-----Original Message-----
From: Jerry Cohen [mailto:jjcohen@PRODIGY.NET]
Sent: Monday September 30, 2002 7:11 PM
I am curious to know if anyone knows or can conceive of a plausible situation where release of tritium to the environment could result in a significant radiological public health problem (excluding problems of mental
health, regulatory compliance, or anything related to perceived risk).
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Maybe we should ask Dave Martin, nuclear policy adviser to the Sierra Club of Canada. In the article appended below, it says that the proposed nuclear fusion reactor ITER "would operate for 20 years, using 15 to 20 kilograms of tritium. That's enough to kill 3million to 4 million people if the minimum lethal dose were ingested by each person. "
Personally, if I were to find myself in a situation where I could actually get a significant dose from tritium, I'd be more concerned about the explosion risk -- after all, tritium is a form of hydrogen, and a chemical blast can kill you right away, instead of just increasing your cancer risk from the normal ~23% to, say, 28% (high dose). Amazing how the media allows itself to be used for this propaganda.
Jaro
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Posted in the Toronto Star on August 31, 2002 and at:
http://www.torontostar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1026144734872&call_page=TS_NationalReport&call_pageid=1012319932217&call_pagepath=News/NationalReport
A problem technology can't fix
Cameron Smith
Cameron Smith is an author and environmentalist living in Lansdowne,Ont.
The most dangerous thing about the possibility of using nuclear fusion
to generate electricity is that it encourages us to believe that there
can be a technological fix to save us from environmental nightmares that loom ever closer.
Fusion is what powers the sun, where intense heat and crushing
gravitational pressure force nuclei of different elements to combine,
releasing tremendous energy. By contrast, Canada's nuclear generating
stations rely on fission, the splitting of nuclei, to release energy.
The major difference for electricity generators is that fusion, unlike
fission, produces no radioactive waste.
Four international partners - Canada, the European Union, Japan, and
Russia - want to build a fusion reactor for research that they call ITER
(ee-ter), for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. The big
question is: Where would it be located?
A Canadian consortium wants it built in Ontario at Clarington, right
beside the Darlington nuclear generating station. The consortium
includes four federal government departments, the Ontario government,
Ontario Power Generation, labour unions, major engineering and
construction firms and the Royal Bank.
With a price tag of $12.5 billion, ITER would be the largest
international project after the space station.
There would be risks, of course. As with any project, there will be
accidents. Tritium and deuterium are the fuels whose nuclei would be
fused. And tritium, the waste product from Canada's reactors, is
radioactive and deadly. It causes cancer, birth defects and, with
sufficient exposure, death.
ITER would take eight to 10 years to build and would operate for 20
years, using 15 to 20 kilograms of tritium. That's enough to kill 3
million to 4 million people if the minimum lethal dose were ingested by
each person. Tritium, in its elemental form, is a gas.
However, say consortium officials, there's no cause to worry, because
only a few grams would be used at any one time in the reactor. If
anything went wrong, the fusion process would simply shut down. The end
products would be helium and energy.
The process would, however, irradiate the reactor and that metal must be
disposed of. Dave Martin, nuclear policy adviser to the Sierra Club of
Canada, estimates it would create at least a thousand times more
radioactive debris than Darlington would produce in the same period.
To mimic the sun, the reactor would need to create temperatures reaching
100 million C. That's so hot that no container could hold the tritium
and deuterium without melting. So the fuel would be suspended by
electromagnets. To approximate the gravitational force of the sun, the
magnets would have to be cooled at close to absolute zero, -273.16 C.
The magnets, a Russian design, would be in the shape of a huge donut,
suspending the tritium-deuterium plasma in the centre of the hole in the donut.
ITER would be the single highest-volume customer of Ontario Power
Generation, requiring a constant supply of 100 megawatts of electricity,
plus bursts of 500 megawatts several times a day. Darlington produces
4,000 megawatts, 20 per cent of Ontario's electricity.
Murray Stewart, managing director of the Canadian consortium, says ITER
research could save the environment by creating a replacement for
coal-fired generating stations, which account for more than half of the
world's present generating capacity and for most of the new capacity as
developing countries industrialize.
However, at the heart of ITER is the assumption that, with restraint, we
can have business as usual. But that's wrong. The carrying capacity of the Earth is at its limit now.
Without radical change, we risk everything. I think we should be
concentrating on chopping by half the amount of electricity we need from
massive generating stations. We need to consume much less, waste much less.
As the comic-strip Pogo used to say, "The problem is us." And technology isn't going to fix that.
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