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A useful analogy might come from WW2 with the fire bombing of cities. What the British discovered is during the German blitz of London is that a well organised fire service could respond and contain the damage from large raids - IF they were spread out over the course of many hours. Yes there was much damage where the bombs landed, but overall the city remained functional.

By contrast later in the war when it was the Allies bombing German cities like Dresden, they had learned to concentrate the raid into as short a period as possible, and the resulting firestorm completely overwhelmed the fire services causing complete obliteration of the city and great loss of life.

It is a good, if somewhat chilling, example of how the rate of damage has a direct impact on the resulting harm.

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Philip,

I like it, but in this case, our repair systems are good enough so that below a certain dose rate there is no detectable harm to the organism. Damaged cells are either repaired or killed off. The old word for this was the tolerance dose rate, which prior to 1950 was set conservatively at 1 mSv/day. That now forgotten number has held up very nicely.

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Yes I agree, like most analogies it is not perfect.

During the 80's I worked in an industrial setting with quite strong Kr-85 sources and wore a small blue photo-dosimetric badge all the time at work. Each month for seven years I posted it back to HQ and like all of my colleagues there was never so much as a blip in my dose record. I once walked through the plant with a live source in my bare hands and absolutely no dose was recorded because we knew the shielding worked.

Yet despite that working knowledge I remained for a very long period opposed to nuclear power, and irrationally concerned about radiation. In hindsight I find it hard to understand how I retained such contradictory ideas in my head for so long. In part it speaks to the power of the activist scare-mongering campaign that was run against nuclear power during my formative years.

The Fukushima event was in some ways a turning point. Initially I was, like many others deeply alarmed. Then slowly the reality of how little actual radiation harm had been caused seeped into my consciousness and I started to look wider. For me personally the tipping point was finding Gordon McDowell's work on YT and investing maybe a 1000 hrs or more deepening my physics understanding on this topic. To the point now I only wish I was 50 yrs younger and could study nuclear engineering as a young man.

I think my point is that even reasonably well educated people with a decent tech background like myself, can hold all sorts of misconceptions and half-truths. Which is why I am reading all of your articles and appreciate them greatly; it often does not take much to tip someone from a state of unexamined and irrational prejudice into a fuller understanding. Just one key idea is all it takes and you can respect the other person by allowing them independence to seek truth for themselves.

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Philip,

In my view, an important reason why even technically savvy people like yourself were so scared of nuclear was that the nuclear establishment was telling you to be scared. Dose rates that were below background in much of the world were so dangerous that we need to spend 20 billion dollars per year of taxpayer money to ineffectively attempt to reduce then further. See Hanford piece. If the nuclear establishment is telling everybody low dose rates are deadly, you don't need the the anti-nukes to tell you the same thing.

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It also helped that Hitler's Luftwaffe was built primarily to support the army, and never built a large force of true strategic bombers comparable to the British Lancaster or American B-17 and B-24.

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Great post! Is it 21 square miles every year? For waste? I didn’t understand that

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Santiago,

Sorry, I did not make myself clear. No, this for the whole 600 years worth. The 21 m2 will slowly fill up over the 1st 600 years. After than the flow in will equal the flow out. Of course, we will pull the valuable stuff out of the waste long before 600 years.

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Ah ok even better! Thanks for the reply!

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Another analogy would be radiation therapy for cancer where a dose is given and a period of time given for the body to recover before the next dose, then repeat X times for a cumulative dose. This is such a common procedure that is understandable, relatable and acceptable to the general public. A radiation oncologist can provide more details.

Richard Louie

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Richard,

True. If we had no repair processes fractionation would make no sense. But fractionation also depends on differences in cancerous and healthy cell repair rates. Tumor cells tend to be deficient in oxygen because they grow so fast. This makes them radioresistant. Fractionation allows these cells time to oxygenate reducing this barrier to cancer cell killing.

I'd advise against bringing in medical practice to this discussion. The dose rates are many orders of magnitude higher than in a release and highly localized. Equating killing cancer cells with the dose rates experienced in a power plant release is not reassuring.

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A new lurker here. After graduation I joined a firm focused on the NRC-mandated remediation to all LWRs in the US and later the rest of the world for post-TMI responses. A birds-eye view of the industry and the accompanying oversight the Commission thought reasonable for this newfangled industry. An interesting job and our firm came to replace the monitoring systems in more than half of the reactors in North America and beyond. We were not a constructor but rather interlopers to the mainline manufacturers GE, Westinghouse & Combustion Engineering. Perhaps the best definition for our entry into the niche was to be a rent-seeker. My run in that business was about 12 years and I still have a legacy product in use at a handful of sites. My mind has become settled. The challenge for the industry (if its moribund current status even qualifies) are monumental. The challenges are mostly legacy, fear, and uncertainty.

I provide this only as an introduction as I plan to read some of your posts as time allows. Thanks for writing and evangelizing as all causes need a voice.

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Fantastic piece. Thank you!

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