Radiation exposure is an easy "event" to dramatize as "very dangerous", regardless of the reality.
Your efforts to bring some sanity to this whole arena are to be lauded.
Thinking about possible measures to better protect those elderly Japanese moved and left in less than commodious situations, I was wondering if a set of converted shipping containers could serve some superior temporary protective role in such cases? Fly them in, pre-engineered with ventilation and suitable filtration, etc. Add layers of lead cladding if that is appropriate? Or even just as temporary command posts for responders to use while adding local people to cope?
I keep looking for technical assistance or solutions, when I suppose the real problem is bad intellectual thinking and overly reactive psychology.
Nobody should have been evacuated at Fukushima, let alone old frail people. There was no need for lead lined containers or the like. Under conservative assumptions, the Lost Life Expectancy for the worst hit 10% in teh worst hit town Okuma was 2 hours. See Underwriter Certification Manual, Table 8.1. For every body else it was less, almost always far less. Wasteful, unnecessary measures such as you are suggesting will exacerbate the situation, both mentally and physically. They will create needeless concern and simply shifting some of these infirm people will have a far higher LLE than leaving them undisturbed.
Jack has mentioned that an N-95 mask will reduce doses by 100x. I don't think anyone's imagination of what the risks are from a release extend to thinking that an evacuation is reasonable 100x over (except for a former Chairman of the NRC, but probably not the current one)
That reduction occurs ONLY during the plume passage at a point which is a matter of hours or at most days. After that the great bulk of the dose will be from groundshine. Masking up will not effect groundshine at all. But ground shine dose rates are almost always well below the 2 mSv/d tolerance dose. 2 mSv/d will result in no detectable harm even if experienced for very prolonged periods because our repair processes have no problem handling this dose rate.
unrelated to the post, but I'd love a post on your favorite up and coming (next gen?) nuclear tech. Is it MSR? fast breeders? That would be a great post to read!
GKN eschews rating the different designs. There are two main reasons for this:
1) Nuclear's problem is regulatory, not technical. It cannot be solved by "new" technology. The LWR is a klunky, brute force technology, but it is plenty good enough. It's should-cost is about $2000/kW which would result in a base load LCOE of about 3 cents/kWh in the absence of regulatory risk.
No new technology can solve the regulatory problem. Worse, even if one of the non-LWR designs is actually cheaper than the LWR, ALARA guarantees that the cost of that technology will be pushed up to the point where it is barely competitive with the alternatives. There's no point in being better.
2) GKN does not know what the best technology is. The way to find out is competition, not some expert or far worse bureaucracy choosing winners. Let a 1000 Flowers bloom in a truly competitive garden.
I will say the SMR craze is a scam, which has morphed into a taxpayer ripoff. And don't get me started on micro-reactors, a super-expensive solution to a non-problem, even in the absence of misguided, out of control regulation. We need BMR's Big Modular Reactors, the biggest we can build in assembly line fashion. And that means using shipyard production, to build the entire plant not just the primary loop.
The stupidest thing we can do is to put a whole bunch of tiny, inefficient, primary loops, in a massive site built structure and call it an SMR. Did you know that the 924 Mwe Nuscale 12-pack is housed in a 60 m deep, 400,000 m3 swimming pool? That's the opposite of small. The building volume of the ridiculously over-built and unaffordable 1600 MWe EPR is about 340,000 m3.
Great reply, and I already agree with you on those points, but don't you have a liking for one thing or another as somebody who knows a lot about the subject? Not the best technology or anything, just personal affinity. I personally look for reactors that can burn a wider array of stuff so Thorium or non enriched Uranium or "waste" from LWR can be used as fuel. This effectively means fuel is cheaper than free since people will pay you to take their "nuclear waste" from their hands.
"LNT's monomanical focus" articulately stated. Our society is being buried under a quagmire of insane rules and regulation, the LNT being one of the most 'total death' ignoring. Thanks for doing what you can to make this a focal point.
From 1977 to 1980, four thousand U.S. servicemen were deployed to the area to clean-up the site with a $100 million budget. While the area is contaminated primarily by plutonium, the servicemen were provided with no special uniforms, no breathing apparatus, and no training to deal with the contaminated environment they were working in. The idea of these men being brought into deal with the nuclear disaster is reminiscent of the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl”, which showcased the work of the Soviet “liquidators” who dealt with radioactive fall-out from the nuclear power plant disaster there.
During this American clean-up endeavor, 85,000 cubic meters of radioactive topsoil and other debris from the area was mixed with concrete and buried in Cactus Crater. Unlike typical landfills, there is no liner for this waste site; it is exposed to the porous ground and water table beneath it. Once the Cactus Crater was filled with radioactive debris, including the tools they were using to construct it, it was capped with large panels of concrete roughly 18” thick. After the clean-up effort, many of the servicemen involved in the “Enewetak Atoll Radiological Support Project” succumbed to radiation-related illnesses and death; there are only a few hundred known survivors from the 1980 clean-up .
I need to tread very carefully here. But it is quite unlikely that the vets' problems are due to plutonium. Pu-239 and its daughters are almost entirely alpha emitters. Since alphas have no penetrating power, the plutonium would have to have been ingested or inhaled to cause any harm.
The vets talk about carrying around chunks of Pu-containing rock. This could not have caused any harm. Workers at Hanford routinely walked around with balls of nearly pure, highly enriched Pu-239 in the pockets of their lab coats.
If Pu is ingested the uptake is nil. 99.99% will be excreted in a day or two. And even if plutonium somehow got into their blood stream their would be no noticeable effect. In 1948 in a reprehensible experiment, 59 year old Albert Stevens, a supposedly terminal cancer patient, was injected with highly soluble plutonium nitrate without his knowledge. The Pu239 was spiked with Pu-238 to increase the dose rate by about a factor of 300.
Stevens had been misdiagnosed. He died at age 79 of heart failure. For 20 years, his body repaired about 8 mSv/d of mostly alpha radiation harm. The UPPU Club consisted of the 26 Manhattan Project employees with the highest level of plutonium in their urine. As a group they outlived both the population as a whole and fellow Manhattan project workers. Eric Voice voluntered to both eat and inhale Pu to track how it moves around. He died at 80.
There was a great deal of work done on inhaled plutonium in the 1950's and 1960's including a slew of animal experiments. We know that about 15% of the inhaled material stays in the lungs with a half-life of about 2 years. So it is straightforward to calculate the dose-rate associated with a given amount of contamination. Given the long half-lives of Pu-239 and its daughters, those dose rates tend to be tiny. In animal tests we start to see an increase in lung cancer at a dose to the lung of about 3000 mSv. The experimenters had to work hard to produce inhaled doses this large.
Without some real measurements of the actual dose rates and a comparison of the vets with a control group, it is hard to say more.
The histrionic article you cite is bereft of numbers. It is true that the Dome has no liner. The material had contact with sea water through the porous coral from day 1. It is also true that only a tiny fraction of all the bomb test radioactive debris was buried in the Dome. Which raises two questions:
1) What was the point of the Dome?
2) If 99.2% of the material is already outside the Dome, why worry about the Dome leaking?
It is also true that plutonium oxidizes very rapidly. PuO2 is insoluble and dense. The material is moving from the Dome very slowly.
Thank you for the reply and detailed explanation. Your name was brought in a Decouple Podcast Vogtle Part 3: Was the NRC to blame? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbKf_TbI000 I am not a Nuclear Expert just a BSEE, but try to determine the truth. Thanks and enjoy your Substack
Radiation exposure is an easy "event" to dramatize as "very dangerous", regardless of the reality.
Your efforts to bring some sanity to this whole arena are to be lauded.
Thinking about possible measures to better protect those elderly Japanese moved and left in less than commodious situations, I was wondering if a set of converted shipping containers could serve some superior temporary protective role in such cases? Fly them in, pre-engineered with ventilation and suitable filtration, etc. Add layers of lead cladding if that is appropriate? Or even just as temporary command posts for responders to use while adding local people to cope?
I keep looking for technical assistance or solutions, when I suppose the real problem is bad intellectual thinking and overly reactive psychology.
Nobody should have been evacuated at Fukushima, let alone old frail people. There was no need for lead lined containers or the like. Under conservative assumptions, the Lost Life Expectancy for the worst hit 10% in teh worst hit town Okuma was 2 hours. See Underwriter Certification Manual, Table 8.1. For every body else it was less, almost always far less. Wasteful, unnecessary measures such as you are suggesting will exacerbate the situation, both mentally and physically. They will create needeless concern and simply shifting some of these infirm people will have a far higher LLE than leaving them undisturbed.
Jack has mentioned that an N-95 mask will reduce doses by 100x. I don't think anyone's imagination of what the risks are from a release extend to thinking that an evacuation is reasonable 100x over (except for a former Chairman of the NRC, but probably not the current one)
That reduction occurs ONLY during the plume passage at a point which is a matter of hours or at most days. After that the great bulk of the dose will be from groundshine. Masking up will not effect groundshine at all. But ground shine dose rates are almost always well below the 2 mSv/d tolerance dose. 2 mSv/d will result in no detectable harm even if experienced for very prolonged periods because our repair processes have no problem handling this dose rate.
unrelated to the post, but I'd love a post on your favorite up and coming (next gen?) nuclear tech. Is it MSR? fast breeders? That would be a great post to read!
E
GKN eschews rating the different designs. There are two main reasons for this:
1) Nuclear's problem is regulatory, not technical. It cannot be solved by "new" technology. The LWR is a klunky, brute force technology, but it is plenty good enough. It's should-cost is about $2000/kW which would result in a base load LCOE of about 3 cents/kWh in the absence of regulatory risk.
No new technology can solve the regulatory problem. Worse, even if one of the non-LWR designs is actually cheaper than the LWR, ALARA guarantees that the cost of that technology will be pushed up to the point where it is barely competitive with the alternatives. There's no point in being better.
2) GKN does not know what the best technology is. The way to find out is competition, not some expert or far worse bureaucracy choosing winners. Let a 1000 Flowers bloom in a truly competitive garden.
I will say the SMR craze is a scam, which has morphed into a taxpayer ripoff. And don't get me started on micro-reactors, a super-expensive solution to a non-problem, even in the absence of misguided, out of control regulation. We need BMR's Big Modular Reactors, the biggest we can build in assembly line fashion. And that means using shipyard production, to build the entire plant not just the primary loop.
The stupidest thing we can do is to put a whole bunch of tiny, inefficient, primary loops, in a massive site built structure and call it an SMR. Did you know that the 924 Mwe Nuscale 12-pack is housed in a 60 m deep, 400,000 m3 swimming pool? That's the opposite of small. The building volume of the ridiculously over-built and unaffordable 1600 MWe EPR is about 340,000 m3.
Great reply, and I already agree with you on those points, but don't you have a liking for one thing or another as somebody who knows a lot about the subject? Not the best technology or anything, just personal affinity. I personally look for reactors that can burn a wider array of stuff so Thorium or non enriched Uranium or "waste" from LWR can be used as fuel. This effectively means fuel is cheaper than free since people will pay you to take their "nuclear waste" from their hands.
"LNT's monomanical focus" articulately stated. Our society is being buried under a quagmire of insane rules and regulation, the LNT being one of the most 'total death' ignoring. Thanks for doing what you can to make this a focal point.
As a disabled VET, I met some of the 4000 vets being treated for cancer and blamed the clean up? This 2019 article seems Anti Nuclear Propaganda? https://weatherboy.com/growing-concerns-with-impending-u-s-nuclear-disaster/
From 1977 to 1980, four thousand U.S. servicemen were deployed to the area to clean-up the site with a $100 million budget. While the area is contaminated primarily by plutonium, the servicemen were provided with no special uniforms, no breathing apparatus, and no training to deal with the contaminated environment they were working in. The idea of these men being brought into deal with the nuclear disaster is reminiscent of the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl”, which showcased the work of the Soviet “liquidators” who dealt with radioactive fall-out from the nuclear power plant disaster there.
During this American clean-up endeavor, 85,000 cubic meters of radioactive topsoil and other debris from the area was mixed with concrete and buried in Cactus Crater. Unlike typical landfills, there is no liner for this waste site; it is exposed to the porous ground and water table beneath it. Once the Cactus Crater was filled with radioactive debris, including the tools they were using to construct it, it was capped with large panels of concrete roughly 18” thick. After the clean-up effort, many of the servicemen involved in the “Enewetak Atoll Radiological Support Project” succumbed to radiation-related illnesses and death; there are only a few hundred known survivors from the 1980 clean-up .
Brian,
I need to tread very carefully here. But it is quite unlikely that the vets' problems are due to plutonium. Pu-239 and its daughters are almost entirely alpha emitters. Since alphas have no penetrating power, the plutonium would have to have been ingested or inhaled to cause any harm.
The vets talk about carrying around chunks of Pu-containing rock. This could not have caused any harm. Workers at Hanford routinely walked around with balls of nearly pure, highly enriched Pu-239 in the pockets of their lab coats.
If Pu is ingested the uptake is nil. 99.99% will be excreted in a day or two. And even if plutonium somehow got into their blood stream their would be no noticeable effect. In 1948 in a reprehensible experiment, 59 year old Albert Stevens, a supposedly terminal cancer patient, was injected with highly soluble plutonium nitrate without his knowledge. The Pu239 was spiked with Pu-238 to increase the dose rate by about a factor of 300.
Stevens had been misdiagnosed. He died at age 79 of heart failure. For 20 years, his body repaired about 8 mSv/d of mostly alpha radiation harm. The UPPU Club consisted of the 26 Manhattan Project employees with the highest level of plutonium in their urine. As a group they outlived both the population as a whole and fellow Manhattan project workers. Eric Voice voluntered to both eat and inhale Pu to track how it moves around. He died at 80.
There was a great deal of work done on inhaled plutonium in the 1950's and 1960's including a slew of animal experiments. We know that about 15% of the inhaled material stays in the lungs with a half-life of about 2 years. So it is straightforward to calculate the dose-rate associated with a given amount of contamination. Given the long half-lives of Pu-239 and its daughters, those dose rates tend to be tiny. In animal tests we start to see an increase in lung cancer at a dose to the lung of about 3000 mSv. The experimenters had to work hard to produce inhaled doses this large.
Without some real measurements of the actual dose rates and a comparison of the vets with a control group, it is hard to say more.
The histrionic article you cite is bereft of numbers. It is true that the Dome has no liner. The material had contact with sea water through the porous coral from day 1. It is also true that only a tiny fraction of all the bomb test radioactive debris was buried in the Dome. Which raises two questions:
1) What was the point of the Dome?
2) If 99.2% of the material is already outside the Dome, why worry about the Dome leaking?
It is also true that plutonium oxidizes very rapidly. PuO2 is insoluble and dense. The material is moving from the Dome very slowly.
Thank you for the reply and detailed explanation. Your name was brought in a Decouple Podcast Vogtle Part 3: Was the NRC to blame? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbKf_TbI000 I am not a Nuclear Expert just a BSEE, but try to determine the truth. Thanks and enjoy your Substack
Very well Said