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Merged nuclear power safe?

JihadJane said:
“It was a profoundly man-made disaster that could and should have been foreseen and prevented. [/I]""""

[My bold -JJ]
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You and I have discussed this before.

Sword_Of_Truth said:
JihadJane said:
"On 20 June Moody's Investors Service obligingly cut its credit rating on TEPCO to junk status and kept the operator of Japan's crippled nuclear power plant on review for possible further downgrade, citing uncertainty over the fate of its bailout plan."
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TEPCO pretty well deserves it. My industry contacts have been far less impressed with TEPCOs performance in the wake of the quake and tsunami than they have with the reactors they built 30 and 40 years ago.
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You still have nothing to say about the general safety of nuclear energy.
 
Concentration of Cs137 is 10 times higher then in sea near Japan at the moment. As they don't state absolute numbers, it's hard to say how total radiation is compared to Japan.
 
They put the worst-case scenario in the headline:

Fukushima Radiation May Cause 1,300 Cancer Deaths: Study

But the best estimate is much lower:
The best estimates of cancer cases resulting from the Fukushima disaster is 180, and range from 24 to 2,500, yesterday’s study said.

The most likely number of cancer deaths is 130 and estimated to range from 15 to 1,300, the authors said, adding that the ranges reflect uncertainties about emissions and the methods the researchers used to calculate their impact.

“They have demonstrated there are no significant public health effects” from radiation exposure, said Evan Douple, associate chief of research at the Hiroshima Radiation Effects Research Foundation. “Their best estimate of 130 cancer deaths in Japan would be lost in the background wash of the hundreds of thousands of cancer deaths that would be occurring in the million or so people in the population exposed.”
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ETA:
If it's only 130 extra deaths it would be pretty much impossible to detect because that's well within the error bar of the total number of expected cases of cancer.
Basically, you can round it down to "no significant public health effects" as in "not statistically significant."

ETA2: Just for perspective:
Air pollution

The World Health Organization states that 2.4 million people die each year from causes directly attributable to air pollution, with 1.5 million of these deaths attributable to indoor air pollution.[16] "Epidemiological studies suggest that more than 500,000 Americans die each year from cardiopulmonary disease linked to breathing fine particle air pollution. . ."[17] A study by the University of Birmingham has shown a strong correlation between pneumonia related deaths and air pollution from motor vehicles.[18] Worldwide more deaths per year are linked to air pollution than to automobile accidents.[citation needed] Published in 2005 suggests that 310,000 Europeans die from air pollution annually.[citation needed] Causes of deaths include aggravated asthma, emphysema, lung and heart diseases, and respiratory allergies.[citation needed] The US EPA estimates that a proposed set of changes in diesel engine technology (Tier 2) could result in 12,000 fewer premature mortalities, 15,000 fewer heart attacks, 6,000 fewer emergency room visits by children with asthma, and 8,900 fewer respiratory-related hospital admissions each year in the United States.[citation needed]
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Although estimates for Japan are not given, a rough estimate based on US rates adjusted for Japan's population would be ca. 200,000 deaths/year due to air pollution.

130 extra deaths due to cancer spread out over multiple decades is like nothing compared to that.
 
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'Japan's nuclear disaster avoidable, utility admits

Company feared effects of new safety measures'




Ottawa Citizen said:
The utility behind Japan's nuclear disaster acknowledged for the first time Friday that it could have avoided the crisis.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said in a statement that it had known safety improvements were needed before last year's tsunami triggered three meltdowns, but it had feared the political, economic and legal consequences of implementing them.

"When looking back on the accident, the problem was that preparations were not made in advance," TEPCO's internal reform task force, led by company President Naomi Hirose, said in the statement. "Could necessary measures have been taken with previous tsunami evaluations? It was possible to take action" by adopting more extensive safety measures, the task force said.

The task force said TEPCO had feared efforts to better protect nuclear facilities from severe accidents such as tsunamis would trigger anti-nuclear sentiment, interfere with operations or increase litigation risks. TEPCO could have mitigated the impact of the accident if it had diversified power and cooling systems by paying closer attention to international standards and recommendations, the statement said. TEPCO also should have trained employees with practical crisis management skills rather than conduct obligatory drills as a formality, it said.

The admissions mark a major reversal for the utility, which had defended its preparedness and crisis management since the March 2011 tsunami. The disaster knocked out power to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, leading to the meltdowns, which forced massive evacuations and will take decades to clean up.
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Puppycow said:
They put the worst-case scenario in the headline:

Fukushima Radiation May Cause 1,300 Cancer Deaths: Study

But the best estimate is much lower:


ETA:
If it's only 130 extra deaths it would be pretty much impossible to detect because that's well within the error bar of the total number of expected cases of cancer.
Basically, you can round it down to "no significant public health effects" as in "not statistically significant."

ETA2: Just for perspective:
Air pollution



Although estimates for Japan are not given, a rough estimate based on US rates adjusted for Japan's population would be ca. 200,000 deaths/year due to air pollution.

130 extra deaths due to cancer spread out over multiple decades is like nothing compared to that.
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We'd better get rid of motor vehicles as well, then.
 
JihadJane said:
We'd better get rid of motor vehicles as well, then.
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And coal plant.

We could handle the situation rationally and evaluate advanatge and disadvantage of each tech compared to the needs we have , forget gut fears about "nookleaar", and concentrate on real effects compared to what we already accepts as human life loss (like the thousands diying of car acccidents , the innumerable death due to air polution, coal plants etc...).

Or we could run around like headless chicken yelling sound bytes "nooklear we are all dooomed doooooooomed !".
 
JihadJane said:
Some good news for nuclear health freaks - the elixir of life, life-enhancing radioactive cesium 137, is coming to America's shores!

'Radiation On West Coast of North America Could End Up Being 10 Times HIGHER than in Japan'
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It appears to me that at best the paper prophesies that the total amount of the contamination from Japan in, say, the year following the breakdown, will appear off the west coast, spread from Alaska through Mexico for a distance of several hundred miles outward, before simply dispersing throughout the whole Pacific. At that point there will be more radiation off California than off Japan in an absolute sense (providing the effluent past the Japanese coast stops), but it will be very dilute; the article quotes a figure of 10 bq/m^3, which is laughably small. Natural well water in Finland reaches 220 bq/liter from radon, for example, a radiation concentration 22,000x higher. Processed water itself has 20 bq/liter.
 
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shadron said:
...At that point there will be more radiation off California than off Japan in an absolute sense (providing the effluent past the Japanese coast stops), but it will be very dilute; the article quotes a figure of 10 bq/m^3, which is laughably small. Natural well water in Finland reaches 220 bq/liter from radon, for example, a radiation concentration 22,000x higher. Processed water itself has 20 bq/liter.
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It's a bit confusing to compare concentrations of cesium 137 to radon, in cubic meters vs liters. Yes, both are forms of radiation, but are they comparable in this manner?

The most useful information pertains to the practical significance of these concentrations, such as the incidence of cancer and birth defects, and comparisons to "normal" background levels.

The reader comments on the linked Zero Hedge article contain some good observations from a skeptical perspective, by the way.
 
babycondor said:
It's a bit confusing to compare concentrations of cesium 137 to radon, in cubic meters vs liters. Yes, both are forms of radiation, but are they comparable in this manner?

The most useful information pertains to the practical significance of these concentrations, such as the incidence of cancer and birth defects, and comparisons to "normal" background levels.
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Comparing radon and cesium might seem off to you, but as it happens the sources of the radiation are less important than the fact that both are radiation. The radiation is question is discrete particles; the measurement unit "becquerel" (bq) is the occurrence of a single particle from a decay event per second, regardless of the source. The radioactivity from radon is mainly alpha radiation, while the cesium is beta; these are fairly comparable in that alphas are rated as 20 to 1 harsher in effect than beta; see sievertWP. Thus my comparison of a harsher radiation type, higher in concentration (both numerically and by a factor of 1000 in a smaller volume [there should be no confusion over liter vs cubic meter]) was meant to qualitatively point to a lack of impression on my part with the amount of radiotides in the ocean water off SF.

Twenty years ago such small concentrations of radiotides would have been unmeasurable; they are today unmeasurable in chemical terms; they are only detected because of their radioactivity. Today they are scare headlines from the anti-nuclear power media.

I agree that it would be appropriate to put the dosage in more human terms. Unfortunately, the arguments as to how exactly to do that are still wrapped in controversy and as yet unexplored data. That started when studies of the Japanese exposed to radiation in Hiroshima/Nagasaki showed that for the data available, it appeared that harm caused by radiation was roughly linear to the amount of radiation dose; this is the "Linear No-Threshold" theory. Unfortunately, the data was very sparse in the mini-dose region. Further data from Chernobyl in particular seems by many researchers to deny the LNT model in low intensity situations, but rather support a non-linear "hormesis" theory, in which the body's immune system takes a hand in helping cells recover from radiation damage. Since this has an obvious dimension in the nuke/anti-nuke power debate, don't expect quick resolution.

Scientists have taken a step in that direction, though, in declaring a unit of radioactivity which quantifies the biological action of various radiation types and their targets. The "sievert" (SI unit of equivalence to the older unit REM, or radiation equivalent man) does sort out the types of radiation and how they interact with the body. 4.50 sieverts (450 REM) is the amount of absorbed radiation which has a 50/50 chance of killing the recipient human, regardless of source (alpha, beta, fission event) or target (whole body, head, heart, hand). That leaves only the manner in which objective measurements (such as mentioned for Cs137 or radon above) can be converted to seiverts. That is difficult. For a look at important numbers in this realm, see http://xkcd.com/radiation/ .
 
I'm sure you'll think of something before March 11th, 2015. It's not likely there'll be anything to draw attention back to this thread before then.
 
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