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Merged nuclear power safe?

r-j said:
It's interesting that the people who seem to have some blind faith in nuclear power and it having to be safe, no matter the evidence, also have a tendency to be personal and insulting, rather than simply answer questions and educate people about the matters involved.
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:id:
 
r-j said:
How does 40 mrem/year convert to becquerels?
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This single post really show how little you understand the entire area of science, and how little you have bothered trying to learn in this thread, despite people attempts to educate you.
 
Ridiculous. No one in this thread has made even an attempt at educating anyone about radiation in food or water and how it increases your yearly or life time dose or radiation.

Obviously the generalized calculation of 40 mrem a year from food is based on just the potassium, and not nuclear material from above ground tests, reactor leaks or other sources of man made radiation sources. Which is why on the calculator there are no different values for where you live, for the food values.
http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/understand/calculate.html

The figures for a coal plant are also just made up, as the prevailing wind matters more than distance. And the amount for a nuclear plant is both variable based on wind, and the history of the plants radiation leaks. The fall out from Chernobyl was not the same everywhere, nor was the Cesium from experiments. Granted this is a US centric calculator, and assumes nobody ever travels or lives anywhere else.

But back to the food and water calculation. It's ridiculous. The amounts vary depending on how much radioactive material is falling from the sky, as well as rain or snow, the watershed, the source of the water itself

And if they aren't converting the potassium activity, which is in Becquerels, to a Dose Equivalent figure, mrems, then how are they getting the figure?

That is the obvious question, well, obvious to anyone with a smattering of knowledge about radioactive physics I mean.

Your sneering response, that contain no information of course, that doesn't make me look bad.
 
Belz... said:
JihadJane said:
Stop your name-calling now and read my words intelligently:
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How is that useful content ?
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It is useful advice.


Belz... said:
:id:
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Belz... said:
In other words, "la la la I can't hear you !"
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How is that useful content ?

;)



MarkCorrigan said:
Why is that fanciful?

If there is a nuclear incident, if handled well and the safety features hold, it can be dealt with without issue aside from the economic cost.

You think I'm wrong? Please, tell me what non economic issues they had to deal with at Three Mile Island.
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Three Mile Island was not a "serious" or "major" accident.

You omitted the disclaimer (hilited) in your previous post, a rather significant omission.

For example, capital became for nuclear power projects became scarce and the cleanup of the damaged nuclear reactor system at TMI-2 took nearly 12 years and cost approximately US$973 million.



Hell, tell me how a minor radiation leak, well within the safe levels of dosage causes any issues that aren't caused by groundless panic.
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The OP asks whether nuclear power is safe, not whether there are grounds for panic from supposedly safe levels of dosage from a minor radiation leak.

It's easy to omitt issues when you immediately focus on panic for rhetorical effect.



Ambrosia said:
Sophistry is using sophisms. A sophism is a specious argument used to deceive someone.
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Equating a nine volt battery with a nuclear power station is deceptive. The same could be said about a toothpick. So what?



is not a specious argument. You defined "safe" as:



Nothing is free from danger or the risk of harm.
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People aren't going to want to go back to living without electricity.
Short of a global catastrophe of some kind that's just not going to happen. Policy makers in the west are going to do everything they can to keep the lights on, else they'll get voted out of office and the voters will vote in policy makers that will keep the lights on.
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I agree, though you are assuming democracy.


Anything that is hyper-destructive isn't going to last long. Civilisation will either stop being as destructive, or it will fall apart as a result of being overly destructive and something else will come along and fill the space.
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I agree and whatever came along afterwards might not be capable of safely dealing with what nuclear power leaves behind.



Where did I posit a thousand year reich? I think that life in general and humans in particular are very resiliant and that in 1000 years there will still be people living on this planet. Either humans will manage to sustain a technological civilisation, in which case how we generate and use power will be very different to the world of today. Or some major catastrophe will have happened and fewer humans will be living simpler lives. Either way nuclear power will be a distant memory.
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Sorry, I read you're comment as implying that a more advanced technology would have replaced it by then.

All that being said it's not the topic of this thread though.
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The survival or not of secure, sophisticated, complex, industrial civilization is very relevant to the safety of nuclear power, which has long-term safety issues.

Any rational examination of nuclear power must conclude that it's pretty safe, that it's getting safer as better technologies are implemented, and that it causes less damage to the environment we live in and to human health than fossil fuel based tech.
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I agree, except that "pretty safe" is not the same as "safe". In fact, it sounds a bit dangerous!

Is it perfectly safe? no. Should we spend more on renewable energy solutions? yes. Can we do without fossil or nuclear entirely right now? absolutely no.
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You said, above, that you thought "that life in general and humans in particular are very resiliant" and I agree, so, of course, we can do without fossil or nuclear energy.

We may have to do without a lot more.

However, as you imply, even with a massive reduction in our energy over-usage, it would be highly traumatic and, for many people, fatal, if our electricity was cut off and our transport systems disabled.

It's worth pointing out that industrial civilization has, so far, required an ever-growing energy supply , not a static one, so nuclear will have to do more than replace our current rates of consumption. To keep us afloat in th manner to which we have become accustomed, it will have to keep up with the demands of economic growth in the way that, until recently, fossil fuels were able to do.

It is doubtful that the addition of more nuclear power will be able to mitigate the effects of a rapidly declining fossil energy supply, effects of which may make it impossible to maintain the societal complexity that nuclear power depends on to exist.

This is a safety issue.
 
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"Three Mile Island was not a "serious" or "major" accident."
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Says who ? It was rated INES 5. That is pretty serious.

I agree and whatever came along afterwards might not be capable of safely dealing with what nuclear power leaves behind
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The same is valid for any stable poisonous chemical we leave in the environment. There are safety issue with nearly all industrial process. The question is not "is nuclear industry safe in *absolute* " , but rather "is nuclear safe *relatively* compared to other baseline production of power".

The problem I see is that a lot of people are *immediately* going into panic mode when they hear "radiation contamination" but don't bat an eye when other stuff go into the environment and are probably as problematic (the whole heavy metal in burned coal world wide, or even the amount of radiation emited thru coal burning, or even global warming which promise on the long term to make MUCH MORE surface inhabitable than Chernobyl by many order of magnitude and over a longer period of time).

The reality is that safety should always be seen relative to the alternative. And that is NOT done for nuclear.

Look at the misinformation on media, ask your colleague, your friend, your family. Look at those comparing Fukushima (or heck , Chernobyl) to Nagsaki or Hiroshima.


The bottom line is that as far as I can tell the alternative is worst than nuclear in the damage done to the environment. At least we can easily bury nuclear waste and with time its activity will go down. Not so much with CO2.
 
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No, in fact some of the nonsense posted there turns out to be completely wrong. It's like the person never studied radioactivty at all.

You convert one measurement to the other based on tables based on the kind of radioactivity. So that the Si for radiation is converted to the amount absorbed, then the amount of biological damage it causes.

Like this post alluded to.
Alferd_Packer said:
For the same quantity in curies you can have different exposures in rems or sieverts depending on other factors.
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But the conversion he linked to http://www.onlineconversion.com/radiation_activity.htm just converts one measurement of activity to another, it does not allow conversion to Sv or rems. For that you need another converter, which no one has linked to.

Pretending it can't be done is ridiculous. Of course it can be done, that is how they come up with the figures in rems.

I found this page to be helpful, unlike the answers we see here.
http://www.colorado.edu/EHandS/hpl/RADHandbook/Introduction.html

There are many units used to describe activity, dose, dose equivalent, and exposure. In the United States, conventional units are still being used, although the complete conversion to the Systeme International (SI) units may happen in the future. At the present time, SI units are used in addition to conventional units on packages and radiation sources. At the University of Colorado, subdivisions of units such as millicuries (mCi) and millirem (mrem) are used, but both SI and conventional units are acceptable.

The conventional unit for radioactivity is the Curie (Ci). One Curie is equal to 3.7 x 1010 nuclear disintegrations or decays per second. Other conventional units include the rad for dose and the rem for dose equivalent. Rad is an acronym for Radiation Absorbed Dose and rem is an acronym for Roentgen Equivalent Man. Dose equivalent was developed in an effort to incorporate biology into the physics of radiation exposure.

Not all forms of radiation produce the same biological effect. For example, 1 rad of beta radiation is not equivalent to 1 rad of neutron radiation. However, 1 rem of beta radiation is equivalent to 1 rem of neutron radiation. Exposure is defined only for gamma or x-rays in air, not tissue. Roentgen (R) is the unit of exposure. Many radiation survey meters use units of milliroentgen (mR).
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It's just like I thought, there is a confusing number of terms used to describe radiation, and radiation exposure.

It's sort of flattering that you think I am smart enough to somehow have know all of this (and more) before I ever asked you a question. Even looking at all the information, I'm still not sure of most of it.

But then clearly nobody else here is either, or instead of insults you could explain it.
 
qarnos said:
r-j, you do realise that most of the questions you are asking can be answered with a few seconds of googling?
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That isn't true. Just like you can't explain the answers in a couple of seconds. It's not possible to become an expert in this in a matter of hours either.

But I'm realizing why nobody is simply answering the questions about safety.
 
r-j said:
No, in fact some of the nonsense posted there turns out to be completely wrong. It's like the person never studied radioactivty at all.

You convert one measurement to the other based on tables based on the kind of radioactivity. So that the Si for radiation is converted to the amount absorbed, then the amount of biological damage it causes.

Like this post alluded to.

But the conversion he linked to http://www.onlineconversion.com/radiation_activity.htm just converts one measurement of activity to another, it does not allow conversion to Sv or rems. For that you need another converter, which no one has linked to.
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See post #1845.

Your question from post #1875 ("How does 40 mrem/year convert to becquerels?"] is nonsensical. It's the equivalent to asking, "How many metres are there in a kilogram?" You're trying to convert from one measurement system to another that have no actual relationship to each other. Ziggurat addressed this in post #1845, hence my link to it.

So, again, I must ask: Are you being deliberately obtuse?
 
The calculation of potassium in your body to mrems a year is done based on the radioactivity of the amount of potassium in your body, from food you eat.

So the becquerels are converted to mrems. That is how they get the figure. What is missing from my question, and is obvious if you know about this, is "how much did you drink?", because becquerels per liter is the figure that matters. Or becquerels per gram.

Explaining this would have taken far less time and effort than all the insults, but hey, that doesn't make me look bad.
 
Officials raised the possibility of a breach of the containment vessel after three workers stepped in water inside the No. 3 reactor that had 10,000 times the amount of radiation it should have in that location. That level of radioactivity indicates some sort of breach of the containment vessel that holds the core, officials said.


Authorities have begun encouraging a voluntary evacuation of people living from 12 to 19 miles from the plant. In addition, instead of asking people living within 12 miles of the crippled plant to remain indoors, officials have now ordered a mandatory evacuation there.


http://www.allheadlinenews.com/brie...ons over fears of ruptured containment vessel
 
r-j said:
The calculation of potassium in your body to mrems a year is done based on the radioactivity of the amount of potassium in your body, from food you eat.

So the becquerels are converted to mrems. That is how they get the figure.
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That calculation depends not only on the activity of the potassium (or more correctly, the time-integrated activity of the potassium), but also on the type of radiation emitted by the potassium, the energy of that radiation, the penetration depth through your body of that radiation, and even the location of the potassium. None of those factors will be the same for Iodine-131. Such a calculation can be done for Iodine-131, but it won't be a simple conversion. Hell, it won't even be as easy as the potassium calculation, because iodine gets concentrated within the thyroid and the penetration depth of beta radiation is small.
 
r-j said:
Authorities have begun encouraging a voluntary evacuation of people living from 12 to 19 miles from the plant. In addition, instead of asking people living within 12 miles of the crippled plant to remain indoors, officials have now ordered a mandatory evacuation there.
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Uhm, mandatory evacuation zone was 20 km (12 miles) from Saturday, March 12th (IAEA Status from this date). It was completed on March 16th (also on IAEA. If you can read, you can find the correct report).

The (continued) recommendation to stay indoors was for the people living between 20 and 30 km (12 and 19 miles), for which now the evacuation is voluntary (not mandatory).
 
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r-j said:
No, in fact some of the nonsense posted there turns out to be completely wrong. It's like the person never studied radioactivty at all.

You convert one measurement to the other based on tables based on the kind of radioactivity. So that the Si for radiation is converted to the amount absorbed, then the amount of biological damage it causes.
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Can you convert degrees Celcius into degrees of burn ?
 
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