Your last paragraph, though, perfectly illustrates why terrestrial nuclear power is fundamentally a bad idea. 

It’s not because it’s impossible to safely split an atom and harvest the energy.

It’s because human beings are the way we are – even before we had nuclear plants to target, we were willing to annihilate entire cities full of people with nuclear weapons.  Do you think there are no nations willing to target nuclear plants?  How about criminal or terrorist organizations?  Do you think corporations that are rewarded for limiting costs can be trusted to build and maintain plants optimally?  The lesson of TMI 1979, Tschernobyl 1986, and Fukushima 2011 is that humans will cut corners, cut costs, trade good performance reviews for blow jobs, cut training, perform unsafe and unauthorized experiments, and generally act in ways incompatible with the best interests of humanity.

We don’t need nuclear-produced energy as much as we need land that is uncontaminated by nuclear accidents, so setting ourselves up to fail is stupid.  Invest in 21st century carbon-neutral biofuels instead of obsolete 1940s crap!

This is far off the “how much radiation are you exposed to on a plane” topic, so I will stop here.  My views do not require more explanation – terrestrial nuclear fission plants are stupid, and will fail, and innocents have been and will continue to be irradiated, and land will continue to be spoiled.  Arguing over whether coal is worse (oh, if only there were some other choice besides coal and nuclear!) is really pointless, and I regret allowing myself to react to Maggie’s claim, even though I still disagree.

[edited, as usual, but this time because disqus ATE several line feeds]

I believe Shaddack’s original point was that resistance to nuclear power options has ensured that new designs are not rolled out, ironically reducing the safety of nuclear power.  I don’t see anything in your response which identifies that as being “bullshit”. 

Well then let me try again.  Perhaps one of us has a poor command of written English.

The safety of terrestrial nuclear fission plants in the US is negatively affected by:

1) Bad design.  We didn’t know as much as we know now when these systems were designed, so there are flaws.  None of these flaws are due to “resistance to nuclear options”.

2) Cost containment.  Terrestrial fission plants are not economically viable without government sponsorship, yet the GE boiling water reactor’s poor design is strongly related to their goal of “the cheapest possible reactor”.  You can look at the marketing material for these reactors and see that they were explicitly sold as having the thinnest pressure vessel permitted by regulatory agencies.  They are designed to be cheap and to wear out and then be decomisssioned.  This is not due to “resistance to nuclear options”.

3) The Bush administrations’s relicensing of old reactors (that are known to have serious design flaws) well past their designed decommissioning dates.  This relicensing was not caused by “resistance to nuclear options”.  During the Clinton administration, these same plants were refused relicensing specifically due to “resistance to nuclear options”.  (Public safety and good science never entered into either set of decisions, in my opinion.)

4) Pseudo-conservative ideology from political parties.  Running old obsolete plants to destruction, and building plants that use old technology, does not drive labor costs up or disrupt entrenched power relationships the same way that investing in new technologies (like switchgrass biofuels or whatever) does.  Appropriate levels of investment would also require appropriate taxation, which is again outside the ideology of political puppetmasters.  STILL no relationship to “resistance to nuclear options”.

The “green environuts have made nukes unsafe” meme is a lie that depends on the acceptance of this unstated premise:  If everyone had held hands and sang together “we love nuclear power, we trust America’s corporations, the government can do no wrong” then somehow all the aging, unsafe reactors would have magically transformed themselves into glittering, thorium-fueled engines of pure and safe goodness.  This is, as I said, utter bullshit.  As far as I can determine, no corporation or government has ever become more responsible due to lack of oversight and involvement by the public.

Here in reality, nuclear fission plant research is ongoing.  And there are no chanting mobs of demonstrators insisting that all future plants must be built to old, unsafe designs.  The decision to build new plants on old designs is based on cost.  The decision to continue to run obsolete plants is due to a willingness to have them fail, or an unwillingness to believe in basic human nature.  “Resistance to nuclear options” has exactly ZERO negative effect on nuclear safety – although California protestors can point to at least one instance where public resistance prevented a nuclear plant from being built to an old design.

You can claim that because “all fish live in the sea” and “all salmon are fish” then therefore “if I buy kippers it will not rain on Monday” but there is, in reality, no connection between these things.  Public resistance to nukes has not caused our problems.

[edited because disqus is an enemy of coherent discourse]

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It should also be noted that the *real* reason Fukushima went ka-boom is because the geniuses who designed the place thought it would be an awesome idea to install the backup generators beneath the level of the top of the seawall. Had they placed them on the hills behind the plant, or on top of plant buildings it might have been a three-mile island-scale incident instead (or we may have never even had the displeasure of hearing newsreaders butcher the pronunciation of ‘Fukushima’).

Subatomic particles come from the Sun and from deep space to bombard our atmosphere. Reactions between those particles and our atmosphere produce secondary particles. Those secondary particles penetrate airplanes, and our skin, where they can damage our DNA.

Even though this is a very accurate and succinct way of describing the process from source to effect, it also makes taking a plane sound like a tiny invisible space battle. That is what makes science awesome.. It’s mind-bendingly amazing and real.

There are two important distinctions. Chernobyl RBMK1000 reactor was a flawed design and the flaws were known. Fukushima reactors were from 70′s.

I’m not sure what your two important distinctions are, but one should be that the proximate cause of the Chernobyl disaster was electrical engineers (with little or no knowledge of nuclear physics) who performed an unauthorized experiment — and to do so they disabled basically all of the safety interlocks, ignored the plant’s safety protocols, broke their own test protocol by rushing it, and did not pay attention to operators who thought the procedure was dangerous.  Their experiment would probably not have led to disaster if the RBMK design had just some of the robustness features that US nuclear plants were required to have.  (PBS has more details here).

I believe Shaddack’s original point was that resistance to nuclear power options has ensured that new designs are not rolled out, ironically reducing the safety of nuclear power.

I don’t see anything in your response which identifies that as being “bullshit”. 

You can’t honestly compare solar installers falling off roofs with a hundred years worth of increased cancer rates and conclude that solar power is just as dangerous.  That’s just lame.

Yeah, actually you can.  If you look at the total number of expected deaths they are quite comparable.  I’m not sure why falling off a roof should get some special treatment as opposed to death by radiation.  It smacks of irrational radiation paranoia.

The threat from isotopes such as Cs-137 and I-131 is long term, but the threat is restricted to centuries, not millenia as those opposed to nuclear often contend.  In addition, radiation, unlike many other modern toxic externalities of production, is very easy to detect, meaning that mitigative efforts are much more likely to be successful.

I expect that due to the limited land in Japan (bio)remediation efforts will be demonstrated in concerted way for the first time.  We will be able to get much better understandings of how we might work with nuclear catastrophes.

I tend to think that LWR are not particularly good designs, even in their more modern designs which emphasise passive  safety.  That doesn’t mean we should abandon nuclear power, it simply means we should turn our eye towards what might work better.

Nuclear power is not just our best long term bet for power, it’s also our best bet for extra-terrestrial exploration and settlement.  Taking the long view, a civilisation that does not learn to harness nuclear power will be permanently stunted.

I believe that it’s also possible to give a mega-dose of iodine nearly completely destroying the thyroid in order to deal with the cancer threat after exposure.

[edited to remove spurious line feeds introduced by disqus]

Don’t even get me started. If you quoted a quote, it would probably show up as a vertical line of single letters.

There are two important distinctions. Chernobyl RBMK1000 reactor was a flawed design and the flaws were known.

A valid objection.  Of course, all the currently operating reactors also have known flaws.  Only the science-fiction thorium reactors have no known flaws, because they don’t actually exist.   Still, the Chernobyl design sucked egregiously, far more than anything currently running.

Fukushima reactors were from 70′s. More modern reactors are built to withstand wider range of mishaps, but the old reactors are not replaced with the newer ones as the people are worried about safety – so because they are worried, they have less safe plants.

No, I’m sorry to be rude, but that is complete and utter bullshit.

When federal regulatory agencies continually re-license poorly designed nuclear plants well past their original, scheduled end-of-lifetime, that isn’t a response to concerns about safety, it’s simply a callous disregard for the value of human lives and
property.

Aging reactors are not being replaced, and will be run until they fail catastrophically, because that is the way the economics of nuclear power are currently structured.  They are guaranteed to fail because that is the trajectory that the Bush and Reagan governments built and the Obama government is continuing to follow.  The corporations that own them have no plans to ever decommission them, as shown by the government audits that reveal most of the owners aren’t even pretending to set aside the funds required to do so.  They aren’t being prosecuted for this failure to meet their legal obligations – so why should they bother to follow the law?

The deaths have to be compared with deaths associated with other power sources – from coal mining accidents to issues with hydropower dams to deaths by falling from a roof when installing a solar panel. I have a feeling that if this would be calculated as deaths per terawatt-hour, nuclear would still come out fairly well off in comparison with the rest.

Even if the accidental deaths per terawatt-hour for nuclear are small compared to other energy sources, that does not compensate for the lasting environmental degradation from even one Chernobyl or Fukushima.  You can’t honestly compare solar installers falling off roofs with a hundred years worth of increased cancer rates and conclude that solar power is just as dangerous.  That’s just lame.

[edited to remove spurious line feeds introduced by disqus]

I have a SOR/T dosimeter (electronic) – it’s pretty cool (NATO-approved! :-), and I fly a fair amount – it’s always in my backpack.   I also have a radiointerface for it – I can dump data from it with little effort (altho’ why their interface is still RS-232 is beyond me…).

I’ve not done this in a while, but I have gone through the effort in the past to dump the data from my dosimeter (and it measures, only, gamma and neutrons), and have found that I can graph my flights as a result.  What I’ve seen:  readings all over the map.  Some flights I’ve seen barely a burp; others, wow.   A bit of research seems to indicate that, while altitude is certainly a factor, time of year and (if I remember right) sunspot activity plays a part as well.

As a side note:  I’ve never seen neutron activity.  It’s all gamma, according to my device.  I can wear it on a lanyard around my neck, and it chirps agreeably for each gamma particle it detects.  And it’s gotten fairly chirpy up high from time to time…

Regards

The deaths have to be compared with deaths associated with other power sources – from coal mining accidents to issues with hydropower dams to deaths by falling from a roof when installing a solar panel. I have a feeling that if this would be calculated as deaths per terawatt-hour, nuclear would still come out fairly well off in comparison with the rest.

Then there’s added exposures from modern sources: X-rays and medical scans, living near power plants (both coal and nuclear, and the coal is actually worse), and flying in airplanes.

The children of Chernobyl beg to differ.   Soon the children of Fukushima might have something to say, too.

Some folks claim that if we were to replace all our sources of electricity with nuclear plants, at the current rate of failure we’d be experiencing over 5,000 deaths per year from nuclear accidents.  I have not checked the math, but I find the hypothesis much more credible than the standard “you greens won’t let us build the safe plants” nuclear shill talking points.

These models take into account the radiological and biological half-life of the substance to figure out how much it will affect you over time, and factor all that into the dose in sieverts. Once converted, 40 µSv should be 40 µSv no matter the source. There are similar weighting factors for dose received to an individual organ, giving you whole-body doses which can be compared to other whole-body doses.

I have no idea if any given news article has done the research — a lot of them are pretty bad. But I hope that helps.

There’s a lot more going on in the world than what fits with the “film at 11″ paradigm.

Dose from internal contamination is typically calculated from the mean path of the emitted radiation (if a photon or electron gets out of the body, only the part of its path that was inside can be counted to the exposition), the half-life of the isotope, its biological half-life (which depends a lot on the form of exposure), and so.

The form of the particles ingested (or inhaled) also significantly alters the possible dose. A grain of a material insoluble in acids (stomach), mild alkalis (duodenum), and water will pass through the alimentary channel without being absorbed, so the dose can be counted only from its residence time in such. If the material is soluble, it gets worse a bit. Inhaled particles can be either dissolved and absorbed via lungs, lodged in the lung tissue, or expelled and coughed out. 

IMHO we need to fund some major studies, using tens of thousands of rats, not just a couple hundred. Perhaps combine it with testing for effects of EMR. Designing the facility would make a great architectural student’s thesis; an environment to raise 10K rats with no radiation, no EM, natural enough to not stress the rats from boredom, and no materials that could outgass or leech into their food/bedding etc.