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Post by jagdish on Aug 2, 2013 0:05:28 GMT 9.5
Part 4 deals with nuclear waste which is not applicable to Australia and many other non-nuclear countries. Indians have been busy creating nuclear waste and learning to process it as a source of fissile feed to nuclear reactors. Australia, on the other extreme, has the world's largest reserves of uranium and does not need to do it. They can start with 20% LEU as in Russian SVBR fast reactors www.akmeengineering.com/assets/files/SVBR-100%20new%20generation%20power%20plants.pdfThey could get their waste processed by someone like Russia or China and recycle it. The Australians could just mine uranium and run the reactors for power and outsource all else.
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Post by trag on Aug 2, 2013 3:00:30 GMT 9.5
Ooops ... "by 2050" should have been "until 2050". No, I think your first phrasing was probably more accurate. Wind turbines have a lifetime of 20 years. Solar of 30 years. In just seven years, the first German turbines should be reaching EOL. By 2030 almost all the turbines built so far will require replacing. Does Germany's projected build rate and targets take replacement into account or are they just multiplying build rate by time and adding it all up, ignoring the huge amount of capacity which will wear out long before 2050?
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Post by rick123456 on Aug 2, 2013 3:32:48 GMT 9.5
Statement: Adelaide given appropriately bizarre assumptions I suppose before 3/11 you would of said 3 NPP blowing up will never ever happen. It is OK for you to state no meltdowns, how bizarre is that. So how many 3/11 equivalent radiation releases can life handle, if you do not know or the nuclear industry doesn't then how can they evaluate the risk or do they do as you seem to do, it will not happen. The more plants the more probability of a biblical event hitting one and plants are getting older. I have asked this question on other sites with no answers, how are NPP going to survive a Carington event like the one that hit the planet several decades ago 1859. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859 This may easily cause 10% of all operating NPP to meltdown at the same time. Why, because when it happened switches, breakers and fuses were welded to gather or flashed over. Have never seen a answer, was brought up to the nuclear industry about 2 years ago.
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Post by edireland on Aug 2, 2013 5:26:31 GMT 9.5
If we have a Carrington event then you have far bigger problems than a handful of reactor meltdowns.
Millions of dead from serious civilisational damage.
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Post by geoffrussell on Aug 2, 2013 10:45:31 GMT 9.5
rick123456: How many 3/11 radiation releases can life handle? Given that the radiation death toll is still zero and steady, then what precisely are you worried about? Japan is getting 80,000 extra cases of bowel cancer annually as a result of dietary change (red and processed meat), why doesn't that bother you but something which hasn't killed anybody has you very anxious.
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Post by John Morgan on Aug 2, 2013 12:58:22 GMT 9.5
Imagine the waste stream from solar panels covering 1% of non-ice land surface area going to landfill every 20 years.
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Post by geoffrussell on Aug 2, 2013 13:57:21 GMT 9.5
John: I doubt they'd go to landfill, they'd just get another 81,000 truckers back on the job carting them back for recycling
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Post by quokkaa on Aug 2, 2013 15:51:31 GMT 9.5
So how many 3/11 equivalent radiation releases can life handle? If you are referring to some planetary scale problem, the answer based on all the evidence available is "many". I recommend you read the UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation) 2008 report Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation to understand how little nuclear power (including Chernobyl and Fukushima Accidents) contribute to average radiation dose. Look at the charts on page 404 of Annex B. In 2006 average yearly radiation dose from medical procedures in the United States was 3 mSv. The contribution from nuclear power is buried in the category "other" - ie some portion of 0.04 mSv. Radiation dose from nuclear power is much less than 1% of that from medicine. Also on that set of charts, somewhat ironically, average radiation dose from medical procedures in nuclear phobic Germany is four times that in the UK. If you want another way of looking at it, even the stupidity of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing at its peak increased annual radiation dose by about 0.11 mSv for a year or two, which then rapidly declined. (page 397). By comparison average natural radiation dose in Cornwall in the UK is about 7 mSv -every year
Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation Annex BAside from medical procedures, contributions to average radiation dose from all other human activities are orders of magnitude smaller than the variations in natural radiation between different areas on the earths surface. Any ill effects due to high natural levels of radiation dose have proved to be very hard to find - either because they are very small or there are no ill effects. This should tell you straight away that any radiation release from the use of nuclear power is many orders of magnitude too small to cause significant conceivable planetary scale harm. If we could say same for some other forms of pollution, we would be in a very happy situation indeed.
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Post by Douglas Wise on Aug 2, 2013 19:35:01 GMT 9.5
Geoff, I think your series of articles on nuclear waste is excellent and deserves a wider readership. However, I have one small gripe. Having recently returned from a catch and release fishing trip, I was surprised to find myself gratuitously insulted as a torturer in an article dealing with nuclear waste. I appreciate you are an animal rights campaigner as well as a pro-nuclear one. I, as a research biologist with some knowledge of neuroscience and experimental animal psychology, have been professionally involved as an anti-animal rights campaigner, but support your pro-nuclear stance. Could you possibly consider separating your two campaigns as I believe such would benefit both?
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Post by David B. Benson on Aug 3, 2013 12:03:22 GMT 9.5
What Douglas Wise just wrote.
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Post by rick123456 on Aug 3, 2013 12:13:02 GMT 9.5
Geoff, by your statement we can have thousands of plants melt down because you believe no one has been harmed by radiation so far. But see these sites. enenews.com/growing-number-of-u-s-military-report-radiation-related-illnesses-after-fukushima-arm-shrunk-to-half-its-size-immune-system-attacking-body-leukemia-testicular-cancer-thyroid-problems-rectalno2nuclearpower.blogspot.ca/2011/11/chernobyl-disaster-in-1986-ukraine.htmlWhy are you bringing in other bad products, these can be debated in another site, we are talking about nuclear, we can talk about lead that is less toxic then Plutonium and asbestos that has been removed from buildings and many other products like meat that many are trying to change but for meat I eat little of it by choice, we can not contain radioactive materials so have no choice. Carington damage to any thing other then nuclear can be repaired, cleaned up and be back to normal. This should not bother you because you believe no amount of radiation can harm you. Who reading this will believe it. At the beginning of building plants the industry told us that the NPP will fail safe, don’t worry. Then later designs changed and they were not fail safe any more but don’t worry we have redundancy and back so safe that we can control the plants from melt downs. These assurances have failed badly and again now we are told new designs are safe, no melt downs will happen and now I hear that no matter how many plants melt down we will be safe. Fuku.... has increased the radiation in the Pacific to the high after atomic testing and the plant is leaking more then ever for how many years.
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Post by Martin Nicholson on Aug 3, 2013 17:03:32 GMT 9.5
Congratulations Geoff on an excellent serious. You have the basis for an excellent book on the subject "Fear of Nuclear Energy". It would be most timely!
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Post by jagdish on Aug 3, 2013 20:08:41 GMT 9.5
Russians and the Chinese are building floating nuclear power houses. If the Australians do not want nuclear waste on premises, they could lease them for the period of one fuel change at a time. Nuclear power can be used outsourcing all the dirty work.
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Post by Nuclear on Aug 3, 2013 22:32:05 GMT 9.5
How "good" is pyroprocessing at separating actinides from spent fuel? Slight impurities in the waste stream would already necessitate shielding spent fast reactor fuel for almost as long as coventional spent fuel.
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Post by edireland on Aug 4, 2013 1:43:07 GMT 9.5
Well you can just wait for a few more years and feed said pyroprocessing waste to a modified aqueous process if you want. The effective lack of criticality concerns would be a major benefit in cost terms.
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Post by engineerpoet on Aug 4, 2013 5:03:42 GMT 9.5
Well you can just wait for a few more years and feed said pyroprocessing waste to a modified aqueous process if you want. The aqueous process means radiolytic byproducts, which means messy waste streams. The papers I've seen on pyroprocessing have listed the Pu loss in the waste salt as much less than 1%, and most of the TRUs wind up in the amalgam with the Pu. On the other hand, the salt contains most of the Sr-90 and Cs-137, which are valuable materials for industrial, medical and other purposes. We should be pushing to employ that stuff as productively as we can, not letting it (literally) go to waste.
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Post by edireland on Aug 4, 2013 7:26:31 GMT 9.5
Are you in a hurry to reprocess? If you leave it 15 years or more before sending it to the "fine process" plant. The radiolytic issue will be far less evident than it would be after the normal 5 year cooling system.
And Sr-90 and Cs-137 are not that valuable because we will be buried in them.
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Post by rick123456 on Aug 4, 2013 11:54:48 GMT 9.5
Quokkaa The amount of radiation from NPP stated is for plants that have not melted down. Show me the studies of projected release of a plant melt down. Fuku... release to the Pacific is soon to be what it was at the end of nuclear bomb tests and this done in about 2.5 years, still leaking more then ever. There is many more types of radiation from NPP melt downs then atomic bombs and NPP leak into the water tables bombs are only air born radiation. In Ontario Canada farmers 60 miles away from NPP plant can not use their well water, NPP owners supply them with water, that was 20+ years ago, I have not heard if it has been extended further.
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Post by engineerpoet on Aug 5, 2013 6:21:51 GMT 9.5
Are you in a hurry to reprocess? We should be, to keep the fuel inventories down and breed up faster. A lot of the useful fission products are also decaying away during that time. They said the same thing about naptha when crude-oil refining was just starting to go; now we go out of our way to make naptha-weight hydrocarbons. If we start getting Sr-90 and Cs-137 in ton quantities, applications which are currently out of reach will suddenly become feasible. For instance, using Sr-90 to irradiate New York's water supply would eliminate most cases of Giardia there. Irradiating sewage and medical waste prevents pathogens from spreading. And I'll be happy to take 20 kg of Sr-90 packaged in 10mm of stainless steel any time you want, because I would really love to have a multi-kilowatt heat source that works 24/7 and doesn't need refueling for decades. That alone would keep me in hot showers for the rest of my life, and I'm sure I could find a way to run a steam or vapor engine off it and get lights too.
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Post by engineerpoet on Aug 5, 2013 6:23:29 GMT 9.5
In Ontario Canada farmers 60 miles away from NPP plant can not use their well water, NPP owners supply them with water, that was 20+ years ago, I have not heard if it has been extended further. Documentation or it's just another anti-nuke fabrication.
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Post by quokkaa on Aug 5, 2013 8:21:13 GMT 9.5
Quokkaa The amount of radiation from NPP stated is for plants that have not melted down. Show me the studies of projected release of a plant melt down. Fuku... release to the Pacific is soon to be what it was at the end of nuclear bomb tests and this done in about 2.5 years, still leaking more then ever. There is many more types of radiation from NPP melt downs then atomic bombs and NPP leak into the water tables bombs are only air born radiation. In Ontario Canada farmers 60 miles away from NPP plant can not use their well water, NPP owners supply them with water, that was 20+ years ago, I have not heard if it has been extended further. It's a bit of a leap from some implied planetary scale disaster in "how much can life take" to an unsupported claim that an unspecified "something" happened in some Canadian farmers wells, don't you think? Anyway, if you were interested, Annex D of the 2008 UNSCEAR report I referenced above has the estimates for average committed effective radiation dose for various populations due to the Chernobyl accident for the period 1986-2005: Evacuees: 31 mSv (about the same as spending 4-5 years in Cornwall in the UK) Inhabitants of the Contaminated Areas of Belarus, The Russian Federation and Ukraine: 9 mSv ( a little over one year in Cornwall) Other Inhabitants of Belarus, The Russian Federation and Ukraine: 1.3 mSv (about a half of natural average annual dose worldwide) Inhabitants of Distant Countries: 0.3 mSv (a little more than 10% of natural average annual dose worldwide) Note that these figures are not yearly. They are the total from 1986-2005 and may increase a little (25%) due to future exposure. Even for the evacuees, the mortality risk is likely to be substantially less than that from air pollution in a big city such as London: Are passive smoking, air pollution and obesity a greater mortality risk than major radiation incidents?
However, air pollution to a greater or lesser extent is almost universal and definitely business as usual. As zero risk and perfect safety is unachievable, the path of least risk should be taken. That path is nuclear.
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Post by rick123456 on Aug 5, 2013 9:39:13 GMT 9.5
Moun, maybe these countries with high back ground radiation feel it is to high all ready and do not want it to go any higher, those with less back ground radiation are a bit more likely to allow more.
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Post by David B. Benson on Aug 6, 2013 7:17:24 GMT 9.5
Anything up to 100 mSv is harmless.
Hormesis by Low Dose Radiation Effects: Low-Dose Cancer Risk Modeling Must Recognize Up-Regulation of Protection Ludwig E. Feinendegen, Myron Pollycove, and Ronald D. Neumann Therapeutic Nuclear Medicine Springer 2012 ISBN 978-3-540-36718-5
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Post by rick123456 on Aug 7, 2013 2:34:32 GMT 9.5
Engineeringpoet: We had no public internet back then so can not get info Easley, I make this statement from a friends experience living in Ontario, US government is alarmed at the tritium in lake Ontario. US sets rate at 750 bq/L and Canada is at 7600 bq/L because the Federal government said it will cost $1 Billion dollars to lower it. The government is in the process to decommission all plants and going to other power types.
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Post by engineerpoet on Aug 7, 2013 12:35:02 GMT 9.5
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 8, 2013 7:54:14 GMT 9.5
The World Health Organisation recommends a limit of 10000 Bq/l for drinking water. This limit is based on extensive testing and expert review, and then taking a much lower value still (after reading up on it, I would gladly drink 100000 Bq/l tritium in my water).
The US limit is completely unbased. In fact it is so absurd that many have argued it is a political limit, meant to protect domestic LWR industry from CANDUs.
The truth is there is not a single documented injury or death due to tritium exposure. This is not surprising at all, considering the low energy beta radiation, very short biological half life, and lack of concentration in specific organs...
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Post by rick123456 on Aug 8, 2013 11:58:15 GMT 9.5
Engineerpoet, see this site welcons.com/tritium.html The site claims tritium was highest in the 60's and that most studies are for exposure for 1 year that comes up with 1000's of bq/L (Very deceiving isn't it). The evaluation hear is over life time of 70 years. Also rates are published for adults, divide by 3 to 8 for under 1 year or more if during conceiving period. All so if it is drinking water or water in food stuffs makes it less safe.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 8, 2013 16:22:59 GMT 9.5
Engineerpoet, see this site welcons.com/tritium.html The site claims tritium was highest in the 60's and that most studies are for exposure for 1 year that comes up with 1000's of bq/L (Very deceiving isn't it). The evaluation hear is over life time of 70 years. Also rates are published for adults, divide by 3 to 8 for under 1 year or more if during conceiving period. All so if it is drinking water or water in food stuffs makes it less safe. Your reference does not provide a shred of evidence to support any of your claims. Not a single documented casualty from tritium. Ever. That's the main thing here. Risks, risks, risks. They are everywhere. If you stand outside a lot you get a higher risk of getting killed by a meteorite strike. However, there is not a single documented casualty from meteorite strikes. It is one thing to suggest the risk of meteorite kills is not zero. It is entirely another to suggest we must all be forced to live deep underground to prevent anyone from being killed by meteorites. Your website is about "the five pillars of wellness". You do not seriously think we can take you serious now? The LNT model should NOT be used for tiny doses and exposures. Even the advocates of this model admit that. The only ones that misuse this already flawed theory of linear damage (which is not seen in any other toxicological field) are anti-nuclear zealots pretending to be knowledgeable about radiation and it biological effects.
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Post by Bob Applebaum on Aug 9, 2013 0:54:33 GMT 9.5
LNT is used in all fields involving genotoxic carcinogens. Radiation is just one type. Hormesis is pseudo-science.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 9, 2013 3:02:26 GMT 9.5
LNT is pseudo science. It uses all sorts of fudge factors such as dose rate fudge factors to make the model work. This is itself an admittance of the model's gross error. Oh yeah, it's linear, if we just fudge out all the stuff that isn't linear, such as dose rate. Pseudo science, indeed. LNT predicts that the world population, which "collectively" receives some 20 billion millisieverts worth of natural background radiation, is getting killed off at a rate of 2 million people a year. (10000 mSv kills one person according to this model). This is what the model predicts. If Bob Applebaum believes in this model, he must therefore believe that the feeble background radiation around us is killing more people than HIV/AIDS. who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/A model that predicts death rates without knowing neither individual dose nor dose rate is not just wrong, it's arrogant. You cannot predict something you don't know enough about. LNT people base their beliefs on an old Japanese bomb survivor data, which is not relevant to nuclear power (the exposure is not prompt like a bomb). This is silly.
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