[ RadSafe ] After Five Years, What Is The Cost Of Fukushima?

Fri Mar 11 08:27:41 CST 2016

I would hate to be the person in the position of trying to decide how many safety features to put into a reactor plant. We can always make something - anything - safer, but it all costs money, and that cost might not be justified. I can design a car that will survive virtually any accident - but it would be built like a tank and would cost millions of dollars. We don't normally need that level of protection. Similarly, I could bubble-wrap my kids to protect them from falls - but that doesn't make sense either. I guess this would be the ASARA approach (As Safe As Reasonably Achievable). 

Consider trying to decide how high to build a seawall. If you assume that a reactor plant will have a 50-year operating lifetime then an event that happens (on average) once a millennium only has one chance in 20 of happening during the plant's operating lifetime. OK - this is a 5% risk so it probably makes sense to protect against it. What about a 10,000-year event? Now we only have one chance in 200 - does it make sense to protect against this as well? How about a 100,000-year event? Add into this that building a wall higher costs more money - at some point you're doing the equivalent of building a tank for city driving.

It's easy to say - especially in retrospect - that (for example) all reactors should be at least 10 miles from the ocean. But now you've got to run cooling water pipes from the ocean to the plants, or you're restricted to siting along rivers (but they flood too), etc. - and all of this costs money as well. As for fault lines - there's not a large body of rock in the world that has absolutely no fault lines, although most of them have been inactive for tens of millions of years. OK, so just go with avoiding active fault lines - but how long does a fault have to be quiet to call it "inactive?" And that would also eliminate virtually all of Japan, Indonesia, California - even many areas in Europe. 

We can't protect against EVERYTHING - at some point somebody (regulatory body, engineer, etc.) has to be able to say "This is what makes sense and anything more is excessive."

One last point - in the mid-1990s I read a paper in (if I remember correctly) the New England Journal of Medicine (might have been JAMA...) that discussed the societal costs of distributed expense. The author was looking at the impact of, say, higher utility bills - expenses that are distributed across society. He realized that if I, say, have to pay more for electricity then that money has to come from other parts of my budget. So maybe I can't afford to eat as healthily, or I delay going to the doctor, I put off buying new tires, etc. These decisions - forced on me (and the rest of society) by my higher utility bills - make my life a little less safe. The author calculated that every $10 million in cost distributed across society in this manner costs a year of life. We can argue with his numbers perhaps, but the principle remains sound - spending more in one area means spending less elsewhere and some of this will likely come from areas that affect personal health and/or safety. Or, going back to Fukushima, taking actions to protect against low-probability risks costs money, spending that money causes greater expense across society in the form of higher utility bills or higher taxes, that higher distributed expense adds risk to society. It would be a shame if, at the end of the day, our safety measures proved to increase more risk than they alleviated.

Happy Friday everyone!

Andy

P. Andrew Karam, PhD, CHP
NYPD Counterterrorism
One Police Plaza, Room 1109
New York, NY 10038
(718) 615-7055 (desk)
(646) 879-5268 (mobile)

-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at health.phys.iit.edu [mailto:radsafe-bounces at health.phys.iit.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph Preisig
Sent: Friday, March 11, 2016 12:25 AM
To: The International Radiation Protection (Health Physics) Mailing List
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] After Five Years, What Is The Cost Of Fukushima?

Radsafe/Sander Perle,

       Japan does not have to eliminate the nuclear option.  They simply have to build their fission reactors 10 miles inland from the ocean shorelines, so they are not susceptible to tsunamis from large/great earthquakes.  They can also build high enough seawalls to minimize the effects of tsunamis.  New reactors should be built away from fault-lines.
Back-up power generators of shoreline nuclear reactors need to be in their own concrete buildings, if possible.  I don't make decisions about which Japanese reactors will continue to operate and which will close.

     Joe Preisig

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 11:28 PM, Sander Perle <sandyfl at cox.net> wrote:

> Joe,
>
> One more point. If you agree that current units should be allowed to 
> operate until their operating life is over, then you ignore your very 
> premise that these units are too vulnerable from 8.0 to 9.0 
> earthquakes. If you truly believe that there is a significant 
> probability for other disasters, then your proposal should be to shut 
> them down now. I don't agree.
>
> Consider that while there have been many other earthquakes over the 
> years, Fukushima remains not the norm.
>
> Regards,
>
> Sandy
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Mar 10, 2016, at 19:31, Joseph Preisig <jrpnj01 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Radsafe,
> >
> >     Japan is vulnerable to magnitude 8.0 to 9.0 earthquakes, and 
> > possible tsunamis.  Such earthquakes will happen again and again.  
> > No nuclear power plants should be built on Japan's Ocean shores.  
> > Nuclear plants currently on Japan's ocean shorelines should be 
> > allowed to live out their operating life and then should be closed.  
> > This should also be the case for other countries with exposure to 
> > large/great earthquakes and tsunamis.
> >
> >     Joe Preisig
> >
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 3:17 PM, parthasarathy k s 
> > <ksparth at yahoo.co.uk>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> Thank you Dan. The Forbes article provided at one place important
> details
> >> on the cost of the Fukushima accident Warm regardsParthasarathy
> >>
> >>    On Thursday, 10 March 2016, 23:42, Dan McCarn <
> hotgreenchile at gmail.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> This is from my friend, Jim Conca.
> >>
> >> *After Five Years, What Is The Cost Of Fukushima?*
> >>
> >> The direct costs of the Fukushima disaster will be about $15 
> >> billion in clean-up over the next 20 years and over $60 billion in 
> >> refugee compensation. Replacing Japan’s 300 billion kWhs from 
> >> nuclear each year with fossil fuels has costJapan over $200 
> >> billion, mostly from fuel
> costs
> >> for natural gas, fuel oil and coal. This cost will at least double, 
> >> and that only if the nuclear fleet is mostly restarted by 2020. 
> >> Since 2011, Japan’s trade deficit has become the worst in its 
> >> history, and Japan is
> now
> >> the second largest net importer of fossil fuel in the world, right
> behind
> >> China. Strangely, the costs that never materialized were the most
> feared,
> >> those of radiation-induced cancer and death.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/10/after-five-years-wha
> t-is-the-cost-of-fukushima/#3a7a79346016
> >>
> >> Dan ii
> >>
> >> Dan W McCarn, Geologist
> >> 108 Sherwood Blvd
> >> Los Alamos, NM 87544-3425
> >> +1-505-670-8123 (Mobile - New Mexico)
> >> HotGreenChile at gmail.com (Private email) HotGreenChile at gmail dot 
> >> com
> >> LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dwmccarn
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