Learning About Energy

DON'T CENSOR THE INTERNET!

2012-01-18T13:16:10-05:00

I'm not smart enough to figure out how to shut down my site for a day, but let me just say here: IT IS ESSENTIAL TO THE BASIC CONCEPT OF THE INTERNET THAT IT NOT BE CENSORED OR INTERFERED WITH BY ANY OUTSIDE AUTHORITY.

This is the citizen's last chance to communicate freely. It must not be abridged!

Ted Rockwell

The

How Are Permissible Radiation Limits Set?

2011-11-17T21:00:01-05:00

[This is an up-date on some previous discussions we've had here]

How Much Is Science, How Much “Prudence”?

U.S. Regulatory Report NCRP-136 examined the question of establishing permissible radiation limits. After looking at the data, it concluded that most people who get a small dose of nuclear radiation are not harmed by it, and in fact are benefited. That’s what the science said: Most people would benefit by receiving more radiation.

But curiously, the report’s final conclusion was just the opposite. It recommended that our regulations should be based on the premise that any amount of radiation, no matter how small, should be considered harmful. It made that recommendation just to be “conservative” or “prudent.”

Let’s think about that. Why is it prudent do just the opposite of what the science indicates? Why is exaggerating a panicky situation considered prudent? I’ve never seen a good answer to that question. Whatever the reasoning, that’s where we’ve ended up.

We’ve had three uncontrolled releases of radioactivity from serious malfunctions of nuclear power plants: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. In each of these, fear of radiation proved to be much more harmful than the effects of radiation itself. And announcing that no amount of radiation is small enough to be harmless was certainly effective in creating and nurturing phobic fear of radiation, when none was justified by the facts.

In addition, the problem is aggravated by the fact that we’ve been told for sixty years (two human generations) that nuclear terror is infinitely more dreadful than any non-nuclear threat, particularly when you blur the distinction between power plants and bombs.

But what Fukushima tells us is that this abstract, academic position looks very different when you’re telling people they can’t go home – perhaps for years, because, well, it seems more prudent that way, even though radiation hasn’t actually hurt anyone there.

Radiation expert Professor Wade Allison, author of “Radiation and Reason,” has cast the question in a new light. He suggests, let’s set the permissible radiation limit the same way we set all other safety limits. Not by asking how little radiation we can get by with, but how much can we safely permit? There’s no intention of lowering the safety margin, and it will not be lowered. That’s not the issue. It’s a matter of working with the scientific data, rather than from a generic fear not supported by the science.

Prof. Allison concludes that setting the permissible radiation limit, with a good margin of safety, results in an annual permissible level about 1000 times the current figure.

To see a brief video of Prof. Allison’s talk to the Japanese people, click on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj8Pl1AiOuA&feature=youtu.be

Ted Rockwell

A Plea for Common Sense on Fukushima

2011-11-17T14:05:12-05:00

New lessons are beginning to emerge from Fukushima. Each new concern leads to additional safety requirements. But some contradictions are beginning to raise questions: Amid tens of thousands of deaths from non-nuclear causes, not a single life-shortening radiation injury has occurred. Not one! And while some people in the housing area are wearing cumbersome rad-con suits, filtered gas-masks, gloves and booties, there are many people living carefree in other places like Norway, Brazil, Iran, India where folks have lived normal lives for countless generations with radiation levels as much as a hundred times greater than forbidden areas of the Fukushima homes.

At Fukushima this is no abstract issue. People are being told they cannot return home for an indeterminate period – perhaps years. And efforts to decontaminate their home sites may require stripping off all the rich top-soil and calling it RadWaste. People who were evacuated have been reduced to economic poverty, clinical depression, and even suicide.

There is good scientific evidence that, except for some hot spots, the radiation levels at these home-sites are not life-threatening. The current restrictions are based on a desire to be “conservative.” No matter how well intended, this “conservatism” is cruelly destructive. The respected radiation authority Wade Allison, author of Radiation and Reason, has proposed that the current annual radiation dose limit be raised 1000-fold, which he says is still well below the hazard level of clinical data on which he bases his proposal. Other radiation protectionists are beginning to feel unhappy about the harm their rules have caused and are joining in the cry for quick action as the Japanese head into winter.

It’s time that the draconian measures be revoked. A simple declaration of the known health facts about radiation from the proper authorities would be a good first step.

Ted Rockwell

The Nuclear Power Safety Record

2011-11-04T15:43:01-04:00

As of March 2011, U.S. Naval Reactors have run 6300 reactor-years, driving 528 reactor cores on 220 ships over 145,000,000 miles without a single radiological incident or injurious radiation exposure to crew or public. Because of the shielding from the hull and the seawater, crews at sea generally get less radiation, living within 100 meters of an operating nuclear reactor, than their families at home. All of the radiological information about the ships and associated shore facilities is released to the public in documents in which the detailed data are accumulated without a break since 1954.

With respect to the international nuclear power industry at large, John Ritch, the Director-General of the World Nuclear Association, made the following statement to the science editor of station NDTV on 24 October 2011: “Perhaps I would think this problem is more serious if we had been besieged by many large fatality accidents in nuclear power. But I think I am correct in saying that in fourteen thousand five hundred reactor-years of civil nuclear power production we have not seen a fatality apart from the limited number of deaths that occurred as a result of the Chernobyl accident...Very few industries have produced such beneficial results with such an extremely low toll of damage to the environment or the public. This industry has an amazing record of safe performance and beneficial contribution. That basic fact is much too little appreciated by the public.”

During the same period, the following non-nuclear accidents occurred:

Banqiao Dam Failure: One of 62 hydroelectric dams in Zhumadian Prefecture in China that failed catastrophically or were intentionally destroyed in 1975 during Typhoon Nina. An estimated 172,000 people were killed, 11 million people lost their homes, and about one-third of the electric power capacity of the national grid was destroyed. The resulting damage to the farmland is not reported.

Bhopal Pesticide Factory Release: A leak of methyl isocyonate gas from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India in 1984 led to 558,125 injuries, including 38,478 temporary and partial, and 3900 severely and permanently injured. An estimated 3000 died within weeks and another 8000 have since died from the incident. Some believe these official estimates grossly understate the situation.

Deaths from Coal: From coal’s air pollution alone, there have been 30,000 deaths per year in the US, 500,000 per year in China. These figures do not include deaths of coals miners, the destruction of stream beds destroyed by pushing mountain-tops into stream beds, the effect of mercury and other toxins on fish, etc.

BP Oil Spill: The environmental and health impact of this event has not been estimated. And there are many other spills that have received little attention.

The fact is that it is simply not true that nuclear radiation is uniquely hazardous, even when totally uncontrolled releases occasionally occur.

Another fact is that unwarranted fear of harmless levels of radiation has caused unprecedented damage. People are afraid to return to their homes and businesses. They’ve terrified themselves, their friends and their children. The health effect of such widely enforced terrorism is itself devastating. The effect on the economy is paralyzing.

In Fukushima, amid thousands of non-nuclear deaths, international investigation under IAEA concluded:

"To date no health effects have been reported in any person
as a result of radiation exposure from the nuclear accident"

But the Government is concerned about letting people return to their homes.

There is no defensible scientific basis for discouraging people from living where radiation levels are “high,” when they are still lower than the highest natural radiation levels in Iran, Brazil, Norway, India, China and other regions where people have dwelt healthfully for countless generations with backgrounds hundreds of times higher than deemed “permissible.”

More fundamentally, why should radiation level be the prime consideration as to where and how one chooses to live? Many people make decisions that increase their radiation dose many-fold by moving to mountainous regions, or by cladding their houses in brick or stone, or by visiting radioactive health spas. By what authority do the radiation protection police have their particular concern outrank all others? Are we going to let them strip the natural soil off the ground in Japan, to lower the radiation background to some arbitrary number?

Why should we fear “nuclear waste”? The only way it can harm anyone is if it is eaten. It is not in soluble form, so we store it in shielded cans until it is needed to be recycled as fuel in a reactor designed for that purpose. This is not difficult; the process has been demonstrated, but it Is currently cheaper to just store the used fuel until needed. Non-nuclear industry produces millions of times more lethal doses of other poisons. The main difference is that the nuclear material gets less toxic every day, and after a few hundred years, becomes no more toxic than some natural ores. But the non-nuclear wastes maintain full toxicity forever. Fukushima and 9/11 have shown that we should design the plants to perform under even more extremes of conditions, and these improvements have been underway in America since immediately after 9/11.

Putting radiation numbers in perspective:

Marshall Brucer, “the father of nuclear medicine,” in his canonical Chronology of Nuclear Medicine, shows how widely radiation backgrounds vary. On page 323, he lists various radiation background levels (with cosmic ray contribution removed) from New York City at 0.62 mSv/year to SW France up to 876; to the potash fertilizer area in Florida up to 1750. He notes, “If you live in one place on earth, your background may vary from day to day by a factor of ten, or even 100…The inside exposure rate can change by a factor of 10 within hours, just by opening windows.” He notes that building with brick, rather than wood, can nearly double your daily radiation dose, but that the radioactivity of bricks and concrete is also highly variable: from 0.05 to 4.93 mSv/yr for bricks, and from 0.29 to 25.4 for concretes. “A factor of 10 daily variation [in radiation dose] marks the diets of most people.” [mR in original, converted here to mSv]

People have lived healthily for millennia with natural radiation up to following mSv/yr:

Ramsar, Iran (260), Kerala, India (35), Guaripari, Brazil (35), Yangiang, China (5.4)

What Should We Learn from Fukushima?

2011-11-04T15:24:22-04:00

The first thing we should learn from Fukushima is that no one - not a single person - received any injury from the radiation from Fukushima. When asked recently how many persons might have their lives shortened by the radiation, LNT-advocate Abel Gonzales replied bluntly: "None."

The doses received by operators in Fukushima are all below the doses received from background radiation from high natural background areas elsewhere in the world, where people have lived healthily for countless generations.

The conservative regulators of the International Atomic Energy Agency Expert Fact Finding Mission stated it this way:

"To date no health effects have been reported in any person

as a result of radiation exposure from the nuclear accident"

In view of the 25,000 deaths from non-nuclear causes, it does not seem reasonable to think of that tragedy as a nuclear catastrophe.

But there are certainly lessons that the international nuclear community should learn from this, and that lesson-learning is now underway throughout the world. We will discuss that in another post.

Ted Rockwell

The Harmful Fallacy of Collective Dose

2011-08-15T00:13:47-04:00

Use of Collective Radiation Dose as a Measure of Good Practice or of Casualty Magnitude

This essay was written some time ago, but the history seems to need repeating, as people increasingly misuse cumulative or collective dose. Adding up individual radiation doses is like adding up temperatures. It gives a figure with no physical meaning.

NRC uses as a prime measure of the severity of a casualty, or the efficacy of “good plant operation,”

the total collective radiation dose in person-rem, multiplying trivial individual radiation doses by large

numbers of people to “predict” many induced cancer deaths. That process has been repeatedly

condemned as scientifically indefensible. Yet current policy presumes that, in the absence of more data,

this is the prudent course. That contention is wrong on both counts: there is no lack of applicable credible

data and the data show persuasively that low-dose radiation is not harmful. And use of this unwarranted

practice continues to have serious detrimental effects.

NCRP-121 specifically warns that collective dose should not be used to predict death or injury from

low-dose radiation:

“The summation of trivial average risks over very large populations or time periods…has produced a

distorted image of risk, completely out of perspective with risks accepted every day, both voluntarily and

involuntarily.” (p.58)

And again:

“…it is recommended that regulatory limits not be set in terms of collective

dose…When the uncertainty in the number of individuals …is large… collective dose

should not be used as a surrogate for risk, even at relatively high levels of individual

radiation dose.” (p. 62)

Roger Clarke, Chairman of the International Commission on Radiological Protection wrote (1 Oct 98

at http://hps.org/documents/controllable.pdf) :

“If the risk of harm to the health of the most exposed individual is trivial, then the total

risk is trivial—irrespective of how many people are exposed”.

And the Health Physics Society, in its March 1993 Position Statement, emphasized in bold-faced type:

“We strongly recommend that dose limits be applied only (sic) to individual members

of the public, not (sic) to the collective dose to population groups.”

The French Academy of Medicine quoted and concurred with the above statement from NCRP-

136, and stated in a press release 4 Dec 01:

[the Academy] associates with many international institutions to denounce improper

utilization of the concept of the collective dose to this end. These procedures are without

any scientific validity, even if they appear be convenient to administrative ends.

Zbigniew Jaworowski, MD, PhD, the noted member and former chair of UNSCEAR, wrote in

“Radiation Risk and Ethics” (Physics Today, Sept 1999, 24-29) that use of collective dose:

“was introduced in the early 1960s…the concept is still widely used, although both

the concept and the concern [about harmful hereditary effects] ought to have faded

into oblivion by now…Individual doses cannot be additive over generations, simply

because humans are mortal and the dose dies when an individual does. Similarly,

individual doses cannot be added for individuals of the same generation because

we do not contaminate one another with a dose that we have absorbed…

If harm to the individual is trivial, then the total harm to members of his or her

society over all past or future time must also be trivial—regardless of how many

people are or will have been exposed…

Some of our Worst Problems have a "Forbidden" Solution

2011-04-03T22:47:28-04:00

This is a blog I wrote decades ago, when the word "nuclear" was the other "N word" that was not spoken by decent people. That situation no longer exists, but the problem that spawned it still festers: the idea that nuclear anything is a solution of last resort; that nuclear is so inherently dangerous, unnatural, evil...that we should always look for a "better" solution. In that context, I think the words below are still relevant. What do YOU think?

Many of the problems we face today seem impervious to solution. Abortion, gun control and welfare rights come to mind. Solving problems like these seems to require that people agree on matters on which they passionately disagree. We have not found a way to resolve such issues, and we don’t seem to know how to make much progress toward doing so.

There are other problems, such as crime, homelessness and medical care, for which we can envision answers, but we don’t know how to get there from here. But since no one argues in favor of crime or of lack of housing and medical care, we hope that somehow we’ll muddle through to a solution of sorts.

There is a third class of crucial problems for which a solution is available but most people in politics and the media seem unwilling to consider it. You will seldom see this solution even discussed, because the pundits are convinced that you don’t want to hear about it. This unwritten conspiracy of silence is keeping us from recognizing that some of our worst long-range problems have a straightforward, proven solution we could begin to apply right now. To name a few of the problems in this category:

Ten thousand people are dying each year (in America alone) from diseases carried by infected foods, and much of the world’s food spoils before it can be eaten.
Tens of thousands of Americans die each year from respiratory problems caused or aggravated by air pollution.
People are avoiding life-saving medical procedures such as mammograms or radiotherapy, out of unwarranted fear of radiation.
Global warming and ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere may or may not be as urgent as some people claim, but we are spending considerable money worrying about them.
Smog from gasoline-burning cars is choking our cities and we are dependent on uncertain foreign sources for their fuel.
The water table is running dry in many locations although water is the most plentiful material on earth.
And we are told that nuclear waste products will pose an environmental and public health threat for perhaps a million years.

Aren’t you glad that these are the solvable ones?

The forbidden solution to each of these problems is nuclear technology. In subsequent essays I will discuss each of these problems in turn, and I will also discuss some of the objections that have been raised in connection with nuclear technology. You may wonder why our politicians and pundits have decided to let these problems fester rather than consider applying a proven technology to solve them, and you may be surprised to learn that the objections to nuclear technology are not as serious as generally described.

Let me illustrate what I mean by “forbidden solution.” The Department of Energy was formed in 1974 out of the old Atomic Energy Commission. (It went briefly under the name Energy Research and Development Agency, but that is beside the point.) The purpose of this action was to separate out the regulatory function and put it into a new Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which would leave the Department of Energy free to promote and encourage the development and use of nuclear energy, as required by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. But one of the first actions of this administration’s new Secretary of Energy was to eliminate the office of Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, leaving the 20,000 employee agency with virtually no one to carry out its original function. Shortly after that, it submitted a report to Congress on how it proposed to tackle the global warming problem. When Congress discovered that nowhere in this fat report was any mention of the most effective step one could take to reduce the production of global warming gases–that is, to encourage the construction of nuclear power plants–the Department was told to correct this deficiency. So the Secretary re-created a nuclear function and filled the top slot with a life-long anti-nuclear activist, Terry Lash of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Other examples:

At a press conference, a NASA official was explaining the latest plan for exploring the outer planets. Asked how the spaceship was to be powered during the long journey, the official said that several alternatives were being studied. The reporter persisted: “Isn’t it true that repeated studies have shown that nuclear energy is the only feasible way, and that all such voyages–ours and the Russians–have used it because nothing else will work?” The official muttered that the matter was being studied. He would not use the forbidden word nuclear.
The tremendously important medical imaging technique called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) was changed to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to eliminate the forbidden word.
A recent international initiative to help foreign countries with their energy problems is being carried out under a document that does not avoid the word nuclear; it says specifically that a wide variety of energy systems would be explored, but not nuclear.

Nuclear technology is an enormous reality; in the U.S. alone it represents $257 billion in total revenues, 3.7 million jobs, and $45 billion in tax revenues, less than 10% of it in electric power generation. Yet a series of grotesque hypothetical scenarios, based on what-ifs that have never happened in 40 years of activity, have scared people into making it an unmentionable in political and public discussion of urgent problems. Nuclear power has never hurt a single member of the U.S. public, yet this technology is being kept from solving problems that are killing real people by the thousands.

931 words

Some Lessons from Fukushima

2011-03-31T18:40:42-04:00

After working for 68 continuous, full-time years in nuclear technology, mostly in nuclear radiation and safety. I find people asking my opinion as to the degree of danger posed the radiation and radioactivity from the battered nuclear reactors in Japan. This is what I've been telling them. Next post will explore the specifics of this in more detail. The numbers are all-important.

Ted Rockwell

A lot of wrong lessons are being pushed on us, about the tragedy now unfolding in Japan. The scare-talk about radiation is not helpful. There will be no radiation public health catastrophe, regardless of how much reactor melting may occur. Radiation? Yes. Radiation catastrophe? No. Life evolved on, and adapted to, a much more radioactive planet, Thus today, a bit more radiation is generally beneficial, not harmful. Statements that there is no safe level of radiation are an affront to science and to common sense. The radiation from Fukushima is expected to be about like that from the Three Mile Island (TMI) incident, where ten to twenty tons of the nuclear fuel melted and slumped to the bottom of the reactor vessel. This is the scenario that initiates the mythical China Syndrome, that postulates that the molten fuel burns its way into the earth. On the computers and movie screens of people who make a living “predicting” disasters, TMI is an unprecedented catastrophe. In the real world of TMI, the molten mass froze when it hit the colder reactor vessel, and stopped its downward journey at five-eights of an inch through the five-inch thick vessel wall. And there was no harm to people or the environment. None.

Yet today, we have radiation protection zealots in Europe and America telling their citizens near Fukushima to defy Japanese instructions and leave their shuttered homes, to wander, homeless and panic-stricken, through the battered countryside—to do what? All to avoid a radiation dose lower than what we get from a ski weekend in Colorado (a low cancer area, incidentally.)

Everyone involved with nuclear power anywhere has design and operating lessons to learn from Fukushima. For investors, the important point is that some of the nuclear plants were swept with a wall of seawater that may have instantly converted a multi-billion dollar asset into a multi-billion dollar liability. That’s bad news. But it’s not unique to nuclear power. If Fukushima were a computer chip factory, would we consider abandoning the entire computer industry because it was not tsunami-proof? It would be ironic if American nuclear power were phased out as unsafe, without having ever killed or injured a single member of the public, to be replaced by coal, gas and oil, each proven killers of tens of thousands each year.

UPDATE AS OF 09:00 P.M. EDT, FRIDAY, MARCH 18:

A World Health Organization spokesman said that radiation levels outside the 20-kilometer (12-mile) evacuation zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan are not harmful for human health. He said the WHO finds no public health reason to avoid travel to unaffected areas in Japan or to recommend that foreign nationals leave the country. He also said there is no risk that exported Japanese foods are contaminated with radiation.

The lessons from Japan involve tsunamis, not radiation.

Theodore Rockwell
Member, National Academy of Engineering

Dr. Rockwell’s classical 1956 handbook, The Reactor Shielding Design Manual, was recently made available on-line and as a DVD, by the U.S. Department of Energy.

We're back again! After nearly a year, we're back.

2011-03-31T14:28:41-04:00

Last Spring, after putting out the April 2010 Nuclear Energy Facts Report (which is still available here), I was diverted by a couple of high intensity projects that I will talk about on this site in the days ahead. I've learned a lot during that year, and I will be posting some new ideas for your consideration and comments.

Many nuclear power advocates were surprised and enlightened by the behavior of the Fukushima reactors, and their associated used fuel pools. It will take considerable time, thought and innovation to fully learn all we need to learn from this once-in-centuries disaster.

Another teaching moment came with the publication by the New York Academy of Sciences of the Greenpeace Book, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment." timed for use in a media blitz on the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. The Greenpeace announcement said:"based on now available medical data, 985,000 people died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster." The authority for this statement is said to be "the book recently published by the New York Academy of Sciences." Since the book itself states that the generally accepted rules of science do not support the book's exteme conclusions, I and others will be challenging the book's scientific validity and the propriety of a scientific academy sponsoring such a report, disguised as science.

One of the major activities that took me away from this blogsite for so long was preparing to makef a documentary film and DVD for public television entitled "Admiral Rickover: Father of Nuclear Power." The project has finally received major funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and pre-filming activities are under way. I will be telling you more about that, as we get into production. Production of the film is expected to continue through the rest of 2011, with release some time in 2012 (hopefully before the widely predicted end of the world ; - )

So, don't go away. The goodies will start appearing shortly.

Ted Rockwell

An Interactive Course on Nuclear Power by NYT's Matt Wald,

2011-01-14T20:42:02-05:00

I just got some news that I expect many of you will want to follow up on. Have you ever wished you could argue with NY Times reporter, Matt Wald, about one of his articles on nuclear energy? Well, soon you will have that opportunity, and more. I just received the following news, which I will pass on to you:

NUCLEAR ENERGY
New York Times’ Matt Wald Teaches New Online Course

America is looking for electricity that is clean, safe, and cheap. Where does nuclear power fit in? For those who want to explore the history and prospects of nuclear technology, The New York Times presents “Nuclear Energy <http://www.nytimesknownow.com/index.php/nuclear-power/> ,” an interactive two-week course led by Matt Wald, a Times correspondent who has covered the industry’s ups and downs for 30 years.

The course includes extensive background materials and opportunities for oral and written Q&A with Matt Wald. “Nuclear Energy” will cover a variety of topics and issues, including:

The history of the nuclear industry

Recent advances in nuclear technology and the future of nuclear power

Financial incentives for transitioning to nuclear energy and implications for the coal industry

“Nuclear Energy” will run from February 15-28, 2011. To register for this new online course or for more information, please visit: http://www.nytimesknownow.com/index.php/nuclear-power/.

This Program of Study <http://www.nytimesknownow.com/index.php/category/type/new-york-times-type/> course is part of the New York Times Knowledge Network, which is open to consumers nationwide. Programs of Study courses, developed and taught by New York Times journalists or professional staff, cover a variety of topics and are delivered online. Students can select any number of these courses: to stand alone, or be taken as a sequence.

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