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Dear all,
Having followed Norm's discussions with others, I was
taking some time to weigh in regarding what I saw the
basis of the disagreements between the positions that he
represents, and the positions that I believe most of the
folks on this listserver hold to.
However, I happened to run across an interesting
discussion of the subject by someone who pretty much
sums up the issues, so I decided to save myself some
work.
This is from www.sepp.org, and I encourage all to visit
the site. You probably won't agree with everything you
see, but (at least on a cursory glance), it appears that
the group is trying to use the correct *process* for
dealing with public policy issues.
Jim Barnes, CHP
Radiation Safety Officer
Rocketdyne/Boeing
james.g.barnes@att.net
====================
Discussions of Nuclear Power Should Be Based In Reality
by Theodore Rockwell
The Scientist, March 16, 1998
The great scientist-philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington
wrote that his words about "the soulless dance of
bloodless electrons" might be truth, but they were not
reality. He urged us to get away from theoretical
speculations periodically and watch a sunset.
Speculation is our business, but when people ask us
about a technical matter, they deserve an answer that
has real-world meaning, not a hypothetical argument.
For example, one day consumer activist Ralph Nader was
debating radiation pioneer Ralph Lapp. Nader stated that
a pound of plutonium could kill every human being on
Earth. One could picture a one-pint jar of the stuff
spilling on the ground and its deadly vapors spreading
until all life was obliterated. That's what Nader's
statement means in the common-sense real world. But Lapp
put the statement in its proper context by replying: "So
could a pound of fresh air, Ralph." Now how can that be?
We've been repeatedly told that plutonium is the
deadliest substance known. And we know that fresh air is
literally the breath of life. What's going on here?
Nader's statement was not actually a lie; he was just
trying to make us think that a hypothetical conjecture
was a real-world problem. He's saying that the lethal
dose of plutonium is a five-billionth of a pound. It's
really several thousand times larger, but even if Nader
were correct, the only way you could actually kill the
world's 5 billion people with just one pound would be to
line them up and have a trained physician inject into
each person just the toxic amount of plutonium—no more
or there wouldn't be enough to go around. It would have
to be in a fine aerosol mist, or it wouldn't be lethal,
and it would have to go directly into the lung. Then we
would have to wait several decades, protecting the
individual from other life-threatening influences such
as cars, smoking, and malnutrition, until he or she died
of lung cancer, because plutonium poses no other health
threat.
Nader's statement is truth, of sorts, but it is not
reality. In reality, atomic bomb tests have dispersed
about six tons of fine plutonium mist into the air,
enough to give each person in the world 1,000 cancers,
and we've had some laboratory accidents and spills that
contaminated people. But not a single case of plutonium-
caused cancer has been found, despite diligent
searching. (Incidentally, plutonium is not the deadliest
substance known; there are pesticides we throw onto food
crops by the ton that are more toxic, spoonful for
spoonful.)
And what about Lapp's statement? It is true in precisely
the same way as Nader's. If a tiny bubble of fresh air
is injected in just the right way into the bloodstream,
a fatal embolism will develop. The only difference from
the plutonium case is that you wouldn't have to wait
decades for cancer to develop. We do not think of fresh
air as deadly, lethal, or dangerous, and rightly so,
although people have been killed by air bubbles in their
blood. How dangerous is plutonium in the real world? The
answer is: Not a single death has resulted from
plutonium poisoning, although we've been handling it in
tonnage lots for a couple of generations. A sheet of
paper, or even a few feet of air, provides enough
shielding from its radiation. That's the difference
between the world of the imagination and the real world
we live in.
Explaining The Differences
Since most nonscientists don't flit so easily from the
hypothetical world to the physical world, we should be
clear when we do. When we talk about casualties we
should distinguish between real and hypothetical deaths.
For example:
1. Persons who die of food poisoning are known by name
and can be counted. They are real.
2. Persons who die from particulate air pollution are
largely unknown individually, but their numbers can be
estimated approximately by methods that are subject to
peer evaluation. These victims are nameless and their
number controversial, but they are probably real.
3. Deaths "predicted" from exposure to radiation levels
less than natural radiation backgrounds are wholly
hypothetical, since the premise on which such
calculations are based is an administrative convenience,
not a scientific model. The premise is that individually
harmless doses of radioactivity in a population can be
added up to "predict" illness and even deaths in that
population—a notion that affronts both science and
common sense.
These various kinds of victims should not be compared as
if they were the same. We should not justify America's
9,000 annual food-poisoning deaths and tens of thousands
of air-particle deaths by claiming we have avoided
hypothetical deaths that might result from irradiating
the food or replacing coal--burning plants with nuclear.
Scientists have expressed their concerns about global
warm-ing and particulate emission predictions but have
been surprisingly reluctant to speak out on radiation
questions. Why?
We are told that we must choose between wrecking the
planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels at current
rates or wrecking the economy by drastically reducing
our energy usage. We don't even discuss the option of
using nuclear power to produce as much energy as needed
without creating pollution or economic disruption.
Nuclear power has been reliably and safely generating 22
percent of the United States' electricity for a full
generation. But we ignore fission and talk about untried
hopes such as fusion, solar power, and
undefined "renewables."
We decide not to build another nuclear power plant
because "we haven't solved the waste problem." How many
people do we save by not adding to the nuclear waste?
None. No one has ever been hurt by nuclear waste in the
U.S., and no one is ever likely to be. We should treat
radioactive waste just as we do selenium, arsenic,
cadmium, mercury, barium, and other toxic materials
whose half-lives are infinite. With such toxins we have
ample experience that simple, common-sense waste
disposal practices are fully adequate.
Another notorious hypothetical scenario is the dreaded
nuclear reactor meltdown and the subsequent China
syndrome, in which the molten core melts into the Earth
on its way to China. (We're talking about the only kind
of reactors built in the West and in the Pacific Rim.
The Chernobyl reactor is a different story—not as bad as
you've heard, but not relevant here.) To get radioactive
clouds and evacuation plans and all the other aspects of
a nuclear emergency, we had to dream up a situation that
would get all of the water out of the reactor vessel
fast; otherwise, the reactor will not melt. In the
laboratory of the mind, that's easy. We came up with
the "guillotine break," a magical, instantaneous
shearing of the heavy-duty main coolant piping. But even
that is not enough, because the water can't escape
rapidly unless the sheared pipe ends move out of the way
of each other quickly so that the water can flash
unimpeded into clear space. No problem— the mind can
move the pipe ends instantaneously, even though the pipe
walls are more than an inch thick and made of high-grade
stainless steel.
Dreaming Up Scenarios
Other scenarios spring up like mushrooms. To study how
radioactive clouds disperse under the worst possible
weather conditions, we imagine a hierarchy of fantastic
scenarios. This requires us to put a network of
radiation monitors around each nuclear plant. And we put
more engineering hours into calculating the impact of
severe earthquakes than we used to use for the whole
plant design. And we set up elaborate security
provisions. And every component and safety system is
backed up with backup systems. And we put the whole
thing inside a steel-reinforced, leak-tight containment
structure. And we prepare emergency procedures involving
local, regional, and national police and fire and
emergency organizations, and we run periodic drills. And
then we turn to the public and say: "How about that! Are
we safe or what?" And the public says, "Gosh, they must
really be scared of this stuff." And who could blame
them?
The public didn't know we were just playing games—
serious games, legitimate games, but hypothetical
speculations, not reality. What does the real world say
about nuclear safety? Quite a bit, actually. Experiments
and theoretical studies have been made, and we had the
real thing at Three Mile Island in 1979. Nearly half the
core melted down, and tons of the molten stuff fell down
onto the bottom of the pressure vessel. That is the
start of the China syndrome scenario. But in fact the
core penetrated only a small fraction of an inch into
the thick vessel wall and stopped. Negligible
radioactivity was released; the nearest residents got
about as much radiation from the accident overall as
they get each day from the natural radiation background
(having nothing to do with the nuclear plant). No one
was hurt, not even the operators. When I pressed a
Nuclear Regulatory Commission official as to why this
was not more nearly the model for a major reactor
accident, rather than various theoretical speculations,
he looked shocked and said: "If I really thought that,
I'd have to ask what I'm doing here!" I assured him he
should ask exactly that, as we all should.
So, after 40 years' experience and running more than 100
U.S. nuclear power plants (plus twice that many in the
Navy), plus hundreds more in other countries, the Three
Mile Island accident is the worst the real world can
offer: nobody hurt, no environmental damage. Yet we
proceed as if the speculations were real. The game is
now costing hundreds of billions of dollars: making
multimillion-dollar studies; "decontaminating" land that
is already harmless; designing shipping casks with yet
another layer of protective shield although the
radioactive cargo they contain poses less of a public
hazard than the diesel fuel in the truck that carries
it. And spending $13 billion to dig a hole in Yucca
Mountain in California to hold some shielded casks of
spent fuel and nuclear wastes.
On June 3, 1997, the Department of Energy issued a
report "after six years of study and analysis,"
predicting that 23 people will be irradiated to death as
a result of shipping shielded casks of radioactive waste
from the weapons program (not civilian waste). Let me
tell you how this works. As a truck with a shielded cask
drives by, a government official says to a
bystander: "Congratulations, sir. You are the millionth
bystander." The puzzled fellow asks. "What do I get?"
"You get to die," replies the official. "This cask has
been emitting radiation at one-millionth the lethal
level. We have now passed a million bystanders and no
one else has died, so it's up to you."
"But I got only one-millionth of a lethal dose, right?"
he asks. "And that can't hurt me, right?"
"Correct, sir. But we have delivered a lethal dose
overall, to the whole population of bystanders. I don't
expect you to understand it. Just be assured that these
calculations have been peer-reviewed by scientists. You
can count on them."
"Tell me this is just a game," the poor chap moans.
Do you doubt it?
---------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------
Theodore Rockwell (tedrock@cpcug.org), an engineer with
more than 50 years in nuclear power, is a founding
officer of the engineering firm MPR Associates Inc. of
Alexandria, Va., and a founding director of Radiation,
Sci-ence & Health, an international public--interest
group in Needham, Mass., working to rationalize
radiation policy. He was technical director under Adm.
Hyman Rickover of the national program to develop
nuclear power for naval propulsion and to build the
world's first commercial nuclear power plant.
************************************************************************
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