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Post by Barry Brook on Jul 29, 2013 18:25:17 GMT 9.5
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Post by grlcowan on Jul 29, 2013 19:30:57 GMT 9.5
The link says radioactivity is "a main source" of the Earth's internal 44 TW. Russell's version of this implies a large nuclear reactor is a main source of 1 MW thermal, 330 kW after heat-to-work conversion. "Thousands of large reactors" would be better. But that's thousands of large reactors, all going flat out. The residual power of nuclear fuel after fission has been switched off is a lot less ( Spent Fuel Explorer (In both the "Label" and "Area" menus, both at bottom right, select "decay heat". To convert the decay heat numbers to fractions of pre-shutdown power, divide by 39 MW/MTU.)). Depending on what decay time is chosen, Earth's internal radioactivity can indeed be equivalent to the leftovers from millions of large retired nuclear power stations. Billions, if they've been retired for centuries.
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Post by joffan on Jul 29, 2013 20:59:32 GMT 9.5
Nice work so far Geoff, looking forward to the rest of the series.
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Post by Asteroid Miner on Jul 29, 2013 21:03:47 GMT 9.5
In the old days, we recycled spent nuclear fuel. We don't recycle nuclear fuel now because it is valuable and people steal it. The place it went that it wasn't supposed to go to is Israel. This happened in a small town near Pittsburgh, PA circa 1970. A company called Numec was in the business of reprocessing nuclear fuel. [I almost took a job there in 1968, designing a nuclear battery for a heart pacemaker. ]
Spent fuel should be recycled, not stored.
Numec did not have a reactor. Numec "lost" some nuclear fuel. It wound up in Israel. The Israelis fueled their nuclear short cycle plutonium239 plant to make their nuclear weapons by stealing nuclear "waste." Notice they had to fuel a short-cycle reactor to MAKE Pu239. Pu239 does not come directly from spent fuel.
My solution would be to reprocess the fuel at a Government Owned Government Operated [GOGO] facility. At a GOGO plant, bureaucracy and the multiplicity of ethnicities and religions would disable the transportation of uranium to Israel or to any unauthorized place. Nothing heavier than a secret would get out.
The problem is political: The Republicans think GOGO plants are socialist/communist, which is nonsense. If a COCO [Contractor Owned Contractor Operated] plant is the low bidder, it is inevitably a front for Israel or some other country. We could send our spent fuel to France, Japan or Russia to be recycled. Those countries have recycling facilities.
I downloaded an article about NUMEC from this dead link years ago: www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/specialreports/buriedlegacy/s_87948.htmlIt starts out: "Government agencies investigated missing uranium, NUMEC By Mary Ann Thomas and Ramesh Santanam VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH Sunday, August 25, 2002 Editor's note: This the first of three parts on the history of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. Part II will appear Monday and Part III will appear Tuesday. The colorful history of the former Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. is rich with intrigue and mystery and unwinds like the plot of a Tom Clancy novel. There are stories of missing uranium, allegations of illegal shipments to Israel, FBI sleuthing, meetings with possible Israeli spies, talk of special "encoded" telephones the FBI could not tap, concern by the CIA, congressional inquiries and interest from the White House. " "NUMEC paid almost $930,000 in fines to the AEC for the lost uranium. " Please read this Book: "Plentiful Energy, The Story of the Integral Fast Reactor" by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang, 2011. Till & Chang's book has chapters on recycling processes. Purex process: The old one. Separates out plutonium, but does not separate the isotopes of plutonium. Any bomb made with this plutonium from a powerplant reactor would fizzle. Pyro process: Leaves plutonium mixed with uranium and trans-uranic elements. [All fissionable elements are kept together with uranium] Other processes [wet] are also under development.
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Post by Rob Parker on Jul 29, 2013 21:37:23 GMT 9.5
Geoff, Almost all the actinides in spent fuel are soluble to some degree or other. The concentration of Pu239 grows significantly in a spent fuel repository over a VERY long time. Also we have some rather ordinary amounts of polonium which you wouldn't want in your cup of tea.
Its therefore entirely reasonable to locate spent fuel in repositories that are so deep and impervious that ground water with associated minerals cannot combine with the spent fuel and carry the radioactive actinides into accessible ground water, artesian basins and surface waters. Also, this stuff is best kept well out of reach of those with malevolent intent now and well into an unforeseeable future - which is where deep holes and concrete back fill come into play
So it seems to me that the Finnish solution of putting the stuff 450m to 500m underground in granite is a very robust disposal method, maybe even an overkill to some degree.
We would all hope however that the era of the fast reactor arrives long before too much money is spent on these deep and complex solutions.
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Post by dwalters on Jul 30, 2013 1:37:19 GMT 9.5
Geoff noted, Rob, that this stuff is WAY too valuable to bury forever. It should first be reprocessed, then used in a fast reactor as feed stock. We could basically reduce the radiation levels down to acceptable levels after only 200 to 300 years this way.
The valuable isotopes we can extract from this spent nuclear fuel is being expanded all the time. This is why the French geologic storage law is far superior to the Finnish one. The French require that all SNF be buried with the ability to retreive it when necessary so the isotopes can be mined for later use.
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Post by zinfan94 on Jul 30, 2013 2:28:35 GMT 9.5
Looking forward to the post on dumping radioactive materials into the ocean... the post will be particularly timely, considering the the release of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean at Fukushima.
Since this is a "science based" site, I am especially interested in the peer reviewed research reports that the author will cite, done by competent marine biologists and ocean experts, that studied and clearly demonstrated that dumping the radioactive materials into the Pacific will have no negative impact.
Please be sure to provide links to this research.
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Post by Robert Hargraves on Jul 30, 2013 3:09:03 GMT 9.5
You wrote "The rate of malignant melanoma is about 67 per 100,000 per year in Queensland and just 0.5 per 100,000 per year in Japan. This means anybody in Queensland could reduce their cancer risk by moving to Japan and living next door to the stricken Fukushima reactors." The difference might be genetic, or related to sun exposure. I recommend you try to avoid such chinks in your armor in future posts.
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Post by grlcowan on Jul 30, 2013 3:52:24 GMT 9.5
Looking forward to the post on dumping radioactive materials into the ocean... the post will be particularly timely, considering the the release of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean at Fukushima. Since this is a "science based" site, I am especially interested in the peer reviewed research reports that the author will cite, done by competent marine biologists and ocean experts, that studied and clearly demonstrated that dumping the radioactive materials into the Pacific will have no negative impact. Please be sure to provide links to this research. Radioactive tuna 2012, radioactive tuna 2013. In each one's Table 1 you should see a 40K column with much larger numbers than the adjacent 134Cs and 137Cs columns. K stands for potassium. Potassium-40 is a natural radioisotope, half-life 1.28 billion years, long enough that an atom the Earth incorporated when it formed decayed just now in your left hand. 134Cs and 137Cs stand for the two cesium radioisotopes that got out of Fukushima. A Fukushima station that was a solid block of salt would eventually increase ocean salinity by a tiny fraction. Similarly, pulverizing or dissolving the real FD1 station, or indeed all the nuclear stations and waste caches in existence, and dispersing the powder or liquid throughout the ocean, would only fractionally increase its radioactivity. 'zinfan94' asked for a demonstration of no-impact. That's hard to demonstrate, but I trust he will acknowledge the numbers make a good case for expecting no impact.
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Post by zinfan94 on Jul 30, 2013 5:19:03 GMT 9.5
grlcowan wrote: 'zinfan94' asked for a demonstration of no-impact. That's hard to demonstrate, but I trust he will acknowledge the numbers make a good case for expecting no impact. My response: Well no, I can't acknowledge that the numbers make a good case. In fact, you missed the target completely. The cesium in the bluefin almost certainly was released into the atmosphere during the uncontrolled steam releases at Fukushima. When I worked on risk assessments and environmental assessments on energy projects almost as large as Fukushima, we were required to assess probable worst case scenarios. Although the release of radioactive material to the atmosphere is a problem, one probable worst case source of radioactive contamination at Fukushima would involve a meltdown with water cycled through the reactor and this radioactively contaminated water accumulating in the ground water, with eventually release of the ground water to the Pacific ocean. In this scenario a significant amount of the radioactive materials in the reactor could end up in the ground water (along with soils and rock in contact with the contaminated water); furthermore, as the ground water cycled (particularly with tidal flows), contaminated water would drain to the Pacific and be replenished with new sources of ground water, which in turn would become contaminated, and also drain to the Pacific. I was hoping that there have been some studies done, evaluating the worst case loss of radioactive materials to the ground water system under Fukushima, then estimating the release rate of these highly radioactive materials from the reactor core to the Pacific. TEPCO has been trying to ignore this issue, and has repeatedly denied that any radioactive material from the ground water has contaminated the Pacific. This last week, TEPCO had to reverse this position, and admitted that not only is the ground water "highly contaminated" (no specific numbers given), but that the ground water levels are moving up and down with the tide, indicating that the ground water is reaching the Pacific, and that there is water cycling through the ground water system. Here is an excerpt from the NYTimes article covering the TEPCO statements: "For weeks, Tepco officials had emphasized that groundwater containing high concentrations of radioactive tritium, strontium and cesium discovered in observation wells at the plant last month did not pose a threat to the nearby Pacific. The utility held its ground even after Japan’s nuclear safety chief said last week that the plant had most likely been leaking contaminated water, probably since the disaster more than two years ago." www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/world/asia/operator-of-fukushima-plant-criticized-for-delaying-disclosures-on-leaks.htmlTEPCO was forced to admit the uncontrolled leak, when fishes caught near the plant site started showing unsafe levels of cesium and strontium, and they had to warn off fishermen. So where are the studies showing various quantities of the radioactive materials leaked from the reactor, modeling the release into the Pacific, and estimating the impact on radioactive levels in the Pacific biosphere? drlcowan (or anyone): Do you want to try again?
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Post by grlcowan on Jul 30, 2013 8:17:07 GMT 9.5
grlcowan wrote: 'zinfan94' asked for a demonstration of no-impact. That's hard to demonstrate, but I trust he will acknowledge the numbers make a good case for expecting no impact. My response: Well no, I can't acknowledge that the numbers make a good case. Given the tone of the initial challenge, I expected no more. No, that is, um, satisfactory. Perhaps someone else could comment on the "fishes caught near the plant site ... showing unsafe levels of cesium and strontium", since in 'zinfan94's world the need for peer-reviewed research reports doesn't seem to apply to that.
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Post by Brendan on Jul 30, 2013 9:57:57 GMT 9.5
studies of caesium contamination at Goiania www.radiationandreason.com/uploads//enc_FukushimaGoianiaInternal.pdf [PDF] with far higher levels than Fukashima could ever cause, indicate that the fear mongering, and the psychological effects of anti nuclear NGOs pushing their agenda, will have vastly more adverse consequences on the population than the contamination
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Post by geoffrussell on Jul 30, 2013 12:35:01 GMT 9.5
Thanks everybody. If this was a peer reviewed journal I'd definitely make some changes. #Robert: The solid point is that migration would increase cancer risks considerably, but using melanoma as an example was a poor choice ... breast cancer, prostate cancer, bowel cancer would have been safer but I wanted something with a clear environmental cause like sunshine. #grlcowan: For people scared of nuclear, they see the rest of the planet as totally unradioactive ... pristine is the usual term! I'd be betting that geothermal energy would have far fewer advocates if it was called "georadioactive energy".
As for ocean dumping ... you'll all have to wait and see. Calling it "safe and benign" seems reasonable in the absence of any evidence to the contrary. But strictly speaking I don't have to prove it's safe to prove that it should be allowed. All I need to show is that its safer than something which is widely accepted and practiced. But given that the Germans are saying they won't get to 80% of electricity from renewables by 2050, then all I really need so show is that nukes+ocean dumping is less risky than renewables or renewables+climate change. That's pretty much a slam dunk. But as everybody seems to be aware, nobody is going to dump waste anywhere at all. They'll use it. #Rob: Agreed. Finding the right sites for repositories obviously isn't as trivial as I made out ... it needs good engineering, but that's all it needs. My point is that it's not some magically tough problem.
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Post by geoffrussell on Jul 30, 2013 12:38:47 GMT 9.5
Ooops ... "by 2050" should have been "until 2050".
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 30, 2013 12:45:05 GMT 9.5
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
is freely available in pdf format. This review states that up to 100 mSv dose is harmless. Wade Allison goes quite a bit further in his "Radiation and Reason". There are also several papers freely available on his website on this topic.
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Post by Barry Brook on Jul 30, 2013 17:34:40 GMT 9.5
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Post by john tons on Jul 30, 2013 17:54:43 GMT 9.5
Barry your argument that because we do not find it troubling that radioactive decay in the earth's crust is continuously releasing as much energy as 44 million large nuclear reactors. We should therefore not be concerned about the disposal of nuclear waste is essentially fallacious. It is the same argument that people put forward who argue that CO2 emissions are nothing to worry about because CO2 occurs naturally anyhow. My personal take on nuclear waste is simple. Given that humans have produced the waste, humans have a responsibility to dispose of it. Clearly I would prefer to live in a world where there was no nuclear waste but nuclear waste is a reality so we must deal with it. Secondly since South Australia is the source of a great deal of the nuclear waste (ie we exported the raw material that generated the waste) we have a moral responsibility to clean up our mess. We aslo happen to live in one of the most geologically stable parts of the planet so it makes sense to store it here. If we are going to store it then we should charge for the storage and use a substantial amount of the funds raised from storage to invest in research to see whether or not there is a commercially viable way of making use of the waste material.
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Post by geoffrussell on Jul 30, 2013 20:18:41 GMT 9.5
Hi John,
First, it's not Barry's argument it's mine and you've misrepresented it.
There's no a priori reason to think that moving carbon from the ground (or turning carbon into methane to increase its warming impact) to the air is at all dangerous. The fact that it is dangerous (ie., that it will change the climate) was a discovery made with considerable effort. Is it possible that adding radioactivity from some external source to the earth's crust will do something cataclysmic? I can't prove that it won't and am happy to reject the idea if anybody can produce a shred of evidence that it might have some large adverse impact. But not only is there no evidence that it might cause an adverse impact, neither you nor anybody else has come up with even a description of what kind of adverse impact we can speculate on. Rob (above) mentioned ground water contamination. Sure. That's an issue but it's not that tough and the best thing of all is that even if you fail, you can detect it relatively easily and you are only dealing with a small number of point sources. Compare this with the much harder problem of arsenic (naturally occurring) in groundwater across large regions. Or compare it with mercury contamination accentuated by the proliferation of coal power stations into the vacuum caused by the stopping of the nuclear roll out in the 80s. Both of these problems involve diffuse sources of contamination which are far tougher (more expensive) to manage.
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Post by John ONeill on Jul 30, 2013 20:19:06 GMT 9.5
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Post by Jaro on Jul 30, 2013 22:54:45 GMT 9.5
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Post by jmdesp on Jul 31, 2013 2:42:31 GMT 9.5
You conveniently forgot in the nuclear baning list Austria which is at rank 33. Whilst France is at rank 6 (and Belgium at rank 5 is also amongst the countries with the highest level of nuclear). There's really no connexion between using nuclear and high cancer rate. But it doesn't protect you either (very high coal Poland is at rank 39, so they are many factors in cancer, and air pollution alone won't weight enough to be decisive).
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Post by Asteroid Miner on Jul 31, 2013 12:25:40 GMT 9.5
Q: "So what is it about nuclear power waste disposal that people find so troubling?" A: They have heard of it and they have been told that it is dangerous. They have never been told that "radioactive decay in the earth’s crust is continuously releasing as much energy as 44 million large nuclear reactors." Nor are they likely to believe that. Start by telling them about natural background radiation [NBR]. They will think NBR came from reactors or bombs, so tell them several more times. Coal contains: URANIUM and all of the decay products of uranium, ARSENIC, LEAD, MERCURY, Antimony, Cobalt, Nickel, Copper, Selenium, Barium, Fluorine, Silver, Beryllium, Iron, Sulfur, Boron, Titanium, Cadmium, Magnesium, THORIUM, Calcium, Manganese, Vanadium, Chlorine, Aluminum, Chromium, Molybdenum and Zinc. There is so much of these elements in coal that cinders and coal smoke are actually valuable ores. We should be able to get ALL THE URANIUM AND THORIUM WE NEED TO FUEL NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS FOR CENTURIES BY USING COAL CINDERS AND SMOKE AS ORE. See: www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.htmlor clearnuclear.blogspot.comin case the ORNL site does not work. Make coal fired power plants meet the same requirements for radiation release that nuclear power plants have to meet.
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Post by John ONeill on Jul 31, 2013 13:40:55 GMT 9.5
Yesterday at 8:19pm, John ONeill wrote: the four countries with the highest cancer rates in the world, Denmark, Eire, Australia and New Zealand, all have laws banning nuclear power. www.theguardian.com/news/datablog....s-uk-rate-dropsCoincidence? I think not! 'You conveniently forgot in the nuclear baning list Austria which is at rank 33. Whilst France is at rank 6 (and Belgium at rank 5 is also amongst the countries with the highest level of nuclear). There's really no connexion between using nuclear and high cancer rate. But it doesn't protect you either (very high coal Poland is at rank 39, so they are many factors in cancer, and air pollution alone won't weight enough to be decisive).' ...oops, caught cherry-picking again. They looked so good I couldn't resist them! Read more: bravenewclimate.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=bncblogposts&action=display&thread=419#ixzz2aao8UmBY
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Post by geoffrussell on Jul 31, 2013 16:41:28 GMT 9.5
AsteroidMiner: The people reading BNC will probably believe the statement about the crust/mantle radioactivity (after checking the link ... perhaps). It's the people not reading BNC that are a much bigger problem. And getting pro-nuclear stuff published in mainstream media is pretty tough.
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Post by geoffrussell on Jul 31, 2013 16:45:10 GMT 9.5
Like the graphic ... bathtub slipping is quite a killer also. I saw a proposal years ago for rubberised flooring in nursing homes ... very expensive but easily cost effective in savings on broken hips. As far as I know, nobody was interested ... too expensive!
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Post by Barry Brook on Jul 31, 2013 18:09:16 GMT 9.5
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Post by rick123456 on Aug 1, 2013 1:08:13 GMT 9.5
In previous part? You lead us to believe that many nuclear plants put out less radiation then the earth crust does. It suggests that this is safe, the radiation given off by NPP has much more of some elements like Plutonium and other types, the radiation from NPP are not equally dispersed over an area. Even readings from 3/11 are just a small area that is covered with radioactive material, there must be areas 10 to 20 times as radioactive as the spot readings that have been chosen because of expected low readings, on hard surfaces that are washed down or on high and or windy spots etc. The statement made I assume is if no plant has a melt down, at the present rate of 5 out of 500 is 1 in 100, take the many plants you have come up with and divide by 100 and how many melt downs will spew out radiation over the crusts surface area, is this safe? I expect a response if safe or not safe. Half of Some Plutonium types released will be around 100.000+ years, in human life may as well be at full strength for 50,000 years increasing every time a NPP melts down. Storing spent fuel in any location concentrates it many thousand times that found in the earth and well never be equally dispersed back to the ground.
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Post by edireland on Aug 1, 2013 4:11:22 GMT 9.5
I know of four light water meltdowns using western designs, TMI and the three units at Fukushima.
But if you count all LWRs that have operated in the west then the count is enormous, since you have to include military reactors. 254 reactors have been or are operated by the USN at sea, no reactor accidents are recorded. 31 reactors have been or are operated by the Royal Navy at sea, no reactor accidents are recorded. ~20 reactors operated (or have been operated) by the Marine Nationale in France, then the enormous french civil reactor programme.
The list goes on and the count gets larger and larger.
If you put modern designs like ESBWR through the conditions at TMI or Fukushima then catastrophic core damage is almost impossible. (I assume the emergency services in Japan could have found a 9hp water pump within 72 hours?)
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Post by geoffrussell on Aug 1, 2013 8:15:27 GMT 9.5
rick123456: I'd bet there's enough petrol in my local petrol station to kill everybody in Adelaide given appropriately bizarre assumptions. And that's all you are doing. Thinking up weird things that could happen but won't. The nuclear industry has a good safety record and can easily have an even better one in the future. But all our futures are in peril thanks to the aid and succour given to the coal industry by getting a free ride over the last two decades thanks to the anti-nuclear movement. The ANM has all manner of blood on its hands ... 100,000 unnecessary abortions at Chernobyl, the evacuation at Fukushima, and the ongoing attempts to scuttle plans to provide clean energy globally, but more particularly in India.
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Post by Barry Brook on Aug 1, 2013 22:27:01 GMT 9.5
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