RE: Some comments on the APASE/Charlotte web site

[Peter Sandgren <peter.sandgren@po.state.ct.us>]

Regarding the comment by Mr. Dukelow (from his email below) "Careful 
studies of the health consequences have not supported the "Thousands of 
people have died" statement you make." I offer this quote from the article 
entitled "Culture of Cancer" by Robert Masterson in the Hartford Advocate 
of Dec. 14-20, 2000:  "During the past decade, approximately 40,000 cleanup 
workers have died, mostly men in their 30s and 40s."  Offered from the "for 
what it's worth" department . . .
Peter Sandgren
Training Division
Connecticut Office of Emergency Management


-----Original Message-----
From:	Dukelow, James S Jr [SMTP:jim.dukelow@pnl.gov]
Sent:	Friday, December 29, 2000 12:25 AM
To:	Multiple recipients of list
Subject:	Some comments on the APASE/Charlotte  web site


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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