Chernobyl's radioactive trees and the forest fire risk
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Per watthour, nuclear power is the safest form of energy production, by a very large margin[1].
Chernobyl is the worst nuclear disaster in history. The UNSCEAR report states that 62 deaths can reliably be attributed to the disaster. Peer-reviewed estimates of additional deaths in the long-term range from 6,000 to 50,000.
You mightn't have heard of the Banqiao Dam, but you should have. In 1975, Typhoon Nina destroyed 62 dams in Henan Province, China. The biggest of these, the Banqiao Dam, released 700 million cubic metres of water over the course of six hours. The resulting flood destroyed six million buildings, killed 26,000 people and caused a humanitarian disaster that killed another 145,000.
The business of energy is inherently dangerous. We have an instinctive aversion to radioactivity, because it's strange and invisible, but it's just energy. Someone falling into a nuclear reactor seems inherently more horrible than a solar panel installer falling off a rooftop, but a death is a death. The Chernobyl exclusion zone seems innately more frightening than the beaches cordoned off after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but cancer from crude oil exposure is still cancer.
We've got very good at controlling the risks of nuclear power. We know what the worst case scenario looks like. Radiation exposure isn't nice, but neither is a mine collapse, a gas explosion or climate change. Stories involving radiation are attention-grabbing, but we can't allow that to distract us from the hard data.
[1] http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/10/snapshot-of-deaths-per-tera...
Chernobyl is still the worst nuclear disaster.
The kids in Fukushima disagree, segment from "Children of the Tsunami," BBC, March 1, 2012 ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JS0Rf_gWFA
I'm not trying to downplay the plight of those affected, but it's worth separating these concerns when evaluating the true risks involved with any technology that can potentially have great benefits for the bulk of humanity, the rare catastrophe notwithstanding.
The dam wasn't engineered well enough, definitely not up to western standards.
Chernobyl is a similar situation. Anyone can build a dangerous power plant using whatever resource they want.
Safety is something you invest in. The question then becomes how expensive is safe nuclear power vs. safe hydroelectric? The biggest problem with nuclear is that "safe" nuclear power is very expensive compared to the alternatives, but if they can get costs down without sacrificing safety (or the alternatives increase in price), its a good option for us.
For e.g. launching rockets to space can still fail from times to times, despite the effort and care it takes to do it. Crashing planes also occur from times to times, despite our extensive knowledge of the field and all the effort we can put in preventing disasters.
Wouldn't it be sane to assume that nuclear power will also fail from times to times, and you can't do much about it?
Turning to nuclear power means that we will have more waste to deal with - and more risks for the future of human-kind. I have no idea what society will look like in just 200 years, but it feels dangerous to be storing up these issues for them to deal with. (I have the same concerns about rampant fossil fuel use).
Yes in the short term nuclear power can also have a 'boogie man' affect, but that shouldn't take away from the concerns that many, who are wary of nuclear power, have for the future.
There are two types of radioactive material: A, stuff that radiates very little but lasts very long. And B, stuff that radiates very much, but lasts only some months.
If you are concerned about stuff A, like uranium. There's plenty in nature. It is dangerous already because it emits Radon gas. People still live with that. But you really need large quantities for it to be dangerous.
Nuclear power plants need surprisingly small quantities of fuel. And that doesn't turn into large quantities of waste.
"In contrast, the amount of natural uranium required to provide the same amount of energy as 16 kg of fossil fuels, in a standard fission reactor, is 2 grams; and the resulting waste weighs one quarter of a gram."
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_16...
[2] http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener... [3] http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull411/... [4] http://allthingsnuclear.org/post/4704112149/how-many-cancers...
Coal kills consistently, and mostly where it is used and mined. If you profit from cheap coal energy, you have a higher risk of pulmonary disease. If better filters are installed, your risk is reduced, incentivizing you to trade off risk and reward. If a country builds unmanagebly big hydro dams, a disaster will also affect mostly its own population.
With nuclear energy you have a few catastrophic incidents that render entire areas uninhabitable but also contaminate countries that don't even benefit from it (e.g. Austria got fallout from Chernobyl, having no nuclear power itself). At the same time, by pure luck, many reactors identical to Chernobyl did not blow up and provided the surrounding areas with ridiculously cheap energy.
This is a Black Swan type of risk that completely disconnects risk taking and reward. Even if you are very neglegient, the risk is still very low, allowing you to reap massive benefits. Even worse, countries that don't benefit but may be affected by a disaster may pay you for upgrading your security measures (this has happened in the EU).
I'd rather have technology that is more dangerous but where risk actualization mostly and consistently affects those who are rewarded if everything works out well.
I am two minds on the subject of nuclear power. But the "ain't so safe" side tends to win out because humans make mistakes. We put all the failsafes in place, we put up seawalls, we presume to know that the walls will never be breached at the same time too many other failsafes have indeed failed. When one valve doesn't function and no one knows because that monitoring system was down for maintenance and the automatic switch for the backup generator got a little too rusty and that maintenance guy hadn't reached that item on his checklist and then the hurricane sweeps too much water inside the infallible seawall...
We seem to hit the "too much shit failed at once" lottery too often. In hindsight, these things may or should have been preventable. But that's after meltdown and contamination and global panic ... This is why nuclear energy is unpopular. And it will remain so as long as failures have the slightest chance of contaminating so much of our world.
I'm of two minds about this as well but I came to a different conclusion. In the case of Fukushima and Chernobyl I believe it was reduced to incompetence to save cost. I would hope that others have learned the lesson when dealing with nuclear energy because fossil fuels can be deadlier (generally more casualties) and more expensive.
The problem with Japan is that in many cases there are obvious conflicts of interest which aren't addressed. For example, A former Manager for a TEPCO might eventually get a position in either the gov't overseeing nuclear policy or with the oversight body (JNES). In addition, gifts from Nuclear Operators to the Oversight body were not uncommon. This evolved into loosey goosey regulation.
Otherwise, I like your thinking.
No one died from radiation exposure from fukushimas meltdown and no one was going to die. Radiation exposure is very hard for the public and even educated people to understand. Releases of radioactive materials from a meltdown like Fukushima are barely above normal radioactive background noise and simply will not cause the devastation people believe it will. The most recent numbers I saw were that in the next 20 years, 4 out of every 100,000 in the area around Fukushima were likely to contract a form of cancer when as it was 40,000 out of every 100,000 were already going to get some form of cancer.
This modeling is also based on the Linear No Threshold (LNT) theorem which is patently wrong. Aside: LNT states that if 100% of people die at a high radiation exposure then, linearly, at 1% of that exposure, 1% of people will die. This is false. It is equivalent to saying that since 100 out of 100 people die from falling from 100ft up then at least 1 out of a 100 people will die from falling from 1ft.
Radiation is just not the monster it's made out to be.
What happens in a meltdown in a pressurized water reactor is the fuel turns to a solid mass with enough decay heat that it's still hot. It ruins the plant, yes. It's a economic loss, yes. But as far as I'm concerned, if it's not dispersed into the atmosphere then it's not an issue and it won't be dispersed into the atmosphere because it won't light on fire. Not in a design like Fukushima or three mile island.
The Fukushima Mark-1 reactors are of very dangerous design, and that is well-known. (For example their containment is perforated at key positions, by design)
Ambient radioactivity is so high in central Japan that it should definitely be considered a hazard (just search on Youtube for Japanese people filming themselves walking around with Geiger counters and measuring the signal, e.g Youtube user "Chanbukimi"). Government ignores it or plays it down.
Exremely radioactive "radiotrophic funghus" (see Wikipedia) is everywhere in the Fukushima area and even in Tokyo.
Cancer risks by long-term low-dose radioactive exposure are even higher than estimated by the models promoted by governmental regulatory bodies. Risks are higher for children and women in particular, and simple back of the envelope calculations can show this convincingly (to me, that is).
The whole food chain in Japan is messed up for the foreseeable future, and this holds for Pacific seafood as well. Young Tuna fish catched in the San Diego area are slightly radioactive, although these fish are so young that they could not have stayed in radioactive seawater near Japan for more than a couple of months, and they are still contaminated.
There is much more contamination to come as the radioactivity spreads just by natural mass transfer processes (water cycle, carbon cycle).
I for one am very pessimistic.
The magical tendency of nature such that nothing man built will lats forever. Every bridge will collapse, every dam will fall, every house, windmill and electric line. Heck we can't even slope ground so that it would not fall down someday (it just might take few million years).
Men make errors all the time. Sometimes dudes don't care about rusty bearings under a bridge, the some truckers don't care about maximum weight limitations. The bridge designer was in hurry and they had to cut some steel from the bridge to fit the concrete sprouting nozzle in between. And Voila.
If you treat all risks equal, you avoid driving and favor nuclear energy.
PS. Safe driving to your all.
The actual concern is that radioactive materials sequestered in the trees might be re-released into the atmosphere if the trees were to catch fire. That is an unsettling possibility.