25 mGy/min may be a low dose rate in a lab, but it is not a low dose rate in a NPP release.
Yes, the production of ROS scavengers can be important for some profiles. That's probably the reason we see the priming effect. But real world release exposures are continuous. My guess is that whatever the priming effect is it saturates pretty quickly. Otherwise, we get into a release-is-good-for-you-world.
But I'm going to cut this discussion off. We need a well defined replacement for LNT. When you have one, pls present it to us.
I'm working on a simple Python program that will model NPP release profiles, exposures that continue for a year or more (Kramatorsk), and intermittent exposures to radon (hormesis). It does show a "priming effect".
This is NOT a replacement for SNT. It is just an idealized model to satisfy my curiosity and maybe anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the molecular biology. SNT is all we need for modeling NPP releases.
To replace LNT we must have a "universal" model, meaning a model that can convert any dose rate profile into a cancer risk. SNT is a model that can handle any dose rate.
I've had it. You will have to take your ramblings elsewhere.
Cohen showed, rather convincingly, in his book, The Nuclear Energy Option, that even using LNT, nuclear power is very safe, indeed much safer than any other means of generating reliable power. It is on par with wind and solar, and those aren't reliable. Cohen also showed that using LNT and long time frames, what anti-nukes do regularly to score points, nuclear power has very big net health benefits, due to reduced radon from using the uranium up.
Cohen's book is a real eye opener. Still one of the best books ever written on nuclear energy risks.
Cohen used an LNT slope 3 times lower than the ICRP/NCRP number (NEO page 38) which few LNTers will accept.
Far more fundamentally, why should we accept LNT when it is flat qualitatively wrong. LNT says we cant repair DNA damage. Indisputable biology says we can and the data agrees. We can't live with LNT. As long as LNT is around, we will have ALARA and all kinds of super-expensive regulation. And perhaps most importantly, we must avoid the ambulance chasers. That means we must have a firm radiation exposure compensation plan. If your harm model is LNT, any such plan is uninsurable.
Yes, that's a key point. But there is more to it. Cohen steel-manned the argument by using LNT to show that these multi billion dollar investments made no sense even with the crazy LNT stuff. So there is more going on here than LNT. Even with LNT you could not justify a 50 billion dollar repository. You could justify making basement ventilation systems mandatory in building code to cut radon dose, but we're not doing that. So there are some things very wrong with the nuclear industry. At this point, abolishing LNT would help but I doubt it would bring us back to the real world. It seems that most in the govt and industry involved are not at all interested in real change. They're being paid to be ignorant. Professional lunacy. Where do you think all those billions end up? Not in good steel or concrete, look at the rusty pipes at Yucca Mountain, or the goof of using organic kitty litter as an absorbent. It's not being spent on materials. It ends up in the pockets of the people and companies involved. They rather very much like the 50 billion repository and would work hard to make it a 100 billion one if they could, and they probably will. Radiophobia and lack of knowledge prevents a widespread public outrage over the obscene amounts of money being wasted for no real results. Same radiophobia and ignorance also fails to provide a bottom up support from the public to get rid of LNT and other falsehoods. Elton John said it best: It's a sad sad situation, and it's getting more and more absurd.
Replacing LNT is only the first step to a competitive market in supplying nuclear plants, and changing all the players' incentives from milking the taxpayer to being forced to do the job right or disappear, but it is a NECESSARY first step. But I repeat myself.
Does it? I was under the impression LNT says that ionizing radiation damage is not special, constitutes a small fraction of DNA damage total, and is subject to the very same almost-perfect DNA repair that gives us our quite substantial lifetime probability of cancer.
Jack, this is excellent. I will ignore the ad hominem (I get worse from the anti's) and read the articles you have cited.
You may have misunderstood the question. There is no argument over LNT (I have not "stumbled on the core issue"). The worry about groundshine is easy to quantify (a few microwatts per square meter). The question was about Cs-137 in the dust long after the plume has blown over.
I think you are right that it is not a problem, but just calling it a "phony issue" won't convince the anti's on FaceBook. Why should you care what they think? Because these are the people who control public opinion. Your NRA proposal will get nowhere if all you do is preach to the choir.
Keep up the good work. Your articles are by far the best on the nuclear debate. Let me and others engage with the morons. Be more tolerant when we come back with a question.
Yeah, the lead in was a little over the top, mea culpa, but it's is not an ad hominum argument.
I did not JUST call resuspension a phony issue. I gave a very compelling citation. A fire is a far more effective way of resuspending than anything else you can name. Resuspension dose rates will always be a tiny fraction of teh groundshine, certainly after the I-131 is gone.
Jack, I have started to read the 5 articles you cited (at least the ones that are not paywalled) and review my earlier reading of your four articles relevant to this topic. No doubt all the information we need is there, but I would really like to see your short summary on the question of resuspension, or even a short article, like this one on groundshine. Hit em hard, and maybe we will get through this last trench before the hill.
Remember our audience is smart people interested in the LNT debate but misinformed, skeptical, and perhaps even a little anti-nuclear. The dedicated anti-nukers are lost, but maybe we can embarrass them.
I understand 102 on your list. This question of resuspension is not as important as your other work.
Yes, I have seen many times the a debunkee will fall back to "another trench" when his/her first claim is proven false. When you debunked Ed Lyman's claim that Cs-137 was a big problem in Molten Salt Reactors, the response was: No he was talking about the Cs-137 that is coming from the decay of noble gas fission products, not chemically bound to the salt.
I am not a nuclear engineer, so I turned to our panel of experts and got some good responses to this new "trench":
From Ed Pheil:
"In general it doesn't [get released from the core] but any losses would likely be as CsI into the offgas system, where a chiller condenses/captures it."
From Robert Gauthier:
"As for the gas issue, this stinks as a red herring, as it insinuates that off-gassing is something that hasn’t been considered to date, which would only be the case if the engineers attached to these projects were incompetent fools. This would have to be extended to the personnel of the several national agencies in various countries that have given initial approval to some of these SMRs."
... and on another complaint from Ed Lyman:
"Tritium is produced by CANDU reactors in volumes enough that it has to be dealt with and it is to the point where this has become the top global source for this isotope and a bit of a side hustle for CANDU operators."
The 'whack a mole' approach IS working. When a mole pops up, I like being able to reply: "We've had this discussion already {link to a summary in Citizendium}. Do you have anything new?"
Yes, we must definitely start with the basics, and leave the details to subtopics in a carefully arranged hierarchy of short, very readable articles. Wikipedia suffers from long, boring articles where the important issues are buried, and controversies are hidden behind verbiage that has been litigated to death.
The lead paragraph in our top article on radiation safety says:
"Government agencies have for decades assumed that deaths and other bad effects of radiation on our health follow a model called Linear No Threshold (LNT), in which death and disease is directly proportional to the total cumulative radiation, no matter how low the rate, even as low as the normal background radiation from space and the materials around us. This assumption ignores the data on low exposures (Figs.1&2) and the role of DNA repair in mitigating the damage done by low doses of radiation (Fig.3). Without a repair mechanism, the number of DNA breaks would simply accumulate in a linear fashion, no matter how low the exposure."
Let me know if we can improve on that. Our articles are always open for improvement.
Leading off the section on "radiation safety" by talking about LNT in the first sentence is exactly the wrong way to go. It makes LNT, a biologically nonsensical model, the effective null hypothesis. I made the same mistake in the Flop book.
One thing I like about the Make Nuclear Cheap Again book is there are 15 pages on the basics of radiation damage and repair before we ever see the acronym. Biology first, then data, then talk about harm models.
Oh, and stay away from the root word "safe" in all its useless forms. It should be banned from any serious discussion of risk.
Chapter 3, Radiation Damage and Repair is excellent, and you have the order right - SNT later in chapter 5. Our lead on "radiation safety" is actually in the article above the one I cited.
** Section on Safety {Your comments on this section are welcome.}
*** Radiation Hazards
*** Fear of Radiation
Perhaps we should have a note at the top of each article - Read the [prerequisite] before this one. Citizendium does this by always having a link in the first paragraph, but it's just a hint, not a prerequisite.
What I left out in my short quote above was the first sentence of the paragraph:
/bold{Fear of radiation} is one of the barriers to /link{reconsidering nuclear power}.
We are also considering making LNT a separate article, subordinate to Fear of Radiation. A lot more could be said on both topics. We need more authors. Maybe some students studying nuclear engineering would have the motive and incentive as part of their studies.
You keep pushing me into specific technologies which is counter-productive, because it's distractive from the real problem, a regualtory process which suppresses competition, and changes all the players' incentives in a auto-genocidally disastrous manner.
But as long as were talking cesium. In a solid fuel reactor release, the most damaging isotope in the 3 months to 2 year period is Cs-134.
Cs-134 is not a fission product.. It is produced by neutron capture on
Cs-133 which inturn is produced by the decay of Xe-133. In a well designed liquid fuel reactor almost all the Xe-133 is bubbled off before that happens, so unlike LWR's, liquid fuel reactors produce nearly no Cs-134. Your panel might have mention that.
Tritium is super weak beta emitter. It's innocuous. For, it to possibly be a problem you would have to drink so much super tritrated water that you would get a heart attack from the water, as marathon runners occasionally do from "hydrating" far, far before you have a radiation problem.
CANDU's non-problem is caused by idiocy.. During operation, tritium builds up inside containment, Since tritium is so innocuous, the obvious thing to do is vent it, and let it dilute. But that would be bad PR so the Canadian keep it all in containment, where it just keeps building up. Then in an excess of precaution, they make the guys where bunny suits with piped in air during maintenance. Total nonsense.
For radiation, dilution is never the solution. And for that we can blame LNT which make precisely that claim.
Sorry to be pushing you on issues that distract from your main mission. I will engage with the anti's, and get back to you if they come up with anything needing a better response.
I've copied your comment on CANDU tritium to the discussion on radioactive gases, with a link back to this forum. Let me know if you want any changes.
Figure 5 in Evangeliou is good evidence on the effect of fires in spreading Cs-137 from a forest near Chernobyl where it has long been dormant (29 years). The worst case exposure to a person near the fires is small ( 1 mSv). The question remains is this really the worst case? How do forest fires spreading Cs-137 absorbed in trees compare with dust storms? If I were a resident wanting to move back into an exclusion zone, how long should I wait?
Figure 2 in Kinase shows the deposition rates of Cs-137 and Sr-90 at two sites near Fukushima. There is a seasonal variation due to "local and long-range transported dust particles {14,15,34,45,46}". Perhaps these cited studies will show the connection between deposition rates (MBq / m2 / month) and dose to the residents (mSv) from inhaled dust.
The mainstream media continue to promote fear of radiation in exclusion zones. I recently saw a report on the Russians kicking up dust moving military vehicles around Chernobyl. The implication was that this was a terrible risk for the poor Russian soldiers - no numbers of course. No clear statement, just innuendo.
Hey Jack, have you ever tried playing a guitar. If so, you will appreciate the difficulty of playing even a simple tune like this with this level of mastery.
One of my anti-nuke friends plays guitar. After our last discussion on LNT, I thought he was going to unfriend me, but we now have something in common.
ROS is the key factor.
https://haematologica.org/article/view/9979
Is a layman translation available?
25 mGy/min may be a low dose rate in a lab, but it is not a low dose rate in a NPP release.
Yes, the production of ROS scavengers can be important for some profiles. That's probably the reason we see the priming effect. But real world release exposures are continuous. My guess is that whatever the priming effect is it saturates pretty quickly. Otherwise, we get into a release-is-good-for-you-world.
But I'm going to cut this discussion off. We need a well defined replacement for LNT. When you have one, pls present it to us.
I'm working on a simple Python program that will model NPP release profiles, exposures that continue for a year or more (Kramatorsk), and intermittent exposures to radon (hormesis). It does show a "priming effect".
This is NOT a replacement for SNT. It is just an idealized model to satisfy my curiosity and maybe anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the molecular biology. SNT is all we need for modeling NPP releases.
We don't need a universal model. We need a model for each dose rate. We need to collect the data for that.
To replace LNT we must have a "universal" model, meaning a model that can convert any dose rate profile into a cancer risk. SNT is a model that can handle any dose rate.
I've had it. You will have to take your ramblings elsewhere.
If your SNT can account for cancers caused by mammography, I would adopt it.
That's rather a holy hyperbole Friday there Jack.
Cohen showed, rather convincingly, in his book, The Nuclear Energy Option, that even using LNT, nuclear power is very safe, indeed much safer than any other means of generating reliable power. It is on par with wind and solar, and those aren't reliable. Cohen also showed that using LNT and long time frames, what anti-nukes do regularly to score points, nuclear power has very big net health benefits, due to reduced radon from using the uranium up.
Cohen's book is a real eye opener. Still one of the best books ever written on nuclear energy risks.
Cohen used an LNT slope 3 times lower than the ICRP/NCRP number (NEO page 38) which few LNTers will accept.
Far more fundamentally, why should we accept LNT when it is flat qualitatively wrong. LNT says we cant repair DNA damage. Indisputable biology says we can and the data agrees. We can't live with LNT. As long as LNT is around, we will have ALARA and all kinds of super-expensive regulation. And perhaps most importantly, we must avoid the ambulance chasers. That means we must have a firm radiation exposure compensation plan. If your harm model is LNT, any such plan is uninsurable.
Yes, that's a key point. But there is more to it. Cohen steel-manned the argument by using LNT to show that these multi billion dollar investments made no sense even with the crazy LNT stuff. So there is more going on here than LNT. Even with LNT you could not justify a 50 billion dollar repository. You could justify making basement ventilation systems mandatory in building code to cut radon dose, but we're not doing that. So there are some things very wrong with the nuclear industry. At this point, abolishing LNT would help but I doubt it would bring us back to the real world. It seems that most in the govt and industry involved are not at all interested in real change. They're being paid to be ignorant. Professional lunacy. Where do you think all those billions end up? Not in good steel or concrete, look at the rusty pipes at Yucca Mountain, or the goof of using organic kitty litter as an absorbent. It's not being spent on materials. It ends up in the pockets of the people and companies involved. They rather very much like the 50 billion repository and would work hard to make it a 100 billion one if they could, and they probably will. Radiophobia and lack of knowledge prevents a widespread public outrage over the obscene amounts of money being wasted for no real results. Same radiophobia and ignorance also fails to provide a bottom up support from the public to get rid of LNT and other falsehoods. Elton John said it best: It's a sad sad situation, and it's getting more and more absurd.
Replacing LNT is only the first step to a competitive market in supplying nuclear plants, and changing all the players' incentives from milking the taxpayer to being forced to do the job right or disappear, but it is a NECESSARY first step. But I repeat myself.
> LNT says we cant repair DNA damage.
Does it? I was under the impression LNT says that ionizing radiation damage is not special, constitutes a small fraction of DNA damage total, and is subject to the very same almost-perfect DNA repair that gives us our quite substantial lifetime probability of cancer.
Jack, this is excellent. I will ignore the ad hominem (I get worse from the anti's) and read the articles you have cited.
You may have misunderstood the question. There is no argument over LNT (I have not "stumbled on the core issue"). The worry about groundshine is easy to quantify (a few microwatts per square meter). The question was about Cs-137 in the dust long after the plume has blown over.
I think you are right that it is not a problem, but just calling it a "phony issue" won't convince the anti's on FaceBook. Why should you care what they think? Because these are the people who control public opinion. Your NRA proposal will get nowhere if all you do is preach to the choir.
Keep up the good work. Your articles are by far the best on the nuclear debate. Let me and others engage with the morons. Be more tolerant when we come back with a question.
Yeah, the lead in was a little over the top, mea culpa, but it's is not an ad hominum argument.
I did not JUST call resuspension a phony issue. I gave a very compelling citation. A fire is a far more effective way of resuspending than anything else you can name. Resuspension dose rates will always be a tiny fraction of teh groundshine, certainly after the I-131 is gone.
Jack, I have started to read the 5 articles you cited (at least the ones that are not paywalled) and review my earlier reading of your four articles relevant to this topic. No doubt all the information we need is there, but I would really like to see your short summary on the question of resuspension, or even a short article, like this one on groundshine. Hit em hard, and maybe we will get through this last trench before the hill.
Remember our audience is smart people interested in the LNT debate but misinformed, skeptical, and perhaps even a little anti-nuclear. The dedicated anti-nukers are lost, but maybe we can embarrass them.
I'll pit it on the list, at about number 102. And then they will dream up another trench.
This whack a mole approach won't work.
You must start with the basics. Can we repair radiation damage or not? The nuclear complex claims we cannot. Are they right?
I understand 102 on your list. This question of resuspension is not as important as your other work.
Yes, I have seen many times the a debunkee will fall back to "another trench" when his/her first claim is proven false. When you debunked Ed Lyman's claim that Cs-137 was a big problem in Molten Salt Reactors, the response was: No he was talking about the Cs-137 that is coming from the decay of noble gas fission products, not chemically bound to the salt.
I am not a nuclear engineer, so I turned to our panel of experts and got some good responses to this new "trench":
From Ed Pheil:
"In general it doesn't [get released from the core] but any losses would likely be as CsI into the offgas system, where a chiller condenses/captures it."
From Robert Gauthier:
"As for the gas issue, this stinks as a red herring, as it insinuates that off-gassing is something that hasn’t been considered to date, which would only be the case if the engineers attached to these projects were incompetent fools. This would have to be extended to the personnel of the several national agencies in various countries that have given initial approval to some of these SMRs."
... and on another complaint from Ed Lyman:
"Tritium is produced by CANDU reactors in volumes enough that it has to be dealt with and it is to the point where this has become the top global source for this isotope and a bit of a side hustle for CANDU operators."
See the Debate Page {https://citizendium.org/wiki/ThorCon_nuclear_reactor/Debate_Guide} for Citizendium's summary of this and other issues with links back to the original discussions, so nobody can claim these quotes are out of context.
The 'whack a mole' approach IS working. When a mole pops up, I like being able to reply: "We've had this discussion already {link to a summary in Citizendium}. Do you have anything new?"
Yes, we must definitely start with the basics, and leave the details to subtopics in a carefully arranged hierarchy of short, very readable articles. Wikipedia suffers from long, boring articles where the important issues are buried, and controversies are hidden behind verbiage that has been litigated to death.
The lead paragraph in our top article on radiation safety says:
"Government agencies have for decades assumed that deaths and other bad effects of radiation on our health follow a model called Linear No Threshold (LNT), in which death and disease is directly proportional to the total cumulative radiation, no matter how low the rate, even as low as the normal background radiation from space and the materials around us. This assumption ignores the data on low exposures (Figs.1&2) and the role of DNA repair in mitigating the damage done by low doses of radiation (Fig.3). Without a repair mechanism, the number of DNA breaks would simply accumulate in a linear fashion, no matter how low the exposure."
Let me know if we can improve on that. Our articles are always open for improvement.
Leading off the section on "radiation safety" by talking about LNT in the first sentence is exactly the wrong way to go. It makes LNT, a biologically nonsensical model, the effective null hypothesis. I made the same mistake in the Flop book.
One thing I like about the Make Nuclear Cheap Again book is there are 15 pages on the basics of radiation damage and repair before we ever see the acronym. Biology first, then data, then talk about harm models.
Oh, and stay away from the root word "safe" in all its useless forms. It should be banned from any serious discussion of risk.
Chapter 3, Radiation Damage and Repair is excellent, and you have the order right - SNT later in chapter 5. Our lead on "radiation safety" is actually in the article above the one I cited.
https://citizendium.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_reconsidered#Safety
The complete hierarchy is:
* Nuclear Power Reconsidered
** Section on Safety {Your comments on this section are welcome.}
*** Radiation Hazards
*** Fear of Radiation
Perhaps we should have a note at the top of each article - Read the [prerequisite] before this one. Citizendium does this by always having a link in the first paragraph, but it's just a hint, not a prerequisite.
What I left out in my short quote above was the first sentence of the paragraph:
/bold{Fear of radiation} is one of the barriers to /link{reconsidering nuclear power}.
We are also considering making LNT a separate article, subordinate to Fear of Radiation. A lot more could be said on both topics. We need more authors. Maybe some students studying nuclear engineering would have the motive and incentive as part of their studies.
You keep pushing me into specific technologies which is counter-productive, because it's distractive from the real problem, a regualtory process which suppresses competition, and changes all the players' incentives in a auto-genocidally disastrous manner.
But as long as were talking cesium. In a solid fuel reactor release, the most damaging isotope in the 3 months to 2 year period is Cs-134.
Cs-134 is not a fission product.. It is produced by neutron capture on
Cs-133 which inturn is produced by the decay of Xe-133. In a well designed liquid fuel reactor almost all the Xe-133 is bubbled off before that happens, so unlike LWR's, liquid fuel reactors produce nearly no Cs-134. Your panel might have mention that.
Tritium is super weak beta emitter. It's innocuous. For, it to possibly be a problem you would have to drink so much super tritrated water that you would get a heart attack from the water, as marathon runners occasionally do from "hydrating" far, far before you have a radiation problem.
CANDU's non-problem is caused by idiocy.. During operation, tritium builds up inside containment, Since tritium is so innocuous, the obvious thing to do is vent it, and let it dilute. But that would be bad PR so the Canadian keep it all in containment, where it just keeps building up. Then in an excess of precaution, they make the guys where bunny suits with piped in air during maintenance. Total nonsense.
For radiation, dilution is never the solution. And for that we can blame LNT which make precisely that claim.
Sorry to be pushing you on issues that distract from your main mission. I will engage with the anti's, and get back to you if they come up with anything needing a better response.
I've copied your comment on CANDU tritium to the discussion on radioactive gases, with a link back to this forum. Let me know if you want any changes.
https://citizendium.org/wiki/ThorCon_nuclear_reactor/Debate_Guide#Radioactive_gases
Question: Tritium is a valuable isotope in short supply. Why is there any buildup in the containment?
I will keep your comments on Cs-134 for later, if the mole pops up from another hole. The complaint was about Cs-137.
Figure 5 in Evangeliou is good evidence on the effect of fires in spreading Cs-137 from a forest near Chernobyl where it has long been dormant (29 years). The worst case exposure to a person near the fires is small ( 1 mSv). The question remains is this really the worst case? How do forest fires spreading Cs-137 absorbed in trees compare with dust storms? If I were a resident wanting to move back into an exclusion zone, how long should I wait?
Figure 2 in Kinase shows the deposition rates of Cs-137 and Sr-90 at two sites near Fukushima. There is a seasonal variation due to "local and long-range transported dust particles {14,15,34,45,46}". Perhaps these cited studies will show the connection between deposition rates (MBq / m2 / month) and dose to the residents (mSv) from inhaled dust.
The mainstream media continue to promote fear of radiation in exclusion zones. I recently saw a report on the Russians kicking up dust moving military vehicles around Chernobyl. The implication was that this was a terrible risk for the poor Russian soldiers - no numbers of course. No clear statement, just innuendo.
Hey Jack, have you ever tried playing a guitar. If so, you will appreciate the difficulty of playing even a simple tune like this with this level of mastery.
https://www.facebook.com/macquigg/posts/pfbid0pC8ipc5nxBMSHBSwUnPYtEWABiHqrFxr1oqbpRSSCLuU12NzjVdAMrBtZDDKVAeul
One of my anti-nuke friends plays guitar. After our last discussion on LNT, I thought he was going to unfriend me, but we now have something in common.