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The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author Dr. Patrick L. Walden Nuclear Physicist retired and TRIUMF experimenter emeritus. TRIUMF only provides the server for this wiki.

Is the environmental movement inadvertently effectuating Climate Change by opposing Nuclear Energy?

Fig. 1: Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant

edit] Before you begin

March 11, 2013

For those who are doubtful about a pro-nuclear article written by a nuclear physicist who considers himself an environmentalist, I suggest you have a look at Intermezzo below. A quick look at tourists walking nonchalantly on radioactive beaches in Brazil in radiation fields far exceeding what is to be found in the evacuated zone around Fukushima should be an eye opener. Perhaps the fear of radioactivity from these nuclear accidents has been overplayed? Then return to here and read this article from the beginning.

edit] Introduction

It is highly ironic that the environmental movement is opposed to the production of nuclear energy. Although there is a sizable fraction of the environmental movement which is not opposed to nuclear energy, indeed I am one of them, I think it is safe to say that on the whole the majority of the environmental movement opposes the development of nuclear energy. It is highly ironic because the environmental movement, a staunch ally in bringing awareness of global climate change to the public and leading the effort to curtail the emissions of green house gases (GHGs), should also be the main antagonist in quashing the only energy system that is currently capable of making significant inroads in the curtailment of these gases. In doing so it is proving to be as every bit irrational to the consensus of scientific fact as are the climate change deniers to the scientific consensus of the reality of global climate change. In the mistaken belief they are protecting the world from becoming a nuclear wasteland, the environmentalists are helping to effectuate a global climate change catastrophe along with their inadvertent allies, the big fossil fuel companies and the global climate change deniers.

Fig. 2: David Suzuki

David Suzuki recently despaired that the environmental movement had accomplished nothing in the last 20 years.It tried to co-exist with economic and population growth while trying to protect and preserve the environment. This was a mistake. Now he realizes environmental safeguards are overwhelmed by population and economic growth. The movement should have opposed the folly of growth from the very beginning. However, in his lament, he forgot to mention the movement's one big success. The environmental movement has brought to a standstill the expansion of nuclear energy. It has done so by playing up the paranoia the public has about anything that causes a Geiger counter to click.In doing so, the environmental movement has placed a straightjacket on the only energy system that could in the immediate short term curb the emission of GHGs. If GHGs are not curbed now, our environment will succumb to the ravages of the global warming nightmare forecast by climate scientists. Hence the environmentalists, the fossil fuel interests, and the climate change deniers will share the infamy when our environment collapses under global warming.This anti-nuclear wing of the environmental movement may not realize it, but they are doing their bit working for the destruction of the environment on a global scale. This is indeed irony.



The environmental movement comes by its opposition to nuclear energy naturally through historical context. One of the first and probably the largest environmental organization today, Greenpeace, got its start by opposing the use of nuclear weapons. It sailed its boat, Greenpeace, to the island of Amchitka to protest the underground testing of a nuclear bomb. Thus from the first, the environmentalists have confused nuclear bombs with nuclear energy. If WWII never happened, the bomb was never developed, the first realization of nuclear energy, Fermi's atomic pile-1 in the middle of highly-populated Chicago, was developed to generate electricity, the world would probably be living harmoniously with nuclear energy today. To oppose nuclear power, the environmental movement must mount the same irrational attacks against nuclear energy as the global climate change deniers do against the findings of climate science. Each movement is in direct denial of science. Thus environmentalists have their anti-nuclear spokespeople like the Caldicotts and the Nussbaums[4] just as the climate deniers have their Soons and Baliunases. There is a parallelism between the two types of deniers. The climate deniers are in bed with big fossil fuel interests in opposing science and the environmentalists. The anti-nuclear environmentalists are in bed with public paranoia in opposing science and the big industrialists (almost the same as big fossil fuel). In the former, environmentalists view scientists as the heroes, in the latter, environmentalists view scientists as the villains. They cannot have it both ways. Science just reports the facts.

edit] Anti-nuclear scare tactics

The hostile environment in which nuclear energy is greeted by the public[5] can be demonstrated by the stories circulating in the media arising from the aftermath of the Fukushima Dai-ichi incident that took place on March 11, 2011.

In the following five stories, the first 2 are from the anti-nuclear environmentalist movement in which a nuclear threat is just imaginatively created based loosely on the facts. They demonstrate the lengths the anti-nuclear movement will go to disparage the nuclear industry and heighten the nuclear fear of the public. They do this in the name of warning the public of the danger of nuclear power and a fate worse than death. They probably sincerely believe in their message and that they are acting in the best interests of the public for they are just as susceptible to nuclear fear as are the rest of the public. Because of their beliefs they consider the nuclear industry a fair target for any unsubstantiated claim, but in this, they act in ignorance and are grossly misguided and incorrect.

This ignorance is not limited to well-intentioned environmentalists. The next 2 stories demonstrate the media is ignorant as well. Nuclear fear attracts attention and in search of headlines the media mines the scientific literature for alarming tidbits concerning nuclear power. It finds them. Alarming headlines can be manufactured from scientific papers by cherry picking the results and ignoring the provisos. After all the media is just following the lead taken by the environmentalists. The nuclear industry is held in disrepute and is fair game for any attack. Even scientists, wishing for some notoriety, play this game, by publishing titles that are sure to gather the media’s attention.

Last but not least, politicians looking for some talking points to gain kudos from the public show no hesitation to knock the nuclear industry. The public has fear towards nuclear power, and is not going to shed any tears for the industry if it comes under political attack. The lure to knock the industry is particularly powerful if you are the politician that everyone blames for a nuclear incident that took place on your watch. That is the subject of the last story.

edit] Cesium-137 at Fukushima Dai-ichi could end the world

Fig. 3: Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata

A self-proclaimed renowned Japanese diplomat, Akio Matsumura, submitted evidence that the amount of Cesium-137 stored at the Fukushima Dai-ichi site was 85 times greater than the amount that was spread far and wide during the Chernobyl accident. He quotes the former Japanese ambassador to Switzerland, Mitsuhei Murata, that if the Cs-137 at the Fukushima Dai-ichi site were released in another accident it "would certainly cause a global catastrophe like we have never before experienced". Matsumura added for good measure, "it would destroy the world environment and our civilization". Where did Mr. Matsumura get his information? He got it from a Mr. Robert Alvarez. This is an unfortunate name as the Alvarez surname is associated with a renowned scientific pedigree which includes Dr. Luis Alvarez, physicist, nobel prize winner, and a major force on the Manhattan project, and his son, the renowned Dr. Walter Alvarez, proponent of the asteroid extinction of the dinosaurs. This Mr. Robert Alvarez is in no way related to this scientific family, but his surname gives certain credence to what he has to say. Unfortunately this Alvarez is not a scientist. He seems to have been a musical school dropout, who despite being married to a prominent anti-nuclear activist received a political appointment with the U.S. department of energy (DOE) in an administrative role. After reportedly being ignominiously fired, he signed on as a senior scholar at IPS, a liberal anti-nuclear political think tank. In other words he has no official post secondary training in science or nuclear science. That hardly qualifies him as an expert. Even the experts, Dr. Arnie Gundersen and Dr. Fumiaki, that former ambassador Murata quotes in his letter of warning to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon regarding the Fukushima hazard, have dubious credentials.[6] Thus Matsumura's report of imminent world catastrophe is not backed up by anyone with any credible expertise to evaluate the hazard. It could be that Fukushima may have or had in storage 85 times the Cesium-137 that was blown into the atmosphere at Chernobyl, but there was never any credible way for that Cesium to leave the Fukushima Dai-ichi site.[7] Even if the Cs-137 was distributed world wide it would not cause the end of the world as we know it. Other than the possibility of maybe a few more cancers, nobody would notice a thing unless they had radiation detectors. Witness the fact that the wildlife around Chernobyl, a supposed nuclear wasteland, is returning to a state of pristine wilderness due to the absence of humans. The fear expressed by Matsumara and others was that a significant seismic event could trigger this world ending catastrophe. Well this seismic event did happen on Dec. 7, 2012. A 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck at the worst possible place and Fukushima survived unscathed.[8] The end-of-the-world catastrophe peddled by Matsumura, Murata, and their experts, did not happen. This was a whopper that had about as much credibility as the Mayan end-of-the-world prophecy for Dec. 21, 2012. The whopper grew in the telling when other "experts" like Helen Caldicott got their hands on it. The inventory of cesium-137 suddenly grew from 85 times that of Chernobyl to 200 at the touch of a keyboard.[9] How credible is the story now? It just keeps getting better and better, and this is the stuff the media passes onto the nuclear fearing public. This is the nature of the material from the anti-nuclear movement. If you dig into it, it evaporates into thin air. There have been attempts to equate Fukushima Dai-ichi with Chernobyl or even represent Fukushima Dai-ichi as being an even greater disaster than Chernobyl such as in the example here. Chernobyl released 10 times the radiation of Fukushima-Dai-ichi. Fukushima was no Chernobyl nor could it ever have been.

edit] High toxicity plutonium detected from Fukushima

Reports of plutonium put the fear into people such as MOX plutonium fuel used in Fukushima's Unit 3 reactor two million times more deadly than enriched uranium and plutonium From Fukushima Has Now Circled The Planet. The latter report is blatantly false. Plutonium is not volatile, and it is hard for it to escape from a nuclear reactor during a meltdown. Authorities have found plutonium in the Fukushimi Dai-ichi exclusion zone (radius 20km) but it does not appear to be a problem.[10] In Nature,[11] there were reports of finding plutonium outside the exclusion zone but only in trace amounts. It posed no health concern.

edit] One millionth of a gram of plutonium can kill you

In the point above there was an alarmist headline regarding the potent toxicity of plutonium. This is one of the big scare tactics used by anti-nuclear environmentalists. I have had a quote[12] that "one millionth of a gram of plutonium if inhaled or ingested will give you incurable cancer". To repeat a previous admonition, this is blatantly false. The correct amount that could give you cancer, curable and incurable, is about 0.14 mg, a 140 times more than a millionth of a gram. That applies only if the plutonium is inhaled. It will require much more if the plutonium is ingested because plutonium is not absorbed into the body efficiently when ingested. Only 0.04% of plutonium oxide is absorbed after ingestion. Plutonium while still very toxic is not, as anti-nuclear environmentalists would have it,[13] one of the deadliest materials known to man. The 0.14 mg figure places the toxicity of plutonium roughly equivalent with that of nerve gas. No human is known to have died because of inhaling or ingesting plutonium, and many people have measurable amounts of plutonium in their bodies. There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during the1940s, but to date, there has not been a single lung cancer among them. While it is not nice to be in close proximity to plutonium, the superlative hyperbole statements about its toxicity are not warranted. All this material is easily found on the web.[14]

edit] Mutant butterflies from Fukushima

Fig. 4: abnormality rate vs. ground radiation dose for Fukushima butterflies. Note the scale of the radiation doses.

Well this is not a hyped up story about the dangers of remnant radiation fields left behind by the Fukushima Dai-ichi incident. At least it was not hyped-up by anti-nuclear interests except for possibly Tim Mousseau.It has, however, played into the fears the public has had about Fukushima, and could affect the future of nuclear energy in Japan. The story is that significant mutations have been observed in the pale grass blue butterfly (), a common enough butterfly seen around Japan. The mutations seem correlated with the distance from the Fukushima Dai-ichi site and the radiation fields from where the butterflies were collected. These mutations have persisted and have become more common in the second and third generation of butterflies, which were raised in the lab far away from Fukushima. There was also a similar correlation in the mortality rates of the offspring of the collected butterflies at various stages in their life cycle. The research, which was done at the Universityof the Ryukyus in Okinawa, was published onlinebywhich is part of thepublishing group. The story was picked up by the media and spread around the world

These stories come straight from the scientists to the press. No embellishment from the anti-nuclear lobby was needed, although I presume that is coming. This is a dream come true for the anti-nuclear people, that being a supposedly clear case of radiological damage due to low level radiation fields. This is something they have always insisted is real, but for which there has been no clear evidence until perhaps now. It is a scientific surprise as was indicated by Joji Otaki, the researchers' spokesman.

"It has been believed that insects are very resistant to radiation. In that sense, our results were unexpected".

In that there lies a tale, for their findings seem to negate 67 years of dosimetry studies in the fields of Radiation Medicine and Health Physics. Timothy J. Jorgensen, PhD, MPH, of the Department of Radiation Medicine and the Health Physics Program at Georgetown University, Washington DC has attached a comment[17] directly to Ryukyus group's online publication severely criticizing the credibility of their results. He has said in part.

the decreased butterfly survival rates reported to be associated with proximity to Fukushima are claimed to be reproducible in the laboratory with external beam irradiation. This claim stretches credulity since it has long been established that insects, including butterflies (Order: Lepidoptera), are resistant to radiation effects...The concept that the low environmental radiation exposures (<15 mSv per year) that are being attributed to the Fukushima accident could be killing off butterflies, or any other insect species, is simply not credible. It should further be noted the external radiation doses that were used to reproduce the results from field-collected individuals were 100 times higher than any radiation doses in the field that could possibly be attributed to Fukushima. Thus, it can even be seen from the investigators' own laboratory experimental data that no measurable killing would be expected at the radiation doses that were encountered in the field.

There were other criticisms. The authors found that eclosion times could be extended by low level radiation fields, and that radiation could target specific developmental genes for mutation simultaneously in multiple individuals. Jorgensen states these findings are unbelievable. He further criticizes the researchers' field dosimetry procedures as being sloppy. The researchers' claim of seeing effects in low radiation fields, that Jorgensen found incredulous, is illustrated in fig. 4 which was taken from the paper. Note the horizontal scale. Any fields below 1μSv/h can be considered to be consistent with background radiation. Thus the authors see effects in fields consistent with background radiation. If life on earth was that sensitive to radiation the mutation rate would have killed off the propagation of almost all life on the planet. I am sure the authors did not mean this. Jorgensen concludes with

In conclusion, the results reported in this study should be considered highly suspect due to both their internal inconsistencies and their incompatibility with earlier and more comprehensive radiation biology research on insects. The study's central assertion is that artificial radionuclides from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant caused physiological and genetic damage to the pale grass blue butterfly. This statement is incredulous and goes well beyond anything that the study data can actually substantiate. Therefore, this study's sensational claims should not be used to scare the local population into the erroneous conclusion that their exposures to these relatively low environmental radiation doses put them at significant health risk.

The comment was uploaded on August 21, 2012. The Ryukyus group has yet to reply.[18] It suggests that this is the Ryukyus group's first venture into the field of radiation studies. Previously they were studying the effects of climate change on the Zizeeria maha[19] when the Fukushima incident offered them this plum research opportunity. Their surprising results now begs the question of why the effect of low level radiation had not been seen before by scores of previous researchers who specialized in radiation dosimetry. This is part of the scientific give and take. The weight of validating their study is up to the Ryukyus group or an independent group using a different approach. Perhaps something has been overlooked in the present study. Until then the view of the scientific consensus that Fukushima radiation would not have adversely affected the butterfly population will be held. Years of peer reviewed studies at variance with this present study are not going to be thrown out the window on the basis of this one maverick paper. Their evidence will have to be compelling beyond a reasonable doubt in order for Ryukyus group's findings to find general acceptance in the fields of Radiation Medicine and Health Physics. The paper does have the prestige of being published by the Nature[20] publishing group, but that does not insinuate that it has gone through the same vetting process as would a paper published in the magazine Nature.[21] This is Scientific Reports which has its own set of editors, its own set of editorial policies, its own set of procedures, and its own set of referees. It is only using the Nature publishing groups' distribution and technological expertise. Scientific Reports emphasis is on speedy publication. Perhaps, in this case, the emphasis on speed sacrificed a thorough vetting.

edit] Bluefin tuna tainted with Fukushima cesium-137

Fig. 5: Radioactive bluefin tuna

Radioactive bluefin tuna crossed the Pacific to US. This is another scary headline especially if you are a connoisseur of Sashimi. However buried inside this piece is the quote, "that (the radioactivity level) is still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments". This report demonstrates again, as was stated in ref. 2, that we can detect levels of radioactivity in such miniscule amounts that are far, far below any conceivable toxic risk. Thus it is not surprising, because of the Fukushima incident, to find increased radioactivity levels in such far ranging fish as tuna. In fact it could have been expected. When there were nuclear atmospheric bomb tests the fallout could be detected world-wide. Despite the claims of fringe groups, there was no detectable health risk. When nuclear reactors release measurable quantities of radioactivity, like at the Fukushima incident, it is not unreasonable that the radioactivity will be detectable thousands of kilometers from the source. I find that the surprise expressed by the researchers at finding 137Cs in the tuna is not warranted. Perhaps the expression should have been modified to "mild but not unexpected surprise".

Ascertaining from the link at the beginning of this section, the news media went wild with this story. How much 137Cs are we talking about? From the abstract of their article, the researchers measured 6.3 ± 1.5 Bq/kg. That is 6.3 radioactive disintegrations per second from 137Cs per kg of tuna. This tells us that in the whole of an adult tuna weighing 450 kg there would be 0.9 thousandths of a millionth of a gram of 137Cs. In the previous section, the environmentalists were overly worried about a millionth of a gram of plutonium. The amount of 137Cs here is 1,100 times smaller and that would not be ingested unless one ate the whole tuna, all 450 kg of it. What is the toxic risk? zero!



Note increase in fossil fuel production and the crash in nuclear power after 2010 Fig. 6: Electricity production in JapanNote increase in fossil fuel production and the crash in nuclear power after 2010

edit] Former Japanese PM condemns nuclear power as being too dangerous

It was also pointed out in the researchers' paper that even with the elevated doses from radioactive Cesium from Fukushima, they were 30 times less than that for Potassium-40 and 200 times less than that for Polonium-210 which are both naturally present in the tuna at all times. This was discussed in Atomic Insights . In contrast to this concern over radioactive Cesium,pointed out the very real hazard to public health regarding all the toxic chemicals released during the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. This hazard was fully documented in a similarly peer reviewed paper as was the radioactive Cesium study, but the media did not pick up on it. The fear of radioactivity in the public's mind is such that the media attracts more attention with an imaginary radiation hazard than with a real hazard from toxic chemicals.

Japan’s Former Leader Condemns Nuclear Power. Japan's former Prime Minister stated that the country should discard nuclear power as too dangerous, saying the Fukushima accident had pushed Japan to the brink of "national collapse." Perhaps, but only in the political sense, not in the physical sense. Because of the nuclear paranoia surrounding the Fukushima "disaster", Japan could have become too unstable to govern. I would think the catastrophe of the earthquake/tsunami would more qualify as bringing Japan to the brink of "national collapse." But no, it is the nuclear power plant and a 20km radius exclusion area where nobody died. He further warned that the politically powerful nuclear industry was trying to push Japan back toward nuclear power despite “showing no remorse” for the accident. Remorse? No one died! In the best interests of Japan it is necessary to get Japan's reactors back on line. Otherwise Japan will have to offload its nuclear power capacity onto fossil fuel plants pumping tons of CO 2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere.[22] These pollutants will kill a lot more people than the nuclear reactor emissions would have done, and the CO 2 exacerbates global warming. The nuclear industry lobby is advising the correct course of action.

edit] Section Summary

The one thing that is absent in the above stories is input from the nuclear industry and nuclear scientists. If present, they are mostly limited to letters-to-the-editor mixed in with know-nothing comments from the general public. I do not wish to knock the latter, but they are truly responding in ignorance to articles written in ignorance. It is the nature of the problem.

In the case of global climate change, the media reports on both sides of the issue, from the climate changers and from the deniers, despite the fact that the science is settled, climate change is happening, and the deniers do not have a leg to stand on. The media's mandate is to present both sides of an issue and not show a bias. Thus the ignorant or liars from the denialists get their fair share of media coverage, and perhaps in the case of Fox News all of it. In their stance, the media shows an ignorance of science, and inadvertently shows a bias by giving a totally false position a leg to stand on. It is like giving equal space to claims that the earth is flat.

But what happened to this mandate not to show bias in the case of nuclear power? Proponents of nuclear power have been relegated to the status of flat earthers. They do not have a voice because they are perceived to be wrong. It is the anti-nuclear interests whose script goes unchallenged. How did this come to pass? In this case, the denialists have won against the facts, observations, and measurements of science. Ignoring science, however, has its consequences.

In this case, the consequence of Fukushima will be damage to the public health and to the future. The damage will not be generated by radiation from Fukushima. The damage will be self inflicted. All the reactors in Japan and Germany are being shut down. There is naught to replace this source of energy but energy from fossil fuels. The megatons of pollutants and GHGs dumped into the atmosphere will kill people and speed up our onward rush to a global climate change catastrophe. What a disaster! What about levels of mercury found in fish due to the burning of fossil fuels for energy. Is not this more of a concern than finding excess radioactivity in Bluefin tuna? Because mercury levels have to be determined by chemical tests, means that the mercury concentration is millions of times larger than any radioactive cesium concentration. Compare the Fukushima incident to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Compare the Fukushima incident to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Is there any real comparison? The only animals that died in the Fukushima incident were those that starved to death because their owners fled the scene. Did Exxon and BP incidents shut down the oil industry? No they did not. Did they lead to a rush of activity to replace our dependence on oil? No they did not. Why is this so? Here we are rushing ahead to a global climate catastrophe, and we are shutting down one means that could avert it. Are we crazy? Is it necessary to answer that question?

edit] supplementary material regarding anti-nuclear scare tactics

edit] The Facts

Fig. 7: Risk to public health in terms of years of life lost per TWh (years/TWh) for various technologies producing electricity

2

So what are the facts? In the light of Fukushima Dai-ichi, let us deal with the most pressing concern first. What is the danger of nuclear power to the general public? Presently with all the excessive over reaction to Fukushima Dai-ichi, nuclear power is regarded with an irrational fear. The fear is so great that the German Chancellor is closing down all German nuclear power plants by 2020, and Japan risks political instability by starting up its nuclear power plants again. It is necessary to put these reactions and other reactions aside and look at the real objective dangers. Look at figure 7. This is an analysis from Krewitt,on the public health risk from generating electricity using various technologies. The study was limited to the European experience, but it is hard to see how it would greatly differ elsewhere. It states the risk to the public in terms of years of life lost per Terrawatt hour (years/TWh)of energy generated. The results shown are for the analysis of each technology along its entire pathway, from construction to mining to production to decommissioning. The big winner (loser) here is coal, 138 years of life lost for each TWh generated. Nuclear is only 25.1 years (see note 1 in this section). Only wind is lower in public risk, 2.7 years. The big renewable favourite, solar, clocks in at 58 years. Why is this so high? Well the solar cell industry uses a lot of exotic materials in its construction and disposal stages.On examination of figure 7 there is but one conclusion, shutting down nuclear power plants to calm the fear the public has for nuclear energy is completely crazy. The only way presently to make up for the loss of nuclear energy to the power grid is a heavier reliance on fossil fuels. Ironically this inane action will result in a big increase in the risk to public health, more than 5-fold if coal is used.This is a stupid action that ranks up there with refusing to reduce COemissions even though there is ample evidence that failure to do so is bringing on a global warming catastrophe. This action was brought about by alarmist misinformation spread by anti-nuclear environmental concerns with an agenda to fan nuclear fears and fed to the public by a compliant media looking for apocalyptic attention grabbing headlines.





Fig. 8: total cost of producing energy per kWh for different technologies

Another drawback made about nuclear energy is its cost. Critics have stated that cost of running a nuclear power plant is many times greater than running a conventional power plant and is heavily subsidized. The latter remark is like the kettle calling the pot black because the fossil fuel industry is heavily subsidized itself. However let us look at the evidence. It is shown in figure 8. These are levelized costs. That is the entire life cycle costs from construction to decommissioning, and from mining, and in the case of nuclear, to waste storage. It shows that the costs of nuclear electricity production is comparable to coal and cheaper than the cleaner GHG alternative, natural gas,and much cheaper than the renewable favourite, solar. This result is quite robust as it is the same over a number of studies.The effective cost was backed up by James Rogers, Chairman, President & CEO, of Duke Energy, USAwhen the notion that nuclear power was too expensive to be considered as a future power source was put forth. He concluded his remarks with

"Nuclear power must be part of any future solution".

Thus with Nuclear being safe and cost effective, why are not more plants being built?

An aside should be made here. The costs of producing electricity from fossil fuels does not account for the health costs to the general public as shown in figure 7, or the destruction of human infrastructure and the environment through the process of global warming. Indeed the cost to human civilization in the form of extreme weather events caused by global warming is staggering. We need only to think of the floods, storms, and droughts of recent years like Southern England 2014, Hurricane Sandy 2012, and the great ongoing drought in California. If a tax were placed on carbon in order to account for the cost of dumping GHG into atmosphere, the cost of producing electricity with fossil fuels would be decidedly uneconomical.

2 emissions per kWh for different power pruducing technologies [30] Fig. 9: Relative COemissions per kWh for different power pruducing technologies

2

2

2

Figure 9 shows nuclear energy's trump card. Plotted are the ranges of COemissions for electricity producing technologies throughout each technology's entire life-cycle. Nuclear has the lowest value of grams of COemitted per kWh. It even beats solar. The current worst emissions technology is coal with natural gas, the fossil fuel industry's so-called solution to the emissions problem, running at about half the value for coal. Oil emissions are not shown, but they are, of course, in the same range as coal and natural gas. Any energy producing technology that produces COemissions or any other GHG gas emission as part of its process of producing energy is not a solution to stop global climate change. There is no such thing as clean coal, clean gas, or clean oil. They are all dirty. The only way that the worst scenarios of global climate change can be prevented is to shutdown all GHG emitting sources of energy. Converting from coal to natural gas does not alleviate the problem of global climate change. We are at the stage where it makes no sense to spend prodigious amounts of capital on infrastructure for the fossil fuel economy. The capital should go into renewables and nuclear as fast as possible.Anything spent on fossil fuel infrastructure should be of necessity only, to make up the difference, if any, between demand and what renewables and nuclear can provide.



It is claimed by anti-nuclear groups that nuclear power plants pollute the environment with emissions of radioactivity from its operations. This is not to be confused with emissions from accidents which is discussed in the next section, but refers to emissions during the normal course of operations. These emissions from any nuclear power plant are small. Indeed, there are claims that, contrary to expectation, it is the coal fired plants that put more radioactivity into the environment. The claim is backed by a Scientific American publication[32] and an Oakridge National Laboratory review.[33] Both articles claim that the population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants. The Oakridge piece has impressive data and figures to back up the claim. Burton Richter, the noble prize winner in physics for co-discovering the J/Ψ particle, does not mention this factor of 100 in his book, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors,[34] (see note 4) but has the relative radiation dose to persons living near such plants. For a Nuclear plant (1 GW), the dose per year is 0.04 μSv.[35] For a coal-fired plant (1GW), the dose per year is 0.03 μSv. The natural radiation background is 4 mSv per year, 100,000 times expected dose from a nuclear power plant. Thus even if the coal-fired plant dose was a 100 times higher, neither form of power plant releases enough radiation to be a health concern. Seeing these figures, it objectively makes no sense for the public to oppose the construction of a Nuclear plant to a more conventional fossil fuel plant.

Hence considering the health risks to the public, costs, GHG emissions, radioactivity emissions, and readiness to fill the rising demand for energy, it is a no-brainer that nuclear energy should be the hands down obvious choice. We should see nuclear reactor plants being built everywhere rising up to meet the need. Yet it is not happening. Why? The answer is the fear the public has of nuclear power aided and abetted by environmentalists absolutely committed to shutting down nuclear power completely, the environmental movement's equivalent of global climate change deniers. Look, our planet is headed for a climate change catastrophe. We need to eliminate all power that generates greenhouse gases and air pollution and do so quickly. This comes at the same time as the population continues to rise and energy demands rise faster. If we are to survive this, and I have my doubts under any scenario, we will need all the help we can get and this includes nuclear power. Nuclear power does not pollute the air with green house gases. To turn our back on this nuclear life line is the equivalent of committing seppuku.

edit] notes

It is not apparent if this risk figure, 25.1 years of life lost/TWh, for nuclear power specifically accounts for deaths from the Chernobyl incident. The paper stated that health risks from beyond-design accidents were analyzed. It mentioned analysis included accounting for the most severe accident which might lead to 10,000 fatal cancers.[36] Hence presumably the Chernobyl experience is in the figures. It would make sense since the paper was published after Chernobyl, and the analysis would be fatally flawed if Chernobyl was not considered. One should note that the years/TWh for accidents was only 0.015, a negligible amount. Why is the number for accidents so low? See note 2 for a discussion. The years/TWh figure for nuclear power does not include any account for potential loss of life from the Fukushima Dai-ichi incident. Burton Richter[37] rectified this oversight. He used the estimate of 130 deaths world-wide made by J. E. Ten Hoeve and M. Z. Jacobson[38] (important, see note 3) due to radiation exposure from the Fukushima Dai-ichi incident to correct this figure. He turned this death estimate into 4810 years of life lost. If you divide by the total energy output of Fukushima-Dai-ichi, 898 TWh, you get 5.35 years/TWh. Burton added this value to Krewitt's 25.1 to get 30.5, still lower than natural gas's 42. However this is being too generous. Fukushima Dai-ichi was the only accident since Japan started to produce electricity from nuclear energy. Hence you must divide by the total energy output for Japan from nuclear sources, 6097 TWh. The figure now becomes 0.79 years/TWh. However this is still not right. This figure must be based on world wide experience. You must divide by the world's total energy output from nuclear sources about 74200 TWh, and the ratio becomes 0.065 years/TWh, approaching insignificance. However on this basis, Krewitt et al.s 0.015 would appear low. It is hard to comment, not knowing the details of the analysis. However changing Krewitt et al. value upward by even a factor of a thousand makes the years/TWh for nuclear still lower than that for natural gas. The H-J paper was completely trashed by Mark Lynas who criticized their using the LNT model to predict the number of deaths and the use of an atmospheric transport model which is not really intended for the purpose used in their paper. The LNT model has now been largely discounted by the health physics community (see footnote 4 on Nussbaum below), and the world distributed radioactivity levels predicted by H-J were far below normal background everywhere except Japan. Lynas accused the authors of trying to hype up fear regarding the Fukushima incident, although Richter gave the pair full marks for doing a good job. Lynas noted that more people died evacuating the Fukushima restricted zone than were killed by the nuclear incident. The number killed by the incident was zero. The Scientific American and Oakridge paper may not be at odds with Richter's figures. They may be the result of different measurements. Richter does not go into details about his figures. The source for these figures was NCRP Report No. 160, Ionizing Radiation Exposure of the Population of the United States. However the report is not available unless you are ready to part with $125.

edit] Nuclear Fear

Nuclear Fear or the fear that public regards nuclear power has become a great concern of the nuclear and particle physics community. In the past, for myself personally as a nuclear physicist, I was not too concerned about the matter. The impact of global climate change had not really been appreciated, and nuclear energy, frankly, was really somewhat boring. The science behind nuclear energy was mostly done and besides there was a lot more interesting things to do in the fields of nuclear and particle physics. There were the standard statements regarding nuclear safety spoken by the technologists who were in the field of nuclear energy, and they were completely demolished by the environmental opposition. Well, if people did not want to avail themselves of a perfectly good source of energy, then too bad for them, was my attitude. I preferred doing interesting experiments, and I believe I was not alone in this attitude amongst my colleagues.

However Global Climate Change has come to the forefront. Climate Scientists have determined that CO 2 and other GHG emissions from energy generated by fossil fuels threatens to upset the global climate system. This will lead, if left unabated, to major flooding of continental coast lines, more violent weather, more rain, more droughts, famine, and a major extinction event. The cost in human lives alone could be in the billions. At the same time the growth of the human population and industrial expansion is pushing this change to a faster and faster pace. Reluctantly scientists, if I am any example, much against their natural inclinations, are being forced to speak out and enter the political fray. Climate scientists speak on the need to curtail GHG emissions and nuclear physicists speak on the need to replace fossil fuel power plants with nuclear. The former are attacked on the right by global climate change deniers, and the latter are attacked on the left by the anti-nuclear environmentalists. Meanwhile the government and public is held hostage in a state of confusion, paranoia, and inaction while global climate change accelerates. Even the record hot year of 2012 in the continental U.S.A. and the fact that 9 of 10 hottest years in history[39] have occurred since 2002 have not led to any significant action on climate change.

Besides myself, who are the physicists now speaking out against nuclear fear and in support for nuclear energy? Here, for example, are three:

Paddy Regan: [40] It’s Time To Stop Being Scared Of The Atom

It’s Time To Stop Being Scared Of The Atom Burton Richter: Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Climate Change and Energy in the 21 st Century , Cambridge University Press, 2010. There was a reference to this book in the last section. (see ref 32). Richter is a Nobel prize winner in physics.

, Cambridge University Press, 2010. There was a reference to this book in the last section. (see ref 32). Richter is a Nobel prize winner in physics. Spencer R. Weart: The Rise of Nuclear Fear, Harvard University Press, 2012. This was the physicist who wrote The Discovery of Global Warming. It was featured in my article on global climate change.

The scientists have been joined by prominent environmentalists who finally saw the sense in what scientists were saying:

George Monbiot: Japan nuclear crisis should not carry weight in atomic energy debate. George reminds us that despite Fukushima nuclear is much preferable than fossil fuels.

Mark Lynas: In Defense of Nuclear Power

James Lovelock: He invented the Gaia hypothesis which postulates that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy. Since 2004 he has strongly advocated that environmentalists support Nuclear Energy. His position is set forth in these books The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity , Penguin Books, 2007 The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning , Penguin Books, 2009



The facts do not impress some people. David Suzuki[41] remains a undeterred opponent of Nuclear Energy as does Helen Caldicott.[42]

[43] Fig. 10: Number of nuclear reactors. Notice that number of reactors in 1979 plus the reactors on order equal the number of operating reactors in 1988. This number has not changed significantly since then. This was the effect of TMI.

edit] Three Mile Island (TMI), March 28, 1979

What has driven the fear of nuclear energy? There are four main reasons, the image of nuclear bombs and the nuclear arms race, the fear of cancers caused by nuclear radiation, the sequestering of nuclear waste, and the three accidents that have have happened at nuclear power plants. Of the four, it has been the last item which has mostly driven the fear. There have been three nuclear accidents, Three Mile Island, Fukushima Dai-ichi, and Chernobyl. I will deal here only with these nuclear accidents and along the way touch on the other three reason for the public's nuclear fear.

This hardly deserves to be called a nuclear accident in that the endangerment to the public health was zero. The extra dose received by someone living within 10 miles of TMI was 80μSv. The normal yearly dose from background sources is 50 times that number, 4mSv.[44] However TMI was a great economic disaster. It cost the operator of the plant $1 billion for the cleanup, the plant had to be shut down permanently with loss of revenue and jobs. However the real cost was to the nuclear industry, to the U.S., and to the world. The anti-nuclear environmentalists used this opportunity to mislead the world about the impacts of radiation on human health and an unquestioning press spread this message to the public. The nuclear industry received a black eye from which it has never recovered and has been held in disfavour ever since. No new nuclear power plants were ordered in the U.S. after the TMI incident, and many reactors on order were cancelled. The nuclear industry came to a virtual standstill (see figure 10). The year of 1979 was a perfect time to see a rapid increase in the use of nuclear power. It was a perfect time to supplant the use of fossil fuel generators as the major source of electrical power. If that had happened the global climate crises would not be what it is today, and the nuclear industry would have the resources and political power, with the help of the renewables, to oversee the elimination of the remaining dependence on fossil fuel power generation. Instead the fossil fuel interests have captured almost a monopoly of electrical generation and their political influence is such that it will be almost impossible to turn them off. The environmentalists need to examine their actions and admit that, yes, they must accept their share of the responsibility for the global climate change situation and the almost inevitable catastrophe that is coming.

edit] Fukushima Dai-ichi, March 11, 2011

On March 11, 2011 a magnitude 9.0(M w ) earthquake and tsunami struck Japan and killed 15,867 people. No matter how headline attention grabbing was this event, media attention was soon switched over to the tsunami caused nuclear reactor accident at Fukushima Dai-ichi which killed no one. The nuclear reactors, which safely survived the earthquake and shutdown as programed, experienced a lost of cooling as the generators to run the cooling pumps were destroyed due to being fouled by sea water from the tsunami that flooded the nuclear plant's basement where the generators were installed. Lack of cooling led to a meltdown of the Fukushima reactors and a significant discharge of radioactivity into the environment. Such was the nuclear fear in the public's imagination that the real catastrophe, the destruction and lives lost in the tsunami, faded into the background. The drama behind the meltdown was played out in a PBS Frontline documentary[45], a gripping drama which had nuclear plant workers and many outside workers put their lives on the line to save the situation. The documentary is probably a fair representation of the fear and anxiety of the situation at the moment it took place, and the apprehension that things could go very wrong and spread devastation nation wide if not world wide. However it lacks perspective. It did not at the end present the true significance of Fukushima as a "disaster" in the large scheme of things. Even though it seemed like it at the time, Fukushima was never the nuclear apocalypse that would spread devastation far and wide. In the end there was an evacuation, a 20km exclusion zone, but no one died.[46] There were no injuries, and the radioactivity released was at most 1/5th that of Chernobyl. Compare this to the devastation of the oil industry's Deepwater Horizon disaster where there were 11 deaths, numerous injuries, there was far more than 20km of coastline contaminated not to speak of the offshore water, large numbers of wildlife killed, and today there are still repercussions. Amazingly Deepwater Horizon did not lead to a shutdown of the oil industry, but Fukushima did lead to a shutdown of the nuclear industry in Japan and Germany even though Deepwater Horizon maybe had the slight edge in the catastrophe department. The difference was irrational nuclear fear.

To put things into perspective:

On Mar. 16, 2011 Dr. Sanjay Gupta told Anderson Cooper on CNN in Tokyo that the 0.002mSv dose he picked up in the last 24 hr. was 20 times normal. This is 0.7mSv per year or 0.08 μ Sv/h. This is only 24% of the world wide average for normal background and happens to be about normal for Tokyo. This is the spread of nuclear panic by news anchors who don't bother to check the basic facts. [47]

Sv/h. This is only 24% of the world wide average for normal background and happens to be about normal for Tokyo. This is the spread of nuclear panic by news anchors who don't bother to check the basic facts. As stated the Tokyo radiation background is around 0.09 μ Sv/h and is abnormally low. It tripled in the Fukushima incident to around 0.27 μ Sv/h and decayed back within the month to more normal levels. Everybody freaked out. The Italians, for example, recommended that their citizens in Tokyo return home to where the background is more like the global average, 0.34 μ Sv/h. [48]

Sv/h and is abnormally low. It tripled in the Fukushima incident to around 0.27 Sv/h and decayed back within the month to more normal levels. Everybody freaked out. The Italians, for example, recommended that their citizens in Tokyo return home to where the background is more like the global average, 0.34 Sv/h. Here is what Jeff Rubin wrote in The End of Growth , [49] a recent best seller on the economy with coming advent of high oil prices. He is discussing the collapse of the nuclear industry after Fukushima. Global warming may pose far greater dangers down the road than a reactor meltdown, but nothing scares people more than radiation. And not just in Japan, which suffered nuclear horrors during the Second World War. Halfway around the world, people in Boston were measuring for trace fallout in rainwater. On the west coast of North America, folks from Los Angles to Vancouver worried that radioactive discharge would wash ashore from thousands of miles away. [50] Ships were diverted from Tokyo Bay to avoid possible radiation exposure. Even the United States Navy ordered vessels to redeploy to the leeward side of the Japanese islands. Jeff Rubin essentially writes off nuclear energy in the foreseeable future, not because it is not viable, but because of the irrational fear people have for it. The same can be said for the next book in the Limits to Growth series, 2052, A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years , by Jørgen Randers.

, a recent best seller on the economy with coming advent of high oil prices. He is discussing the collapse of the nuclear industry after Fukushima. Jeff Rubin essentially writes off nuclear energy in the foreseeable future, not because it is not viable, but because of the irrational fear people have for it. The same can be said for the next book in the series, , by Jørgen Randers. On Mar. 16, 2011 it was reported that workers were pulled from the Fukushima plant with only a skeleton crew left behind because of the high radiation levels. This act was dramatized in the PBS special. The ones left behind became known as the Fukushima 50. Radiation levels were reported to be 11mSv/h in the control room. [51] This is the equivalent of a CT scan per hour. It would take 36hrs, at this level, before for the threshold signs of the onset of radiation sickness would be reached. It would take 182hrs.(7.5 days) before a possible lethal dose is received. [52] Long before the expiry of these times the levels were brought down and the other workers came back. These numbers should put the risks faced by the Fukushima 50 in perspective. I would not personally wish to be in such radiation fields. The Fukushima 50 were very brave to remain behind. However, at the same time, even though they put their lives on the line, it was not, as the PBS documentary seemed to imply, a high probability suicide mission.

This is the equivalent of a CT scan per hour. It would take 36hrs, at this level, before for the threshold signs of the onset of radiation sickness would be reached. It would take 182hrs.(7.5 days) before a possible lethal dose is received. Long before the expiry of these times the levels were brought down and the other workers came back. These numbers should put the risks faced by the Fukushima 50 in perspective. I would not personally wish to be in such radiation fields. The Fukushima 50 were very brave to remain behind. However, at the same time, even though they put their lives on the line, it was not, as the PBS documentary seemed to imply, a high probability suicide mission. At one point in the PBS documentary, a figure of 67mSv/h was yelled out, just before work on turning a valve to vent steam building up in the reactors was to begin. Workers had to manually turn the valve (the power was out on the valve motors because of the tsunami). It had to be done otherwise the reactor vessel would explode. Each worker was allowed 17 min. each. They succeeded. The dose for each worker would be 19mSv, which is about the dose of a full body CT scan. The maximum yearly allowed dose for an atomic energy worker is 50mSv. It was an excessive single dose, but not life threatening. [53] μ Sv/h Fig. 11: Background radiation dose rate from locations in and around the Fukushima Prefecture. It is not stated whether any of these measurements are from inside the forbidden zones. The world-wide average background rate is 0.34Sv/h

Also in the documentary, Firemen came to the rescue. [54] They had an hour in 100mSv/h fields to lay a hose to pump seawater onto spent fuel rods in settling ponds. Maximum dose would be 100 mSv, twice an atomic radiation worker's yearly dose, if they had stayed in those fields for the full hour. Again this was an excessive one time dose, but not life threatening. After all it was an emergency. [55]

They had an hour in 100mSv/h fields to lay a hose to pump seawater onto spent fuel rods in settling ponds. Maximum dose would be 100 mSv, twice an atomic radiation worker's yearly dose, if they had stayed in those fields for the full hour. Again this was an excessive one time dose, but not life threatening. After all it was an emergency. Fig. 11 shows radiation dose rates for locations in and around Fukushima. They are taken from a brochure of the International Medical Corps. [56] I think these tables were made for shock value. However knowing that the global average background radiation dose rate is about 0.34 μ Sv/h, it is hard for me to get upset about the dose rates I see here. Some of these figures are even below the average global rate! The long term effects on public health caused by these doses will be nil. The brochure mentioned on the first page that 1,900 were killed and another 1,600 were injured within the Prefecture from the tsunami. In addition nearly 190,000 residential buildings were damaged, 17,000 of which were completely destroyed. Also an estimated 17,700 public buildings, businesses, and other non-residential units were damaged. After this first page the brochure almost completely ignores the tsunami disaster and deals almost exclusively with the Fukushima Dai-ichi incident, an incident in which no one died, and an incident in which no buildings, outside of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, were destroyed. Such is the power of nuclear fear.

I think these tables were made for shock value. However knowing that the global average background radiation dose rate is about 0.34 Sv/h, it is hard for me to get upset about the dose rates I see here. Some of these figures are even below the average global rate! The long term effects on public health caused by these doses will be nil. The brochure mentioned on the first page that 1,900 were killed and another 1,600 were injured within the Prefecture from the tsunami. In addition nearly 190,000 residential buildings were damaged, 17,000 of which were completely destroyed. Also an estimated 17,700 public buildings, businesses, and other non-residential units were damaged. After this first page the brochure almost completely ignores the tsunami disaster and deals almost exclusively with the Fukushima Dai-ichi incident, an incident in which no one died, and an incident in which no buildings, outside of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, were destroyed. Such is the power of nuclear fear. Finally George Monbriot assessed Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster and decided if this was the worst that could happen, he was all in favour of nuclear energy. Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power.

Two things should be clear from the above list. First is that the public's reaction to the nuclear incident has been blown all out of proportion with respect to the real magnitude of the danger from the event.[57]. Second, maximum radiation levels, individuals are legislated to receive are orders of magnitude below doses that can actually cause measurable harm. The individual's legislated doses are extremely small so that there is not one iota of a possibility that the amount of radiation received will cause any harm. The difference between the legislated dose and and a dose that will actually cause harm is vast. This has been done on purpose to protect radiation workers. But it is clear that individuals can receive much higher doses than the legislated ones and not be adversely affected. Unfortunately, in the public's mind, the legislated doses are equivalent to dangerous doses, and the hysteria that greets readings slightly above makes a reasoned response to a nuclear incident like Fukushima almost impossible to manage what with the anti-nuclear interests sounding the tocsins.

Nature published a summary of the radiation assessments done by WHO and UNSCEAR on the doses received by the Japanese populace and radiation workers.[58] The highest doses of just over 600 mSv was received by 2 radiation workers. While people start to show signs of radiation poisoning at 400 mSv, neither worker here has shown any ill effects. Severe radiation poisoning is usually not manifest with doses under 2000 mSv or 2 Sv. There were 167 workers and contractors who received doses over 100 mSv,[59] the minimum dose known to be associated with a slight cancer risk. No cancers were reported, but it is still early. However for all the furor over radiation exposures, no one died, no one was injured, no one suffered any symptoms of radiation sickness, and while there may be some increase in cancer risk that may not be detectable statistically.[60] The risk to the roughly 140,000 civilians who had been living within a few tens of kilometres of the plant seems even lower. Most residents received doses of less than 10 mSv, the dose of a CAT scan. Some received doses of 50 mSv, the yearly limit for radiation workers. No adverse effects are expected from this dose because, as stated above, allowable legislated doses are are orders of magnitude below doses that can actually cause measurable harm. A far greater health risk may come from the psychological stress created by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. The greatest loser in this "disaster" seems to have been the government and the authorities which the public no longer trust due to the mixed messages sent out during the incident.

The lost of confidence in the government and nuclear fear was the subject of an earlier article in Nature, "Japan's nuclear crisis: Fukushima's legacy of fear".[61] The fear seems more disastrous than anything that could have been physically attributable to the Fukushima "disaster". A couple of quotes:

"Since 11 March, people haven't trusted scientists who receive funding from the government."

Outside observers, and even some critics in Japan, are increasingly worried that the loss of public trust, together with politicians' desperation to regain it, could undermine rational decision-making about clean-up and resettlement. At stake are the futures of more than 100,000 residents who have been displaced from the area around the plant, and billions of dollars in economic activity across the region.

Having no radiation dose standards in place in order to meet a nuclear emergency, the Japanese government was forced to raise the legal dose limits during the emergency in order to bring the reactors under control. In doing so the government appeared to be cavalier with the public safety and lost credibility instantly. Such is the price of lacking foresight. Now the government in an effort to gain back the trust are imposing super-strict and completely unnecessary safety measures such as:

guaranteeing to bring radiation doses from the accident down below 1 mSv per year. This is completely superfluous as the average world wide background dose is about 4 mSv per year and anything below 10 mSv per year could be considered normal.

the health ministry is planning to lower the safe level for 137Cs in food from 500 becquerels per kilogram (Bq/kg)[62] to 100 Bq/kg, a completely useless move as some food will exceed 100 Bq/kg due to residual contamination from nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s and 1960s. This contamination is not from Fukushima, and people have been eating this food for years.

Thus in the name of safety the Japanese government could be keeping people from returning to their homes for years all in the name of gaining back their trust. Our friend Mousseau[63] again seems to be contributing to the overall panic with more disturbing bird studies showing a third of the bird population around Fukushima has gone.[64] However there again appears to be questions regarding his statistics.[65] It is unfortunate that the public and government are so ill informed about radiation that a more reasoned response to the Fukushima Dai-ichi incident is simply not possible. A proper response would involve far less expense and human anxiety. Fear and ignorance is bringing a stop to the generation of nuclear energy and transferring the production of this energy to fossil fuels which will cause far more deaths, human suffering, environmental destruction, and expense than nuclear energy ever could.

edit] Chernobyl, April 26, 1986

Fig. 12: A modern travelog to the forbidden zone and other polluted places by Andrew Blackwell

This is the mother of all nuclear disasters. In the beginning events start out like an episode of the Keystone Cops directed by Mack Sennett. For on the evening of April 25, 1986 some engineers were trying out a little experiment at Chernobyl. We do not know for sure what they were trying to do. Conflicting testimony, and various logbook interpretations, read like a nuclear version of Rashomon. Hence there are several versions of this story, but I like the one here.[66]

The little experiment that they were trying was to see if the latent heat of the reactor could produce enough steam to drive the site's turbines to fulfill the reactor's electricity needs. To do this they disabled most of the reactor's safety systems. Yes, you heard right. They disabled most of the reactor's safety systems because they thought they could fly the reactor manually, like landing a 747 on visual in a fog. Well the reactor taught them a thing or two about the speed of their reflexes when the reactor's temperature shot sky high and they couldn't insert the control rods fast enough. The steam in the reactor exploded the building exposing the core to the open world. This Soviet design did not have a containment vessel like all western reactors are mandated to have, and as a result the contents of the core were distributed far and wide. The carbon moderator caught fire and a plume of radioactive smoke, dust, and steam belched the stuff high into the atmosphere. Meanwhile the remaining fuel melted and sunk into the basement. The engineers must have sat there horrified at the calamity they caused. It would would be fitting to say that the radiation field of 300 Sv/h beside the reactor core soon put an end to their misery, and that they all earned that most prized award for stupidity, the Darwin Award.

However the operators all saw the dawn of the next day. If they had all stayed in the control room which had fields of 30-50 mSv/h, about 4 times that of Fukushima, all would have perhaps survived. But some, maybe most, or all of them rushed out to see what they could do about the situation. They did so without protective clothing and some of them succumbed to radiation sickness about a month or two later. Wherein the Keystone comedy turned into a tragedy. Aleksandr Fyodorovich Akimov, Chernobyl shift leader at the no. 4 reactor, led an effort to restart cooling water into the reactor. He died May 10, 1986 after receiving a dose of 15 Sv as did Leonid Fedorovych Toptunov, who helped him. The latter died May 14, 1986. Firefighters arrived on the scene. One of the first in was lieutenant Vladimir Pavlovych Pravik. He went to the roof and attempted to put out the fire there and in the reactor core. He was followed by Vasyli Ivanovych Ignatenko. Both later died from their radiation dose. Pavik on May 11, 1986 and Ignatenko on May 13, 1986. Both men as well as others rushed to their efforts without protective clothing. Leonid Petrovich Telyatnikov, head of the plant fire department, received 4 Sv of radiation and survived. So did Anatoly Stepanovich Dyatlov, the supervisor of the little experiment. Receiving a dose of 4 Sv is usually fatal but can be survived if treated promptly. Telyatnikov died Dec. 2, 2004 from cancer at age 53. Dyatlov died Dec. 13, 1995 of heart failure at age 64. Who can say if these last two deaths were caused by the radiation doses received. Nikolai Fomin, chief engineer of the whole shebang, was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for gross violation of safety regulations. He was released shortly after the start of his sentence because of a nervous breakdown. He is still alive.

To date WHO has assigned less than 50 deaths to be directly attributed to Chernobyl.[67] This includes 28 or 31[68] deaths from acute radiation poisoning, the four who died in the helicopter cash while putting out the fire, the two that died in the initial explosion, the 9 deaths from thyroid cancer,[69] the film maker Volodimir Mikitovich Shevchenko, who died from cancer Mar 29, 1987 less than a year after filming that harrowing night,[70] plus Leonid Petrovich Telyatnikov and Anatoly Stepanovich Dyatlov mentioned previously. As stated before, it would be hard to hang the deaths of Telyatnikov and Dyatlov on Chernobyl.

That's it! No more deaths can be specifically assigned to the accident at Chernobyl. WHO said that eventually there could be an estimated 4000 deaths due to the radiation exposure to the emergency workers and the local residents in the most contaminated areas over the period of their entire lifetimes. That is from a sample of 600,000 people. Since a quarter of the population succumbs to spontaneous cancer not caused by Chernobyl radiation, the 4000 "extra" deaths from Chernobyl will represent just a 2.7% increase in the cancer rate. This will be impossible to measure! The indigenous cancer rate probably shows more random fluctuations than this for various population samples. In other words, if there had been no Chernobyl and these 600,000 people were magically given doses equivalent to what they received from Chernobyl without them being aware of receiving such a dose, then the extra 4000 deaths from cancer, if they did occur, would be completely unremarkable and would have passed by completely unnoticed. Everything would have appeared to have been normal. To be blunt, the number of expected extra deaths due to Chernobyl radiation is statistically compatible with zero.

However, these extra 4000 estimated deaths, have been estimated by the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model, a model which, as noted above, is highly suspect for low level radiation doses. It is this model because there is no other way 4000 deaths could have been projected on the basis of the radiation doses reported for this sample of 600,000 people. For the liquidators, some 200,000, who were the most highly exposed, the total average summed dose from Chernobyl over the last 20 years is somewhat greater than 100 mSv.[71] The normal background dose in the same time period is about 60 mSv and can be as high as 200 mSv. Both numbers are considered to be normal. An atomic radiation worker is allowed to receive 1000 mSv in this same time period. The danger to the atomic radiation worker is considered to be negligible. The other 400,000 people in this Chernobyl sample received considerably smaller doses than 100 mSv. Nothing but a LNT model would project 4000 cancer deaths with these levels of radiation.[72] The radiation doses are low and on the same level as the normal background radiation. To say that an extra 4000 deaths are expected with these doses, I find completely ludicrous. The Chernobyl accident is responsible for some 50 deaths, and that probably is that.[73][74]

In no sense did Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences or the New York Academy of Sciences commission this work; nor by its publication do we intend to independently validate the claims made in the translation or in the original publications cited in the work. The translated volume has not been peer reviewed by the New York Academy of Sciences, or by anyone else.

Yablokov's assessment for the mortality from Chernobyl fallout of about one million (!) before 2004 (Subsection 7.7) puts this book in a range of rather science fiction than science.

The WHO results of 50 deaths and a projection of a future 4000 deaths was not greeted with enthusiasm by anti-nuclear environmentalists. Maybe the magnitude of the figures were not gruesome enough to support nuclear fear. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that the number of deaths world-wide from the Chernobyl accident would be 27,000 based on the same LNT model. Again if this estimate is based on the same doses seen in the WHO report, I find this finding implausible. Another study funded by Greenpeace has 200,000 additional deaths. The German affiliate of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) said that 10,000 people were affected by thyroid cancer and an additional 50,000 cases are expected in the future. By far the most superlative effort was a Russian publicationby Yablokov AV, Nesterenko VB, and Nesterenko AV, translated and published in 2009 in theIt states there will be 985,000 premature deaths as a result of Chernobyl. If the radiation doses reported by WHO are correct, this figure stretches the bounds of all credulity. However the book being published by the New York Academy of Sciences gave the impression it was a peer-reviewed tract by a prestigious scientific society. George Monbiot made inquiries, and said the New York Academy of Sciences offered him this explanation:Furthermore Mikhail I. Balonov of the Institute of Radiation Hygiene, St. Petersburg, Russia gave this scathing criticism and essentially trashed the whole book. His conclusion wasHowever exaggerated distorted figures do not deter prominent anti nuclear activists such as Helen Caldicott. She uses the exaggerated 1,000,000 Chernobyl fatalities, without shame, as a cudgel to strike nuclear fear into the heart of her audiences.





More fundamentally, it’s just hard to accept how little is known with any confidence about the disaster’s effects, whether on people or animals. And it’s hard to accept that the Chernobyl children may be the children of regular misfortune, not of nuclear fallout. That the accident’s most traumatic effects may have been social and psychiatric, rather than radiological. That Chernobyl – and humankind’s wretchedness – may not quite have lived up to our expectations.

There probably were health benefits for zone squatters (from context of quote it was suggested that the radiation was actually beneficial), but surely they came from living in a little cottage in the countryside, where they grew their own (albeit contaminated) vegetables and breathed clean (if radioactive)air, instead of being evacuated to a crappy apartment in Kiev...that perhaps around here, quality of life just trumped radiation dose.

The anti-nuclear activists are doing no favours to the people in the Chernobyl area by exaggerating the impact of the radiation. Almost every sniffle now in the affected populace is attributed to the effect from radiation. Almost every death in the affected area is attributed to radiation. Radiation is blamed for all their woes. It seems the population has forgotten we are all mortal and in the normal course of time we all die from causes other than radiation. WHO labels the mental health impact of Chernobyl as "the largest public health problem created by the accident" and partially attributes this damaging psychological impact to a lack of accurate information.These problems manifest as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state. Andrew Blackwell who wrote an interesting travelog(see figure 12) summed it up rather nicely.Actually the people who stubbornly refused to be relocated in the evacuation, there were a few but not many, are now in the zone as illegal squatters have done relatively better, healthwise, than the people who were removed. In the words of Blackwell





The world thinks of Chernobyl as a place where humankind had over-whelmed and destroyed nature. The phrase "dead zone" still gets tossed around. But this was nowhere more obviously untrue than here, watching the sunset, my entire horizon a quiet rhapsody of water, sun, and trees. Paradoxically, the accident may actually have been good for this environment. The radiation-while not exactly healthy for any organism-has been so effective at keeping humans away that Chernobyl has gone back to nature, a great unplanned experiment in conservation by way of pollution. For decades, wildness has been reclaiming the place, growing in where civilization would have pushed it back, reoccupying the space once reserved for people.

Radioactive Wolves, PBS Nature documentary Oct. 19, 2011 Fig. 13:, PBS Nature documentary Oct. 19, 2011

Yes, Chernobyl is now a tourist destination. Blackwell visited the site probably sometime in 2010 or 2011 and had to get special permission. But as of this year, 2012, you can ask your travel-agent to book you a trip. What's it like there? Well it's returning to the pristine wilderness that was there before before the advent of man. Two legged animals have had a more profound impact on the environment, creating a wasteland, than did the radiation. The nuclear wasteland seems to be a fictional invention. Here are some more words from BlackwellWhat does this environment look like, and what really was the impact to the environment? The appearance to a travel writer may have been deceiving. On Oct 19, 2011 the PBS programbroadcast a program called Radioactive Wolves which was an in depth scientific look into the area. What was the conclusion? This was a vigorous pristine flourishing healthy environment exhibiting no signs whatsoever that radiation was a problem. There were over a 120 species of birds. The ground fauna of wild boar, bison, beavers, moose, deer, snakes, lizards, turtles were plentiful and doing well. Catfish in the former radioactive cooling ponds were gigantic. Nobody was catching them. Przewalski horses had been introduce from abroad and were thriving. Most importantly the presence of top predators such as falcons, eagles, and wolves in numbers compatible with an untouched wilderness testified to a healthy robust environment. And yet the bones of a moose that had been eaten by wolves had radiation 50 times more than normal. Fish bones left behind by raptors were highly radioactive. This is an environment returning to its natural vigorous wild state, but it is all radioactive. Perhaps nature's tolerance to radiation is much greater than what has ever been thought. Not being able to positively tag any radiation health effects in the Chernobyl irradiated population outside of the 50 initial deaths would certainly support this speculation. Radioactive environments do not a wasteland make. What will make a wasteland is our continued use of fossil fuels as an energy source.



The cynic in me has proposed a solution for the destruction of the Amazon rain forest. Build 70 Chernobyl-type reactors in the forest and deliberately explode them all. Evacuate everyone from the radioactive wasteland and watch the forest return to full environmental health. People are the problem, not the radiation. This would be an ironic counter-intuitive result to the horrific outcome that one would first believe would be the result of such an action.

Fig. 14: A trip to Chernobyl in 2012 by Bionerd23

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Well with a seemingly healthy natural environment, what radiation fields can we expect to see in the Chernobyl zone? Tourism to Chernobyl has answered this question. In 2012 a German graduate student and radiation enthusiast who calls herself Bionerd23 visited Chernobyl as a tourist. Most importantly she took her radiation measuring equipment and her video camera and recorded it all . The link should start a list of 11 videos where Bionerd23 scampers all over the zone, where permitted, recording radiation readings, from 0.5Sv/h in the city of Pripyat to 250Sv/h in the Red Forest. Do not be put off by the initial video. For reference, normal background can be anything below 1Sv/h. Radiation workers can be in fields of 5Sv/h 24/7. TRIUMF workers are allowed temporary occupation in areas where fields do not exceed 10Sv/h.For the Red Forest, TRIUMF workers would be allowed in with recording dosimeters for a strictly limited time period. At 5Sv/h it would take 12 weeks of continuous occupation to receive the dose of one medical CAT scan, 10mSv. At 5Sv/h it would take 2.25 years of continuous occupation to receive the minimal one-year dose clearly associated with an increased cancer risk, 100mSv. For the most part the fields encountered would not be considered worrisome. In videos 9 and 10 she isolates a speck of material from the Chernobyl core with a point source strength of greater than 90 mSv/h. This is worrisome but these bits are probably rare and need someone with a radiation detector to find them. The bits do not seem to be problematic for Chernobyl squatters and the wildlife. Similar bits would not be found at Fukushima because the cores did not escape their containment vessels. The last video, the 11th, is quite interesting. She shows she received 3 times the radiation dose on a radioactive tourist beach in Brazil than she did in Chernobyl for the same period of time. More about this later.



So where do we stand with Chernobyl? Like at Fukushima the response was perhaps greater than what was necessary. The disruption to the lives of Chernobyl’s inhabitants in this socio-economic upheaval was responsible for more human misery and deaths than any public health risk by allowing the inhabitants to stay in place.[81] The cure was probably worst than the disease. The health of the illegal squatters and the flora and fauna of the environment certainly testifies to this fact. However even in knowing this how many would really go back to live in a radioactive environment? Your brain may accept it as OK, but your emotions probably would not. How would people living in a radiation zone be received by the populations outside? How would food grown inside the zone be received? No, our nuclear fear is still irrational and it will take years to understand what radiation levels really are tolerable. In the meantime, based on ignorance, the legislated limits for radiation tolerance are set very very low with a wide safety margin to account for the grossest of errors. It is these legislated limits based on ignorance that provoke the real "disasters".

edit] Intermezzo

until the next "disaster"



Fig. 15: A radioactive tourist beach in Guarapari, Brazil

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Bionerd23 (see previous section) made an earlier trip in 2012 to the radioactive tourist beach in Guarapari, Brazil. This is not the only radioactive beach in Brazil. Along a roughly 500-mile portion of Brazil's Atlantic coast that runs from north of Rio de Janeiro up to the region south of Bahia, the sands of old beaches are naturally radioactive. As in Chernobyl she made videos with her radiation device in hand. In the second video, in this series, she scans up from the horrific reading of 34Sv/h in the sand to pan a beach (see fig. 15) full of happy tourists. She then pans back to the sand to get a stabilized reading of 56Sv/h.



This is astounding! The abandoned kindergarten in Chernobyl had readings of only 7 μSv/h! Authorities in Pripyat noted the hot spots where the moss grew, 11 μSv/h! If this beach were in Chernobyl or Fukushima, the population of the city would have been cleared out and not allowed back in until activity levels had fallen to normal. In this case it would be a very long time as the principal source of the radiation, Thorium-232, 232Th, has a half-life of 14 billion years. Europeans here have cavorted in the sand since 1585.

There seems to be a disconnect here. In Fukushima they evacuated places with readings just over 1μSv/h, and yet here in Brazil, in sands reading 56 μSv/h, tourists just sit in it with only their underwear on. Kids buy goodies to eat from vendors with their hands all covered with the sand. There was no attempt to wash before eating. In Chernobyl you would have a hard time finding fields as high 56 μSv/h unless you went to the Red Forest. Is this not Guarapari saying we simply have overestimated the danger of low level doses of radiation? Is this not the same indication as being given by the wildlife and the squatters around Chernobyl?

Fig. 15 should be an iconic image with the message that the anti-nuclear environmentalist position has over-hyped the dangers from radioactivity, and the public, governments, and even scientists have gone along with it. This one image cries out "faux" to the entire anti-nuclear environmental establishment.

μ Sv/h Fig. 16: Guarapari medical professional explaining why he did not consider it mandatory to evacuate the public from fields of 50Sv/h

Bionerd23 gave a talk on radiation which has more footage from Guarapari (see start of Guarapari segment at 32:20). At 35:20 of the talk there is a meeting with a medical professional who was asked why the place wasn't evacuated, surely he knew that those levels were suppose to be dangerous. The professional replies that decisions for evacuation must not only be scientific but also political and he doesn't have any evidence that these levels are dangerous. This is 56 μSv/h! Imagine what the different socio-economic impact would have been if public officials reacted in the same way to the situations in Fukushima and Chernobyl.

Bionerd23 was asked to have her Guarapari sand samples locked up, tagged, and inventoried after her return to Germany because they were deemed to be radioactive sources.

Guarapari is not the only natural radioactive place on Earth. There is the similar situation with the beaches in Kerala, India, but the most radioactive place on Earth is in Ramsar, Iran.[82] The annual dose there can be as high as 260 mSv/y.[83] There are hot springs there which arise from dissolving radium from uraniferous igneous rock.[84] The springs are used as spas by locals and tourists. The radium has seeped into the local limestone which is used as building material. Some homes show dose rates from their walls of 140 μSv/h. Anecdotal evidence from the residents would indicate that there are no health effects from the radiation. Epidemiological studies have proved to be statistically inconclusive. There have been calls for relocation, but have been resisted by the locals.

Hence we must conclude that we do not know very much about the health issues of low level doses of radiation. When the source is natural we tolerate fields of 50 μSv/h without batting an eyelid. Some people even think it is beneficial. But in the aftermath of a nuclear accident, nuclear fear and pandemonium sets in, radiation is feared, anti-nuclear activists spread the fear, governments destabilize, and authorities evacuate all areas with readings higher than 1 μSv/h. This causes a huge socio-economic upheaval and the shutdown of nuclear energy. Coal and fossil fuel burning for energy are the beneficiaries.[85]Are we nuts?

edit] Future Nuclear "Catastrophes"

Part of the anti-nuclear strategy in its ideological goal to eliminate nuclear power is to predict when the next the next nuclear "catastrophe" will come. The sooner it is predicted the better, in their eyes, as that will put pressure on governments to close down nuclear power. One thing to remember with regard to any future accident is that, from reading this present article, it seems that the catastrophes are driven more by the enforcement of legislated radiation limits than by any actual danger caused by the radiation itself. This little piece, Are Chernobyl and Fukushima legislated disasters?, drives home this dilemma. Thus future nuclear accidents will not be the end-of-the-world scenarios painted by the anti-nuclear interests just as Chernobyl and Fukushima were not end-of-the-world catastrophes no matter how much the anti-nuclear movement has tried to make it look that way. Thus for any future nuclear accident, hopefully, we will have learned enough so that a more balanced response will take place other than what happened at Chernobyl and Fukushima. This will eliminate a great deal of human suffering and misery because it was largely the response that caused the economic loss and the psychological distress not the direct dangers of the radiation itself. Look at nature.[86] Nature survived both Chernobyl and Fukushima almost virtually unscathed.

Now there will be future nuclear accidents, but as to their severity it is only a guess. The GEN III or GEN III+ reactors, which are the only type of reactor being built today on anything like a large scale, have core reactor failure (i.e., meltdown or CRF) probabilities of about a 100 times smaller[87] than the older reactors. These factors are largely not taken to be absolute due to the fact a Chernobyl and Fukushima exist, however the relative ratio between the CRFs is a measure of the relative safety between the newer reactors and the older designs. This should result in accidents becoming 100-fold less frequent per reactor-year of operation and less severe. However predictions of repeats of Chernobyl and Fukushima are quite common, and since they mostly come from the anti-nuclear people, It is stated these events will happen with more frequency than would otherwise be imagined. There is now a serious academic work looking into quantifying probabilities for future Chernobyls and Fukushimas entitled,

Of Disasters and Dragon Kings: A Statistical Analysis of Nuclear Power Incidents & Accidents

by

Spencer Wheatley, Benjamin Sovacool and Didier Sornette.

Benjamin Sovacool is well known to the anti-nuclear community because of a previous study which high-balled the amount of CO 2 emissions of nuclear power per kWh of energy produced. His figure was shown to be suspect due to his data sampling methodology and a questionable procedure of using an average instead of a median to arrive at a final figure. The present paper on future Fukushima probabilities is discussed in fair detail in

On the Probability of Predicting Future Fukushimas, A criticism of a paper on nuclear risk assessment by Wheatley, Sovacool and Sornette

Their probability figure appears to be another high-ball mainly due to the fact that the safety improvements of the current generation of reactors and future reactors are not taken into account. In this they ignore the plea of Caldeira, Emanuel, Hansen, and Wigley ( see below)

No energy system is without downsides. We ask only that energy system decisions be based on facts, and not on emotions and biases that do not apply to 21st century nuclear technology.

Wheatley, Sovacool and Sornette are clearly applying a bias which does not apply to 21st century nuclear technology.

edit] Summary and Conclusions

Fig. 17: Canisters of nuclear waste waiting for storage

How do you address the issue of nuclear waste disposal?

To prevent this (the CO 2 greenhouse effect, i.e., global warming), we might make every effort to switch from fossil fuel to fission fuel, but in doing that, we would be producing radioactive ash in enormous quantities and that would present an even greater and more dangerous problem than carbon dioxide would.

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Even the deliberately set worst case scenario for nuclear waste would be better for the environment than what the fossil fuel economy is brewing up now for free without even trying. It would be radioactive, but the ecosystem would remain intact.

Thus any waste disposal solution, even the so-called non-solution we have now will be orders of magnitude better than the the deliberately set worst case scenario and that in turn being magnitudes better than being fried in our coming fossil fuel future. From the start, all nuclear waste and spent fuel has been sequestered and inventoried by the nuclear industry. Accidents like Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island are rare events and will continue to be rare events.

How did the fossil fuel industry ever get carte blanche to pollute the Earth with its waste?

We now deal with the number one issue of nuclear fear, hitherto not mentioned. It is the question designed for the anti-nuclear side to stop the pro-nuclear side in their tracks during a debate.Gotcha!No, not quite.To many this has been the killer question. Isaac Asimov even said Well, no it won't. The COgreenhouse effect has already brought devastating floods, record drought, raging fires, super hurricanes plus loss of Arctic ice, oceans which are 30% more acidic, and all this is but the opening act of Global Warming as the planet continues to heat up. Hence this is not all. Sea levels will rise and inundate coastal habitats (New York City will be flooded) accompanied by a litany of other horrors like, tropical diseases moving north, loss of fresh water supplies, loss of cropland, decreased food supplies, famine, and mass extinctions. These shocks to the system could result in infrastructure and societal breakdown especially if the 2.3 billion more peoplethat are expected to exist on this planet by 2050 add their demands onto a system already stretched to the limit. War over resources is a possibility.In other words we could get the Full Monty: famine, war, disease, and death, all four horsemen. Thus you get the idea of what this COgreenhouse effect really can do. Nuclear Waste, on the other hand, from the world's worst nuclear disaster, will bring us an environment like the one around Chernobyl. That's if we are so stupid as to go and deliberately spread our nuclear ash/waste willy-nilly all over this planet with no attempt whatsoever to contain it like the fossil fuel industry does presently with its COwaste. Of the two scenarios, the nuclear case is obviously preferential. Observations:

Now it appears the fossil fuel industry's egregious ways are catching up with it. It has promised promised to sequester and bury its CO 2 waste with a process called carbon capture and storage, CCS. That way we can continue to use the old familiar fossil fuels. Let's see if this is believable.

If one tonne of coal is burned, it will create 3.67 tonnes of CO 2 , 2 million liters of gas. It will occupy a spherical volume with a diameter of 15.5m, half the length of a blue whale. CCS proposes to bury the gas down a borehole and into an extracted gas well, kilometers below the surface.[91] The trouble is to guarantee it will not come back up to the surface forever, for all time.[92] This becomes problematic because the full extent of the well may not be known and there maybe other boreholes (i.e., leaks). The boreholes have to be capped and stay in place forever, for you cannot ever let the CO 2 into the atmosphere. If all present reserves of fossil fuel were burned and buried, we could be sitting on a bomb that had more CO 2 buried underground than what is in the atmosphere.[93] All this seems worrisome. There are many CCS proposals, all with problems, all under-capitalized, and none with proven technology that it will work.[94]

Fig. 18: The reason for the nuclear waste problem

On the other hand, the size of a low enriched uraniumsphere which contains the equivalent energy that is in a tonne of coal would be 1.5 cm in diameter, the size of a marble. The question is, which initially is the easier problem, sequestering a solid lump the size of a marble or 2 million liters of gas? The former is obviously easier. Furthermore the technology is all worked out. Sequestering spent nuclear fuel in a suitably inactive geological formationis technically feasible and is already to go in the US. The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevadawas just opening when it was closed by an act of congress, April 14, 2011.The US Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons. It seems that senator Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader, from Nevada did not want the thing in his back yard. Here is the spectre of nuclear fear again raising its head again against rationality. This is the story repeated around the world. The solution to the nuclear waste problem is hampered by political not technical problems. Nobody wants the storage to be in their backyard. Thus the environmentalist who asks

"How do you address the issue of nuclear waste disposal?"

is really asking for it because it is his peddling of nuclear fear that has created the issue in the first place. The public has been made to fear what could happen at a nuclear waste facility, thereby paralyzing the politicians to act. Hence the problem just sits there with no resolution in sight, while the radiation paranoic public goes to Guarapari, Brazil to relax on the beaches[99].

Now for a few final words from Paddy Regan:[100]

But it is what to do with radioactive waste that remains a major and emotive issue in the minds of the public and politicians alike. Although some elements in spent fuel waste can remain radioactive for many thousands of years, the safety issues here seem to be political, rather than technical. Indeed, nature provides excellent examples of nuclear waste storage, with the example of the Oklo natural reactor in Gabon. Geological examination of this area shows evidence of an ancient, naturally occurring nuclear reactor within the uranium-rich mineral deposits which operated approximately two billion years ago. The radioactive "waste material" from the natural reactor at Oklo appears to have migrated less than 10 metres from where it was formed.

If this is what happens in nature’s random geological disposal site, a carefully chosen, geologically stable deep storage facility for vitrified nuclear fuel waste would seem safe to me. Civilian nuclear power represents approximately one sixth of the world’s current electricity production, operating in more than 30 countries.

The danger for future generations is that our residual, Cold War-based fear of radiation means that we face an uncertain future, reliant for our energy needs on coal, natural gas and unproven technologies such as carbon capture and wind farms. Meanwhile carbon reduction targets remain as unattainable as ever. Our irrational fear of the atom stands in the way of the development of nuclear power and its potentially vital contribution to the long-term energy needs of an ever-increasing and energy-greedy world population[101]

Nuclear power poses the least risk to public safety except for wind power. Nuclear power is as cheap to build and run as coal fired plants. Nuclear power has the least CO 2 emissions of any source of power. The waste can be contained and stored, not like CO 2 presently. Plants can be built where the power is needed, not where the wind and sun are always plentiful. What's not to like? This is a life line from a CO 2 generated global climate crises and civilization collapse, take it!

Richter's ending, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors:

There is no silver bullet to slay the climate-change dragon, and neither nuclear nor the renewables on their own can solve our greenhouse gas emission problem. What technologies might be available 50 years from now is beyond my vision. We need to get started and for now, nuclear power provides us with one of the safest, most cost-effective alternatives to continuing on our present course. We should be moving vigorously to increase the nuclear energy supply.

edit] climate scientists' open letter to environmentalists and further reading

updated March 29, 2014

Here are two items which express similar views to the ones expressed here.

November 2013: Four top climate scientists:

Dr. Ken Caldeira, Senior Scientist, Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution

Dr. Kerry Emanuel, Atmospheric Scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. James Hansen, Climate Scientist, Columbia University Earth Institute

Dr. Tom Wigley, Climate Scientist, University of Adelaide and the National Center for Atmospheric Research

came to approximately the same conclusion as the message in this article and they decided to issue an open letter to environmentalists world-wide to stop their opposition to nuclear power. They argued that continued opposition to nuclear power will threaten humanity's ability to avoid dangerous climate change. They point out that the risks associated with the expanded use of nuclear energy are orders of magnitude smaller than the risks associated with fossil fuels. So in conclusion they state that while it may be theoretically possible to stabilize the climate without nuclear power, in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power. This is the same conclusion as reached in this article. A copy of this letter can be found here.

This letter created quite a stir and in and about the same time CNN announced that they were going to show on prime time TV Pandora's Promise, a film that promoted the expansion of nuclear power.

The reaction from the environmentalists was decidedly negative and swift with prominent highly-respected environmental blogs that usually showcased the science of global warming coming out with posts citing negative criticism towards the nuclear position of the four scientists. Amongst many criticisms, It was said that nuclear:

was too expensive.

emits too much CO 2 in its mining and milling process

in its mining and milling process has limited reserves for a meaningful expan