I don't think you understand: the problem with that model is that it greatly overestimates the number of cancer cases due to low doses. I assume you haven't read the article. Careful. It might have some facts in it.Originally Posted by iceaura
I really don't know what your problem is.
This discussion overlaps the idea of hormesis, which I find interesting. Hormesis suggests that minor stresses to the body stimulate the repair mechanisms, which then boost such things as our anti-cancer and anti-aging mechanisms. This also applies to low level radiation.
This idea is still a bit controversial, despite a lot of experimental evidence, and I suspect this is because homeopaths have tried to claim it 'proves' their quackery is correct. However, the dose levels used in hormesis experiments are many orders of magnitude greater than the mythical dose levels used in homeopathy. They are not the same.
For those who would like to check this out, try Hormesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
If hormesis turns out to be correct (and there is a hell of a lot of evidence), then low level radioactivity will actually reduce cancer and increase average life span.
We are discussing what has been proven as a viable method of generating electrical power to replace existing coal and nuclear plants. I noticed you didn't want to say which solar plants you think are the "proven trial setups that worked." When you do that, I will then explain why it does not meet these criteria.So make up your mind: are we discussing what we have built, which is too small and so forth, or what we should build ?
btw: That tech is more than thirty years old, its location is not "the best" for insolation in the US (there are significantly better places in Arizona et al), 90% of its output is from sunlight (the 10% from natural gas would be replaced by storage in a larger setup), and despite its various outdated features and small scale its running cost of production is 4.6 cents/kwh. Its only serious risk premium is potential loss of capacity.
No. Not if the harm factor is nonlinear, and the "threshold" effect is an artifact of that. The model then overestimates the very lowest dose effect, and underestimates the increase in effect from a small increase in dose near the "threshold".
The net effect is to underestimate the consequences of variance in the dose. This is better than simply ignoring it, as you guys seem bent on, but not much. And unlike background radiation, or even bomb residue usually, nuke plant mishaps produce great variance in individual dose - they emit plumes, narrow bands of high concentration in both time and space, of radiation sources not common from anything else.
Unless I point to the SEGS facility you posted, in which case you won't - you'll just say it's too small, as above. Or Andasol. or the Stirling cycle trial setups in California.
That is why we have measurements. For Fukushima, as an example, literally tens of thousands of radiation measurements were taken. More than a few kilometers from the plant, all came back less than 10 millisieverts per year. The vast bulk of them way, way less than that.
We know that less than 100 millisieverts in a single dose shows no measurable harm. We know that, in some places 250 millisieverts per year shows no measurable harm. So to run around preaching disaster over levels of less than 10 millisieverts per year is just not rational.
That's nowhere near enough to support your claims of harmlessness.
Depends on delivery method, and the kinds of harms tested for.We know that less than 100 millisieverts in a single dose shows no measurable harm.Background radiation, the least harmful kind; harm measured in a few aspects that researchers think are the most likely. So?We know that, in some places 250 millisieverts per year shows no measurable harm.
There is no safety in ignorance.
No one is doing that with Fukushima. The people who want to estimate the risk premium for nukes a bit more reasonably than the pollyanna stuff, so as to figure out what happened to solar tech without the "too expensive" noise, regard Fukushima as an example of sheer good luck for which we should all be grateful.
The main issue that is often talked about with respect to the safety of Western reactors is that they use water as the moderator. In the event of a runaway reaction where the core gets too hot, the water would evaporate and thereby bring the reaction to an end on its own. (At least the chain reaction part of it.)
I'm not sure it is that simple. Yes, cost probably came into it. I don't know enough about reactor design to say whether the risks of different types of designs was well understood at the time (or even what range of designs existed). There was undoubtedly also poor management and maintenance. And the immediate cause, apparently, was the staff performing some sort of extremely dangerous experiment on a live reactor. And then not handling the situation properly.
The trouble with graphite is that it has the same melting point as diamond. That's a lot of the reason the Chernobyl reactor was able to get as hot as it did after the control rods failed.
Thanks. I'll try and keep it coming, but I can't make any promises. Also some of this discussion is still ideological, about what risks and costs/benefits we as a society prefer to take or gain. There's no data to apply to some of it.Yes, in the sense that the perception of danger keeps standards high. There are also things like improved designs that need to be developed, better corporate and government openness, etc.Regulate them strongly? Wouldn't that require the public to have exactly the attitude it has right now? It seems paranoia is getting us exactly the right results in that regard.
But the sort of knee-jerk reaction we have seen of shutting reactors down for no reason seems to be going too far.
p.s. I agree with skeptic, thanks for bringing some references and data to the party.
You're leaving out psychological pain. Pain has to matter at least as much as life/death, because death is guaranteed. Nobody lives forever. Many people, however, go their whole lives and never have to experience the horror of cancer. One we can really avoid altogether. The other we can only delay so it happens later.
In terms of loved ones, the parents of a child that disappears (fate unknown) generally suffer a great deal more psychological trauma than the parents of a child who simply dies outright. Both events are very painful, but in the one case they're able to mourn the loss and move on, while in the other they just simply don't know. I know that runs contrary to common sense. Clearly the parents of the missing child *should* be happier because there is still a non-zero chance of being reunited with their loved one. ..... But that reaction is not what is usually observed.
Chernobyl traumatized the people of Ukraine in a way few other disasters ever could. You could look at your own children and not know which one of them was going to live a full life, and which one was going to die in a year from a latent cancer. That's tremendous psychological pain. People are going to remember it. They're not wrong to want to avoid going through that experience again. When you downplay it, it makes it sound like you don't think the problems those people have to live with are important. It's always the living who suffer loss, not the dead (their problems are over.)
If I can refer you to one of my earlier links, the death toll for Chernobyl appears to be much higher when you consider cleanup workers who died later on from complications. And the overall casualty count becomes higher still if you count maiming.On nuclear accidents.
I said one serious and one less serious. Chernobyl remains the only truly serious nuclear power accident. Fukushima killed no-one by virtue of it being nuclear, although three people died in industrial type accidents on its site. There is the possibility of extra cancer deaths from Fukushima, but even if it happens, the numbers will be low. Three Mile Island was a lesser situation. No deaths, and almost certainly, no cancers.
If an accident causes no fatalitites, it cannot be termed serious. The Fukushima irrigation dam, which burst and killed four people during the big earthquake, was worse than the power station accident in immediate consequence. The Banqiao Dam burst, which killed nearly 200,000, was far worse, and far worse than Chernobyl.
25 years after Chernobyl - the ongoing health effects
The paper is titled
"Only 50 deaths caused by Chernobyl?
Press Release by IPPNW Germany on its new study"
It's first bullet point is:
"50,000 to 100,000 liquidators (clean-up workers) died in the years up to 2006. Between 540,000 and 900,000 liquidators have become invalids;"
Admittedly a lot of that number may be due to the Soviet Union's general disregard for worker safety (like proper gear and stuff.) A similar cleanup in the USA would probably not have resulted in so many casualties. But out of fairness I think it's important to mention all deaths and/or casualties.
Kojax
A lot of total garbage is written with estimates for deaths at Chernobyl.
I have quoted the International Atomic Energy Agency which set up a computer model to try to take into account all factors and estimate all deaths, short and long term. Their estimate is 4,000 deaths. Now, they might be wrong. But they at least are experts in the issue.
Your reference, however, quotes Greenpeace. That immediately casts deep suspicion on them. Greenpeace is a political organisation that makes money as a result of scare mongering, and generates its power and influence the same way. They have a long history of exaggerating every damn environmental issue they can find. Anyone who quotes them as an authority is immediately cast as probably totally unscientific.
Quite simply, I do not for a moment think that those in your reference have the faintest idea what they are talking about. Thank you, but I will stick to the experts.
I didn't "just" say it's too small, I also said it produces no solar power at night, and that it's in the desert. I could also add that it takes up 1600 acres. If you want to scale it up to a small to middling size power station, then you need something 10 times that big, or 16,000 acres.Unless I point to the SEGS facility you posted, in which case you won't - you'll just say it's too small, as above. Or Andasol. or the Stirling cycle trial setups in California.
Solar can be useful in a limited role, in some parts of the country. If you want to tout solar as a replacement for coal and nuclear plants across the board, you have to show how they can be scaled up, and you have to show how you get the power to New York, Chicago, and places like that.
Here is an article about scaling up Andasol. It shows how you need vast amounts of concrete, steel, and land for a decent sized solar plant.
TCASE 7: Scaling up Andasol 1 to baseload « BraveNewClimate
Werrgh... forget about nuclear. (lets get to the point...)
The actual point is:
solar is safer even though its abit expensive. Its mode of failure is not destructive. -When its broken then it just a broken solar panel, then you can recycle it, *but they are actually strong and don't break easily*.
Also,
seeing Germany to produce the world largest solar energy is also inspirational & such a learning experience. From what I learn: solar energy effected energy market considerably. -For example: the massive surge of solar energy during the day caused the energy price to drop considerably at day, causing cheaper electricity (and probably caused some coal & fossil fuel plant to shut down to save cost)... and I guess this also make consumer more inclined to invest in storage technology for themselve (eg: like Nissan Leaf).
And,
Solar energy is not just the PV. They can also directly convert solar energy to organic fuel like Formic-acid (Panasonic) or Hydrogen (MIT). -Its possible that by promoting such solar energy we will also promoting new exciting technology in energy storage system (eg: fuel-cell battery that can power laptop for whole 2 days).
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EDIT: solar-thermal is cheaper than nuclear it seems: http://www.instituteforenergyresearc...-technologies/
Interesting cost comparison.
The costs listed agree very well with the ones I posted from Wiki with the exception of solar thermal. However, it is probably a variable depending on what you think will happen in the next five years. I hope they are right, and that solar thermal can play a good part in the future generation of electricity. Time will tell.
If you click on the PDF document there are some other charts and tables that tell a very different story. Solar thermal is the most costly of all, and also has huge regional variation.
I think the chart you are looking at factors in subsidies and tax breaks. That's the only thing I can figure.
Thank you Harold.
I am embarrassed to admit I missed that. The reference actually has a table of levelised costs which get rid of such distortions. Here they are, ordered from cheapest to most expensive, in American cents per kilowatt hour.
Natural gas 7
Hydroelectric 9
Geothermal 10
Wind 10
Coal 10
Nuclear 11
Coal with carbon capture 14
Solar cells 16
Thermal solar 25
Offshore wind 33
That ties in very nicely with the Wiki list of costs.
You have really got to read the fine print on those charts. For example it says that if a backup power source is needed for an intermittent generator, the cost of the backup is not included. Also, look at the maximum column of the regional variation table. There are some areas where the cost of wind or solar is exorbitantly high. That makes sense, because some areas don't have enough sun or wind. For these areas it makes no sense to even talk about building wind or solar generators.
By the way, iceaura mentioned Stirling. They have gone belly up.
Solar Shakeout Continues: Stirling Energy Systems Files for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy | Renewable Energy News Article
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This value is only for US. The first table shows US average, the second table show: the-worse-case vs. the-best-case for US. -so they might be expensive in US if the technology is new and the manufacturing facility is not yet available in the region. Ref:The first graph shows the estimated price after 20 years. It shows solar-thermal cost drop lower than nuclear power cost. -This is the estimate after 20 years (probably can be use as reference for the world too). Ref:The first table below provides the average national levelized costs for the generating technologies represented in the AEO2012 reference case.[3] The values shown in the table do not include financial incentives such as state or federal tax credits, which impact the cost and the competitiveness of the technology. These incentives, however, are incorporated in the evaluation of the technologies in NEMS based on current laws and regulations in effect at the time of the modeling exercise, as well as regional differences in the cost and performance of the technology, such as labor rates and availability of wind or sun resources. Due to the regional differences in the cost of labor, fuel, and other factors that affect the levelized generation cost, a second table is provided below that gives the range in the levelized cost based on these differences.NOTE: as you see... PV cost is high in the bar chart, but in Germany they were used because its cheaper in Germany.The Energy Information Administration (EIA) produces forecasts of energy supply and demand for the next 20 years using the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS)[1]. These forecasts are updated annually and published in the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO).[2] All sectors of the energy system are represented in NEMS, including the electric power generation, transmission, and distribution system.
You just skip right over the parts you don't like to hear about, don't you? It's not a matter of the technology being new or unavailable in different parts of the country. It's this:-------
This value is only for US. The first table shows US average, the second table show: the-worse-case vs. the-best-case for US. -so they might be expensive in US if the technology is new and the manufacturing facility is not yet available in the region. Ref:The first graph shows the estimated price after 20 years. It shows solar-thermal cost drop lower than nuclear power cost. -This is the estimate after 20 years (probably can be use as reference for the world too). Ref:The first table below provides the average national levelized costs for the generating technologies represented in the AEO2012 reference case.[3] The values shown in the table do not include financial incentives such as state or federal tax credits, which impact the cost and the competitiveness of the technology. These incentives, however, are incorporated in the evaluation of the technologies in NEMS based on current laws and regulations in effect at the time of the modeling exercise, as well as regional differences in the cost and performance of the technology, such as labor rates and availability of wind or sun resources. Due to the regional differences in the cost of labor, fuel, and other factors that affect the levelized generation cost, a second table is provided below that gives the range in the levelized cost based on these differences.NOTE: as you see... PV cost is high in the bar chart, but in Germany they were used because its cheaper in Germany.The Energy Information Administration (EIA) produces forecasts of energy supply and demand for the next 20 years using the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS)[1]. These forecasts are updated annually and published in the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO).[2] All sectors of the energy system are represented in NEMS, including the electric power generation, transmission, and distribution system.There are areas where solar just is not feasible.availability of wind or sun resources
The first graph shows the results of subsidies and tax breaks. That's why solar looks good. Furthermore they are comparing cost per kilowatt-hour. This kind of comparison fails to take into account the need for base loading plants. Try to understand this. Even if solar power is free, you would still need something else to generate your power at night.
In Germany they used PV because that's the kind of solar people could put on their rooftops and take advantage of the outrageous feed-in tariffs, which is paid for by increases in price of non-renewable generated electricity.
The International Atomic Energy Agency isn't exactly bias -free either. However, if what you say is true and they're relying on a computer model, then I'd definitely prefer the study by Greenpeace. They may not be quite as "expert" but at least they drew a lot of the statistics for their study from primary sources. Real reports of real people, instead of just predictions of how many casualties someone thinks there *should* have been, given the initial starting conditions. (Which is then presented as evidence of how many casualties there actually were.)Kojax
A lot of total garbage is written with estimates for deaths at Chernobyl.
I have quoted the International Atomic Energy Agency which set up a computer model to try to take into account all factors and estimate all deaths, short and long term. Their estimate is 4,000 deaths. Now, they might be wrong. But they at least are experts in the issue.
Your reference, however, quotes Greenpeace. That immediately casts deep suspicion on them. Greenpeace is a political organisation that makes money as a result of scare mongering, and generates its power and influence the same way. They have a long history of exaggerating every damn environmental issue they can find. Anyone who quotes them as an authority is immediately cast as probably totally unscientific.
Quite simply, I do not for a moment think that those in your reference have the faintest idea what they are talking about. Thank you, but I will stick to the experts.
I'm highly suspicious of anyone who uses a computer model for something that doesn't require computer modeling. This isn't some ancient event being pieced together by historians long after the fact. It was 1986. Many of the participants are still alive today . If primary sources exist, wouldn't it be better to go out and look at them, in case the theory is wrong?
Perhaps let data revise theory instead of letting theory revise data?
I was hoping,hat we'd move on to the next issue. Even if we allow that Chernobyl was a huge mess, we still also know that water moderated reactors are totally incapable of that severe a mode of failure. You could try very hard to make a water moderated reactor blow up like that on purpose, and you would most likely fail.
This leads to the main problem the public has: They know they're not educated enough to be aware of such distinctions, and will be forced to blindly rely on "experts". I put "experts" in quotes because while genuine experts exist, the public cannot even be sure of their own ability to recognize those people for who they are, and not be fooled by fake experts (or quacks), a problem that becomes even more frustrating because sometimes a quack may still have a college degrees and plausible looking credentials in spite of being a quack.
In a democracy, the people are the decision maker that ultimately has final say. How smart is it for them to put themselves in a situation where they know already that they won't be able to make a good decision? That's like going to a bar with no designated driver, and just hoping you'll have the common sense not to drive home after you've gotten plastered.
If we always limit ourselves to water reactors, then there will never be another Chernobyl. But if some super-smart-looking guy with a charming smile and a fancy lab coat shows up one day and claims he's found a way to double the yield by going to graphite, and pokes fun at everyone for being so "paranoid", and "letting their fears prevent them from realizing an obvious benefit", then maybe a generation down the road our children actually will be stupid enough to go back to graphite. And I don't care how carefully the plant is run, if it uses graphite there is ALWAYS a chance of a super giant explosion. You just need one or two crucial mechanical parts to fail and KABOOM!!!.
So how does the public trust themself with that? Their answer: They shouldn't.
To Kojax
With the greatest of respect, on matters relating to nuclear power, you cannot equate Greenpeace with the IAEA for expertise. Greenpeace is not a technical organisation. It is a political organisation which deliberately takes the most extreme view, every time. The IAEA includes the world's greatest experts on nuclear power. Greenpeace includes the world's greatest exaggerators.
Now the question is: is that because they're competing with more heavily subsidized firms in China, or because solar energy is "just plain a losing business"? You can set anyone up to fail by giving them enough disadvantages. It only proves something if you can show that the disadvantages were unnecessary.
Put Rocky Balboa in the ring with a mediocre boxer wearing weighted gloves, and maybe he loses that match also.
What I have to wonder is why a country like China, that has made so many incredibly prudent business decisions over the past couple of decades, realizing some of the highest rates of growth of anyone in he world..... feels like buying into solar. Y'know, if solar is such a loser business and all.
http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/426393/the-chinese-solar-machine/
If you choose to read it, you'll note that the above article also softly repeats my earlier point about economy of scale.
China is taking the long view, and covering all its bases. China is investing in every form of energy generation you can think of, from coal (its main method), through hydro, nuclear, wind and solar.
As I have said before, solar energy, and thermal solar may come down in cost. Wind power certainly has. Perhaps in another couple decades, solar power will be a real winner. I hope it is.
So your insistence, a couple of posts back, that we were not discussing replacing the current plants, is (as that great conservative spokesman once put it), no longer operational ?
Once again: figure out what you want to argue, and what the reality you wish to argue from looks like. Only then you will know why you are wrong.
How many times must we quote your own links to you, before you quit saying things that are simply wrong?
The disclaimer for the deaths not considered by the IAEA is right there, in the article you linked. They state, directly and clearly, that they do not take into account all factors or estimate all deaths, short or long term. Your claim that they do is in error, and this is by my count the third time this has been pointed out to you.
That is in addition to the fact that the IAEA was formed to promote and defend nuclear power, and has a track record of deception and industry-favoring PR garbage many decades long now. They did yeoman's work minimizing Chernobyl, TMI, and Fukushima, for example (do you remember the media interviews with the IAEA experts in the wake of Fukushima? Someone would get near the subject of the waste pools or the chance of meltdown, the IAEA guy would start talking at length about how it wasn't a bomb and couldn't explode). Greenpeace does a lot of dramatizing, but is reasonably honest about it.
And since we already know the Wiki list of costs is bullshit as a reference for this thread, and exactly why it's bullshit no matter how many times you post it, we already know what's wrong with these "levelized costs" - they ignore the decommissioning costs of the nuke plants, they ignore the risk premium for nukes, they ignore the risk premium of coal, they lump all thermal solar int one category, they base the estimates on non-comparable plants, and so forth. Completely useless for this thread - unless you want to ascribe the neglect of solar options to that kind of marketing for nukes.
No. What we know is that a water moderated reactor is not capable of that mode of severe failure. There are modes of failure available to water moderated reactors, some of them at least as severe as Chernobyl. They tend to be built near water supplies and population density,for one thing - near rivers, big cities.
The technology has not gone belly up. Only one of the companies trying to use it.
Which would make an interesting matter for a discussion of why solar is on the back burner - almost all solar setups share a huge problem the nukes and fossils don't have, which is that almost all the money for the real costs must be put up in advance.
It's not on the back burner anyhow--the initial premise was wrong from the get-go. PV is expanding rapidly--but it's nowhere near a panacea nor as capable of replacing proved base-loading technologies even where it works the best. Other forms of water and space heating for homes should be getting wide use already but Americans just don't like it for what ever reason and don't want government forcing removal of community covenants rule that prevent their installation.Which would make an interesting matter for a discussion of why solar is on the back burner
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Funny ice you continue to complain about skeptics references
As as things go, probably taking their patented designs with them as well as shown, like a dramatically broken ship on the rocks, that the tech can't compete and shouldn't be invested for some time.The technology has not gone belly up. Only one of the companies trying to use it.
Wrong.
The IAEA is a group of experts on the subject and they do not lie. The real issue, for you, is that they do not tell the story you want them to. As opposed to Greenpeace, who do tell lies. Take the case of the Brent Spar - the Shell Oil rig that Shell wanted to dispose of at sea. Greenpeace claimed it contained crude oil and toxic chemicals. This was an outright lie, since Greenpeace had no idea what it contained. In fact, Shell permitted an inspection by independent inspectors, and it was found to be clean.
Greenpeace cannot be trusted. They tell lies. The irony is that, after the Brent Spar issue had settled down, Greenpeace disposed of its defunct ship, the Rainbow Warrior at sea, just as Shell Oil wanted to do. Not only are Greenpeace liars, but they are two faced hypocrites as well!
Come on now. Do you want to have a reasonable discussion, or do you just want to make snarky comments? We need future generating capacity to replace plant as they are retired. This does not mean shutting down existing plants before their time.So your insistence, a couple of posts back, that we were not discussing replacing the current plants, is (as that great conservative spokesman once put it), no longer operational ?
Once again: figure out what you want to argue, and what the reality you wish to argue from looks like. Only then you will know why you are wrong.
They went belly up because of the falling cost of solar photovoltaic. Solar thermal like the Stirling have the capability of using thermal storage. This did not turn out to be a significant advantage. I think the natural niche for solar is in hot dry areas supplying peak air conditioning loads in the day time. For this you do not need storage.
All they care about is if there is a market for their panels. Somebody made money selling pet rocks, too.What I have to wonder is why a country like China, that has made so many incredibly prudent business decisions over the past couple of decades, realizing some of the highest rates of growth of anyone in he world..... feels like buying into solar. Y'know, if solar is such a loser business and all.
They are a group of experts formed at the behest of the military/industrial complex in the US, to promote nuclear power - separate it in the public mind from bomb technology, spread it around to many countries, etc. Their mandate is the promotion of nuclear power worldwide.
Whether they actually lie or not I do not know, not being a mind reader. They do deceive, spin stuff in the "reasonable" and "scientific" way, - a quick reread of their expert commentary in the days immediately after Fukushima, compared with what we now know to have happened and been known to the "experts", provides yet another example of this function. International Atomic Energy Agency - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
They are your source for the spun and silly "4000" number, for the total deaths from Chernobyl, for example - and here you are, like so many journalists and media pundits as well, posting it over and over, completely gulled, despite the disclaimer and demurrals and carefully worded descriptions of where it came from buried in the fine print, that maintains their credibility such as it is. That's how it's done, in the scientific arena of marketing stuff like this.
You are not capable of reasonable discussion, so my wants are irrelevant.
Weasel as you will, we are talking about replacing the existing nukes or we aren't.
So by your latest take, we are talking about replacing every nuclear plant in the US over the next ten years or so - many of them are long past their "time" already, and the rest will be soon. So even the official cost of nuke power is about to skyrocket, as the American Numbers hit a wall even you guys can't pretend isn't there - right?
They went belly up partly because of the large and rising sums of Chinese government subsidy to their competition; And partly because of the continuing large sums of US government subsidy to their competition. And partly because of some financial fallout from the crash of 2008. And partly because of their less than ideal business plan and location. And so forth - as observed, an interesting example of what has happened to solar power in the US.
No idea what "initial premise" you're talking about - that was a response to one of Harold's typical trolls about a specific company, which he will never, ever, actually analyze or discuss. Neither will you.
Or not, as reality would have it.The technology of ships should have been abandoned when one of them hit some rocks? OK.
The weird thing is, you aren't talking about the obvious scenes behind such poetic fantasy: Chernobyl, or Fukushima, or TMI, or the massive government bailout required recently by the nuke waste handling situation, or the spectacular messes created by the nuke power programs in North Korea and Iran and Iraq and Pakistan and so forth. You aren't talking about dramatic oil blowouts that threaten entire oceans, or a coal mine fires that take out whole town over decades.
You aren't even talking about the destruction of fisheries by laissez faire exploitation, or what happened to the GM crops in this latest drought still plaguing the US farm country, or the like.
And the incompetent forum moderation that allows such repetition of bullshit, the same debunked crap over and over and over, in thread after thread, yes. This kind of behavior is not treated with respect from creationists( they're ghettoed and people are allowed to just dismiss them without detailed argument each and every time) and it shouldn't be allowed to take over the place from these guys either.
Harold is just incapable of reasoning, his bizarre and meaningless links at least come in a variety. But some of the rest of this is actual trolling, by definition.
But you're one of them, and a couple of other moderators are willing to back you, so every nuke power thread and every solar power thread and half the organic food or economy or political faction discussions out comes the Wiki list showing nuke power at 10 cents per kwh; out come the industry bent and fiction based casualty estimations for various nuke mishaps; out comes the mass confusion and alternate lumping (for averages) and splitting (for high or low extremes) of PV, all forms of thermal, wind, hycro, and so forth and so on; out come the silly inferences and ridiculous unsupported claims; out comes the personal innuendo about irrationality and so forth (never applied to corporations or their pet experts); merry go round style. Then you wonder where the scientific discussion went. It's buried, like a farmer in a silo, by an inundation of long-fermented garbage.
There is an actual discussion possible, about what has happened to solar power options and why they are not being financed or legally encouraged or attempted at the scale considered routine for non-solar power options. But it can't happen here.
Last edited by iceaura; August 7th, 2012 at 12:27 PM.
Did you read your own link? Its a UN organization, originally proposed by Eisenhower...you know the guy who warned about the military/industrial complex, formed with an explicit purpose it to make sure its expertise is not used for military purpose. You couldn't be more wrong.They are a group of experts formed at the behest of the military/industrial complex in the US, to promote nuclear power - separate it in the public mind from bomb technology, spread it around to many countries, etc. Their mandate is the promotion of nuclear power worldwide.
Whether they actually lie or not I do not know, not being a mind reader. They do deceive, spin stuff in the "reasonable" and "scientific" way, - a quick reread of their expert commentary in the days immediately after Fukushima, compared with what we now know to have happened and been known to the "experts", provides yet another example of this function. International Atomic Energy Agency - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
About IAEA: IAEA Statute
See title of thread....that "solar energy revolution is on the backburner"No idea what "initial premise" you're talking about
But you seem to buy into that flawed premise with your closing sentence.
While ignoring or apparently not bothering to look up the scale of investment in solar and broader "green energy." That facts are renewable investment is being hugely financed, and passed fossil fuels two years ago.There is an actual discussion possible, about what has happened to solar power options and why they are not being financed or legally encouraged or attempted at the scale considered routine for non-solar power options. But it can't happen here.
https://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/jp...-fossil-fuels/
Here's a summary of one of the reports Global Investments in Green Energy Up Nearly a Third to US$211 billion - UNEP
I trust experts insofar as I a believe their opinions to be unbiased (and more importantly insofar as I trust that the reporting institution didn't cherry pick those experts' opinions). However, I trust data regardless of bias or expertise. Humans of all kinds, even expert humans, have the problem that they're, well....human. And some of them think they are not.
In the paper I mentioned, they do actually address the "4,000" deaths number presented by the AIEA.
http://www.chernobylcongress.org/fileadmin/user_upload/pdfs/chernob_report_2011_en_web.pdf
The most disturbing part is that it ends with "due to cancer and leukaemia." What I strongly suspect is that a lot of sources are trying to understate the death toll by focusing on just one or two types of death, or narrow their search to a short time scale.
It bothers me because understating like that fully dehumanizes the people who suffered. It shows no respect at all for them. Future populations are naturally going to assess their trust of big nuclear companies based on how fairly past populations have been treated post-disaster. Politically it would be smarter for the AIEA to have always over reported rather than risk under reporting even once.
If a group of people already don't trust the safety of your enterprise, the last thing you want to do is lie to them and thereby add to their suspicions so now they worry both about the honesty of those in charge of nuclear power and the inherent risks of the enterprise - both.
No. What we know is that a water moderated reactor is not capable of that mode of severe failure. There are modes of failure available to water moderated reactors, some of them at least as severe as Chernobyl. They tend to be built near water supplies and population density,for one thing - near rivers, big cities.
Kind of.... maybe.... but not really. Fukushima is almost as about as bad as it can get because they lost power to pump coolant into a reactor that was still hot. The chain reaction had stopped, but the non-chain part of the reaction continued for a while afterward. That's hot, but not blow-up-the-area hot. Worst case, some contaminants could have leaked out and required cleaning. But with Chernobyl, that was a matter of contaminants getting spread out into the air.
Even if they hadn't managed to shut it down in time, it would still stop reacting when its moderator evaporates. For graphite, though, if you can't shut it down, the heat will just build until it blows.
Last edited by kojax; August 7th, 2012 at 03:07 PM.
On the IAEA
I quote from their own literature.
"The IAEA works for the safe, secure and peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology. Its key roles contribute to international peace and security, and to the world's Millennium Goals for social, economic and environmental development."
As a United Nations division, the IAEA is not part of commercial interests.
To Kojax, on the 4,000 fatalities.
As I have said, many times, this is an estimate, based on a computer model. I suspect it is the best estimate we will get, since the IAEA are the most expert body involved. But there are other estimates. It does not make any difference overall, though, since even if the ultimate death toll of Chernobyl is 30,000, it is still much, much lower than the toll from hydroelectricity, or burning coal, or a number of other modes, including domestic solar cells and wind power.
The other thing you must realise is that those estimates based on the linear no threshold model will always be over-estimates, since there is a threshold. There are many bodies that cling to this obsolete model, and get it wrong.
Who cares when the plants will be shut down. This is about solar, and whether it is capable of performing the same function of base load electrical generation as nuclear or coal plants.[Weasel as you will, we are talking about replacing the existing nukes or we aren't.
So by your latest take, we are talking about replacing every nuclear plant in the US over the next ten years or so - many of them are long past their "time" already, and the rest will be soon. So even the official cost of nuke power is about to skyrocket, as the American Numbers hit a wall even you guys can't pretend isn't there - right?
Bizarre links like the Wikipedia article that listed the generating capacity, capacity factor, and the acreage used for SEGS? Or a news article about Stirling power going bankrupt? Or the analysis of projected generating costs from the US Energy Information Agency?
Harold is just incapable of reasoning, his bizarre and meaningless links at least come in a variety. But some of the rest of this is actual trolling, by definition.
You have just wasted a whole long post complaining, in which you could have presented some facts supporting your position.There is an actual discussion possible, about what has happened to solar power options and why they are not being financed or legally encouraged or attempted at the scale considered routine for non-solar power options. But it can't happen here.
The problem, Harold, is that rational and smart people like you, Lynx Fox, Strange, and myself, do not accept greenie propaganda as valid references. This leaves poor Iceaura with nothing.
So it was sort of relevant to the thread, in a way, just meaningless as a reply to the quoted post it purported to answer, then - one of those random off topic things you come up with when you've lost track of the argument once again. OK.
The guy who warned about the influence of the military/industrial complex based on personal experiences, such as observing first hand the formation of the IAEA - yep, that guy.
I chose that link because it's very favorable to the IAEA overall, without the kinds of criticisms found in more objective sources, simply to avoid the kind of crap you and your kind would otherwise fog the thread with, but even there in Wiki you can read down to some hints and suggested links (to Nature, for example, in a peer reviewed expert discussion of the IAEA handling of Fukushima) of the IAEA's record in nuclear safety and waste handling issues and so forth.
Or if alert you would notice that the IAEA in its own defense - in its own language, itself saying this - has claimed to have greatly boosted and strengthened its oversight of safety issues with regard to power plants -> after Chernobyl, and again after Fukushima <-. That is not a joke. That is the IAEA, sincerely defending its record.
Its charter, its mandate, is the promotion of nuclear power around the world. If you want unbiased expertise to provide you with information useful in evaluating whether or not nuclear power is a good idea at all, you've gone to the wrong place.
Its mandate is to promote the spread of nuclear power world wide. That's right there in it its charter.
You don't have to "strongly suspect" that - the limits on the data collection are written down in explicit detail in, say, Skeptic's continually reposted link from the IAEA. It's a demonstrated fact of the situation.
Fukushima was not nearly as bad as it would have been had the wind blown toward Tokyo instead of out to sea, and Fukushima's location was almost ideal for minimizing the consequences of a meltdown - there are power reactors of Fukushima design characteristics built over earthquake faults on low islands in the upper Mississippi River, where there is no good direction for the wind, and no huge ocean to hide the leaks from the media reports. Fukushima was almost as good, not bad, as a meltdown in that kind of reactor can get. Estimates of the risk premium for nukes, to compare with the near zero risk premium for most forms of solar, should include Fukushima as a low-cost, low end mishap.
No. That depends on the exposure regime, and the nature of the harm curve that produced the threshold. If there is high variance in the exposure regime (as there always is in nuke mishaps) and the mean is anywhere near the "threshold" (which is commonly true of large areas around nuke mishaps) and the harm curve is non-linear in one of the ordinary ways ( biological effect curves almost always are), then the linear no-threshold model will often underestimate the casualty total.
Iceaura
There is a threshold, which is probably at or just under 100 millisieverts in a single dose. We know this because :
1. Hiroshima survivors who experienced less than 100 millisieverts had (on average) slightly longer life spans than people elsewhere in Japan.
2. Professor John Cameron's research comparing nuclear ship builders (who experienced substantially more radiation) and conventional ship builders showed that the nuclear ship builders had longer life spans than the conventional ship builders, and the difference was very highly significant statistically.
3. People living in or close to the Rocky Mountains, where the granite causes substantially higher background radiation, live longer than people living on the prairies and the mountain people have less cancer.
4. Animal studies show a clear threshold, below which radiation has no measurable effect, except (in some experiments) to increase resistance to cancer.
I could go on. The evidence shows very clearly that radiation higher than a certain level will kill. From above another level (probably around 100 millisieverts) will increase chances of cancer. But if the radioactivity is low enough, but still well above average global background, will cause no harm. What needs to be remembered is that humanity has had 3 to 4 billion years of evolution under natural radioactivity, sometimes a lot higher than current global average, and has evolved the ability to cope with that radiation.
Let me put this into perspective. In the USA, there are 12,000 fatalities each year in work place accidents. Fatalities from radioactivity in the nuclear power industry, over its entire history equal zero.
Even if resolving all of the methodology disagreements lead to 4,000 exactly, that's only cancer and leukemia. Clearly there are health effects being suffered which fall into neither category. Hence the reason why I say it's misleading of the IAEA to present that as the "number of deaths."
I really object to relying on any kind of a computer model, though. The effects of nuclear exposure on the human body can't be predicted so simply. Not reliably anyway. What have we got to compare with? Hiroshima and Nagasaki? One very specific kind of nuclear catastrophe. Maybe observations of marine life in the area around the Bikini Atoll? However mature a field it may be on the physics end, it's hardly a mature field on the medical end. There is no justification for relying on a computer model to predict outcomes in an immature field. If someone does that, it's because they want to understate the numbers. There is no other reason. Nothing but an actual count of what outcomes did occur should be considered reliable.
It's impossible to be an "expert" about something for which an insufficient amount of actual knowledge exists to be had. You can be the "closest to an expert that we've got", but you can't actually be an "expert". Otherwise the leach handlers of medieval Europe would have to be considered "experts" at medicine.
Are we sure that isn't just a "selection for hardiness" type of effect? Clearly the hardiest individuals are the ones who survived. It stands to reason they would live longer.
The statistical average for a group is always going to move upward if you take out the weakest members. (They're what was holding it down.)
I think it's clear by now, though, that short term exposure to radioactivity isn't the main problem, or not exactly anyway. It's the trace amounts of exotic isotopes/chemical that begin taking the place of other chemicals in the body's metabolism. That leads to long term exposure, because the source of the radioactivity has now become a permanent part of your bone, or a gland, or .... etc. As well as the exposure being focused on just one part of your body instead of being spread out among your cells. (So for the purposes of your "Safe" exposure level, we have to treat you as if your whole body were just that patch of cells and was getting exposed at that level.)4. Animal studies show a clear threshold, below which radiation has no measurable effect, except (in some experiments) to increase resistance to cancer.
I could go on. The evidence shows very clearly that radiation higher than a certain level will kill. From above another level (probably around 100 millisieverts) will increase chances of cancer. But if the radioactivity is low enough, but still well above average global background, will cause no harm. What needs to be remembered is that humanity has had 3 to 4 billion years of evolution under natural radioactivity, sometimes a lot higher than current global average, and has evolved the ability to cope with that radiation.
Let me put this into perspective. In the USA, there are 12,000 fatalities each year in work place accidents. Fatalities from radioactivity in the nuclear power industry, over its entire history equal zero.
It could also lead to your body sometimes substituting the wrong chemical, and being less healthy on account of it. We have to remember that a lot of the chemicals created in nuclear reactions don't occur in nature very much. Our bodies didn't evolve to take them into account. We have no safeguards in place to filter them back out of our system when they go to the wrong place.
I think scientists in general (especially physicists) have a natural bias in favor of going nuclear, because a nuclear reactor is the only place you can study some things, and the more common nuclear power becomes the easier it will be to gain access to reactors for scientific purposes. It's quite understandable. Super-colliders are great, but you can't really use them to experiment on free neutrons very well.
However, the trick is to remember that the public is probably not going to weigh that very heavily in their decision. For them it's just safety vs. price. And if they didn't value safety very much, then probably the Department of Defense wouldn't have as large a budget as it has.
Last edited by kojax; August 8th, 2012 at 03:52 PM. Reason: "the more common" instead of "the common"
What is clear about that? Do you have evidence of such an effect?
No matter what isotopes you are talking about, there is only alpha, beta, and gamma. Dose calculations take into account the long term dose due to ingestion or breathing of radioactive isotopes. A lot of chemicals which are a byproduct of manufacturing solar cells do not appear much in nature either. I don't see you obsessing over those ones.That leads to long term exposure, because the source of the radioactivity has now become a permanent part of your bone, or a gland, or .... etc. As well as the exposure being focused on just one part of your body instead of being spread out among your cells. (So for the purposes of your "Safe" exposure level, we have to treat you as if your whole body were just that patch of cells and was getting exposed at that level.)
It could also lead to your body sometimes substituting the wrong chemical, and being less healthy on account of it. We have to remember that a lot of the chemicals created in nuclear reactions don't occur in nature very much. Our bodies didn't evolve to take them into account. We have no safeguards in place to filter them back out of our system when they go to the wrong place.
This is silly. There aren't any experiments going on in nuclear power plants.
One more solar thread becomes a nuclear thread!
As it happens I believe Kojax has a legitimate point that the health impacts of radioactive materials is not independent of the element and the chemistry - the relationship between specific radioactive elements and specific health risks is well known (eg radioiodine) and arises because of how and where such elements end up in the body (eg replacing iodine) and what happens to biochemistry when radioactive decay of such elements occurs within biological compounds in living cells. Which is why I view simple risk vs exposure in REM as misleading and should be taken with a pinch of (potassium iodide) salt. Recalling a school friend's father who was chief medical officer at Australia's Lucas Heights nuclear facility, he used to insist the greatest health risks of radioactive materials were ultimately chemical in nature.
Threshold levels for harmful effects from normal background radiation or Hiroshima bomb estimated averages are 1) controversial and complex 2) essentially irrelevant to this discussion.
What you need are the shapes of the harm curves, and a detailed description of the exposure regime, for the isotopes and radiation types actually emitted. You need to consider the variance, the frequency and timing and scale of pulses of high exposure, not the landscape average over weeks or months.
You can post alleged landscape average threshold levels, and the evidence for them, until you are blue in the face, and all it proves is that you don't understand the situation.
Such confidence in one so completely ignorant. Try simply settign aside this nuke plant stuff in which you've dug yourself too deep to see out, and check out something like radon in houses. Note that a key variable is cigarette smoking. Do you recall hearing anything about the cigarette smoking or other such lifestyle factors in Fukushima's aftermath? Neither do I.But if the radioactivity is low enough, but still well above average global background, will cause no harm.
But we have people asserting, as fact, that the death toll from the nuke mishap at Fukushima is zero. And it gets sillier:The hits just keep coming from this crowd, don't they? Can it get any goofier?Fatalities from radioactivity in the nuclear power industry, over its entire history equal zero.
The very first nuclear pile, the construction of the very first controlled reaction, killed one of the construction workers by radiation exposure. His screwdriver slipped - workplace accident.
And then of course we had Chernobyl, a workplace accident of larger dimensions. Rumor hath it that some employees died from radiation exposure in that event.
But never mind me - I don't post evidence, you see. Not like these guys.
Yep. Variety in teh stupid, much appreciated - but no argument, no sense, no comprehension, no bearing on the OP. You actually think "Stirling power" went bankrupt, say - that wasn't a slip - and you apparently don't care why, which would be the only relevance to the OP and marginal at that.
See, this kind of waht is basically dishonesty, a species of lying, is the problem. Is there anyone here who can't think immediately of a common and much publicized example of exactly that effect which has been a headline concern in the aftermath of all nuclear plant mishaps?
So what is the question about, really? Why was it posted?
It's flat below 50 SV, there is no curve--we have enough evidence to highly doubt linear based models application to low dose radiation.What you need are the shapes of the harm curves,
At least you realize your forum failing--which leads us to believe you don't think it's important to provide evidence, are just making things up, don't care, or don't want to really engage in meaningful evidence-based conversation which in truth make you a poor contributor.But never mind me - I don't post evidence, you see. Not like these guys.
(sigh)
Not only do you not post evidence, but you do not bother reading what others post.
I made the statement that the US nuclear industry has not had a nuclear accident in which even one person died from radioactivity, and you immediately quote Chernobyl to prove me wrong. Sheesh!
Solar thermal really work. Here's a vid about eSolar (a company who made the first solar thermal in US): Future360: eSolar - YouTube
They said they going to first combine gas power & solar thermal to provide a 24hour supply, but then they plan to implement a power storage system (like molten salt) to make solar thermal a stand alone 24hour energy supply. Which sounds excitingly possible.
msafwan
Solar thermal energy does work. That has never been in question. The problem is that, right now, it does not work economically. The challenge is to get the cost down to where it can compete with other modes.
So, if it's much publicized in headlines, that is evidence that it is ''clearly" the main problem?
At Chernobyl, the helicopter pilots who received an acute dose of radiation and died shortly thereafter were clearly killed by radiation. After that, everything gets a lot less clear.
You need to dig down a little beyond the press releases to find the real story.Solar thermal really work. Here's a vid about eSolar (a company who made the first solar thermal in US): Future360: eSolar - YouTube
They said they going to first combine gas power & solar thermal to provide a 24hour supply, but then they plan to implement a power storage system (like molten salt) to make solar thermal a stand alone 24hour energy supply. Which sounds excitingly possible.
eSolar Sierra SunTower offline – Again | GUNTHER Portfolio
Erm... -_- maybe another failed product (probably software bug in the mirror alignment? problem with water usage? mirror attract dust?). A sad news. -He (the author) did says about the mirror aren't precisely pointing to the tower, and the worker says it can only be seen to 'lit up' at certain time, and in India they might continue with PV because of dust(?), and also something about a deal to use recycled water (maybe not enough water?).
But the molten salt solar thermal in Spain seems to be working.
Last edited by msafwan; August 9th, 2012 at 08:27 AM.
Once again: this kind of post is a species of dishonety. That is the third or fourth consecutive post of this type by this poster in this thread, let alone the forum. Discussion of issues is impossible when that kind of posting is tolerated to this extent.
This statement was perfectly clear:It was also perfectly ridiculous.Fatalities from radioactivity in the nuclear power industry, over its entire history equal zero.
As amended later, the poster prefers thisWe ignore the illiteracy of "you quote Chernobyl", and instead remind the poster that I also pointed out that a construction worker was killed directly by radiation poisoning in the building of the very first reaction pile - the first ever controlled nuclear reaction setup, the original power reactor core, built in the US by US workers. So that's at least one, immediately.I made the statement that the US nuclear industry has not had a nuclear accident in which even one person died from radioactivity, and you immediately quote Chernobyl to prove me wrong.
The notion that none have been radiation killed since would be similarly obtuse, given the hundreds of over-exposures in the hundreds of mishaps, but that's a well-trashed topic.
And not the thread topic, which is:No - given the extraordinarily high and rising costs of the other modes (the Iraq war alone, for pity's sake), that's yesterday's solved problem. The challenge is to gather capital and expertise, choose appropriate modes for various circumstances, and build the necessary plants, transmission lines, storage setups, and other infrastructure.The challenge is to get the cost down to where it can compete with other modes
If that is the incident I recall from my reading, it was a result of research work. It was not a nuclear pile in use for electricity generation. It was a researcher who got careless and paid the price.
If I am wrong, please give me a reference so I can check it for myself.
On a science forum, it's not a good practice speak in riddles. Come on right out and say which reaction pile you are referring to, and who was killed by radiation poisoning.
Not really sure to what incident you are referring. The first thing that came to mind was Louis Slotin, but I can't imagine you would mistake him for a construction worker. I'd definitely like the source for this statement. I've found myself becoming a proponent of nuclear power so I'm very curious.
Everyone who has researched the history of nuclear power knows about the deaths at Idaho Falls, but most of the construction and maintenance worker deaths I've seen are related to electrocution.
I was thinking of Harry Daghlian, making the first criticality tests with plutonium - building the industrial knowledge base for the power reactors of the future.
But if you don't want to call him a "construction worker", because he like everyone building fission cores at the time was a highly educated person engaged in R&D, so be it. There are several other deaths to choose from, in responding to a claim that no employee has died from radiation released in a nuke power incident, or a US nuke power incident, or whatever the claim is:
Criticality accident - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Note that list only counts as fatalities people directly and immediately killed by massive doses of radiation. One could as well use the ordinary estimates of the delayed kills from the effects of the many dozens of incidents involving lower doses of radiation (starting with the workers hospitalized for more than a month after the Oak Ridge incident in the link) to show the blatant nature of the claim being refuted, but apparently that is not "scientific" around here.
Prediction: nothing posted here will prevent that claim - that nuke power (at least in the US) has killed no one, or no one on a workplace, or no employee, or whatever, by radiation - from being repeated in the future as it has been in the past.
And then use that to somehow imply a justification of the relegation of solar power to "the back burner" - a process of "reasoning" that has yet to involve the standard technologies of solar power, any of them, at all.
Last edited by iceaura; August 10th, 2012 at 06:42 PM.
To Iceaura
My claim was that no one had died in the USA from radiation at a nuclear power plant. Your list of criticality incidents shows that still to be true.
There have been lethal accidents in nuclear laboratories, and there have been industrial type accidents resulting in death at American nuclear plants. But I think my point is made. American nuclear power plants, like those in France, Britain, and other advanced nations, are run well and safely, and no one has died from radiation due to the kind of accident that can happen only when there is a nuclear reactor .
There have been accidents, like Three Mile Island, and smaller ones at places like Sellafield. But I call these minor, since no deaths resulted. The only genuinely major nuclear reactor accident is Chernobyl.
Fukushima we can call moderate, since no one died on the scene. There may be a few deaths in the future from cancer, from the heroic people who went into the plant to carry out emergency work. Fukushima was an accident that came as a result of a natural disaster, which made any harm by the nuclear accident pale into comparative insignificance.
Counting the deaths from the Manhattan project as deaths from the nuclear power industry is silly.
The process of reasoning by which this is related to solar power is as follows: Nuclear power is capable of base load electrical power generation replacing fossil fuel power stations throughout the country. Standard technologies of solar power are not.
Solar power with combination of fosil fuel can provide a continuous power, its called "combined-cycle-power-station". With lesser CO2 emmision and is safer.
--
Iran: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yazd_in..._power_station
Algeria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassi_R..._power_station
*Both use solar-thermal.
The first link does not say how much of the rated capacity is gas and how much is solar. The second link for the Algerian plant says the solar array is 25 megawatts and the gas turbine is 130 MW. If the Algerian solar plant is similar to SEGS, it will operate on average about 1/5 of its rated power, so thats around 5 megawatts solar. Let's say the solar output about 4% of the total. So what you basically have is a gas turbine generator supplemented with a puny amount of solar power.Solar power with combination of fosil fuel can provide a continuous power, its called "combined-cycle-power-station". With lesser CO2 emmision and is safer.
--
Iran: Yazd integrated solar combined cycle power station - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Algeria: Hassi R'Mel integrated solar combined cycle power station - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
*Both use solar-thermal.
I'll be honest with you, I never click on Wikipedia links. Give me a link to a publication to support facts. If you're just using your opinion to say that the people who died during the Manhattan Project somehow give substance to the anti-nuclear power debate, I'd have to disagree. You might as well lump Marie Curie into that argument as well.I was thinking of Harry Daghlian, making the first criticality tests with plutonium - building the industrial knowledge base for the power reactors of the future.
But if you don't want to call him a "construction worker", because he like everyone building fission cores at the time was a highly educated person engaged in R&D, so be it. There are several other deaths to choose from, in responding to a claim that no employee has died from radiation released in a nuke power incident, or a US nuke power incident, or whatever the claim is:
Criticality accident - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Note that list only counts as fatalities people directly and immediately killed by massive doses of radiation. One could as well use the ordinary estimates of the delayed kills from the effects of the many dozens of incidents involving lower doses of radiation (starting with the workers hospitalized for more than a month after the Oak Ridge incident in the link) to show the blatant nature of the claim being refuted, but apparently that is not "scientific" around here.
Prediction: nothing posted here will prevent that claim - that nuke power (at least in the US) has killed no one, or no one on a workplace, or no employee, or whatever, by radiation - from being repeated in the future as it has been in the past.
And then use that to somehow imply a justification of the relegation of solar power to "the back burner" - a process of "reasoning" that has yet to involve the standard technologies of solar power, any of them, at all.
As for the rest of the post, I'm not someone who thinks nuclear power should be our only resort. Every power source has its dangers and limitations and we need to be aware of all of them. Anyone who thinks there is a silver bullet available with today's technology either works for someone or has their blinders on.
Then ask a question that needs or even has such "publication" requirements in its answer.
Do you even recall what you were asking about? A gossip column in the newspaper would be a perfectly appropriate source for such "facts" as you seem interested in.
And if I'm not doing anything like that, you're wasting bandwidth on irrelevancies because you can't be bothered with following the argument, and none of your opinions about any of my posts here have the slightest merit: Right?
If the Algerian solar plant is similar to SEGS, 90% of its power output will come from the solar and 10% from the gas turbine. According to your link re SEGS, anyway.
Now all you have to do is back that last assertion up (nothing you've posted so far is even relevant).
I quoted your claim, in my original reply. Read it above, if you've forgotten.
Your revisions are appreciated, as they have become steadily less blatantly false and (not coincidently) even less relevant to the discussion here - this last one is merely a matter of your ignorance and incomprehension: you don't understand why or how the people who have determined its falsity make their case. But since you have abandoned the thread topic altogether, that is of little moment here.
To return to the thread topic: the relegation of solar power to "the back burner" is still a bit of a mystery without the standard invocation of military/industrial complex market manipulation and political leverage most disinterested observers note - although if the people making that decision are as oddly oblivious to basic principles of reason and cost accounting as the critics of solar power are here, much of the mystery vanishes. Is that the basic explanation, then?
Last edited by iceaura; August 11th, 2012 at 03:55 PM.
Try to pay attention. The topic of discussion is using solar for base load. SEGS was shut down at night. They did not even attempt to use it for base load.If the Algerian solar plant is similar to SEGS, 90% of its power output will come from the solar and 10% from the gas turbine. According to your link re SEGS, anyway.
The next time you even attempt to back up your assertions on solar power will be the first. Thus far, you have offered nothing.Now all you have to do is back that last assertion up (nothing you've posted so far is even relevant).
Eh? You said a "construction worker" was killed building our first nuclear reactor core. Then, you send me a wiki link to a Manhattan Project scientist who was killed in the beginning trials of the science. That is a HUGE jump from the assertion that nuclear power is too dangerous to adopt nationally.Then ask a question that needs or even has such "publication" requirements in its answer.
Do you even recall what you were asking about? A gossip column in the newspaper would be a perfectly appropriate source for such "facts" as you seem interested in.
And if I'm not doing anything like that, you're wasting bandwidth on irrelevancies because you can't be bothered with following the argument, and none of your opinions about any of my posts here have the slightest merit: Right?
I have no idea what the second part is about. You seem very upset with what I said. To reiterate, I don't think that the evidence you provided has any merit in determining the safety of nuclear power. I was also not writing off your opinion as irrelevant, I simply disagree with it. I'm also not sure what you're implying about me not following the debate. I was talking about a specific point you made regarding nuclear power safety. If you want to get back to the OT, that's fine with me, but I came here late and I was just sticking to where the topic seems to have drifted.
I'd suggest you take a deep breath before you reply.
What is clear about that? Do you have evidence of such an effect?
I wanted to hold off on answering this until I could get you a more complete listing, as this is not the only isotope on the list, but we can start with Cesium 137. It's time in the human body isn't as long as some others, but it's considered one of the primary risks because it can take the place of Potassium. Also because Chernobyl did lead to the release of a good amount of it.
Caesium-137 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's also one of the central reasons why Bikini Atoll hasn't yet been cleared for resettlement. The soil there is poor in Potassium, and so the plants that grow there have been absorbing Cesium 137 in its place.
https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/bikini.php
Strontium - 90 is also another fun one. It replaces calcium in your bones.
Strontium-90 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Last edited by kojax; August 11th, 2012 at 09:23 PM.
All of which, kojax, is fine and good. However, your references have not even begun to answer the two vital questions
1. How much is needed to cause significant harm to health?
2. How much is actually present in the bodies of people who are suggested as victims?
Unless you have answers to those two questions, anything else is pure speculation.
Quite to the contrary. If someone is willing to actually go to the regions and sift through hospital records (like Greenpeace did in many cases for their estimates), they don't need to know the answers to those questions at all.
What is speculative, is using a computer model to map the predicted outcomes, and then holding that to be superior to direct observation because an "expert" did it. Just because you don't need an expert to compile statistics the old fashioned way doesn't mean the old fashioned way isn't more reliable. That would be like if a physicist with a phd in astrophysics were to predict where a star might be in the sky, and then a technician with only a bachelor's degree were to look through a telescope and visibly confirm the star was in a different place..... and you go with the astrophysicist's value because you think the technician is too dumb to even look through a telescope.
Compiled data is much closer to a "visible confirmation" in that sense. You're bypassing theory and just looking straight at the numbers.
For example, the findings in Berlin about Downs Syndrome, which I linked earlier would probably not have been a predicted outcome. It was observed, but there's no likelihood that AIEA's computer model would have included it. How many more maladies do you think there are like that? We don't know. It's more likely that there will be some than that there will be none, and if so then theory will miss them. A direct count from records will not miss them.
Chernobyl disaster - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Relinking the Downs Syndrome thing)
Sorry, that is incorrect.
Sifting through hospital records is the most misleading of all methods, for the simple reason that it is an uncontrolled experiment. You get a bunch of ailments, some fatal, like cancers. What you do not know is how many cancers and so on would have occurred in the absence of the purported cause. This is ripe for corrupt people to misrepresent things. Greenpeace, as I have pointed out before, have a history of lying or inventing statistics.
Let me give you can example of how facts can be mistaken, when taken out of context like this. One of the heroes of the green movement is Erin Brockovitch, who got a utility company to pay out $ 333 million (and made herself rich in the process) to cancer patients, when she claimed the cancers were caused by a release of toxic chromium by that company.
In fact, cancer rates in that entire area were never higher than they should be. The chromium release had not changed cancer rates at all, and the pay out was a swindle.
http://reason.com/blog/2010/12/13/er...-town-shows-no
Its really unexpected that radiation cause down-syndrome... I was imagining all about cancer.
Have you ever heard of the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy? It is the fallacious belief that an event which occurs after some other event, was necessarily caused by the first event.
There could be several explanations of a spike in down syndrome. One would be random fluctuations, which was noticed simply because it coincided with the nuclear accident. Maybe there was a random downward spike in some other disease, but that would not be noted by Greenpeace, who were looking for harmful effects. Maybe it was caused by hysterical reaction of women who feared harmful effects on their babies. Consequently, their fear somehow caused an adverse environment for their developing fetus. Maybe it was an increase in diagnosis by doctors who were looking harder for harmful effects 9 months after the accident.
I'm not sure if Greenpeace is the source for the Downs Syndrome statistic. I just pulled it off of wiki. But I see your point. Coinciding doesn't always mean cause.
However, it looks like you and Skeptic are now both dropping into the realm of "maybe". You see the problem? Whenever the science is very inexact, as it is in evaluating the health effects of Chernobyl, whatever each side wants to see is what they see. The IAEA looks only for a narrow range of predicted types of harm, thereby ensuring the number they arrive at will not be higher than the real number, but providing no safeguard against low estimates. You get one kind of accuracy, but not the other. Greenpeace goes out looking for every malady in the world, but without attempting to determine which ones originate how/where. So, we know their estimate won't be low.
What bothers me is presenting a number based on a search method that isn't designed to give an upper limit, but only a lower limit, and then presenting it as if it were an upper limit. Even if an "expert" did it, that expert must know that what he/she is presenting is a lower limit. It's an estimate that won't be unfairly high, and I think it is good to have such estimates - so long we take them for what they are and don't try to make them into something else.
I can see your concern, but fear of biased reporting is just another kind of hysteria.Sorry, that is incorrect.
Sifting through hospital records is the most misleading of all methods, for the simple reason that it is an uncontrolled experiment. You get a bunch of ailments, some fatal, like cancers. What you do not know is how many cancers and so on would have occurred in the absence of the purported cause. This is ripe for corrupt people to misrepresent things. Greenpeace, as I have pointed out before, have a history of lying or inventing statistics.
Let me give you can example of how facts can be mistaken, when taken out of context like this. One of the heroes of the green movement is Erin Brockovitch, who got a utility company to pay out $ 333 million (and made herself rich in the process) to cancer patients, when she claimed the cancers were caused by a release of toxic chromium by that company.
In fact, cancer rates in that entire area were never higher than they should be. The chromium release had not changed cancer rates at all, and the pay out was a swindle.
"Erin Brockovich" Town Shows No Cancer Cluster - Hit & Run : Reason.com
The Greenpeace paper is, for the most part, just a compilation of other studies, many of which appear to have been done by people who were very much experts in their specific fields. It's just like Greenpeace to mix in bad studies with good studies, but fortunately they mostly appear in distinct parts of the paper, so when you see a bad study you can ignore it. (There are a lot of exerpts which I do ignore as I read them.) That's the advantage of having a non-expert compile the paper. They're so inexpert that they can't mingle the papers.
Some, as I've mentioned, are simple health record searches, or searches of other records. For the liquidators, their statistic of how many they estimate to have died comes from searches that find overwhelming percentages, like 78% of people on a liquidator roster in Uzbekistan ending up becoming invalids from multiple afflictions later in life. Now that could be selection bias. Perhaps only disabled liquidators registered on the list? But I would think that as heroes of the people, they would have registered anyway. Or maybe some registered fraudulently. I don't know...
Now if the reporter is unscrupulous and there is a a registration bias (such as only disabled people choosing to register), then maybe the earlier number 8.3% is being compared with the final number (so 8.3% of the final number.) If they're honest and both the 8.3% and 73.8% are being taken from the same list, then a rise from 8.3% ro 73.8% would mean most of the negative health effects were occurring later on, and makes for a staggering statistic.
If they're just registering as they get sick, then it could be that the overall group is much larger than 10,000, and so 73.8% should really be a lower percentage of the overall. Then we're dealing with ol' Erin Brockovich again in a new form. I guess one would have to try and determine how many liquidators would have been pulled from Uzbekistan alone, and if they think it's much more than 10,000.
Their estimate was that there had been ~800,000 liquidators involved in the cleanup process, taken from all over the Soviet Union.
Or ... well... actually according to this article, 10,000 is the full number from Uzbekistan. But I don't know where they're getting their numbers, hopefully not the same source as Greenpeace.
Chernobyl remembered 25 years later in Central Asia - Central Asia Online
The Soviet Union mobilised more than a million people – dubbed liquidators – to clean up after the Chernobyl disaster. Most lacked any training for dealing with radiation. From Kazakhstan, 31,743 people went to Chernobyl, with 2,000 from Kyrgyzstan, 10,000 from Uzbekistan, 6,000 from Tajikistan, and an unknown number from Turkmenistan joining them. Of those, only 4,519 are still alive in Kazakhstan, although some left for Russia and Germany after the collapse of the Soviet Union. There are still 1,485 surviving liquidators in Kyrgyzstan, 7,000 in Uzbekistan and 4,500 in Tajikistan.
Kojax
That was 26 years ago.
If we were to check 26 years from now, I am sure we would find a large fraction of those reading our posts on this forum would be dead.
Sure, a few of the deaths will be caused by Chernobyl radiation, but how many? Also, I am not sure how much credence to put in reports from Central Asia Online. More than Greenpeace, which I know to be corrupt? Or less?
You have no trouble accepting even quite ridiculous assertions from sources corrupted by corporate interests such as the nuclear power industry. And you have no trouble advancing your uncertainty about something you haven't looked into and do not appear to comprehend anyway, as if it were evidence of something wrong with the thing.
Which might be a clue as to why I haven't been making that jump, and a clue as to why I posted the list of other casualties, and so forth and so on - my observation that part of the reason nuclear power has been and remains extremely costly is because it has been and remains extremely dangerous, is meant as a comparison with some forms of solar thermal and other, superior, almost certainly cheaper, solar alternatives.
Hence the thread relevance of my posts, maintained with some difficulty in the middle of this noise.
But you have no argument, or relevant reason, for the dismissal. You appear to have misconstrued the evidence. You have an opinion about something or another (not sure what) and nothing visible to base it on. We all have opinions.And the fact that you feel justified in claiming to have sensible disagreements with what you have no idea of, is part of what is irritating about pretty much all proponents of nuclear power expansion.I was also not writing off your opinion as irrelevant, I simply disagree with it.
It's a collection of people who "discuss" like this:Just one heedless, ill-considered, silly assertion after another.
Or the spike in miscarriage and stillbirth and sudden infant death that showed up in the landscape rise downwind of TMI for about a year after the meltdown, and then vanished. Or the rise in heart disease in the areas most affected by Chernobyl's ejecta. Sure - lots of other explanations are reasonably possible. But so is explanation by the effects of high-variability low dose radiation and chemical poisoning of relevant types. And as long as that explanation is reasonably possible, and especially as long as it has not been investigated in such cases (which it hasn't ), the assertions here that these harms certainly do not exist are empty - hot air and ignorance.
Last edited by iceaura; August 12th, 2012 at 06:47 PM.
Point One.
The IAEA is a United Nations Agency - not a corporate body.
Point Two.
My "heedless" assertion is a point that is demonstrably true. In any significant body of people of random ages, over a 26 year period, a large fraction will die. Death after life. The normal state of things.
And the peer-review studies which support that assertion? [/quote]Or the spike in miscarriage and stillbirth and sudden infant death that showed up in the landscape rise downwind of TMI for about a year after the meltdown, and then vanished.
Particularly in the face of several studies which showed no such events--in fact the rates of spontaneous abortion was actually lower than average, but within the noise level.
"Although the incidence of spontaneous abortion for women exposed to the TMI accident was not unusual, the incidence of fetal loss after 20 completed weeks of gestation was particularly low. We determined that this was not a problem of ascertainment since we cross-checked our file against state fetal death certificate listings, which tend to be fairly complete after 20 weeks. Because fetal death incidences show considerable instability in small regions over short periods of time, it is likely that the scarcity of fetal deaths after 20 weeks of gestation was a random fluctuation..."
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Longer term are the same: "All heart disease accounted for 43.3% of total deaths and demonstrated elevated SMRs for heart disease of 113 and 130 for men and women, respectively; however, when controlling for confounders and natural background radiation, these elevations in heart disease were no longer evident."
Mortality among the residents of the Three Mile Island accident area: 1979-1992.
--
But this gets into the sampling problems related to Kojak's side-discussion. Take ANY random town in the US and study it in medical detail whether by going through their records, self-reporting, or doing extensive physical evaluations and you'll get a much higher than average rates of just about every disease, simply because you're studying the population in more detail. All such studies have to be corrected for these known sampling effects. On a broader level, it's true in other sciences as well--Eastern Colorado, for example has one of the most frequent reported number of severe storms in the mid-west, not because that's really happening, but because of several meteorology research labs along the front range (I used to work in Boulder doing storm chasing)--once adjusted for under sampling everywhere else, it turns out to be not so special. Not a miscarriage happened around TMI after the even went unnoticed, because everyone was watching for it including doctors, prospective moms, concerned relatives and of course scientist--but as the study I posted shows, those types of reports need correcting and comparison and accounting for other effects--where the miscarriage rate turned out to actually drop, rather than go up. We could get Mark Twain about this (his damn lies-statitics quote), but analysis takes good unbiased methods to be accurate--the types of methods unlikely to be used by overtly biased groups such as Greenpeace.
How fascinating. Your point is what?
1) You didn't make your assertion about a body of people of random ages, you made your assertion about the people on this forum 2) It's still false in general - it depends on the age distribution in the population one drew the "random" sample from, compared with their stable age distribution (the principle eigenvector of the mortality matrix). 3) The assertion, if true, would not in itself refute any claims made about Chernobyl's survivors. Nor would its refutation of claims made about Chernobyl's survivors be of much relevance in this thread. Hence the "silly" adjective.
I assumed you were taking the position of defending your statement that nuclear power was dangerous. I was simply listening to that defense. You can't say that nuclear power is dangerous and then put the onus of proving you wrong onto my shoulders. The reason I do not accept the idea of nuclear power being a serious danger as a power supply is DUE to the fact that we are not faced with deaths in nuclear power plants related to the dangers associated with nuclear power. Sure, we see people die from electrocution and from incidents occurring during the infancy of the plants, but to me that isn't enough to write off a very powerful and relatively clean source of energy.
Basically, I'm willing to entertain the idea that nuclear power is too dangerous to utilize, but you have to supply me with that evidence. Consider me unconvinced, but don't get mad at me because you're not able to convince me.
To Flick
I appreciate your stance on evidence. That is very rational.
The arguments about Chernobyl are almost irrelevent anyway. We have an IAEA estimate of 4,000 deaths in total as a result of the Chernobyl accident. Other estimates are higher, with one WHO estimate of 30,000.
But if we compare this to hydroelectricity, it is all still utterly trivial by comparison. The Banqiao Dam which burst and killed nearly 200,000 people and made 11 million homeless puts Chernobyl definitely into the shade. And Banqiao is only one of a number of such incidents.
Is there some kind of school the Fox News corporation runs to train you people in that tactic?
Why not? The extraordinary claim is the one requiring the extraordinary evidence. I'm pointing to the obvious - to dangers so clear to everyone that governments bid to start wars to forestall them; private industry is willing to spend hundreds of millions to merely reduce their likelihood, and use every political lever in its possession to slough off the remaining liability and risk on somebody else. I'm not the one claiming that no one died from the TMI meltdown, or any of the dozens of other lower level incidents, and then concluding that nuke power is safe.Well, no one can stop you from ignoring the obvious hazards that contribute so much to the cost of nuclear power, pretending that the relative rarity of direct and immediate radiation kills within a power plant is evidence of the absence of those hazards so much money is spent to avoid, overlooking the actual consequences of building these plants and the good luck we have been depending on so far, and so forth.
But if you recall, you are defending this claim, the subject of the posts you "argued" against in that so routinely imitable Fox manner:Is that a claim you want to be on record as defending?Fatalities from radioactivity in the nuclear power industry, over its entire history equal zero.
The striking part of that kind of bs, from you and Harold and Skeptic and the entire ship, is not that it's irrelevant (who cares whether it's flat below 50SV, or merely very low and attenuated slope?), and not the visibility of the fact that math isn't your field,
but rather how obvious it is that you can't know what you assert, because you are claiming knowledge that does not exist. WTF are you trying to prove?
A logistic, the most common shape of curve for biological phenomena like that, often has a left tail indistinguishable from a horizontal line in any realistic data set. So do many other curves. (A linear function with a sudden "threshold" to zero is a curve, btw - just a very unlikely shape of curve for a biological phenomenon That shape is included in my post of what was necessary, and lacking.)
iceaura
Please try to refrain from putting false words in our mouths.
No one has said nuclear power is "safe."
What I have said from the beginning is that nuclear power is dangerous - just less so than a number of other modes of generating electricity, and I have given the actual numbers of fatalities per terawatt year of electricity generated to demonstrate the point.
Of course nuclear power is not "safe". But relative to most of the alternatives, it is less hazardous.
This guy said that nuclear power is not "seriously dangerous", and objected to my claiming that nukes were "dangerous".I was replying directly to that, which you can tell by the fact that I quoted it for the reply.
If you want to base your criticisms of my posts on a relevant distinction between "safe" and "not seriously dangerous", not "dangerous", etc, then let's see that explicitly - I'd just let it stand as exemplary of the kinds of arguments you guys are posting here.
It would go right next to the argument that nukes are less dangerous than other forms of power, posted in a thread about about solar power, that omits any comparison of the dangers of nukes and the dangers of any of the relevant forms of solar power.
In the first place, you have not. You have omitted most of the fatalities from the nukes (and coal, but not to effect) and used incompatible criteria to count the others - or rather, your sources have, but you are responsible for accepting and posting obviously bogus numbers.
In the second, averaged out fatalities per terawatt are a poor measure of hazard or harm in comparing such widely divergent scales of production, in time and place and output and so forth, that do their harms on such different scales of frequency and intensity. To push it to the absurd, no one with a reasonable alternative would knowingly build a power generator with a one in a million chance of suddenly and permanently depopulating their continent, regardless of its fatality per terawatt average over a couple of human lifespans. It would be too hazardous, too dangerous. The risk premium in the cost accounting would be too high, even if the thing had never killed anyone to date.
Fatalities per terawatt over forty years or so do not well inform us about the hazards of building nukes on islands near the headwaters of a continent's major river systems, for example.
One of the advantages of the relevant solar power techs is that their hazards are small scale, easily isolated and ameliorated, in both time and place. They don't have huge risk premiums. That's why denigrating and dismissing the risk premium of nukes is so important to nuke proponents in relegating solar tech to the back burner.
The fact that the costs of solar are up front, not hidden or "externalized" or postponed or otherwise deniable by those in line to make big money off of them, is my nomination for the key reason solar power is "on the backburner".
In winter when we really need the extra power, ofttimes we get 3+ weeks of cold and cloudy---it often seems as though we have "a cold lifeless sun hanging in a leaden sky"
wind makes a lot more sense here in Iowa
fun map on the link.
Wind Map
wish I could find something like this for the whole freaking world
Iowa, like most places south of Canada, uses more electricity in the summer than in the winter.In winter when we really need the extra power, ofttimes we get 3+ weeks of cold and cloudy---it often seems as though we have "a cold lifeless sun hanging in a leaden sky"
wind makes a lot more sense here in Iowa
Iceaura
You still have not in any credible way opposed the fact that nuclear power is relatively safer than most other forms. You choose not to believe that fatalities per kilowatt year are a measure of relative safety, but that simply tells us that you reject any data that is inconvenient to your own greenie propaganda based beliefs, instead of accepting good science.
Solar thermal power is much, much more expensive than almost any other power generating method (except offshore wind), as we have demonstrated several times with clear cut published data. Solar cells are becoming more economic and outperform thermal solar very comfortably. It is likely that, in a decade or less, solar photovoltaic cells will become a financially competitive source of electricity. Solar thermal is struggling, and has a major uphill battle to reduce its costs sufficiently.
ice
I'd place the deviding line a tad farther south. In this area, we use more electricity for heat than cooling.
Here's a thought---outlaw air conditioning----or make it by prescription. design buildings to self cool, and plant more trees.
the thing about nuclear, is that it is high impact low incidence for accidents.
but if you take into account the wars for oil, it is far more deadly than nuclear
and abreviated mountains, and slurry dam collapses make king coal more deadly also
(wild guess du jour)
as long as the guys runnung the nuclear plants behave responsibly, then nuclear is an inexpensive safe backbone for the energy grid.
I have, but it doesn't matter - the thread is not about "most other forms".
No, you haven't. You haven't posted a single "clear cut" comparison of the total costs of any of the forms of solar thermal, in context on site, with those of any other form of power generation.
You haven't even posted an accounting of the total costs of any form of power generation by itself, without comparison at all.
So, you're suggesting that a substantial fraction of the people recruited to clean up nuclear waste were 40 or older at the time? Besides, the 78% statistic for disablement was from within 10 years of the event.
"In total" is incorrect. The 4000 number is the number due to leukemia or cancer. Other deaths caused by the accident are not included. But then I'm relying on Greenpeace for that, and of course they always lie. They're big fat liars. Absolutely not one word of anything they ever publish can ever be used as information (even if they're quoti.
The IAEA on the other hand, has no agenda, none at all. Even their own continued employment is of no concern to them. Sure they'll have no one to regulate if nuclear power plants aren't built, and therefore much less basis upon which to justify their annual budget, but that doesn't matter to them. Most of them don't like their jobs anyway. They'd rather be unemployed, or go back to teaching or something.
The problem with only considering Leukemia and cancer is a big one. If someone absorbs Cesium 137 or Strontium 90 into their body, we're talking about beta particles getting emitted from inside their body. Those particles have to pass through their flesh to escape. If some of them hit DNA on their way out, that's going to cause mutations in their cells. Besides that the Cesium 137 atom which emitted that beta particle is now Barium ... which means now you've got a Barium atom where it doesn't belong. You don't think that might disrupt the rest of the protein or acid, or whatever that has absorbed it? (Or a Zirconium atom in the case of Strontium 90).
I'm hard pressed to believe there won't be any negative health effects beyond cancer/leukemia.
Whether it's morally right in your opinion or not, I can assure that from a political stand point, the public will put 100% of the onus on you.
If you want to tell them something is safe, and that they should stake their lives and their childrens' lives on that being true, they're going to expect you to provide all the evidence for that. Nobody presumes safety. I'm sorry. That's just not realistic.
For the purposes of this discussion here on TSF, I don't mind going 50/50, because we're trying to establish something academically. Or better yet, we can be true scientists and presume the null theory, requiring both sides to prove their case or defer to null. In that case, the onus would be on both of us equally. I'm fine with that.
However I'm not going to concede to special pleading and allow that all of the onus is on just one side.
The problem you are faced with is that in any discussion of methods to continuously power an electrical grid, in most areas of the world, there is no such thing as a "relevant solar power tech." If you wish to refute this statement, please show us an engineering study that shows the feasibility of this technology for that purpose. (Smartass, sarcastic replies will be ignored.)
kojax
You have overlooked the main point I was trying to make. I really do not care whether we go by the IAEA estimate of 4,000 deaths or the WHO estimate of 30,000. Both are professional bodies with people who are expert in their field.
The point is that either way, the fatalities due to nuclear power shrink into insignificance compared to the Banqiao Dam burst, or to the people dying each year from respiratory disease aggravated by coal smoke, or those who die due to oil exploitation, and so on.
Let's not get knickers in a twist fighting over whether the IAEA is a non corrupt body (which it should be, as a United Nations Agency) or not. Let us look clearly at the actual estimates, high or low, compared to other ways of manufacturing electricity. In spite of Iceaura's denials, there is no better way of measuring safety that fatalities per terawatt year of power produced, spread over a period of decades. Those results are clear. Of the main ways of generating power, nuclear and burning natural gas are relatively the safest, whether you go for 4,000 or 30,000 fatalities from Chernobyl.
I'll post one word and then leave: Thorium!
A very good word.
If we can overcome a few bugs, that is the power of the future.
? The IAEA has an agenda, written into its charter and formally enjoined upon it, right there in black and white and labeled "agenda". That agenda is the promotion of nuclear power, world wide. That's what they themselves declare their agenda to be.
They have behaved accordingly.
Fascinating. The thread, of course, is about solar power.
You would have to count them accurately, and estimate reasonably for events that happen infrequently - a difficult task for new technology, especially if it were really dangerous but only at long intervals. And even then you would still just have fatalities.
But sure, if you want to try that, that would be contribution to the discussion. What percentage of the casualties of the Iraq War are you going to count against nuclear power?
You sure? States further north than Iowa use more electricity for cooling than heating, and Iowa is agricultural - agribusiness uses far more juice in hot weather than in cold.
Last edited by KALSTER; August 14th, 2012 at 12:30 PM. Reason: kojax said that, not me.
Absolutely zero.
If the Iraq war has anything to do with energy, it is oil, not nuclear.
You have pushed this crackpot hypothesis before, Iceaura. it is one of the reasons why the rational people on this forum do not take you seriously.
I don't know what your problem is, but I'm beginning to get the notion that you just like to be heard regardless of the quality of what you're saying.
Also, this is the first time I've ever been linked to Fox News. I'm more of a Daily Show person.
Its this sort of behavior that got iceaura suspended not too long ago.
Hey, what about the fallout when nuclear incident happen? about area being denied for any agriculture & residential use for hundred of years! -in comparison: when a gas power plant explode, or a dam break, or a thermal solar power plant burn, then the area can still be reclaimed & reused.
Reality about nuclear power plant is that: its only safe when you are able to quarantine the radiation, but when it escaped you can't fix it. eg: how do you fix an irradiated soil? you can't wash soil with detergent!? (how much will you willing to spend washing the soil??)
What happen in real life is that: you don't wash the soil (you can't), you just say its private propery (owned by energy utility company) and then is fenced from public for their safety. In reality: the area is lost, but in legal: its owned by private entity. -Its only OK when you look at the ownership, but in reality you lost an area used to create economy.
--
Also, other country across the globe will also forced to *emotionally* live with the nuclear explosion. Because some country do not want nuclear power because they politically hate it, and since nuclear fallout spreads across the world (albeit diluted): it just make them sad. -The only way to make other nation happy about new nuclear power plant or new nuclear weapon testing is to make them they live on other planet ("not on my backyard" policy)...
Last edited by msafwan; August 13th, 2012 at 11:21 PM.
To msafwan
Claims made for serious harm over large land areas, even for Chernobyl, appear to have been exaggerated. Most of the area restricted around the old Chernobyl nuclear plant is now apparently very hospitable to wild life, and it is now thriving as a nature reserve.
Researchers have found that, apart from the area right up close to the affected reactors, the radiation harm is either minimal or non existent.
Wildlife thriving after nuclear disaster? Radiation from Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents not as harmful to wildlife as feared
Issues:
1) It took 2 decade to recover!??
2) Cesium-137 and Plutonium is still found in the soil. (Chernobyl Fallout? Plutonium Found In Swedish Soil)
Last edited by msafwan; August 13th, 2012 at 11:58 PM.
The thing is, I actually sympathize with you. I know full well that another Chernobyl is more unlikely than another Banqiao Dam burst.kojax
You have overlooked the main point I was trying to make. I really do not care whether we go by the IAEA estimate of 4,000 deaths or the WHO estimate of 30,000. Both are professional bodies with people who are expert in their field.
The point is that either way, the fatalities due to nuclear power shrink into insignificance compared to the Banqiao Dam burst, or to the people dying each year from respiratory disease aggravated by coal smoke, or those who die due to oil exploitation, and so on.
Let's not get knickers in a twist fighting over whether the IAEA is a non corrupt body (which it should be, as a United Nations Agency) or not. Let us look clearly at the actual estimates, high or low, compared to other ways of manufacturing electricity. In spite of Iceaura's denials, there is no better way of measuring safety that fatalities per terawatt year of power produced, spread over a period of decades. Those results are clear. Of the main ways of generating power, nuclear and burning natural gas are relatively the safest, whether you go for 4,000 or 30,000 fatalities from Chernobyl.
I just don't like "holocaust denial" type behavior. Chernobyl killed and maimed a lot more people than either of those numbers. It's not right to downplay the significance of a tragedy no matter what the agenda. There's no "ends justifies the means" argument here. The end is good (getting people to accept safer water reactors), but the means is worse (trying to ignore a horrible tragedy, or sweep it under the rug by pretending most of it didn't happen.)
My opinion about "experts" is that a lot of "experts" in Langley thought Saddam Hussein was building nukes. Except they didn't. The bureaucracy in charge of those experts thought so and cherry picked their data until they had enough evidence to convince the public with. Aluminum tubes that an expert thought *might* be useful to refine Uranium became incontrovertible proof that Saddam had refined some. Do you think the expert him/herself thought that? Probably not. But we didn't get to hear from that gentleman/lady.
Do you really think that the experts at the IAEA honestly believe the numbers you're quoting to be the upper bound on Chernobyl deaths? Why do they qualify them, then, by stating that the 4,000 number is just cancer/leukemia? I haven't talked to them myself, but I somehow suspect that if I did, I would find that they were much more open minded about their own findings than you are being
The Iraq War was sold to the US public as an emergency measure to prevent the evil Saddam from developing nuclear weapons and doing something crazy with them. This threat derived directly from the IAEA approved nuclear power program that handed Iraq the necessary foundation in technology and expertise.
The notion that the Iraq War was being launched for oil interests was loudly and repeatedly denied, at the time, because the US public would not have supported such a war - the nukes were the big deal, the main source of war fever and support in the US. The UN was not in Iraq looking for oil, but for WMDs and especially nuclear facilities. The Israelis did not bomb Saddam's oil refineries or pipelines, but the nuclear power reactor he was building. That is not a crackpot theory, that is the content of the media headlines and public war-mongering in the months leading up to the invasion.
That war is part of the cost of the spread of nuclear power technology and expertise - as are the nuke threats in Pakistan and India and Iran and North Korea. Those involve costs that would not have been incurred by the US citizenry had the US military/industrial complex researched and developed and spread some form of solar power instead. The difference, if one is comparing solar power with nuclear, is hundreds of billions of dollars and at least a goodly share of the deaths and maims in the Asian wars.
It isn't the last, if you keep using Fox tactics in your posting. The label is too handy, and too accurately descriptive.
This is still not true, even after being posted several times by you.
The wildlife is harmed in the radiation zones, as predicted. It's just that the benefit of having the humans removed is much greater - human civilization is worse for wildlife than even fairly serious radiation damage. That is not surprising - what's more significant, a doubling of the birth defect and miscarriage rates, or extermination by trap and shotgun and eradication of resources across wide areas of the landscape?
Make up your mind. Was it about oil, or was it about nuclear weapons?
So Bush wasn't lying?The UN was not in Iraq looking for oil, but for WMDs and especially nuclear facilities.
You need to tell your friends at the Daily Kos. They think Bush lied about the WMD.The Israelis did not bomb Saddam's oil refineries or pipelines, but the nuclear power reactor he was building. That is not a crackpot theory, that is the content of the media headlines and public war-mongering in the months leading up to the invasion.
This is where we get to disagree.
The experts say that it was 4,000 to 30,000 people. I go by the experts rather than a bunch of looneys with Greenpeace or similar organisation. If you think the experts were wrong, then you better have a good set of data to demonstrate that.
To Iceaura.
You are getting nuclear weapons and nuclear power mixed up. They are not the same. If Bush used the possibility of Saddam making nuclear weapons as an excuse to wage war, that is not something to be laid at the feet of the nuclear power industry.
You ever hear of a thermobaric bomb? This is a rather nasty weapon that uses the reaction between petroleum and air to both blast an area and remove the oxygen so that enemy soldiers suffocate. It is exactly the same chemical reaction as that which propels your car.
Blaming nuclear power for the Iraq war is like blaming your car for a thermobaric blast that kills 100 people. Utterly lacking in logic.
That fact it exist doesn't mean much--it's about the amount and the dose and as shown in several studies during this thread, at low levels it's not of concern.Issues:
1) It took 2 decade to recover!??
2) Cesium-137 and Plutonium is still found in the soil. (Chernobyl Fallout? Plutonium Found In Swedish Soil)
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