A draft slide deck on radiation damage and repair has been uploaded to the Flop book site. It can be downloaded from here. The plan is to have at least five of these slide shows: Radiation Damage and Repair LNT SNT Underwrite Certification Spent Nuclear Fuel
Nice. From my perspective, it is missing the ROS response, which is essential to understanding how dose rate is the most important factor. Low dose rates have no effect.
I read this out loud to my wife - she does understand the core ideas - and I found I was inserting a few extra words here and thereto convey the meaning better.
Otherwise an excellent and concise presentation. Looking forward to the next one!
I have a number of general comments and some slide specific comments.
Slide #4/19 you have: “Some” fission products are unstable isotopes.
It is my understanding that “all” fission products are unstable isotopes. Certainly if it is not “all” it would be most fission products are unstable isotopes.
Slide #5/19 You have a mixture of the Greek particle names (e.g. Alpha) and what the particle is (e.g. electron) in the bold text. You are not consistent. Also, you are assuming people know the Greek alphabet as your text does not include the Greek symbol, but the picture on the right only has the Greek symbol. I have to know how to connect the text on the left with the picture on the right. You could be change this to something like:
Alpha particle (a) Helium nucleus -2 protons, 2 neutrons Almost no penetrating power.
Stopped by piece of paper or few cm of air.
Beta Particle (b)
Electron - similar to the electrons made by cathode ray TVs. Little penetrating power. Most stopped by outer layer of skin.
Gamma ray (g) Same particle as sunshine but higher energy. High penetrating power 50% can pass all the way through a human body
Slide #6/19: you use the acronym RBE in the table, but do not define it on the page. You could put in a small font at the bottom of the page something like:
RBE = Relative Biological Effectiveness (strength of radiation effect)
That being said, I hate acronyms. They are like a secret handshake. I am in the “know”, you are not. Could you just eliminate the “RBE” and just say what it means in the table. Get rid of “linear energy transfer”. Is there a simple set of words my grandmother would understand that gets your message across? If you reduce the buzzwords, you will appeal to a wider audience.
This brings up a general comment. I was an economics undergraduate in college. All of our classes had graphs and charts with lines that shifted, and special economics vocabulary such as “marginal cost”. Great. It made it easy for economists to talk with other economists, but NOT to the general public. My favorite economics author is Dr. Thomas Sowell. He has very comprehensive economics book called “Basic Economics” that cover all of the first two semesters of economics without a single graph, a single chart, any math, and any buzzwords. Any person with moderate intelligence can follow his book. He re-imagined an econ textbook. I would suggest you reduce the complexity of your message. You will probably be stuck with a few terms (alpha, beta, gamma, reactive oxygen species, sievert, gray) but you can probably get rid of some of them such as RIFs, LETs, and RBEs. I would suggest you re-imagine the deck with far fewer terms. It is likely you will lose some of your audience with how detailed you are trying to be.
In the table you have a relative mass column. I worked for IBM for 31 years and built zillions of presentations. When I was new to IBM, I wanted to tell my audience everything I knew. My slides were full of detail. “Let me tell you have a cache line on a computer core works.” It took me 20 years to figure out I had to think about what was most important to tell my audience (because they were not going to remember much). I ended up taking out a lot of detail as it was not central to my message. I was more successful. How is “relative mass” central to your message? My advice would be to take it out of the table.
Slide #12/19 you have: 100mGy: 4.0/7.3, OK
Based upon what you say above in the same slide (i.e. 100 mGy: 73 RIF’s/Gy) shouldn’t the “7.3” be 73?
Slide #13/19 – you could explain the entire thing with a simple diagram and not use the words “High Let” and “Low Let”. Your message does not need them. You could just refer to a damage factor or something like that.
A Sievert is “gray” multiplied by a damage factor.
It is clear that this deck is part of a larger deck you have built. I think it is important to have a simple slide on half-life. The key message is the longer they half-life, the slower the energy given out, the less the danger. I can hold Uranium in my hand as it has a long half-life. Most of the “waste” of a nuclear power plant (something like 95%) is Uranium-238. Unless I eat it or inhale it, its long half-life means it is not giving off much radioactive energy. This is the same for many household chemicals. I can’t drink bleach, but if I don’t eat it, it won’t hurt me.
Slide 7/19: I would simplify the picture. You are showing ions. You have to know some chemistry to know what OH- or H3O+ are. Just show H2O with an arrow to ROS with an arrow to the DNA. You do not need the extra detail. Your message is that radiation, and in fact many normal cell processes (like eating), can break water molecules into highly reactive components called “Reactive Oxygen Species” that can easily chemically interact with DNA. Radiation does some of the same things that breathing does. Because we have to breath, our body has processes to manage the ROS. The issues is overwhelming that mechanism. You can drink a beer and you will probably be fine. You can’t drink 100 beers. You overwhelm your body’s ability to deal with it.
Would it be wrong to use the term “free radicals” rather than reactive oxygen species? People hear about free radicals all the time for other non-radiation reasons.
Slide 14/19 – I have no idea what “endogenous damage” is. Also, on first glance, I had no idea what “Vilenchik-2003” was. It took a minute to figure out it was a study. Why not just say something like:
“Some study estimates of cell breaks are:”
OK, now a very general broad comment… probably one you do not want to hear.
There are two common ways that organizations distribute information, presentations and something that looks like a whitepaper. The presentation assumes a presenter. The whitepaper does not.
In a presentation, words on a slide are death. When a slide is full of words, the audience will try to read and understand the slide. When they are reading the slide, they are NOT… I repeat NOT listening to you. You are effectively blah blah blah in the background. Our brains cannot absorb that much complex visual information with someone talking. Go watch Ted talks. The slides are dumb simple. The presenter provides the rest. Go look at roadside billboards. You have to be able to figure out what the billboard is saying in 1-2 seconds while driving 65 miles an hour. They have darned few words. Your charts are so busy with words. Reduce the words, focus more on pictures, assume a presenter, use speaker notes if you have to. If you are willing to spend the time, get rid of almost all the words on the slides and leave behind a white paper with the pictures and the sentences explaining the pictures.
One last idea …. maybe a bad one. Radiation has a lot of vocabulary. One set talks about how much energy is released by something (Becquerel), the other sets talks about how much is absorbed and the effect of that absorption (Gray, Sievert). You could have a simple chart with three columns.
Energy Released
Becquerel
Energy Absorbed
Grey
Biological Affect
Sievert
One point that can be made is that Becquerels talk about how many atoms decay in a second. Because even small amounts of material have lots of atoms, Becquerel numbers will always be huge. It is not uncommon for anti-nuclear people to talk about Becquerels as the amounts seem massive.
One other thing. One slide with two ideas is more cognitively dense than two slides each with one idea. Don’t be afraid of having more simpler slides with less on them. Watch TV commercials. Think of every time a TV commercial changes its visual focus as being equivalent to a new slides. A 15 second car commercial could change viewpoints 20 times. Despite all the changes, we can easily follow it.
By the way, thanks for the work you do. I appreciate you working on this complex topic. I have read your online book.
Look at Robert Bryce’s substack. His latest entities are simple slides. They are easy to follow, use big fonts so an older person can read them, have one idea per slide, and provide the details in his off-slide comments.
Watch Steve Jobs. His slides are simple with relatively few words.
At a 100 mGy UCB observed 73 RIF's per gray. 100 mGy is one tenth of a gray, so at 100 mGy
they saw 7.3 RIF's.
But agree the slide needs lots of explanation from the presenter. From my perspective, Berkeley's use of centigray , a disparaged unit, was unfortuante.
As far as I can tell, there are only two real issues with nuclear power: cost and radiation. Radiation includes accidents, short and long term storage, etc.. The issue with radiation in the real world is probably more about risk than anything else.
I have heard that the people who evacuated (by car) the three mile island site took a bigger risk driving than the risk they got from the limited radiation exposure they would have received from the plant itself. We can always make things safer if we want to be ridiculous. We could force cars to keep a 100 foot distance between each other, we could mandate 2 miles an hour speed limits, and force each car to have 2 professional drivers onboard. Driving would likely be safer, but no one could afford to drive. Your obvious frustration (and mine) with LNT is it looks like the driving example I give above.
In high school I was part of an anti-nuclear group in Wisconsin called Northern Thunder. I still have a stop nuclear power bumper sticker on one of my old music books. I laugh when I see it. What changed my mind is reading books by Bernard Cohen. He explained things in terms I could understand. I did not feel attacked by him for my stupid beliefs. I was open to his message.
I don’t think we will be able to convince those people that work for the Rocky Mountain Institute that nuclear is the way to go, but I do think we can change public opinion with honest digestible messages. I applaud you working on this.
Slide 19, third bullet, "Expect any harm from 2 mSv/d to be undetectable." Depending on how a reader views 'harm', as written could verify LNT in that person's mind. If there is actually no harm at that level the bullet should read "Expect any harm from 2 mSv/d to be none." (There is a difference between reparable cell "damage" in a human body and actual permanent harm.)
I never claim absolutely zero harm. SNT explicitly says there is a non-zero probability of harm at any repair period dose other than zero. Accepting the no perfectly harmless dose doctrine does NOT imply LNT. There is an infinity of non-linear dose response curves which accept this hypothesis. SNT is one of them. If you claim that the alternative to LNT is an absolute threshold, you are not only setting up a false dichotomy, you are putting yourself in a very difficult position. How do you prove there is absolutely zero harm up to dose x? What exactly is x? You have to come up with a number. What is magic about x such that just below x there is zero harm and just above there is harm? You have fallen intot eh Muller trap. Do NOT go down that route.
Nice. From my perspective, it is missing the ROS response, which is essential to understanding how dose rate is the most important factor. Low dose rates have no effect.
I also think that everybody should stop using Sievert.
I read this out loud to my wife - she does understand the core ideas - and I found I was inserting a few extra words here and thereto convey the meaning better.
Otherwise an excellent and concise presentation. Looking forward to the next one!
I have a number of general comments and some slide specific comments.
Slide #4/19 you have: “Some” fission products are unstable isotopes.
It is my understanding that “all” fission products are unstable isotopes. Certainly if it is not “all” it would be most fission products are unstable isotopes.
Slide #5/19 You have a mixture of the Greek particle names (e.g. Alpha) and what the particle is (e.g. electron) in the bold text. You are not consistent. Also, you are assuming people know the Greek alphabet as your text does not include the Greek symbol, but the picture on the right only has the Greek symbol. I have to know how to connect the text on the left with the picture on the right. You could be change this to something like:
Alpha particle (a) Helium nucleus -2 protons, 2 neutrons Almost no penetrating power.
Stopped by piece of paper or few cm of air.
Beta Particle (b)
Electron - similar to the electrons made by cathode ray TVs. Little penetrating power. Most stopped by outer layer of skin.
Gamma ray (g) Same particle as sunshine but higher energy. High penetrating power 50% can pass all the way through a human body
Slide #6/19: you use the acronym RBE in the table, but do not define it on the page. You could put in a small font at the bottom of the page something like:
RBE = Relative Biological Effectiveness (strength of radiation effect)
That being said, I hate acronyms. They are like a secret handshake. I am in the “know”, you are not. Could you just eliminate the “RBE” and just say what it means in the table. Get rid of “linear energy transfer”. Is there a simple set of words my grandmother would understand that gets your message across? If you reduce the buzzwords, you will appeal to a wider audience.
This brings up a general comment. I was an economics undergraduate in college. All of our classes had graphs and charts with lines that shifted, and special economics vocabulary such as “marginal cost”. Great. It made it easy for economists to talk with other economists, but NOT to the general public. My favorite economics author is Dr. Thomas Sowell. He has very comprehensive economics book called “Basic Economics” that cover all of the first two semesters of economics without a single graph, a single chart, any math, and any buzzwords. Any person with moderate intelligence can follow his book. He re-imagined an econ textbook. I would suggest you reduce the complexity of your message. You will probably be stuck with a few terms (alpha, beta, gamma, reactive oxygen species, sievert, gray) but you can probably get rid of some of them such as RIFs, LETs, and RBEs. I would suggest you re-imagine the deck with far fewer terms. It is likely you will lose some of your audience with how detailed you are trying to be.
In the table you have a relative mass column. I worked for IBM for 31 years and built zillions of presentations. When I was new to IBM, I wanted to tell my audience everything I knew. My slides were full of detail. “Let me tell you have a cache line on a computer core works.” It took me 20 years to figure out I had to think about what was most important to tell my audience (because they were not going to remember much). I ended up taking out a lot of detail as it was not central to my message. I was more successful. How is “relative mass” central to your message? My advice would be to take it out of the table.
Slide #12/19 you have: 100mGy: 4.0/7.3, OK
Based upon what you say above in the same slide (i.e. 100 mGy: 73 RIF’s/Gy) shouldn’t the “7.3” be 73?
Slide #13/19 – you could explain the entire thing with a simple diagram and not use the words “High Let” and “Low Let”. Your message does not need them. You could just refer to a damage factor or something like that.
A Sievert is “gray” multiplied by a damage factor.
It is clear that this deck is part of a larger deck you have built. I think it is important to have a simple slide on half-life. The key message is the longer they half-life, the slower the energy given out, the less the danger. I can hold Uranium in my hand as it has a long half-life. Most of the “waste” of a nuclear power plant (something like 95%) is Uranium-238. Unless I eat it or inhale it, its long half-life means it is not giving off much radioactive energy. This is the same for many household chemicals. I can’t drink bleach, but if I don’t eat it, it won’t hurt me.
Slide 7/19: I would simplify the picture. You are showing ions. You have to know some chemistry to know what OH- or H3O+ are. Just show H2O with an arrow to ROS with an arrow to the DNA. You do not need the extra detail. Your message is that radiation, and in fact many normal cell processes (like eating), can break water molecules into highly reactive components called “Reactive Oxygen Species” that can easily chemically interact with DNA. Radiation does some of the same things that breathing does. Because we have to breath, our body has processes to manage the ROS. The issues is overwhelming that mechanism. You can drink a beer and you will probably be fine. You can’t drink 100 beers. You overwhelm your body’s ability to deal with it.
Would it be wrong to use the term “free radicals” rather than reactive oxygen species? People hear about free radicals all the time for other non-radiation reasons.
Slide 14/19 – I have no idea what “endogenous damage” is. Also, on first glance, I had no idea what “Vilenchik-2003” was. It took a minute to figure out it was a study. Why not just say something like:
“Some study estimates of cell breaks are:”
OK, now a very general broad comment… probably one you do not want to hear.
There are two common ways that organizations distribute information, presentations and something that looks like a whitepaper. The presentation assumes a presenter. The whitepaper does not.
In a presentation, words on a slide are death. When a slide is full of words, the audience will try to read and understand the slide. When they are reading the slide, they are NOT… I repeat NOT listening to you. You are effectively blah blah blah in the background. Our brains cannot absorb that much complex visual information with someone talking. Go watch Ted talks. The slides are dumb simple. The presenter provides the rest. Go look at roadside billboards. You have to be able to figure out what the billboard is saying in 1-2 seconds while driving 65 miles an hour. They have darned few words. Your charts are so busy with words. Reduce the words, focus more on pictures, assume a presenter, use speaker notes if you have to. If you are willing to spend the time, get rid of almost all the words on the slides and leave behind a white paper with the pictures and the sentences explaining the pictures.
One last idea …. maybe a bad one. Radiation has a lot of vocabulary. One set talks about how much energy is released by something (Becquerel), the other sets talks about how much is absorbed and the effect of that absorption (Gray, Sievert). You could have a simple chart with three columns.
Energy Released
Becquerel
Energy Absorbed
Grey
Biological Affect
Sievert
One point that can be made is that Becquerels talk about how many atoms decay in a second. Because even small amounts of material have lots of atoms, Becquerel numbers will always be huge. It is not uncommon for anti-nuclear people to talk about Becquerels as the amounts seem massive.
One other thing. One slide with two ideas is more cognitively dense than two slides each with one idea. Don’t be afraid of having more simpler slides with less on them. Watch TV commercials. Think of every time a TV commercial changes its visual focus as being equivalent to a new slides. A 15 second car commercial could change viewpoints 20 times. Despite all the changes, we can easily follow it.
By the way, thanks for the work you do. I appreciate you working on this complex topic. I have read your online book.
Look at Robert Bryce’s substack. His latest entities are simple slides. They are easy to follow, use big fonts so an older person can read them, have one idea per slide, and provide the details in his off-slide comments.
Watch Steve Jobs. His slides are simple with relatively few words.
https://www.bestpresentation.net/presentation-secrets-steve-jobs/
John,
Feel free to move most of the words to presenter notes.
At a 100 mGy UCB observed 73 RIF's per gray. 100 mGy is one tenth of a gray, so at 100 mGy
they saw 7.3 RIF's.
But agree the slide needs lots of explanation from the presenter. From my perspective, Berkeley's use of centigray , a disparaged unit, was unfortuante.
As far as I can tell, there are only two real issues with nuclear power: cost and radiation. Radiation includes accidents, short and long term storage, etc.. The issue with radiation in the real world is probably more about risk than anything else.
I have heard that the people who evacuated (by car) the three mile island site took a bigger risk driving than the risk they got from the limited radiation exposure they would have received from the plant itself. We can always make things safer if we want to be ridiculous. We could force cars to keep a 100 foot distance between each other, we could mandate 2 miles an hour speed limits, and force each car to have 2 professional drivers onboard. Driving would likely be safer, but no one could afford to drive. Your obvious frustration (and mine) with LNT is it looks like the driving example I give above.
In high school I was part of an anti-nuclear group in Wisconsin called Northern Thunder. I still have a stop nuclear power bumper sticker on one of my old music books. I laugh when I see it. What changed my mind is reading books by Bernard Cohen. He explained things in terms I could understand. I did not feel attacked by him for my stupid beliefs. I was open to his message.
I don’t think we will be able to convince those people that work for the Rocky Mountain Institute that nuclear is the way to go, but I do think we can change public opinion with honest digestible messages. I applaud you working on this.
Slide 19, third bullet, "Expect any harm from 2 mSv/d to be undetectable." Depending on how a reader views 'harm', as written could verify LNT in that person's mind. If there is actually no harm at that level the bullet should read "Expect any harm from 2 mSv/d to be none." (There is a difference between reparable cell "damage" in a human body and actual permanent harm.)
Michael, Michael, Michael
I never claim absolutely zero harm. SNT explicitly says there is a non-zero probability of harm at any repair period dose other than zero. Accepting the no perfectly harmless dose doctrine does NOT imply LNT. There is an infinity of non-linear dose response curves which accept this hypothesis. SNT is one of them. If you claim that the alternative to LNT is an absolute threshold, you are not only setting up a false dichotomy, you are putting yourself in a very difficult position. How do you prove there is absolutely zero harm up to dose x? What exactly is x? You have to come up with a number. What is magic about x such that just below x there is zero harm and just above there is harm? You have fallen intot eh Muller trap. Do NOT go down that route.