"Dee D. Flint" wrote in message .com...
"N2EY" wrote in message
...
In article , "Dee D.
Flint"
writes:

Only 31 people died from Chernobyl. Even now there has been
no increased incident of deaths from diseases that may possibly be linked
to
radiation.

Directly attributed deaths. If a pregnant woman 1000 miles away was
exposed to
high levels of windblown radiation, and her child developed leukemia at
age 2
and died as a direct result of that exposure, how does that death ever get
attributed to the Chernobyl accident?

The area where the fallout could be discerned from the normal
background measurements was relatively small.

How many square miles? How long will it be hot?


Dissipation will be by the inverse square law so at 1000 miles from the
plant it will have a concentration of only 1 millioneth of the concentration
at the release site.

I think you mean "it will have a concentration of only 1 millionth of
the concentration at *1 mile from* the release site."

If you're talking about long-term exposure from a contained source, I
agree. But when Chernobyl popped, it let off a cloud of radioactive
gas, dust and smoke that spread over a wide area. How much a specific
individual was exposed to how much and what types of radiation and
radioactive material for how long is pretty much anyone's guess.

Plus it's not just direct exposure from one incident, but overall
exposure from many sources. Suppose radioactive dust falls in a water
source, and people or animals drink the water, and ingest the
radioactive material. How chemically toxic is plutonium?

While specific deaths can't be attributed,

And that's the problem. If someone dies in a coal mine cavein or
downwind of Bhopal, it's attributed.

the overall
numbers can be assigned by simply comparing the death rate due to leukemia
in the affected zone to the death rate outside.

Ah - but what constitutes the affected zone and what constitutes
outside? How do we know the control group wasn't exposed from other
sources? Heck, there's americium in smoke detectors...

This can be done for each
cause of death that can be increased by radiation. If society wants the
data, it can be gathered.

It should be gathered. But the results may not be pretty.

But people would rather hide behind the emotional
fear of possible problems than researching what problems will occur and the
magnitude of the problem and making an enlightened decision.

To a certain extent, I agree. But it's not all emotions - it's also a
matter of judgement, trust and education.

Look at the links Mike Coslo posted about Navajo uranium miners. Would
you work their jobs? Can you say with any degree of certainty that
none of their deaths or disease are due to exposure to uranium ore?

Most of all, will any of their deaths ever be attributed? Probably
not, because we don't know how much of that uranium went to make fuel
rods.

"Society" and "the public" were told for decades that nuclear energy
was "the future" and was safe, clean, and would be "too cheap to
meter". We were all supposed to trust the govt. and the industry, but
those folks make mistakes too. Is it any wonder people are not willing
to accept such promises at face value any more?

Perhaps the biggest problem is education. Most people have only the
vaguest ideas about how electricity works, let alone how it is
generated and transmitted. Yet they are expected to accept on faith
that nuke plants *and all the rest of the nuclear industry* are safe.
Until people are educated to how things really work, you're just not
going to get that kind of trust.

In addition, that accident
was due to an unauthorized experiment being conducted at the facility.
In
other words, rules and safety precautions were being deliberately
ignored.

Yep. Absolutely true. And I've never seen any reason given.

But these were not stupid, evil or suicidal people. They just did some
amazingly dumb things, which got out of their control. And perhaps that's
the
real lesson of Chernobyl: People will do amazingly stupid things for no
explainable reason at all. Then the rest of us are left to pick up the
pieces.

Still, stupidity can't be allowed to stop us from facing the energy needs of
the future.

It should give us pause about what technologies we use to face those
needs. For example, look at Palo Verde, the newest US nuke plant,
which became operational in the mid '80s.

How much did it cost to build per kW of capacity?
How much has it cost to run per kWH since it started up?
How much will it cost per kWH to dispose of the waste, ranging from
very low level stuff to used fuel rods?
How much will it cost per kWH to decommission when its useful life is
over?

Now compare the answers to those obtained from, say, a wind turbine
plant.

Instead one addresses the issue and error proofs and mistake
proofs the facility.

Except that it is *IMPOSSIBLE* to error proof and mistake proof
anything that involves humans. The whole history of technological
goofs proves that simple fact again and again. There is *always* a way
for people to mess things up.

Remember the Titanic? "Practically unsinkable" was the description.
OOOPS...

Titanic's sinking was due to a long chain of human errors, not
technological ones. She wasn't even new technology, and her crew was
experienced. Sister ship Olympic was the first of that class, and much
of the Titanic crew (including her captain) was simply transferred
from Olympic when Titanic went into service.

Of course people didn't stop building steamships after 1912. But
neither did they call *any* ship "practically unsinkable", either.

We can make technology safer, but it can *never* be 100% safe. So we
have to understand the risks, and utlimately decide which risks are
worth taking. And when an industry asks millions of people to live
with a certain risk, it is to be expected that different people may
not accept certain risk factors. Because it's *their* lives and
property.

But when technology is small and distributed, the effects of doing
amazingly
stupid things for no explainable reason at all are contained to a
relatively
small area and numbers of people. When technology is huge and
concentrated, the
effects can be much worse.

And the more complex the technology, the easier it is to do something
really dumb.

Nuclear technology is not complex. It's relatively simple in fact.

Old joke:

First banana: "Life is strange"
Second banana: "Oh yeah? Compared to what?"

When you say "Nuclear technology is not complex. It's relatively
simple in fact.", one has to ask "Compared to what?"

I would dare to guess that the Peach Bottom nuclear plant is far more
complex than Holtwood or Conowingo dams (all three are on the same
river, within 100 miles of here).

Nuclear power generation has been round for 50 years now. A total of 34
people have died. That's the 31 at Chernobyl and 3 in the 1950s at an
experimental government facility (where once again regulations were not
followed).

Attributable deaths.

The collapse of hydroelectric dams have affected areas as wide or wider
than
a nuclear power plant accident. And they have killed more people. I'd
much rather live next to a nuclear plant than downstream of a dam.

When is the last time a hydro dam in the USA collapsed and killed people?

Hmmm??

I don't know of a single case of such a disaster in the USA in my
lifetime.

And speaking of long term environmental impacts, what about thousands of
square miles that are supposedly affected by acid rain from burning
coal??
What about the miles of coast and ocean that have been contaminated by
oil
spills?? The long term effects could be quite significant.

Sure. But not as significant as the effects of radioactive materials that
take millennia to break down.

Not proven.

And that's the problem. We do not know the long term effects of the
release of radioactive stuff into the environment. Particularly the
effects of the release of elements like plutonium, which do not occur
naturally at all.

Millennia worth of acid rain could conceivably be just as
harmful as the time taken to breakdown radioactive materials. Why? Because
even though the acid rain dissipates, it keeps on coming down year after
year.

I think you're grasping at straws, Dee. The acid from acid rain will
break down far faster than many radioactive debris will decay.

Consider just one spent fuel rod from a nuke plant like TMI. How long
before it is harmless?

Let it be reprocessed and recycled and it's not a problem.

You're avoiding the question. How many years?

As I understand it, (correct me if I'm mistaken on this) such a rod
starts out as contains uranium, plutonium and some other fission
products . Reprocessing extracts the usable uranium to make new rods
- but the plutonium and other fission products are not usable in
current technology power reactors. Plutonium can and is used in
weapons, however, which is why the Bush administration is so
interested in other countries' nuke programs. Like Iran.

IIRC, there's only one operational reprocessing plant in the world,
and it's in France. And there are far more spent rods than it will
ever be able to handle. On top of which, the rods which do result are
more expensive than new ones.

When you add in the cost per kWH of reporcessing rods, what happens to
the above cost evaluation?

So if an honest evaluation and comparison of long term effects, deaths,
environmental impacts, etc is done and the same standards applied across
the
board, then it would indeed be necessary to shut down all oil, coal, and
hydroelectric plants.

I'd like to see such a comparison.

I would too. It is exactly the type of data that we as a society need to
make informed decisions about our energy future. Right now we are stuck
with people's emotional reactions. I should have said "...it would probably
be necessary..."

Ah - but you made the statement up front that nuclear would win the
comparison. That sort of thing makes folks distrust the industry that
much more.

My point was that people are refusing to even consider the
dangers of other means of power generation.

I'm not one of them.

Personally I don't care to sit in the dark and
shiver.

It's not a binary problem.

It's getting close to that in California although shivering will be mild
(except perhaps up in the mountains) as it isn't a severe climate.
California has built no new power plants of any kind in 10 years. They
can't get any of them (fossil fuel, hydro, or nuclear) past the
environmental requirements in the state. Population continued to grow and
they had brown outs and blackouts. Their solution was to buy it from out of
state. Well that hasn't worked either. The rates are simply too high and
the state can't afford it.

How much do they pay per kWH, residential?

Costs are being absorbed by the state government
instead of being passed to the users and it's wrecked the state budget. It
looks like those contracts will be canceled and California will be right
back to their brown outs and black outs.

Because they made some really dumb decisions about "deregulation".
They treated electricity as if it were the same as any other commodity
- which it isn't.

Now let's take a look at serious industrial accidents. A prime example
is
the chemical plant in Bhopal. 3,000 people died immediately when that
happened. As many as 10,000 people have died from long term effects of
exposure to the gas released since it damaged their lungs and other
organs.
No one is shutting down the chemical industry.

The chemical industry in India does not have anywhere near the safeguards
of
the chemical industry in the USA.

And as horrible as the Bhopal disaster was, the gas dispersed and will
break
down. How long will TMI be radioactive?

TMI has been contained so it will not impact the surrounding residents.
Long term radiation exposure thus becomes a non-issue.

WHOA!

That's *ENTIRELY* the issue!

As long as TMI is contained, it poses no hazard. Just like there was
no need for lifeboats on the Titanic until it hit the iceberg...

How long must it be contained? Decades? Centuries? Millenia?

How long can the containment building be expected to stay tight, while
its radioactive contents decay?

Who gets to pay for that containment and monitoring?

Will there *ever* be a way to safely dismantle it?

Yet some chemicals are as
persistent in the environment as nuclear materials.

Some examples, please?

A process can be developed to break down any chemical compound. PCBs, for
example, were specifically designed to be inert and nonreactive, yet they
can
be broken down into their components quickly. But there's no way to speed
up
nuclear decay.

Yes you can speed up radioactive decay by reprocessing and reusing the spent
fuel.

But not waste products like irradiated equipment.

While PCBs can be broken down, it's not being done due to cost. Save
with PVC. Same with other chemicals.

Actually, some disposal of those chemicals is being done. PCB
transformer oil in particular.

So sorry to say, your long term environmental arguments just don't hold
water. There's lots of things that can affect even wider spread areas
and last just as long.

Perhaps we should discuss the half life of plutonium?

Again preprocess and reuse.

For what - weapons? Are there any operational US power reactors that
will run on plutonium?

And again you've avoided the question - what's the half life of
plutonium?

And if you're going to discuss dangerous industrial processes, consider
this:
The most dangerous common form of mechanized transportation in use today
in the
USA are privately owned motor vehicles. Every year and a half, about as
many
Americans die on US highways as died in the entire Vietnam war. Airlines,
trains, buses and ships are far safer, yet few people refuse to drive or
ride
in a car compared to other modes. Why?


1. Convenience
2. It's what they are used to
3. Each feels they are in control so it can't happen to them.

Sure. But they are CHOOSING what risks they take.

Just because we do something doesn't mean it's rational.

True - and the opposite is true.

Mankind is a
rationalizing animal. We will find justifications for our wants and desires
and fears whether there is any basis in fact for them or not.

And that goes as much for the folks who support nuclear power as those
who oppose it. You say you'd rather live next to a nuke plant than a
hydro dam, but can you point to a single case in the past 50 years
where a US hydro dam failed and killed people?

73 de Jim, N2EY