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Nuclear fallout? / Media blackout?
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hooradiation wrote: »How can hydro, wind or solar produce anywhere near the level of energy needed to power a nation our size, let alone anywhere bigger. They're not primary sources of power production and i treated them as such.
Did some digging and found out the Worldwide Wrestling Federation and Greenpeace have reports out pointing to ways to achieve sustainability by 2050. Agree with you that they're far from primary at the moment.
They're not far off primary in some countries that it suits though.
Maybe your caveat will not apply to renewables in a few years hopefully, but will go with your method so we can get on to nuclear safety and the rest of it.
The fact that uranium is so sparse might suggest nuclear will not be primary into the future regardless of the big safety argument, but stand corrected on that one.
What i can't stand is that ****ing Monbiot from the Guardian telling us we'll all shortly fry in our millions of global warming if we stop or phase out nuclear. Nobody has a crystal ball with any of this stuff either with AGW or nuclear, (thats not say am not against lowering CO2)
Apparently we can take CO2 levels back to pre-industrail levels by converting agricultural land from chemical industrial production to organic agriculture Answering the Climate Question with Smart Food Production (haven't read this yet, just came across it)
Quote: Originally Posted by ed2hands
Renewables and general Reducing doesn't either have the finance or the political will because the politicians and fat cats of this world have their heads too far up their fat greedy arses to see that.hooradiation wrote: »They also have neither because they're currently very inefficient. It's easy to blame rotund felines and politicians but it's let us not simply assume that the sole reason we aren't all working of wind and solar power is because a clandestine group of ne'er do wells have decided we can't.
Fair enough but still reckon everyone's been kicking the can down the road for far too long; rather putting off the decision to preserve their wealth/seat in parliament. If you're saying i think that technology has been purposfuly supressed somewhere along the line; no i don't, as haven't heard of anything so nothing to say there. Big business doesn't care much for reducing. Reducing is the way to roll.
Finally got through the links and the blog. Yea it's interesting info some of it and does it's job of pointing out very well the bad record of fossil.:)
A bit silly in parts though IMO. Like for solar panel-related deaths, he tries to guess how many people will fall off ladders and such.
Don't think it tells the true story of nuclear deaths either by a longshot (4000 future Chernobyl is well off for me), but as you said nobody really knows. The figures vary so much depending on who you ask. Personally i wouldn't go with the WHO figure of 4000 possible future deaths on what i've heard of it's possibly flawed methods used and also it's links to the IAEA.
Greenpeace has it at around 200,000 future Chernobyl. Some Russian studies go even higher. Nobody knows.
To muddy the waters even further, there is many say a long history of the industry and govt cover-ups, lying about safety etc. As they seem to be mostly the ones collecting the data and publishing it, it's by definition a hard area to get independant info.
So am far more sceptical of it's safety and future at the moment than some in here.
Have a couple of vids on Fukushima, but they're more to do with some other stuff on the rest of the thread and OP so will separate 'em from this and stick them up at some stage. Just to say they're not aimed at your points, more railing against the industry. Will also try to put something together on safety from the anti lobby perspective so that can get feedback on it from you, gbee or whoever feels like throwing their opinions in.0 -
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Here's a link to the Fairewinds Associates updates from Arnie Gunderson on Fukushima. He has been on TV here and there to give analysis, especially at the early stages, so is considered an expert no doubt.
It contains a few easy to digest short vids. Although he's worked in the industry all his life, he explains things clearly for the rest of us with not too much nuclear science ****e about milliservients or whatever. Worth a watch and beats Fox News any day hehe.
The short vid titles include:
"Hot Particles From Japan to Seattle Virtually Undetectable when Inhaled or Swallowed"
"White House & NRC Recommend 50 Mile Fukushima Evacuation, Yet Insist US Safe With Only 10"
"Gundersen Gives Testimony to NRC ACRS"
"The Implications of the Fukushima Accident on the World's Operating Reactors"
"Fukushima Accident Severity Level Raised to '7': Gundersen Discusses Lack of US Radiation Monitoring Data"
"Closing Ranks: The NRC, the Nuclear Industry, and TEPCO are Limiting the Flow of Information"
http://www.fairewinds.com/updates
Another 3 month old one from RT that for me shows he called it right from the start:
And this is a sample offering of what Fox News were dishing out at the early stages:
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Hooradiation, am just getting back to you as promised with some stuff from the anti-nuclear side. I've taken the points below directly from the people that commented on the link you posted that i agree with.
They're cherry-picked of course, and pasted as they appeared as they're well put enough without me tampering with them. It's getting away from the OP, but don't want to pass up the opportunity of seeing will anyone who is either pro-nuclear or who feels they want to reply or debate them.
Not meant to be preachy or closed-minded about it or anything else
Now to use your caveat mechanism, i must state at the outset that i ain't well up on the scientific aspects:) so am not the best person to be arguing this i know. Just putting this out there and sure thats all.
Great. Thanks for taking the time to do this, I'll try to give it my best.-The problem with any assessment of deaths as a consequence of nuclear power generation is that so many deaths would not be directly attributable to the source.
-Nuclear power is the only power source that has the capacity to keep on killing for decades or more.....and none (or very few) of those deaths will be correctly attributed to the cause.
-Stats on deaths due to nuclear power can only regarded as largely fictional....beyond those immediately killed by high doses of radiation at source.
-Also, the author doesn't include the long term health damage/cost ratio for all the affected individuals, other than thyroid cancer.
I've grouped these together for brevities sake and because they're making more or less the same claim just differently phrased.
That there are X numbers of deaths caused over a long period of time that are caused by exposure to nuclear material, and these should be included.
The problem with this line of reasoning is twofold- firstly, and by it's own admission, it's almost impossible to know this number of people, and this is due to the second problem, is that over that length of time it's very hard to accurately attribute the cause of death to one specific factor. If I were at, for examples sake, Fukishima and then twenty years later I contracted bowel cancer it would be easy to blame something i was exposed to twenty years previous, but it would discount the twenty intervening years of environmental factors, poor lifestyle choices and the strong family history of said type of cancer.
Basically, after a certain length of time it becomes harder and harder to legitimately link cause and effect, so sadly, the speculation on the number of other people affected does remain just that.-I'm sure the technology could be made safe but I'm equally certain that people involved can never be made safe. They lie, cheat, defraud...and can almost be relied upon to put the interests of themselves and their organisations above the public good. For this reason alone, the world should avoid the only power source that can keep on killing long after any accident.
-There is also a long and well documented history of the nuclear industry - and governments sponsoring the nuclear industry - lying about safety, accidents....pretty much everything. We can have little confidence in these sources of information...and there are few others.
We've touched on poisoning the well before, and these are a textbook examples. If people genuinely feel this way then they are more than welcome to try and find or produce data they feel is less tainted, but i think it's highly childish to simply go "well, we can't trust this, therefore the opposite of what is said must be true" for it discounts the possibility that the opposite may also be false as well as the blatant dishonestly of the poisoning the well fallacy.
That's a half-truth at best, I'd imagine. Dosage is the important factor, and I'm hard pressed to think of a radioactive material that is so dangerous that as single particle that could do so much damage. This is assuming 'particle' is referring to atoms of material and not a fistful. The definition of particle is relative after all.-Plus we have the residual radiation of atmospheric testing in a number of countries (US, USSR, Australia, various pacific atolls) still loose in the environment globally, resting in the soils. Highly diluted, sure....but one particle of the wrong stuff is enough.
I'm lumping these together because they all have the same argument, an appeal to fear. Particularly the "Fukushima could have been worse by orders of magnitude" one. This is technically true, but it important to note that it wasn't.-There have been so few nuclear accidents, and each one has the potential for so much damage, that death statistics are meaningless. You don't have a large enough sample. The next accident might kill Millions - what then? Is that "whoops!"-time, like in Fukushima?
-Fukushima could have been worse by orders of magnitude.
-The interesting measure is not how many people have died, but how many could die if everything goes wrong. By that metric nuclear power plants are an unacceptable risk. Murphy's law.
-One thing I am sure about: I've never heard of a solar roof panel that required a 30km evacuation radius. US scientists recommend 80km - that's 50 miles, and several million people.
As an argument it's invalid, simply because it doesn't rely on anything other than the fear that something spectacular and awful might happen.-Let me put this in a framework of reference - I am not a statistician but I do understand enough about it to know you usually simply assume a normalized distribution - the bell curve. And that you need a sample of > 100 at the very least to make any kind of prediction. That means in order to predict the death rate from the largest possible nuclear accidents over time, you need around 100 such accidents. So far we've had two, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Many things went wrong in these accidents - but many things also went right. Both were very bad (one still ongoing), and both could have been much worse.
The total number of nuclear accidents worldwide is roughly 99, not two. If we accept the idea that you need a sample size of 100 (which is also untrue, it's dependent on many factors) then we're close enough to the minimum to be able to do statistical analysis.
Also, there are, currently, 422 reactors in operation worldwide - which also gives us enough information to do statistical analysis on the effects of powerplants as they function normally. The concept that we don't have enough information available is simply untrue, I'm afraid.
-For that matter, no one is considering the impact on property values or the farm communities in areas that have been left uninhabitable, or areas that can no longer be used for agricultural purposes because of the movement of radioactive substances in the soil into the food chain.
-I assume this author wants to be taken seriously when he compares deaths for rooftop installations of solar with accidents related to nuclear. . I am sure little is written about mining of radioactive materials, and how many deaths are involved, or in its shipping or transport.
Someone didn't read the linked studies
Both of which refer to the costs of extracting nuclear material and in turn link to more detailed reports - once again it's the insinuation that information is lacking in these obvious areas.
Firstly, there is rarely uniformity in opinion, such is the nature of science - but dissenting voices does not mean the consensus is incorrect nor does the opposite hold true, so having reports that "fly massively in the face of reports from the UN, WHO, and the IAEA" is evidence of nothing more than the existence of those reports.-Reports from medical doctors and scientists in Russia, Bylorus, and the Ukraine fly massively in the face of reports from the UN, WHO, and the IAEA, all of whom have concluded there was little to no impact from Chernobyl.. In fact, in 2006, at a conference on Chernobyl in Germany, where all Soviet scientists and physicians reported the impact, it was said that 50,000 sq miles of land in Russia, and 5 million people were affected. In Belarus, 2316 sqare miles were rendered useless, and in Ukraine 17.2 million people and 11.36 million acres were affected, most rendered useless. There is a very important book, written by the theoretical physicist who headed the cleanup for 6 years at Chernobyl: V.M. Chernousenko, Chernobyl, Insight from the Inside, from Springer Verlag, published 1991. It is a uniquely specific source of accurate information about what happened there, written by the man who was in charge. There were well over 7,000 deaths that happened pretty soon after the event, and 600,000-1,000,000 soldiers were involved in the cleanup. Their rate of chronic debilitating illness was staggering. There was a skyrocketing mortality rate in Russia, from 1990-1994, with peaks in deaths due to cardiovascular causes, followed by occupational injuries/suicide/homicide/MVA's. The rise affected mostly people aged 25-55, peaking at age 35-45. This is the not-so-very long term impact of an event of this kind.
Also, I am unsure if it's the posters interpretation or if it's verbatim from the original source, but I am unsure as to what connects the events of Chernobyl to "7,000 deaths that happened pretty soon after the event" and the "skyrocketing mortality rate in Russia" (i am assuming the poster means in Belarus, not modern Russia) especially given the peaks include occupational injuries/suicide/homicide/MVA's, i am unsure as to how nuclear material causes unsafe driving or murderous urges.
I'm not going to write this off as it's by far and away the most interesting of all the responses, but i'll have to try and find the original material before i comment further.-So while I appreciate very much the effort to stop demonizing one energy source at a time of media-exaggerated panic; and while I appreciate the reminder that coal is by far the worst and most dangerous way to get electricity of all the sources you mention; and while I entirely agree that we must move past coal immediately.... Phrasing "coal v nuclear" is not a fair or reasonable way to frame the real problem. Nuclear can never be available at a scale like coal. It can only be a bit player, comparable perhaps to hydro which is limited by some similar physical and fiscal realities. It is good to work against panic. But lets not imagine nuclear can ever be a genuine replacement for coal on a wide scale.
The idea that nuclear can only be a bit player doesn't really match the current reality - to link again the information on Nuclear power plants, world-wide you can see that it's more than a bit player in plenty of countries. He's correct in that it's essentially finite, but the power extracted from nuclear V coal is very much slewed in nuclear powers favour which helps to get around difference in volume available.
Likewise the comparison to hydro is a bit disingenuous, hydro power plants need very specific natural features to make it work - while nuclear power plants can be build just about anywhere, NIMBYism not withstanding.
The poster is correct in one way, nuclear is not a permanent solution but right now it is the best option on the table.-The problem with technology is it requires educated people and the powers that be have decided higher education is not available to the masses. Priced higher education lately? So you want to build a high tech future with people trained to press a picture of what they are selling on the cash register. A society that does not honor the liability associated with risk taking.
A society where telling a lie is an ok business model.
-Until we get our minds right nuclear power is going to get worse not better.
This one is, well, weird. From what i can grasp not everyone is receiving a higher education therefore the society is ill equipped to deal with nuclear power because it's beyond the grasp of the lowest common denominator?
I can't accept that - it'd be fantastic if everyone could understand how a nuclear reactor works, but that's not going to happen. No more than most people don't know how to fly a plane, but that's not enough to dissuade me or millions of others from flying. Nor do i understand how to preform surgery on another person - this doesn't mean doctors shouldn't operate on people because that level of specialisation is not common to the general populace.
Most people don't understand how a combustion engine works beyond the generalities, or indeed how the internet works. That a subject is complicated to grasp is not a mark against it.a) the fact that the nuclear industry is notoriously secretive and opaque (and also the issues are hard to understand for ordinary folks)
As above there is more information available than most people realise.d) the potentially catastrophic consequences of nuclear accidents ("potentially" not just because of "wild immagination" but because we don't have enough statistical data to know how far the distribution tails extend to the left of the graph and how fat they are)e) the number of "experts" who regularly claim that this or that accident is "impossible" because of a "new design" who have been subsequently been proved wrong (the last 5 major accidents have been with 5 different reactor designs, all in countries with vast nuclear "expertise")
I'm going to be a bit of a pain and ask for you to tell me which five accidents you are referring to, i don't want to dismiss this prematurely, if at all.-then you start to realize that the mistrust that ordinary people ("dumb" and "un-scientific" as they might be) is amply justified, if nothing else as a precautionary measure.
I can never accept that, I'm afraid. People are entitled to feel however they want about anything, but my obligation to give their concerns credence is limited by their understanding - this ties into the "amateur scientist" thread in a way. "Amateurs" can and should question all they want - but their observations and conclusions should be weighted by that amateur status.
Well, that was a long post - here's a cute puppy as a reward for anyone who's read all this.
Who could hate puppies?0 -
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