. I could go on at great length and in more detail, and cover all Caldicott’s material, but I will look at only a limited portion of it now to try and give you an idea, and cover all the rest later if you really insist I should continue:
Uranium (U-238 or U-235) has a very low specific activity, and it does not pose any significant health physics risk when it is being handled. Of course, nuclear fuel fabrication is done under carefully controlled conditions, with good industrial hygiene practices, and good health physics controls – as much to ensure the quality and integrity of the finished fuel as to ensure health and safety for people handling the fuel.
Where would the radon come from? It takes an extremely long time for a sample of uranium, which has a very long half-life, to reach equilibrium with the radon nuclides in the radioactive decay series.
Caldicott loves to suggest that these people working in the nuclear fuel or nuclear energy industry are in danger or are at risk of harm. But what would those workers say to Caldicott? They actually know what they are talking about and know what they are working with, as contrasted with Caldicott’s complete ignorance of this science and technology, and they would laugh her out of town.
This sentence only serves to demonstrate ?rst hand Caldicott’s alarming lack of comprehension of the technology of nuclear power, even at the most simple level. Caldicott doesn’t seem to recognise the critically important distinction between the moderator and the neutron absorbers in a nuclear ?ssion reactor.
When low-enriched uranium is put into a neutron-scattering moderator, which is light water in a LWR (with the water also acting as a coolant) and neutron-absorbing control rods are removed, the mass of the system doesn’t change (the critical mass of uranium of a given enrichment level in a given geometry surrounded by a given moderator is a constant, by the way), the effective neutron multiplication rate of the overall system increases, to the point where criticality is reached and the reactor is running.
When irradiated uranium fuel is removed from a ?ssion reactor, it is indeed very radioactive – initially, many millions of times more radioactive than the original uranium oxide fuel. (Although it is certainly not a billion times more radioactive.) Why? Simply because uranium, contrary to popular belief, is hardly radioactive at all – uranium, and U-238 in particular, has an extremely low speci?c activity, one of the lowest of almost any radioactive nuclide.
Uranium-238 has a speci?c activity, for example, of only 330 nanocuries per gram, and natural
uranium – uranium containing a mixture of U-238, U-235 and U-234 as they are found combined in nature – has a speci?c activity a bit higher than that, at 683 nCi/g.
For comparison, radium (speci?cally radium-226), a reasonably radioactive material which can be
found naturally occurring in minerals within the Earth, is 1.46 million times more radioactive than natural uranium.
This important and special property of nuclear ?ssionability that one of the naturally occurring
nuclides of uranium has, along with a few other, shorter lived nuclides that are “extinct” from natural abundance in the Earth today, is not necessarily correlated to an especially large level of radioactivity – in fact, as primordial radionuclides, uranium nuclides kind of have to have a very low speci?c activity. Otherwise, the uranium wouldn’t be so abundant in the Earth’s crust today.
The radioactivity of used uranium fuel discharged from a pressurized water reactor, assuming a burnup of 50 MW-days/kgU and an initial enrichment level of 4.5% 235 U, is approximately 214 MCi per metric tonne – 79 million times more radioactive than the original uranium oxide fuel, which has an activity of about 2.7 microcuries per gram, for uranium dioxide enriched to 5% U-235. This radioactivity starts to decay quite rapidly indeed, once the fuel is discharged from the reactor – after one week of cooling, the radioactivity of the fuel has decayed from 214 Ci/g down to 25 Ci/g.
There’s no such thing as “long-lived radiation”. That’s like saying that the Sun “contains long-lived sunlight”. Radiation is not a substance, and it cannot be contained or stored or released.
What about the radioactivity (the incandescence of the hot Sun-stuff which emits radiation, if you will) in a nuclear power reactor?
A nuclear power plant – or a coal-?red power plant, solar-thermal or whatever kind of power station you like – with an electrical output capacity of one gigawatt and a thermodynamic e?ciency of, say, 33% for a typical thermal (Rankine-cycle) power plant – generates a Hiroshima bomb worth of thermal energy, by ?ssioning uranium, or burning fossil fuels, or collecting thermal energy from the Sun, or whatever this particular plant is doing – every 5.8 hours. It’s simple arithmetic.
The nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima had an explosive yield of somewhere around 15 kilotons – 6.276 x 10^13 J, or 17.4 gigawatt-hours – what might seem like a surprisingly small amount of energy, on the scale on which we generate and consume electrical energy in the developed world. The power output associated with a nuclear weapon is enormous, as is its energy density – but the amount of contained energy, in absolute terms, is not unfathomably large.
If you imagine for a moment that all the energy produced by a typical large power station (coal-?red, gas-?red, wind powered, or whatever you like) could be stored up for one day, say in some kind of hypothetical enormous capacitor, or a vast energy storage ?ywheel, or by pumped hydrostatic storage in a dam, and then all suddenly released, the e?ects would be comparable to a Hiroshima-scale weapon, capable of razing a good part of a city.
Relative to the scale on which a city consumes energy, the overall energy output of a nuclear ?ssion bomb isn’t even particularly noteworthy. (What is horrifyingly destructive about such a weapon, though, is its power output.)
A typical nuclear power plant contains enough ?ssionable fuel in a single loading of the reactor core to supply years worth of energy, not just 5.8 hours worth.
Can you see Caldicott’s fallacy? I’m sure you can.
A typical large power plant, using any energy source, generates far more energy in even just one day of operation than does a small nuclear weapon such as this – in the case of a nuclear power plant, it consumes much more ?ssile fuel, and obviously produces correspondingly more radioactive ?ssion products – of course more radioactivity is produced, for a correspondingly larger amount of energy produced! The energetic equivalent of 1000 Hiroshima-sized bombs is produced in less than eight months of operation, for such a power plant.
All the radionuclides associated with nuclear ?ssion reactors were created in signi?cant amounts when uranium was ?ssioned in nature, two billion years ago in Africa, in natural nuclear fission reactors, as well as from various other nuclear reaction processes, in the case of a good number of the relevant radionuclides.
It is important to note, of course, that nuclear ?ssion is a nuclear process rather than an atomic
process – 200 distinct chemical elements have not been identi?ed to exist, in fact, 200 is far greater than the 138 or so distinct chemical elements that current physics predicts can exist, but it’s plausible that about 200 distinct nuclides of a couple of dozen different elements could be identified in irradiated nuclear fuels.
Of course, uranium has always been a part of this planet, and radioactivity and ionising radiation
has always been a part of the universe. Nuclear reactions are the mechanism of energy generation in stars, allowing life – which is intrinsically very thermodynamically intensive – to exist, and stellar nucleosynthesis is the the mechanism by which essentially all matter – barring the hydrogen and helium in the early universe – was formed. Although they do not occur terrestrially in large quantities, radionuclides usually regarded as being “arti?cial” are in fact just as natural as any other nuclides.
It’s a bit of a misconception to say that certain elements, like say plutonium for example, didn’t exist before they were created arti?cially. They occur in nature. They’re forged in the hearts of stars, in supernovae, just like uranium and neodymium and every other heavy element. They were created in the supernova in our region of the galaxy approximately ?ve billion years ago which formed and dispersed a lot of the other relatively heavy nuclides that are abundant in the Earth and the inner Solar System.
To turn a hydrogen-1 nucleus (a proton) into a tritium nucleus, you would need to have a neutron captured by the proton to form a deuteron, and then that deuteron capturing a neutron again to form tritium. The cross-section for a proton-neutron capture, for thermal neutrons, is fairly small, under one barn, and the cross section is smaller still for deuterium (that’s why deuterium is a more efficient moderator than light hydrogen, since it absorbs less neutrons.) The overall rate that tritium could be formed through such a mechanism is insignificant. Most of the formation of a little bit of tritium in the coolant of light-water reactors occurs when boron (added to the coolant to adjust reactivity) absorbs neutrons and splits apart, actually.
In any case, tritium (of which there is a little bit formed in the coolant of typical LWRs) is not “intensely radioactive”. It has a moderately long half-life (12 years), which means it has a moderately low specific activity. It emits beta particles with quite a low energy, among the lowest of any beta-emitting radionuclide. It’s actually one of the least potentially dangerous radionuclides, which is why it is widely used, as a modern replacement for promethium-147 and radium and things, in radioluminescent items such as signs and watches and gunsights.
In a pressurized light water reactor, the hot primary coolant (water which does not boil because it’s pressurized) heats the secondary-coolant water in the steam generator, making steam. The primary coolant and the secondary coolant are isolated by the steam generator.
Caldicott’s description is sort of very roughly accurate if you’re talking about a PWR – but only if you’re talking about a PWR. It’s completely irrelevant to any description of any other kind of power reactor. In a BWR for example, there is no steam generator, and the same coolant goes through the turbines and through the reactor.
Caldicott implies that if there was to be a pinhole break in a steam generator tube and a tiny bit of primary coolant reached the secondary coolant circuit that would somehow be extremely dangerous. Why? In a BWR, all the coolant passes through the reactor core and directly on to the turbines once it has boiled into steam, and you don’t see that hurting anyone.
Whilst Ar-39 does have a half-life of 269 years, its nuclear mass is clearly too small for it to be a ?ssion product. Ar-39 is not a ?ssion product, and as such it is not formed in any nuclear fuel. Nevertheless, Ar-39 can in principle be formed in the reactor via the K-39(n, p)Ar-39 reaction, from any potassium present within the reactor and primary coolant.
However, since there is nothing within the reactor core which requires any content of potassium, no signi?cant yield of would be expected to result from any typical light-water nuclear power reactor at all.
It could be formed in the coolant of a fast reactor with a coolant of NaK eutectic alloy – but such reactors are extremely rare. I think a couple of reactors designed in the USSR for use on spacecraft used NaK as their coolant, but I cannot think of any other examples anywhere.
Data on the amounts of radionuclides associated with emissions of any gaseous or liquid e?uents
from commercial nuclear power plants in the United States is collected and collated by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. All such data collected from nuclear power plant operators is available to
the public via the NRC.
The 2.97 megacuries of gaseous ?ssion and activation products reported as being released from Millstone Unit 1 in 1975, and the 1.3 megacuries of gaseous ?ssion and activation products reported as being released from Nine Mile Point Unit 1 in 1975 are by far some of the absolute highest emissions of radioactive e?uents from nuclear power plants in the United States ever measured, for any reactors, for any year. This is what is commonly referred to as cherry-picking the data.
For comparison, in 1975 Brunswick Nuclear Generating Station in North Carolina released a combined total of 190 curies of gaseous ?ssion and activation product e?uents from both the nuclear units on the site. In 1982, Millstone Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1 released 8330 curies of gaseous ?ssion and activation product e?uents, and Nine Mile Point Unit 1 released only 51.1 curies of gaseous ?ssion and activation products in total.
Most of the ground-state technetium-99 in the environment gets into the environment from patients who have had medical diagnostic tests or imaging using Tc-99m, which they then excrete. The Tc-99m rapidly decays to Tc-99, which the patients eliminate, and it’s certainly detectable in the environment. You would see this in Australia today, for example, in the absence of nuclear power.
Do I really need to continue? If you really think I have to, I can keep going with every other sentence in Caldicott’s book. But it’s time consuming work, since the whole thing is a pile of mendacious baloney.
To cut to the chase, the fact is that nuclear power does not give any significant ionising radiation dose above the natural variance in background to any member of the public, and it is extremely safe and environmentally sound.
When you’re looking at material like that from Caldicott, I really don’t think you need to have detailed knowledge of nuclear engineering, nuclear physics or health physics to identify that it is rubbish. All you need is basic science literacy, basic statistical literacy, an understanding of critical thinking, scientific skepticism, and common logical fallacies and rhetoric, and what Carl Sagan called a “Baloney Detection Kit”. Anybody who possesses those faculties will immediately see this rubbish for what it is. It’s all just false information, scientific ignorance at best and outright dishonesty at worst. It’s FUD without one iota of respect for the truth.
Seek the evidence. Seek the real information. Seek peer-review. Think about it. Ask skeptical questions. Try and check how sound the information is.
Suggested reading: http://www.ntanet.net/publicinfo.html