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Post by GJ on Jun 22, 2012 12:51:58 GMT 9.5
Has any one done the calculation of :
Total Radiation released by Fukushima
v
Total Radiation released by coal plants each year?
This would be a very useful unit of comparison I think
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Post by grlcowan on Jun 23, 2012 4:29:22 GMT 9.5
In advance of doing any calculation, I can tell you this for sure: it would be useful to coal advocates.
Let us approximate coal as carbon that contains 2.5 parts per million uranium, plus its daughters in equilibrium, and is otherwise pure. At 40 percent thermodynamic efficiency, we get an electrical gigawatt-year's coal requirement as 2.402 million tonnes. Times the uranium content, that makes 6.0 tonnes of uranium. All right so far?
About a billion people were at risk of unnecessary medical X-rays last year, but each one's unnecessary exposure was, I'll quickly guess, a thousandth of the 20-mSv order of magnitude dose near FD1, so unnecessary X-rays amounted to only ten Fukushimas ... except the 100,000 people who might have got 20 person-mSv each were mostly evacuated. The exposure they would have received, had their well-being been the only thing on the authorities' minds, amounts to a tenth of the collective dose the whole developed world got from unnecessary X-rays in that year, then. (How do you suppose we got so developed!)
(Unnecessary X-rays, annually per average person, 20 microsieverts? Just a guess. Maybe someone in the business can pseudonymously do better.)
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Post by anonposter on Jun 23, 2012 17:01:21 GMT 9.5
Such a calculation would be basically meaningless, a more useful figure would be total lives lost including from particulate matter as well as radiation (though if you don't assume LNT you won't get any radiation deaths from either).
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 23, 2012 18:37:36 GMT 9.5
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Post by sod on Jun 23, 2012 21:30:03 GMT 9.5
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 23, 2012 23:03:26 GMT 9.5
Well, the Cohen book is among the best and most scientific that I've read so far, covering most subjects in a scientific and quantitative way. The Fukushima meltdowns would be in the range of the 1 in 10 meltdowns, ie very serious, when compensating for the 3 meltdowns (factor 3) and inflation (factor 2-3), it becomes a 1 to 1.5 billion per reactor cost.
However, there are some peculiar things about the probabilistic analysis that you have to know. The probabilistic analysis is done with internal failure probabilities, which determine Cohen's cost range. The probabilistic analysis usually does not treat common mode failure from flooding (tsunami) in a generic way, as this is of course site dependent. In stead it is often asserted that design basis takes care of flooding, ie by having sufficient elevation etc. which is simple and therefore assumed to be incorporated into the risk analysis of the site. Clearly this went wrong in the design of the Daiichi plants 1 to 4. So it's a bit not entirely an apples to apples comparison. Fukushima accident wasn't an internal equipment event, it was common mode failure.
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 23, 2012 23:08:12 GMT 9.5
I should add also, that inferring anything statistical from Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns is of course impossible - most of the meltdowns in commercial plants in history were at Daiichi!! Anyone who has taken a class in statistics means we shouldn't try to infer any probabilities out of such limited statistics. Cohen does make an interesting calculation though, which shows that, for nuclear power to be as dangerous as coal, there would have to be 75 meltdowns per year.
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Post by sod on Jun 24, 2012 6:09:24 GMT 9.5
can you give a page or direct link for that 75 meltdowns claim? for clean up, you are slightly bending the numbers for Cohen. according to him, 3 simultaneous meltdowns shouldn t have any additional effect as the clean up works like this:
"With this definition, the worst meltdown accident considered7 in the RSS — about 1% of all meltdowns might be this bad — would contaminate an area of 3,000 square miles, the area of a circle with a 30-mile radius. About 90% of this area could be cleaned up by simply using fire hoses on built-up areas, and plowing the open ground, but people would have to be relocated from the remaining 10%, an area equal to that of a circle with a 10-mile radius.www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter6.htmlso no (or next to none) additional cost for similar location meltdowns! |
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 24, 2012 16:57:15 GMT 9.5
Actually, Sod, decommissioning a molted core reactor is very expensive. Three Mile Island cost a billion just to clean up, even though there was no land contamination at all. In today's money that would be over 1.5 billion per reactor. Bearing in mind that the meltdowns in Fukushima Daiichi units 1-3 were far more extensive than the partial meltdown of Three Mile Island. At TMI the damaged core didn't even get out of the reactor vessel, that's much easier to clean up. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accidentThe 75 meltdowns claim is in chapter 6: "In most meltdowns the containment is expected to maintain its integrity for a long time, so the number of fatalities should be zero. In 1 out of 5 meltdowns there would be over 1,000 deaths, in 1 out of 100 there would be over 10,000 deaths, and in 1 out of 100,000 meltdowns, we would approach 50,000 deaths (the number we get each year from motor vehicle accidents). Considering all types, we expect an average of 400 fatalities per meltdown; the UCS estimate is 5,000. Since air pollution from coal burning is estimated to be causing 30,000 deaths each year in the United States (see Chapter 3), for nuclear power to be as dangerous as coal burning there would have to be 75 meltdowns per year (30,000 / 400 = 75), or 1 meltdown every 5 days somewhere in the United States, according to the RSS; according to UCS, there would have to be a meltdown every 2 months. Since there has never been a single meltdown, clearly we cannot expect one nearly that often." Interestingly we haven't any confirmed deaths from the radiation, but Cohen uses the linear no threshold model, a worst case scenario. It's kind of funny how that still makes nuclear so much better than anything else (especially coal). |
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Post by sod on Jun 25, 2012 6:13:25 GMT 9.5
The numbers i cited above ($12.81 billion.) is a pure (and very optimistic) guess of decontamination of land. the estimates of the total cost of the disaster (including compensations and decommissioning the plants) is much higher. Japan made an estimate of "20 trillion yen ($257 billion)" www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/06/japan-nuclear-cost-idUSL3E7N60MR20111206and again: if the cleaning is done by fire hose, 3 meltdowns would not cost more than 1. (of course what Cohen proposed will not be done either!) |
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Post by anonposter on Jun 25, 2012 16:48:33 GMT 9.5
Of course if the government believes the anti-nuclear movement then they're likely to end up spending a lot more than they need to.
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 25, 2012 18:06:48 GMT 9.5
The numbers i cited above ($12.81 billion.) is a pure (and very optimistic) guess of decontamination of land. the estimates of the total cost of the disaster (including compensations and decommissioning the plants) is much higher. Japan made an estimate of "20 trillion yen ($257 billion)" www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/06/japan-nuclear-cost-idUSL3E7N60MR20111206and again: if the cleaning is done by fire hose, 3 meltdowns would not cost more than 1. (of course what Cohen proposed will not be done either!) The cost of cleanup can be as high as you want it to be. If you decontaminate to below background levels, costs are massive. However, your claims such as 12 billion being "optimistic" and 3 meltdowns not being more expensive to cleanup, are substantial claims. These require substantial evidence. 3 meltdowns and containment failures produce more radioactive contamination than 1 so that increases the cost. Really talking about figures like 250 billion $ is just speculative nonsense. We can spend any amount we want, if we want to cleanup every microsievert. If that is the approach, then most of Japan has to be cleaned up; radon is everywhere, and Cohen showed it is dangerous. Sod, you have to read Cohen's book. In full. Then come back with more questions or assertions if you have any. Most of your assertions are fully debunked in Cohen's book. |
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Post by anonposter on Jun 25, 2012 22:40:16 GMT 9.5
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Post by sod on Jun 25, 2012 22:41:07 GMT 9.5
Do you have any source, that shows that Japan is planning to reduce contamination below (local) background level? it is the japanese government, that gave$12 billion as the cost of clean up. online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204879004577107703452346104.htmlthis is a first guess, and these sort of estimates tend to err on the low side mostly. the Cohen number is total decontamination. It is the final value, which we will only see in many years. www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter6.htmlBut even so far, Fukushima looks like being one of the more expensive decontamination cases. because according to Cohen, "In most meltdowns, the cost would be less than $50 million (all costs are in 1975 dollars)" i also gave the reason for my claim, that according to Cohen 3 meltdowns at the same location should not be much more expensive than a single meltdown. he describes clean up like this: "About 90% of this area could be cleaned up by simply using fire hoses on built-up areas, and plowing the open ground"neither f these two methods should cost any more after 3 accidents. (though their might be a slightly bigger core zone than 10%) |
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 26, 2012 0:08:28 GMT 9.5
Sod, Cohen is not concerned with statistics, but with probabilities, two very different things. If you read the book you would have known the difference. Of course Fukushima is among the more costly meldtowns; considering the long duration of the station blackout (essentially permanent station blackout for accident purposes). I really must recommend that you read the book in full.
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Post by sod on Jun 26, 2012 7:13:35 GMT 9.5
sorry, but his "probabilities" have to fit to the statistics we have!
you simply can not claim, that the majority of meltdowns cost below $50 Million and then have 3 in a row, costing billions!
i tend to side with statistics in this case: if the first part of a book i look at, turns out to be obviously false, then you will need to convince me to read much more. (the entire chapter 6 looks pretty bad to me. do you get the feeling that his descriptions are a good explanation for the what happened in Fukushima?)
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 26, 2012 8:06:09 GMT 9.5
sorry, but his "probabilities" have to fit to the statistics we have! you simply can not claim, that the majority of meltdowns cost below $50 Million and then have 3 in a row, costing billions! i tend to side with statistics in this case: if the first part of a book i look at, turns out to be obviously false, then you will need to convince me to read much more. (the entire chapter 6 looks pretty bad to me. do you get the feeling that his descriptions are a good explanation for the what happened in Fukushima?) Actually that is exactly what we, or anyone, can claim. Just as I can claim, after rolling a dice three times, while getting three times 6s, that the probability of rolling a 6 is 1/6. Even though I just got 100% 6s. Statistically I got only 6s but that's not the same as probability. Please just read the book, it's generally excellent. Yes, Cohen's descriptions are eerily close to reality. Even though the book is old, almost all of his predictions came true (eg no significant % solar PV market penetration, etc.). Don't judge a book on a few passages. If I judge you by what you've written so far, I might be inclined to think I'm dealing with just another not-thinking-clearly lacking-all-perspective, knowing-nothing-about-probabilities-and-statistics, anti-nuke. |
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