Potential for powercuts in UK this winter

[Dr Mordrid]

Yup....another prime example of enviro-hypocracy.

Dr. Mordrid

[UtwigMU]

We have gas powered station for cases, when there's unexpected outage of nuclear plant or some other plant, as it can come online quickly than others can ramp up.

[Brian Ellis]

1. I've no idea what Poland is doing

2. There are no two-headed children as a result of Chernobyl. In fact, the number of deaths due to Chernobyl is very small and mostly people who were massively exposed during the attempts at containment. If I remember correctly, the number of deaths due to it, amongst the ordinary population, is less than 10, all kids with thyroid cancers which were left untreated. The worst effect is some 4000 kids (at the time) who have thyroid cancer, which is kept medically controlled; they lead normal lives (other than the daily pills) and have a normal life expectency. There have not been any statistically significant changes in birth defects as a result. It is true that a number of women miscarried after the accident, but extreme stress from the combination of exposure and evacuation cannot be ruled out as a confounding factor.

3. Some of the less radical eco-political extremist NGOs, actually including Greenpeace, are currently softening their stance towards nuclear energy. However, this may take time to infiltrate to the local chapters, which are more or less autonomous. As a professional environmental scientist, I have never been a member of any of these groups. I have, however, worked alongside some of their scientists (from 2 major NGOs) who are professionally correct. However, they are not the guys who have the last say in policy and I know they are often distressed by the way their findings are distorted to support exaggerated or even extremist views. They are equally upset that their considered views may be rejected by authorities, simply because they are labelled with the NGOs name. I could never work in such a situation as diplomacy has never been a strong point with me.

However, not everything that these NGOs do is bad. Where they are most useful is at whistle-blowing about new issues which are worthy of study.

My main reasoning as a pro-nuke is because a) the risk that fossil carbon emissions (gas, coal and oil) may be irreparably harming this planet that we are renting for our lifetimes and b) the pollution caused by burning fossil fuels is globally causing an estimated 3,000,000 deaths per year and immeasurable health care costs that none of us can really afford. I have no established figures but the best guess is that if we stopped burning them today, health care costs, in constant money, would drop by 50% within two decades.

[KvHagedorn]

http://www.ccp-intl.org/facts.html

[Brian Ellis]

I'm sorry, but the latest information (September 2005), issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA), United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), and the World Bank, as well as the governments of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, state very contradictory information, after intense study by more than 100 scientists.

The following is extracted from the WHO summary of the 600 page in-depth report which stated the economic, medical, social and other aspects of the disaster:

# Approximately 1000 on-site reactor staff and emergency workers were heavily exposed to high-level radiation on the first day of the accident; among the more than 200 000 emergency and recovery operation workers exposed during the period from 1986-1987, an estimated 2200 radiation-caused deaths can be expected during their lifetime.
# An estimated five million people currently live in areas of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine that are contaminated with radionuclides due to the accident; about 100 000 of them live in areas classified in the past by government authorities as areas of “strict control”. The existing “zoning” definitions need to be revisited and relaxed in light of the new findings.
# About 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children and adolescents at the time of the accident, have resulted from the accident’s contamination and at least nine children died of thyroid cancer; however the survival rate among such cancer victims, judging from experience in Belarus, has been almost 99%.
# Most emergency workers and people living in contaminated areas received relatively low whole body radiation doses, comparable to natural background levels. As a consequence, no evidence or likelihood of decreased fertility among the affected population has been found, nor has there been any evidence of increases in congenital malformations that can be attributed to radiation exposure.
# Poverty, “lifestyle” diseases now rampant in the former Soviet Union and mental health problems pose a far greater threat to local communities than does radiation exposure.
# Relocation proved a “deeply traumatic experience” for some 350,000 people moved out of the affected areas. Although 116 000 were moved from the most heavily impacted area immediately after the accident, later relocations did little to reduce radiation exposure.
# Persistent myths and misperceptions about the threat of radiation have resulted in “paralyzing fatalism” among residents of affected areas.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

Even if every one of the 116,000 people, mentioned in the penultimate bullet above, died from radiation-induced disease, which is extremely unlikely, what is this compared with the 3,000,000 people who are estimated to die EACH YEAR from fossil-fuel-related causes?

[KRSESQ]

the pollution caused by burning fossil fuels is globally causing an estimated 3,000,000 deaths per year and immeasurable health care costs that none of us can really afford. I have no established figures but the best guess is that if we stopped burning them today, health care costs, in constant money, would drop by 50% within two decades.

Even if every one of the 116,000 people, mentioned in the penultimate bullet above, died from radiation-induced disease, which is extremely unlikely, what is this compared with the 3,000,000 people who are estimated to die EACH YEAR from fossil-fuel-related causes?

Source, please?

Kevin

[Tjalfe]

does car accidents count as death by fossil fuel?

[Dr Mordrid]

I too would like a source, but don't find the number all that unbelievable.

Many, if not most, of the 50,000 asthmatics who die every year in just the US can list their disease as pollution related....mostly due to particulates from diesel engines, parental smoking or coal fired power plants. Add to that the other chronic diseases caused by particulate emissions of other sorts and if anything 3,000,000 worldwide is a conservative estimate.

As for radiation deaths; I have no problem with the notion that burning coal puts more radioactive materials into the atmosphere than all the nuclear accidents in history. Nor do I have a problem with them causing thousands of deaths a year. I also know for a fact that mined fertilizers contain many radionuclides and that they end up in tobacco, foodstuffs etc. etc.

I used to do an experiment for my students where we put tobacco into a radiation counter and let it run overnight. Got some pretty interesting readings due to the polonium 210 and lead 210 content. These emissions were alpha and beta, the two most ionizing of radiations and also the most likely to cause mutation.

Add to this the isotopes found in the particulate emissions found in "normal" smoke (ie: from diesel engines etc.) and you have quite a soup floating around out there.

Radionuclides are unavoidable when using coal, mined fertilizers etc., yet everyone goes nutsy over reactors. Go figure.

Dr. Mordrid

[Fluff]

What's the Half-life of those particles? Were the readings pretty high?

[GT98]

Radionuclides are unavoidable when using coal, mined fertilizers etc., yet everyone goes nutsy over reactors. Go figure.

Dr. Mordrid

Becasue people don't know any better....I didnt know this till reading though this thread...

[Brian Ellis]

I can't remember offhand where this estimate was published, but I'll try and research it tomorrow.

As for asthma, that you mention, those of us who are >50 will remember that juvenile asthma was extremely rare when we were at school, perhaps <1% of the kids. Today, in some places, ¼ of the kids have to carry MDIs. Not to mention emphysema in middle-aged patients being a modern disease. The recrudescence of tuberculosis may also be partially due to pollution overloading the immune system.

[Dr Mordrid]

What's the Half-life of those particles? Were the readings pretty high?

They were high enough to make anyone who smokes a fool. It calculates out to a 1.5 pack/day smoker absorbing the radiation equivalent of 300 chest x-rays a year.

Is that enough for you?

Here's the natural isotope decay tree. Just remember that in any soil sample, geo-strata or mined product there is a souip of materials including most of those listed below.

Percentages vary from place to place with some locales fairly "clean" and others so concentrated that natural nuclear reactors have been formed (Africa).

Radon gas, like carbon-14 gas, is completely natural. It forms during the decay of uranium-238, an element with a fairly interesting decay sequence (to learn more about decay sequences and radioactivity in general, see How Nuclear Radiation Works):

1. Start with a uranium-238 atom. This atom has 92 protons and 146 neutrons. It has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. When it decays it emits an alpha particle, leaving behind a thorium-234 atom.

2. A thorium-234 atom has 90 protons and 144 neutrons. It has a half-life of 24.5 days. When it decays it emits a beta particle and a gamma ray, leaving behind a protactinium-234 atom.

3. A protactinium-234 atom has 91 protons and 143 neutrons. It has a half-life of 269,000 years. When it decays it emits a beta particle and a gamma ray, leaving behind a thorium-230 atom.

4. A thorium-230 atom has 90 protons and 140 neutrons. It has a half-life of 83,000 years. When it decays it emits an alpha particle and a gamma ray, leaving behind a radium-226 atom.

5. A radium-226 atom has 88 protons and 138 neutrons. It has a half-life of 1,590 years. When it decays it emits an alpha particle and a gamma ray, leaving behind a radon-222 atom.

That radon atom is a gas atom, and it has a half-life of only 3.825 days. Accumulations of radon atoms from the natural nuclear decay of uranium-238 is where radon gas comes from. That means that radon gas concentrations are higher where uranium is plentiful in the soil. For completeness, here is the rest of the sequence:

1. radon-222, with a half-life of 3.825 days, emits an alpha particle to become polonium-218.

2. polonium-218, with a half-life of 3.05 minutes, emits an alpha particle to become lead-214.

3. lead-214, with a half-life of 26.8 minutes, emits a beta particle and a gamma ray to become bismuth-214.

4. bismuth-214, with a half-life of 19.7 minutes, emits either an alpha particle or a beta particle and a gamma ray to become either thallium-210 or polonium-214.

5. polonium-214, with a half-life of a 150 microseconds, emits an alpha particle to become thallium-210.

6. thallium-210, with a half-life of 1.32 minutes, emits a beta particle to become lead-210.

7. lead-210, with a half-life of 22 years, emits a beta particle and a gamma ray to become bismuth-210.

8. bismuth-210, with a half-life of five days, emits a beta particle to become polonium-210.

9. polonium-210, with a half-life of 138 days, emits an alpha particle and a gamma ray to become lead-206.

10. lead-206 is a stable isotope of lead.

Uppance: avoiding radionuclides is nothing more than fantasy.

Dr. Mordrid

[KvHagedorn]

I think reasonably minimizing them is not a bad goal, though.

I do remember when there was not a purplish-brown haze permanently parked on the horizon. Perhaps in the 60s.. What has happened is just a cumulative effect of billions of people using more energy for everything.

I read a short story once that was made into a movie:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097883/combined

Really bad movie, and only tolerable because you get to look at Cheryl Ladd the whole time, but the sci-fi plot mover is that we have so destroyed the earth in the future that men are cancer-ridden sterile losers from hell, and only a few women are healthy, so they go back in time to get breeding stock from airliners doomed to crash. Scary what we are doing. We would be better off being far fewer in number and relying on blankets and wood stoves.

The asthma thing Brian mentions is true.. I notice a lot more kids with it now than when I was young.

[KRSESQ]

Just a casual Google search on childhood asthma would lead one to conclude that EVERYTHING causes childhood asthma. I was looking for a link to research indicating that one cause might be that we are keeping our home environments TOO clean, forstalling the development of immunity factors that would prevent childhood asthma. This research was triggered by the finding that children from rural environments have a lower incidence than children in urban environments, even though their exposure to common asthma triggers is greater. When/if I find a link I'll post it.

Note that this link gives regional US stats on asthma from 1960 to 1995. The greatest rise seems to be in the northeast where bituminous and subbituminous coal use is common. In the midwest, where lignite is the chief fuel for coal-fired power plants, the rate is somewhat lower. It may be that our plants, being somewhat newer, have better exhaust scrubbers (but that's speculation on my part -- although our scrubbers are very good).

Kevin

[Nowhere]

...children from rural environments have a lower incidence than children in urban environments, even though their exposure to common asthma triggers is greater...

Except human-made pollution.

BTW, this all reminds me about our nuclear power plant that was 80% complete and...scrapped in 1990 due to craze over Czernobyl (though it was completelly different desing, on world-level). And so the biggest brown coal plant in the world, which was supposed to be only temporary (until the nuclear one will be operational), works to this day :/