Some comments on the APASE/Charlotte web site

["Dukelow, James S Jr" <jim.dukelow@pnl.gov>]

Dear APASE:

Your web site, which purports to offer educational information about energy
sources and use, has been the subject of considerable comment recently on
RADSAFE, an Internet mailing list for radiation safety professionals.  

There are some indications in the material on your site that you aspire to
present a balanced view of various energy options, but I feel you fall short,
tending to emphasize the disadvantages of some sources of energy and ignore the
disadvantages of others.  In addition, there are some simple errors of fact on
the site.

Some specifics:

You write, "Natural gas has no sulphur or nitrogen, so burning it does not cause
acid rain.  It produces less carbon dioxide than coal or oil, but it produces
methane, which is a worse 'greenhouse gas' than carbon dioxide." 

Natural gas is mostly methane, but depending on the gas field, may contain
significant amounts of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, or hydrogen
sulfide.  If it is burned in a power plant without systems to "scrub" these out
of the exhaust stream, they will, of course, be exhausted to the atmosphere.
Fossil fuels users solve most of their waste problems by pumping the waste into
the atmosphere.  Since natural gas IS mostly methane, it doesn't produce methane
per se.  Rather, methane may leak into the atmosphere at the well head, from the
pipeline, or from incomplete combustion.

I question the assertion that the world has twice as much natural gas as oil,
unless you include methane hydrates locked in tundra or the deep sea bed.  Also,
much natural gas is simply flared off as oil is produced, since there is no
economical way to get it to market.

You say that all fossil fuels cost money and will become more expensive in the
future.  The future is here.  The price of natural gas in North America has
quadrupled this year and the world price of oil has tripled or quadrupled in the
last couple of years.

You say, correctly, that nuclear energy can be reasonably inexpensive and makes
very little air pollution.  However, you then go on to say that "When the
radioactivity hits human bodies, we get very sick.  Radioactivity is very
dangerous and lasts for thousands of years."  This is so vague and innumerate as
to be ludicrous.  Our bodies contain radionuclides, mostly uranium, radium,
carbon-14, and potassium-40 -- enough so that there are on the order of 6000
radioisotope decays per second.  Most of us get very sick and die eventually,
but not because of these 6000 radioactive disintegrations per second.  Life
evolved in a high radiation environment and our cells have a variety of
mechanisms for maintaining the integrity of the genome against the assault of
radiation and the much larger insult of chemical attack on our genes by free
radicals, etc.  Some radioisotopes last for billions of years, others for
fractions of a second.  Some are high energy, others are barely more energetic
than UV radiation.

Nuclear power now accounts for around 15-20% of the electricity used around the
world, not 17% of all the energy used.

You say that "People have learned that using nuclear power can have even more
serious risks than air pollution."  Who are these people and where have they
learned this.  Every credible study of the risks associated with energy use has
found that the normal everyday operation of fossil power plants and cars and
trucks and planes and ships causes tens of thousands of premature deaths due to
the concommitant air pollution, while estimates of deaths from the use of
nuclear power, most ascribable to accidents that may or may not occur, are three
to four orders of magnitude smaller.

You write, "When plants, animals, or people are exposed to too much radiation,
they can be burned, become sick, or even die."  Again, vague and innumerate.
What is too much radiation?  6000 radiation "hits" per second from the
radionuclides we each carry in our body?  The smaller number we suffer from
standing next to someone else.  The 10 to 20 Sievert exposure suffered by the
two Japanese workers who died in last year's criticality accident?  People are
burned, become sick, or even die even if they aren't exposed to radiation or a
whole laundry list of other insults.  The methods of epidemiology were developed
to answer the question of whether a particular exposure might be the cause of
some consequence.  Results of epidemiological studies of radiation have tended
more toward exoneration than indictment, although the picture is muddy for a
variety of reasons.

You write that the Chenobyl explosion (and the subsequent fire, which you don't
mention) blew radioactive material 1.3 kilometers into the air.  I suspect this
is a considerable underestimate.  Many people were evacuated and most have not
returned to the areas around the plant, but animal populations are thriving,
probably because of removal of all the humans.  Careful studies of the health
consequences have not supported the "Thousands of people have died" statement
you make.   Contrary to your assertion that the "rest of the Chernobyl plant is
still operating", the last operating reactor at Chernobyl was shut down a few
weeks ago.  Two of the four reactors were shut down several years ago because of
various mishaps.  The Ukranian government kept the last one operating until last
month because the country needed the electricity so badly.

Reactors are not, in general, operated by computers and robots and spent fuel is
removed from the core and moved to the spent fuel cooling pool by remotely
operated (by a human operator) tools.

Nuclear reactor vessels and internals become activated (i.e., neutron radiation
transforms some of their atoms into radionuclides) during operation, but they
are a less serious disposal problem than spent fuel.  Radioactivity levels are
lower and the radiation is generally trapped inside the metal.  In the desert a
few miles north of my home are buried the reactor compartments for several dozen
nuclear submarines.  This doesn't even register on my personal registry of risks
associated with living where I do.  Similarly, radioactive materials have been
trucked, "trained",  shipped, and flown around the world for the last 50 years,
with no significant consequences to the public or to the workers involved.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been studying the issue of aging of
nuclear power plants for almost 20 years and has recently extended the operating
license for five US reactors from 40 to 60 years.

Rather than being "very expensive", nuclear electricity is price-competitive
with coal and cheaper than oil-generated or natural-gas-generated electricity,
to say nothing of all the renewables.

It is mostly true that people do not want a nuclear waste dump in their area
(although my community is an exception), but that is not because scientists
haven't been able to think of a safe way to sequester nuclear waste.

If I were based in British Columbia, I suppose I would be excited about fuel
cells too, but I feel you underplay some of the safety issues associated with
the use of hydrogen as a fuel and some of the environmental issues associated
with producing that hydrogen.

Geothermal energy is limitless and renewable in the same way that fossil fuels
are limitless and renewable.  If we use all of the fossil fuels in the next 100
or 200 years, all we have to do is wait a few million years and there will be
more (as long as we haven't destroyed the ability of the earth to support plant
life in the interim).  Similarly, a geothermal facility can use all of the heat
in the volume of hot rock near the facility, and then we can wait thousands or
millions of years for heat to diffuse back into that volume of rock.  Or we can
build a new facility elsewhere, in a high tech version of slash and burn
subsistence farming.

Similarly, there are relatively few geothermal sites that supply "clean" steam.
Most geothermal steam contains nasty contaminants that can pollute the
atmosphere and the surrounding land and corrode the internal workings of the
facility.

It might be noted, in passing, that the ultimate heat source for geothermal is
the decay of radioisotopes in the mantle and core of the earth and that
geothermal regions are associated with relatively high levels of environmental
radioactivity.

Your piece on solar power does not note the evironmental pollution associated
with the production and disposal of photovoltaics.  There is also a more general
environmental and health risk problem with solar power.  Because the sun's
energy is so diffuse, large facilities are required to generate interesting
amounts of electricity or other forms of energy.  These large facilities use
land and consume large amounts of material in their construction, which in turn
implies significant energy use, pollution, and occupational and public health
risk (assuming the energy is provided by fossil fuels).  Also, the intermittency
of solar energy either requires battery backup (with potential environmental
problems) or requires public utilities to provide sufficient backup to carry
users of solar power through long solar "outages".

You say, "Best of all, wind power causes no damage to the environment, except
the sight of so many windmills gathered in one place."  Sigh!  The impact of
wind farms on migrating birds is well-established and they share the same
diffuse energy/large facility problem described above for solar.  There is also
a noise pollution problem for neighbors of the facilities.

I hope you will take action to make your presentation more balanced and to
correct the errors pointed out.  More generally, it appears you need to cast a
somewhat wider net when you are collecting information, if you are really
interested in education, as opposed to indoctrination.

I would appreciate hearing what action you take in response to this and other
messages you have received.

I would be happy to provide documentation for any of the assertions I have made
in this message.

Best regards.

Jim Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, WA
jim.dukelow@pnl.gov

These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved my management
or by the U.S. Department of Energy.





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