Nevada Senate passes measure denouncing nuclear dump

[struggle4progress]

The Nevada Senate has passed a measure that urges federal lawmakers to oppose controversial plans for storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The measure, approved earlier by the Assembly, asks federal decision-makers to give up on Yucca Mountain because it is, "an ill-advised project based on bad science, bad law and bad public policy."

Despite delays and spending cuts, Energy Department officials have said recently that the Yucca Mountain plan is alive and well, and that support from the Bush administration remains strong. But opponents have declared the project dead.

http://www.krnv.com/Global/story.asp?S=3355170&nav=8faOZx6Y

[NNadir]

1. And according to these illiterate journalists, strip mining West Virginia

for coal is "a well advised project based on good science, good law, and good public policy?"

Is there one of them, who unlike anti-environmentalist anti-nuclear radiation paranoids who can actually name a person who has been injured by the storage of nuclear waste?

There isn't?

I didn't think so.

NIMBY fucks can't think.

I'll bet that they go to Greenpeace meetings where they celebrate the daydream that by 2040 25% of the world's energy might maybe if someone orders if the price could potentially come down if money assuming subsidies are provided and someone makes a break through and discovers a practical realistic hoped for advantage expected by exstrapolation of the historical trends that could happen even if currently unrealized still might someday come (insert optimistic pie in the sky blah-blahs here) from photovoltaics?

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/climate-change/solutions

Is there anyone in this organization who can tell us, given that 80% of the world's electrical energy is now generated by nuclear or fossil fuel means, who can compare the integers 25 and 80? (My kindergartner can do this.) Is there one such twit who has heard of the existence of nighttime? (My kindergartner can even tell you how night occurs.)

I really can't tell what's worse, saying this shit, linking this shit, reading this shit or believing this shit. Actually, it doesn't matter, they're all pretty pathetic.

[struggle4progress]

2. It's difficult to keep track of your incoherent, ever-shifting positions.

If you oppose Yucca Mountain (as you have claimed) then you ought to be thrilled to discover that the Nevada legislature opposes it as well.

[phantom power]

5. I assume it's a case of the broken clock being right twice a day.

There's nothing very gratifying about seeing somebody "agree" with a position, but for completely the wrong reasons. These folks don't oppose Yucca because they'd rather see us re-use the nuclear waste, they oppose it because they have an unreasonable fear of nuclear waste.

[struggle4progress]

8. If the waste is nothing to worry about, why do we need Yucca Mountain?

Why not just keep the waste where it is now, or put it in municipal swimming pools, or hand it out as souvenirs?

Why would anybody, who thinks that the waste is really safe and that it really is a national treasure that shouldn't be permanently entombed, fly into a rage when confronted with another party (who also doesn't want to entomb the waste) and claim (say) that said other party didn't care about West Virginia and global warning? Instead of complaining that Nevada is full of NIMBYs, why isn't the person (who claims to think this stuff is potentially a wonderful blessing to us all) attempting to gain title to it and preparing a storage pad for it in his/her own backyard?

Somehow, the "logic" of this position escapes me: I could, perhaps, understand the response as a publicist's rhetoric but can find no consistency in the views expressed.

[phantom power]

11. Keeping it where it is now, is a reasonable solution.

As you probably know by now, NNadir is an advocate of re-using this "waste". If you are advocating re-use, then building a vast, permanent storage facility is a waste of time, energy and money. I imagine that it would be better to spend that money on the construction of reprocessing facilities. Or new reactors.

To my knowledge, nobody is claiming that nuclear waste is "safe", in the sense that it would be OK to walk around with a glowing bar down your pants, a la Homer Simpson. Like a lot of other modern materials, it's safe if it's handled and stored appropriately, otherwise it's not safe.

I hesitate to put words in his mouth, but I bet that NNadir would happily host a nuclear storage faciltity in his back yard, if he were appropriately compensated for it, and if it were appropriately designed. I hear he's trying to get rich.

[jpak]

12. Reprocessed plutonium for MOX fuel is 20-times more expensive

than reactor fuel produced from uranium ore.

http://www.npec-web.org/projects/summary6.htm

Reprocessed uranium is contaminated with 232-U (a gamma emitter) and 236-U (a fission poison) - it is, for all practical purposes, unusable.

http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/epfr.html

Reprocessing would only increase the volume of waste derived from spent fuel - even if actinide burning was employed (note: actinide burners don't exist) - it would not eliminate the need for "permanent" geological disposal.

Reprocessing is dirty, uneconomic, unnecessary and would create more problems than it would solve - any way you look at it.

on edit: added dreaded Google links...

[phantom power]

14. My reading of that first link is...

that reprocessing is uneconomical compared to just mining it. But that isn't the same thing as saying it's uneconomical in the big picture.

Allegedly, they do reprocess fuel in Europe, so if that's true, I'd consider that a proof of feasibility and economics, by existence.

Getting down to brass tacks, I'm not in a position to declare that reprocessing is dirty versus clean, or feasible versus infeasible. NNadir's position appears to be opposite yours. I'm pretty sure you can't both be right.

I don't know where that leaves me. I find NNadir's arguments to be more convincing, because he gives me the impression of speaking from direct expertise in nuclear engineering. But since I don't have any such expertise, I can't claim to know he's right, either.

I doubt I can aquire that kind of authority by reading web pages, from either side of the fence, and I'm not going to take a sabbatical and become an expert on nuclear engineering, and then take another sabbatical and become an expert on solar energy.

You could say, this is the overriding problem of our age. We're all called on to formulate opinions and make decisions, but only a handful of people have deep expertise in any particular subject. I probably know more math, physics and chemistry than 9/10 people, but that's only because the first 9 don't know any, not because I'm a mathematician, physicist or chemist.

Hell, 7 out of 10 people can't even name our vice president. That doesn't leave me much hope for a meaningful national debate on the relative merits of nuclear reactors versus photovoltaics.

I don't know where that came from. But it seems like the reason we're having this ongoing and acrimonious debate.

[jpak]

16. US spent fuel reprocessing was uneconomical

The West Valley (NY) commercial reprocessing plant shut down in 1972 for financial reasons after producing $20-35 million of plutonium from spent fuel - it will cost US taxpayers $2-4 billion to clean up...

http://www.ieer.org/pubs/highlvl4.html

The British admit that their recently shut-down THORP plant was a money loser.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/green/story/0,9061,1483998,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1479483,00.html

The Russians admit that their Mayak reprocessing station is uneconomic as it requires continuous dumping of radioactive liquid wastes into local waterways.

http://www.ransac.org/Projects%20and%20Publications/News/Nuclear%20News/2005/414200520518PM.html#3J

http://www.antiatom.ru/e-report/mox1.htm

The French have serious reservations about the economics of their reprocessing program...

http://www.ieer.org/sdafiles/vol_9/9-2/charpin.html

Japan's $20 billion Rokkasho reprocessing plant is clearly uneconomic....

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=mj01burnie

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N05166648.htm

http://www.ieer.org/comments/rokk-pr.html

Just because these things exist doesn't mean they make economic sense.

and...coming from a REAL science background, color me "unimpressed" by the Cult of Personality argument...

[phantom power]

19. The conclusion I draw from those links is...

that implementing reprocessing is "difficult" and "expensive". But then, all of our choices from here on out are difficult and expensive.

For example, you proposed a plan for America recently, which involved the demolition of every house in America, followed by the re-construction of those houses as "super-energy-efficient", at a cost I estimate conservatively to be $5 trillion dollars.

Mind you, that $5T is just the cost of the demolition and re-building. It doesn't address the cost of actually implementing the mixed-bag of energy sources you specified.

And I notice, on re-reading your plan, that you never actually computed the energy-output of your scenario, so that we could compare it against the 100ExaJoule target value.

[jpak]

20. LOL!

tongue-in-cheek sarcasm and obvious flamebait are not to be taken seriously...

:)

[phantom power]

21. There was no sarcasm in that post.

Those are my observations, and I'm completely serious.

[hunter]

15. That "20-times more expensive" figure is not anti-nuclear

Nuclear fuel accounts for roughly 10% of the cost of nuclear power. If the fuel is "20-times more expensive" then the overall cost of the electricity produced roughly triples.

That is of course a stupid and simplistic model, but I do remember buying a lot of gasoline for less than 80 cents a gallon. I would have thought that gasoline at triple the price would have made a mess of our economy (and maybe it has), but it does illustrate why it is not easy to claim that the cost of a nuclear fuel "20-times more expensive" is prohibitive.

[NNadir]

10. Well one would need a subtle mind.

I am not a dogmatic conservative with one or two ideas on which I fixate in defiance of reality.

A conservative is a person who has one dogmatic idea and holds to it in spite of all evidence. For instance, Greenpeace is a conservative organization that has not had a new idea since the 1970's: Here is one Greenpeace idea as I've hear it over and over again since I first read about Greenpeace self promotion parlor tricks:

"All forms of energy except solar energy are bad, but nuclear energy is especially bad, because none of us in Greenpeace can say the word radioactive without bursting into tears, especially when we've been drinking..."

Here is another Greenpeace idea I've been hearing for about thirty years: Solar energy is going to provide more than X % of the world's energy in Y years. The values of X and Y have been changing though not the ridiculous claim that "solar is the answer."

I would estimate that in 1975, when I still had sympathy for these twits because I was young, naive, and had not yet learned any science, X was 75% and Y was 20 years. Now, of course in slow subtle decrements, we hear that X is 25% and Y is 35 years.

What does it matter? It's all twittery.

Now one would need a mind subtle enough to have never attended a Greenpeace meeting to understand my position on so called "nuclear waste," which should be clear other wise to the type of people to whom I find speaking most rewarding:

I oppose Yucca mountain, but not for the same reason that illiterate Greenpeace twits and Nevada NIMBY types oppose it. I oppose it because it is wasteful. Most of the materials being placed in chemically inert (and therefore difficult to recover) glasses at Yucca mountain are very valuable materials. That should be pretty simple.

On the other hand, I have discussed at length the chemistry and physics of individual fission products at length on this website. Understandably, these discussions, which require a level of technical insight, go right over the head of my antagonists, but as I've made clear, I hold an especially low opinion not only of their intellectual and moral abilities but also of the degree to which they are educated. In this context I have frequently referred to the fossil reactors at Oklo, Gabon.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=5609&mesg_id=5609

In preparing these posts, it's become abundantly clear to me that while Yucca Mountain is not a desirable outcome, it is certainly not a dangerous one. No one is going to be killed by Yucca Mountain any more than anyone has been killed by the storage of commercial nuclear waste in the United States. Instead the focus on Yucca Mountain by small minding nit-picking paranoids is just a game played to divert attention from what is the most important energy waste issue to have ever faced humanity: Carbon Dioxide.

To make it clear enough that even a Greenpeace simpleton can understand it, my position is this: I oppose Yucca mountain broadly because I believe in the recycling and use of nuclear materials, especially actinides, but generally fission products. Still, Yucca mountain is not "dangerous." It is not going to harm anyone if it is built, any more than the grand nuclear catastrophe predicted by Greenpeace has not happened. The situation is very much like Oklo, 2 billion years ago, where most of the fission products remained in place without any human intervention at all. With human intervention it is very, very, very, very, very improbable that even a single person will be injured ever. I am a pragmatic not a dogmatic. If Yucca mountain is the only way to expand nuclear power in the current emergency, I will reluctantly accept it while agitating for the better solution.

Now, it appears that Greenpeace types, for whom so called "nuclear waste" distraction is de riguer don't give a shit about global warming, since being conservatives, they cannot adjust their position to realities.

In 1975, when I was a relatively young man, it was easy to oppose nuclear power for the following reasons: 1) Solar energy was in its infancy, and it sounded good so no one knew if it had problems or if it was lacking in realism. 2) The global climate change scenario was not widely understood, nor were its consequences as profoundly obvious as they are now. 3) The intensity of the global distribution of mercury was not measured nor as intense. 4) The performance characteristics of nuclear reactors had no measurable history. 5) The world's population was much smaller in 1975, and the largest countries, India and China, were not practically approaching decent living standards. 6) Per capita energy consumption world wide was much lower.

We all know that conservatives are people who believe that nothing should be tried for the first time. One of the more subtle things conservatives do is to take apart a new idea by selectively picking information, usually making a claim about a specific as representing a general case. Ronald Reagan for instance, started the ball rolling for dismantling social programs by focusing on one or two "Welfare Mothers" who were defrauding the system. Such mothers existed, but they did not represent all poor people. A conservative who holds fast to his positions for a few decades in the face of new data and information is no longer a conservative, however. Ultimately his or her ideas are so fixed on events from previous decades that he becomes a reactionary.

It is difficult to determine whether the Greenpeace position on nuclear power is conservative or reactionary, though it is one of the two. Reagan like, certainly Greenpeace solar hype types attempt speciously to poke holes in nuclear energy by claiming a specific (usually Chernobyl) as the general (The 360 functioning gigawatts of capacity). Certainly that organization has never had a new idea since its founding in 1971. However, as described above, things have changed since 1971, especially with respect to the question of whether nuclear capacity should expand or not. The world is expanding its nuclear capacity while Greenpeace is calling for a shut down of nuclear capacity. Like reactionaries calling for the reinstitution of conditions as they were in 1860, Greenpeace wants to go back to 1970. One of the things that reactionaries like Greenpeace and the Republican Party don't say however, is how they are going to make the old world function in the new world. In fact, it can't be done. Reactionaries can nitpick specific problems with things they don't like in the present, but they cannot build something new or restore something old, because they cannot think. They do not have supple minds.

[Kool Kitty]

3. I have a question for you,

but I am hesitant to ask it, because I don't want to be considered just another idiot that you will villify in your next post. I just read on another thread that the soonest that a new nuclear reactor could be completed, if begun now, would be 2014. If they take the time and don't cut corners (crappy concrete, slipshod welds, etc.), that's a good thing. But why does it take so long, if indeed it would take that long?

[NNadir]

25. I am indeed a nasty person, although your question is legitimate.

I don't see where the claim that the earliest a nuclear reactor could be built is 2014 comes from.

The United States built almost 100 nuclear reactors between 1960 and 1980, and the vast majority of them continue to operate. This is an overall rate of 5 reactors per year. (France built reactors at a much higher rate.) This occurred in a period during which reactor engineering was in its infancy. People knew far less about materials science, construction techniques and quality control than they do now. (Further there was very little computational power for modeling reactor design. I can run on my home PC modeling programs that could not be run on the most powerful computers available in 1980.) Many reactors toward the end of this period took a very long time to construct. This was not because they were particularly different or more "dangerous" than reactors built earlier, but because a certain type of ignorance, as practiced by my own generation, the pathetic "baby boomers," gained wide credence. This allowed legalistic delays (on increasingly absurd grounds) in regulatory approval and in some cases, required expensive reverse engineering. I know. I was a participant on the side of stupidity - I helped to stop the Shoreham nuclear power station on Long Island. Many of the myths we helped to create in those days are still widely believed in the United States - in defiance of the experimental evidence.

Of course, the United States in that period was a country in which engineering and science were valued and prized. It is not such a country now. The ease with which nuclear reactors can be constructed is a function of the literacy of the citizens of the country where the nuclear reactor is being constructed.

In Finland, a new reactor has been approved and is now under construction. It will come on line in 2008, six years from approval to completion. Finland has under taken this project expressly because Finland intends to meet its Kyoto goals. This is six years from approval to completion, but one doubts that fools will engage in all sorts of demands for reverse engineering to address inflated or imagined risks.

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/16112/story.htm

All power systems have crappy welds, slipshod concrete, and so on. The safety of nuclear power systems does not derive from their perfection. It derives from a system of "defense in depth," where the failure of a component is compensated by another component that prevents catastrophe. All nuclear reactors built in the United States have had two important features of this type: The first is a negative void co-efficient, which causes the reaction to become sub-critical when the water (coolant) drains out of it. (Chernobyl had a positive void coefficient - loss of water caused the nuclear reaction to speed up.) There has only been one such incident, known as a loss of coolant accident (LOCA), in the history of US commercial nuclear power, this of course being Three Mile Island. At Three Mile Island, the reactor core melted anyway, because there was no way to remove the decay heat of the fission products. The second feature found in all reactors prevented a widespread catastrophe such as occurred at Chernobyl: This, of course, was the containment building.

New reactor designs not available in the 1960's and 1970's would have a third such feature, passive cooling systems. This would mean that a Three Mile Island type accident, were such an accident to occur again - which is unlikely - would not destroy the reactor at all.

"Defense in depth" is not possible in fossil fueled power plants. These plants simply spew waste - notably carbon dioxide - into the atmosphere in a fashion that is uncontrolled and which represents a danger to all humanity. This danger is NOT cause by slipshod concrete or by poor quality welds or failure modes of any type. This type of danger occurs every day in normal operations. People die every day from coal, almost indiscriminately. Indifference to this fact does not change it.

[Kool Kitty]

26. Thank you for answering my question.

i do know that crappy concrete and shoddy welds can happen in all construction, not just nuke plants. I really didn't mean to imply that. Heaven knows that the housing that is being built lately suffers from lots of construction problems. I just don't want any of Bush's buddies to get the contracts, you know? I guess I just don't trust them to be on the up and up about anything, and I don't want corners cut on construction that needs to be safe. I just didn't understand why it should take so long, and your answer was easy for me to understand.

I watched a show on History channel today about Chernobyl, and it made me wonder why they would build such a reactor without a containment building. Just didn't seem wise to me, but that's just me.

Thanks again. (I don't think you are nasty, I just didn't want to ask a question that maybe was a stupid one. I read alot in this forum, but I don't post a lot here because I am the first to admit when a subject is over my head. But I do try to educate myself.)

[NNadir]

27. The reason that Chernobyl was built without a containment building

was that it was designed to be a dual use weapons plutonium/power reactor. (One such reactor was built in the United States at Hanford on orders of John F. Kennedy, but it is thankfully offline.)

Plutonium from commercial nuclear power plants is not particularly suitable for weapons use, because during a normal fuel cycle, plutonium-239 is contaminated with 15-20% of plutonium-240. The presence of plutonium-240, while it does not completely preclude weapons diversion, greatly complicates weapons design, stability, and yield, so much so that plutonium from commercial nuclear fuel it is generally considered useless for weapons production purposes.

If however, one removes the fuel earlier from the reactor, when plutonium-240 has not had much time to build up, one can use it in weapons. Typically weapons plutonium has less than 5% plutonium-240, often very much less. Reactors that require frequent changes in their fuel require special designs. They are not, like the pressurized reactors, very compact.

The RBMK reactor, like John Kennedy's N-reactor, was designed to allow the fuel to be removed at will after short periods of neutron irradiation. Certain features of these graphite moderated reactors, made the construction of a containment building very problematic so at both Kennedy's reactor, and the RBMK series, containment buildings were ignored.

No one will ever again order and build a graphite moderated reactor with a positive void coefficient and no containment building. The lesson of Chernobyl will prevent the repeat of this serious mistake.

[cprise]

4. There is always an assumption of reducing frivolous consumption

...whenever renewables are plugged like this.

Instead of susidizing perhaps we should effect a rationing of energy similar to the way cellphone calling plans ration airtime: A certain amount of energy can be purchased at the lowest rates, and beyond that limit have a surcharge which grows progressively more costly as usage goes up.

We could tie this energy ration limit to the amount of renewable energy being produced. That way, non-renewable sources begin to be associated with excess consumption and pollution.

NIMBY can really undermine environmentalism's greater goals but its not that powerful, nor it is necessarily prevalent in a global NGO like Greenpeace esp. when they are promoting PVs to reduce climate change.

Your kid is lucky if nighttime is, on overcast nights, experienced with a black and not pale-orange sky.

[phantom power]

6. I've thought the same thing about water.

Provide some baseline amount of water at current inexpensive rates. Any water used after that is more expensive. In fact, I favor the same idea relating to family planning. Any children after the first two shouldn't get tax credits.

[jpak]

7. The West Virginia legislature could ban mountain top strip mining

tomorrow - so could Congress. You don't need new nuclear power plants to do this.

Moreover, even if we built new nuclear power plants, these practices would continue.

Mountain top strip mining has NOTHING to do with Yucca Mountain or opposition to nuclear power.

This argument is nothing more than a laughable transparent straw man.

Finally you don't see reactor vendors or nuclear plant operators or the Nuclear Lobby opposing mountain top strip mining - its only those illiterate moron Greenpeace environmentalists that do that.

BTW: "illiterate journalists" is an oxymoron...

[thegreatwildebeest]

9. I don't even...

I don't even understand half of what you wrote in that one paragraph, nor see what it has to do with calling everyone twits, and calling what other people say or do "shit". In fact most, if not all of your posts in response to things having to do with nuclear energy are absurd ad-homenim attacks and filled with worse langauge than a sailor, calling other people and organizations names just because they oppose nuclear energy. If this is your attempt at persuading people, its failing.

[GumboYaYa]

13. "...name a person..."

who has been injured by the storage of nuclear waste?

Actually there are several examples of this. Here is one:

On September 13, 1987 an old radiation source was stolen from an abandoned hospital in the Brazilian city of Goiânia and subsequently handled by several people who suffered serious contamination, resulting in several deaths. The incident is considered one of the worst accidents in world history to involve the improper handling of radioactive waste.
The object was a small highly radioactive rod of caesium chloride (a caesium salt; it was made using a radioactive isotope of caesium) encased in a shielding canister made of lead and steel with an iridium window. It was made and used as a radiation source for radiation therapy when the hospital was still in operation. When the building was abandoned in 1984, the source was left behind. Over the following years, many scavengers entered the building to look for useful or interesting items. Eventually in 1987, two people came across the radiation source and took it with them.
The two attempted to open the casing, but were unable to. However, they did manage to break the iridium window, which allowed them to see the cesium rod emitting a deep blue light. The light was caused by fluorescence of the chloride ions when stimulated by the strong gamma rays emitted by the cesium. They sold the object to a junkyard owner who intended to make a ring for his wife out of the strange and beautiful blue material. The invisible gamma rays severely irradiated the two people who initially found it—one later had to have an arm amputated.
The sale to the junkyard owner led to many more people becoming contaminated:
• Junkyard workers hammered open the lead casing. Two of them died later of radiation poisoning.
• A brother of the junk dealer scraped dust off the rod, spreading some of it on the floor of his house. His six-year-old daughter, Leide dos Neves Ferreira, later ate on this floor, absorbing some of the radioactive material. She died a month later, and was buried in a lead coffin.
• Several people who visited the home came into contact with the dust and spread it around the local neighbourhood and to other towns nearby.
• Another brother of the junkyard owner used the dust to paint a blue cross on his skin. He also contaminated the animals at his farm, several of which died.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%E2nia_accident

Obviously, there have been much larger tragedies than this in the coal industry, but to act like there are no examples of people being killed by nuclear waste is just wrong.

[hunter]

17. And this is somehow different than other misadventures with toxic waste???

For example:

Thousands of children suffer brain damage from exposure to lead and mercury based paints, which are yet another toxic legacy of our industrial age. What are the anti-nuclear activists doing about that?

Agricultural field workers today are being poisoned by toxic pesticides and herbicides or nitrates in their drinking water. (Have you ever seen a "blue baby?" I have.) Here's just one link I googled:

http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/2004/112-10/editorial.html

What are the antinuclear activists doing about that?

I get very irritated by the "twits" (and yes I will happily adopt that terminology) who think nuclear toxins are somehow qualitatively different than the other sorts of industrial toxins. They are not. Clearly these toxins are all VERY BAD. But some toxins are worse than others, or more likely than others.

If it was my choice was to live near some well run and well built nuclear power plant, or some crap ass coal fired power plant, the nuclear power plant would win easily. The coal fired plant is much more likely to poison me and my family. The coal fired power plant spews more radioactive and non-radioactive crap into my environment than the nuclear power plant ever will, even if that nuclear plant suffers a Three Mile Island style "partial meltdown" which is damned unlikely.

In my utopia world we don't need nuclear power or coal power. Everyone lives happily ever after with a very low energy lifestyle. But that's not going to happen soon. There are too many people on this earth.

Human beings are the bacteria reaching the edge of the agar plate, or the algae reaching the edge of the pond. As our inexpensive oil and natural gas runs out many of us are going to die unless we find new energy sources.

Coal is not the answer even if we somehow burn it cleanly because the resulting climate changes will kill people just as certainly as the lack of energy would.

Personally, I do not believe the United States is going to solve this problem. Our political culture has gone entirely insane. Any nation with the likes of George W. Bush as president is not credible. The United States seems to be reaching this stage of social development:


http://www.eco-action.org/dt/eisland.html

I do not believe other nations will fall into a similar trap. At some point the people of the United States are going to notice that the people of other nations who do not have insane leaders are doing much better then we are, and then we will throw the liars out. Right and Left wing ideologues will no longer get any "air time."

I used to be a very serious anti-nuclear activist. (PM me your anti-nuclear "creds" and I will PM you mine...) I'm not an anti-nuclear activist anymore, mostly because I think there are a lot of things far worse than nuclear power. I do not (yet?)consider myself a "supporter" of nuclear power, especially as it might be developed by our corrupt government, but it's been a very long time since it was the boogey-man of nuclear power keeping me awake at night.

[GumboYaYa]

18. Why the tirade????

I made no value judgment about nuclear waste vis-a-vis other toxins. In fact I reconize in my post that coal causes much worse problems.

The question was posed to name one person killed by nuclear waste and I pointed out just one example out of many where in fact people have been killed by nuclear waste. That is simply a fact, not a value judgment. Of course other toxins are harmful; forgive me for not stating the obvious.

I fail to understand why the pro-nucear crowd feels the need to foreclose any reasonable discussion of the risks of nuclear waste by calling anyone who points out the very real problems with nuclear power "twits" and various other names that don't advance the discussion in any way.

I grew up six miles from the nuclear power plant at Port Gibson, Mississippi. My mother was one of the local citizens trained and equipped with a geiger counter to monitor the area if there were ever any fears of leaks. I certainly have no irrational fear of nuclear energy. Every morning of my childhood I stared up at the tower of that plant.

I also know that there are real risks associated with nuclear power. Waste of any type that is allowed to accumulate creates potential problems. Nuclear certainly is better than coal and other hydrocarbon forms of energy and will have to be used in some way if we plan on powering the future, but personally I think that we should minimize the number of nuclear power plants we build not plunge headlong into a massive building project.

We need to emphasize conservation first and foremost. Saving energy is always the cheapest and cleanest alternative. Wind power has great potential in many parts of the U.S. We have tons of waste generated daily that could be used to produce bio-diesel. Changing our zoning laws to provide for mixed use neighborhoods and better planning to allow people to use bicycles and walk places needs to be on the table. Growing food locally and supporting CSA farms saves tons of energy. Biomass from the timber industry that could be producing energy gets thrown out. The list of ideas for conserving energy or producing clean energy goes on and on and on.

I worry that diving headlong into building nuclear power plants could result in all of these other very good ideas being taken off the table. Not to mention that the toys we build that use energy produce lots of waste, and a nuclear future with no emphasis on conservation would not end the profligate consumption that threatens the environment. Plus, in the end we would still be relying primarily on a energy production methodology that generates a dangerous waste (and yes no matter how you slice it nuclear waste is dangerous).

Instead of digital histrionics and name-calling, it would be refreshing to have a real discussion about these issues wihout the bombarment from the pro-nuclear lobby who feels the need to call anyone who disagrees with them a "twit".

[hunter]

22. Okay.

Anyone who writes this, "a nuclear future with no emphasis on conservation would not end the profligate consumption that threatens the environment" is probably playing fair.

A good number of anti-nuclear activists will not express their true motives.

Personally, I do not believe that nuclear power has the "energy return on energy invested" required to support our current consumer society. Cheap oil is what makes something like an SUV affordable to the "middle class" American. An SUV built and fueled by nuclear power would be an expensive toy for the wealthy.

Even if we started building new nuclear power plants today, we could not sustain our current levels of consumption and political corruption.

As metaphor, this plane is going down. If we are lucky it will be a soft landing.

[thegreatwildebeest]

23. I think most...

A good number of anti-nuclear activists will not express their true motives.


Most anti-nuclear activists I would presume, hold similar feelings on the issue of conservation and reducing consumption. Greenpeace (which has its own share of problems), the one organization every pro-nuclear person on this board seems to hate, promotes the need to conserve and reduce consumption. No one who holds a vaguely environmentally concerned position, I would think would not hold to the need to reduce consumption.

Personally, I do not believe that nuclear power has the "energy return on energy invested" required to support our current consumer society. Cheap oil is what makes something like an SUV affordable to the "middle class" American. An SUV built and fueled by nuclear power would be an expensive toy for the wealthy.

Nuclear power would make a poor substitute for cars, unless the cars were electrically run. Even then, I would agree that nothing right now can support consumer society as it is. Even widescale implementation of alternative energy production doesn't deal with the large scale use of petroleum in consumer products and agriculture, the raping of old growth forests for paper products, or the pollution, by industrial factories and the like, of our waterways and lakes.

The enivironmental issue is not one merely of whether or not nuclear power is viable, and whether it can replace petroleum, but alot of various issues from consumption to production.

[NNadir]

24. This is NOT an example of reactor waste.

The radioactive materials in this case were from a cancer treatment machine, albeit one made from fission products.

This was NOT a commercial energy production related event.

One of the strategies of anti-nuclear anti-environmental activists is to confuse, say nuclear war and nuclear medicine with nuclear power. They need, of course to change the subject from nuclear power to some isolated incident of radiation injury, because their claim - like the claim of the Nevada legislature - is so weak.

Let's be clear: The claim is that so called "nuclear wastes" from power production cannot be safely stored. This is NOT a claim about whether nuclear materials used in medical treatments are harmless. Many millions of people with prostate cancer have been treated with radon seeds, and millions more have been treated with nuclear imagining agents. Thyroid cancer is treated with a fission product I-131. Many other cancers are treated with Y-90, which exists in radioequilibrium with the much feared fission product Sr-90. Technetium, also a fission product, is deliberately created in accelerators as Tc-99m for treatment and imaging. This isotope decays to Tc-99, which is also a consituent of spent fuel, which has a half-life of over 200,000 years. People who have been imaged with technetium products, or treated with them, pee this isotope out of their systems, and it ends up widely distributed throughout the world in sewage. There is no evidence that anyone has been injured by the radiation found in sewage.

Now, for the record, I happen to believe that the use of nuclear materials such as those used at Goiana, is overall a good thing. This was after all, a cancer treatment device, and the the death of Leide dos Neves Ferreira and the other people at Goiana may not match the number of lives saved by the radiation device before it was abandoned, although the case does make a good radiation scare story. Actually there are millions of persons on the planet who have had radiation therapy, although of course, there are millions of people on the planet who think that such therapy should be banned. In fact, I just sat for a few hours with a person under such treatment a few days ago. Although he is radioactive, no one seems to be afraid of him. He's regarded simply as a pleasant interesting 85 year old man who retains a youthful wit and who, in spite of his radioactivity, was often fondly embraced by his ten year old granddaughter. No one refers to him as "dangerous waste."

The issue in any case is not that nuclear energy is harmless, although many try to claim that it - as opposed to all other forms of energy production - must be so to be acceptable. Even if we could demonstrate someone who has been killed by the storage of commercial nuclear waste we would have to demonstrate that the loss of life represents a greater amount than its alternative. In spite of all the solar hype and magical thinking connected with it, the alternative is some idealized solar PV system and a pile of batteries that may be available in 2040.

The alternative is coal.

This is the point of my response. The people of Nevada are profligate in their use of electricity, as anyone who has had the unfortunate experience of visiting Las Vegas can see if they are not blind. This state is not conservation row. They buy energy from California and Arizona, states having nuclear capacity. The claim that Nevada somehow bears zero responsibility for nuclear materials is frankly just immoral garbage, which was my point.

I have yet to hear of one anti-nuclear anti-environmental activist who is not a hypocrite. They are, as I often repeat, almost Bushian in their level of hypocrisy.

I have some experience with an anti-nuclear anti-environmental activist who makes a dubious claim to have worked with millicurie amounts of tritium in some kind of vaguely defined "research." Now, I see no evidence that this person even knows the first thing about radioactivity, never mind how to do research with it. However, were it true that a person can have research that depends on radioactive tracer work - especially work involving tritium, one would have to recognize that such work would be impossible without the use of nuclear reactors. 100% of the world's supply of tritium comes from either from the LiT reaction or from neutron capture in deuterium, both of which, in turn, occur almost exclusively in nuclear reactors. (A few tritium generating reactions occur in the upper atmosphere, but such reactions are not practical sources of tritium.) Now, leaving aside the issue that the "research," if it exists, is almost certainly worthless, since the claimant shows no evidence of understanding even basic science, we would have to acknowledge that the "research" would be impossible were the person to get his or her wish and have nuclear reactors banned.

Risk/benefit analysis is at best obscured by the logical fallacy of "hasty generalization." http://www.fallacyfiles.org/hastygen.html
It is not sufficient to say, "nuclear power is too dangerous and should be banned because of the events in Goiana." This is one very tiny sample of nuclear materials. In fact, 75,000 metric tons of spent fuel will have accumulated in the United States by the end of this decade. In no case anywhere has anyone demonstrably been killed by it despite all kinds of loud - and stupid - agonizing about the subject. This number, zero, is very different from the number of persons who typically die each year in the United States from air pollution - and water and land pollution - caused by burning coal. The NIMBY legislature of Nevada is therefore engaged in the practice of declaring that those lives lost to coal are worthless and meaningless when compared to a few lives that imaginably may be be lost to the storage of so called "nuclear waste" in their state at some point in the distant future. This declaration is at best ethically dubious.

[jpak]

28. and who would that "anti-nuclear anti-environmental activist" be

and why are his claims "dubious"

and why is his research "worthless"????

Please enlighten us.

[NNadir]

29. I merely assert I know such a person and decline to identify that person.

I am under no obligation to identify anyone in my personal experience here or anywhere else.

In fact, I am under no obligation whatsoever to identify myself or even to say anything about myself. I might be George W. Bush. I might be Al Gore or John Kerry. I might be someone else. People here are free at all times to judge me - and guess about who and what I am - by what I say.

I say I have such experience of a person clearly knows nothing about radiochemistry, nuclear physics or radiobiology who represents that he or she works with tritium. In fact, I can recall no conversation that I've had with the person to whom I refer that indicates any scientific knowledge whatsoever. I surmise therefore that if, in fact, the person is doing scientific research, it is worthless. This is hardly a spectacular expectation. Lot's of people do scientific research that is worthless. Many of them are employed, for instance, by the Bush administration, as we discuss here frequently.

In fact there are a series of prizes awarded each year for research that is notable for its worthlessness. They are called the "Ignobel prizes." http://www.improbable.com/ig/ig-top.html

For the record, I have known some people who successfully compartmentalize, who are totally out to lunch in one area and who actually succeed in another area. For instance, I have known two Ph.D medicinal chemists who were Christian religious fundamentalists and who denied the demonstrable reality of evolution. One might expect that their research would be worthless, since the field of medicinal chemistry necessarily involves molecular biology - a field in which an understanding of evolution is intimately involved. As it happened in these cases however, their research was not worthless. Both were rather decent synthetic chemists. One solved a difficult problem which will have significant bearing on my own future.

I decline to identify these people too.

Now, I will say this: Both of these individuals could - at least in the narrow area of synthetic chemistry - speak in a fashion that is consistent with a scientific education. Thus I had no trouble believing that they were competent to accomplish certain tasks. If however, they were claiming to be working in a scientific fashion on matters relating to the origin of life, I probably would have dismissed such work as worthless and spent my time considering other things. On the other hand, even if I was uninterested in their view of the origin of human life, when they spoke about other things, I knew that they did so in a way that had some value.

Still, one's lexicon demonstrates something about one's background. Mark Twain famously doubted that William Shakespeare was who people said he was, because Shakespeare demonstrated as familiarity with the language of royalty that exceeded what Twain believed to be possible for the commoner represented in biographies. Twain believed that "Shakespeare" was a pen name. (Of course, Twain didn't remark on Shakespeare's equal familiarity with commoner's language, since that would have undermined his case.) Now, Twain's assertion about Shakespeare may or may not be correct, but at least in Twain's case, we can say he knew something about the workings of language.

Now, I am spectacularly uninterested in any scientific work that the unidentified person who is the subject of this conversation may or may not have done, mostly because the person has never said anything of any scientific interest to me. I find this person of use in only a negative way - as a foil - since what the person says demonstrates what the person knows. This, in my view, supports my case.

Whether or not the person actually works with tritium is also unimportant. One hopes that the person does not have access to or responsibility for tritium. One would hope that people who work with radioactive materials would be more knowledgeable about their properties. Even so, many people who work with radioactive istopes actually know little about them. Hell, my father used to handle radioactive materials and he had a very limited education. Still, tritium, especially in millicurie quantities is not a tremendously dangerous isotope. It is a weak beta emitter, and has a half-life of 12.33 years, and therefore, a specific activity of roughly 9600 curies per gram. This means whole curie of the stuff weighs only about 10 micrograms. Being the third lightest nucleus known, and an isotope that is easy to exchange with water, it easily diffuses out of most systems and is not generally concentrated except by extraordinary means. Because of the vastness of the hydrosphere, it is hardly likely that tritium released in millicurie quantities would ever harm anyone anywhere. Even the worst idiot working with it probably couldn't do all that much damage with a full curie of tritium. Under many circumstances irresponsibly handled tritium might even be gone before the miscreant could remove his or her finger from his or her ass.

[jpak]

32. I use tritiated thymidine and leucine in my "worthless" research

3H-thymidine is used to measure rates of bacterial DNA synthesis (which is proportional to cell division rates and a measure of bacterial community production).

3H-leucine is used to measure bacterial protein synthesis (another measure of bacterial community production).

I used to use 14C-leucine, but the specific activity is too low to measure the uptake rates we encounter in Antarctic waters.

I've also used 14C-urea to measure urea turnover rates in Danish estuaries, and 14C-glucose and 14C-mannose to measure bacterial monosaccharide uptake in a number of locales.

I've used 14C-bicarbonate to measure rates of aquatic photosynthesis and the activities of ammonium and nitrite oxidizing bacteria.

(note: nitrifying bacteria use energy derived from the oxidation of ammonium and nitrite to fix CO2 via the Calvin-Benson cycle. I used allylthiourea and sodium chlorate to specifically inhibit bacterial nitrogen oxidation, then measured the difference in dark 14C-bicarbonate uptake between inhibited treatments and controls.

I've used 32P to measure phosphorus uptake by marine bacteria and in RIA's (RadioImmunoAssays - specifically, 32P-dTTP) used to measure cyclobutane pyrimidine dimer production (DNA damage) in marine and freshwater bacteria exposed to UV radiation.

I've used 35S to measure sulfate reduction rates in marine sediments (sulfate-reducing bacteria play a major role in marine sediment carbon cycles).

More recently, I used 55Fe to measure bacterial iron uptake (size-fractioned water samples) in the eastern tropical Pacific.

Again, I've published 9 papers using these methods over the last 12 years - including one in the journal Nature in 1996 (I also co-authored a paper in Science in 1992 - no radioisotopes involved - only some fancy-assed solid-state NMR).

and...I too have some experience with an anti-environmentalist.

This twit claims he severely contaminated his thyroid with 125-I over at 3 year period and then made the claim that he could "control" his level of thyroid contamination with iodized table salt!!!!

This guy is a complete fraud - no one "severely contaminates" his thyroid through sloppy lab work and gets away with it for 3 years - unless he falsified his swipes, or if the institution's radiation safety officer never swiped his lab independently.

Furthermore, it is physiologically impossible for one to "control" thyroid radio-iodine uptake with table salt.

The minimum dose of potassium iodide required to prevent thyroid radio-iodine uptake is 2 mg per kg body mass.

A 70 kg adult would have to ingest 140 mg of KI to prevent thyroid radio-iodine uptake. (note: a standard "radiation pill" contains ~300 mg of potassium iodide).

The potassium iodide content of US iodized table salt is 77 mg iodine per kilogram...

http://www.people.virginia.edu/~jtd/iccidd/iodman/iodman7.htm

One would have to consume ~2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of table salt to prevent thyroid 125-I uptake.

Ingesting this amount of salt would kill you.

I call major bullshit...

But, I too am under no obligation to reveal the identity of this individual...


:)

[struggle4progress]

37. Whether tritum actually "easily diffuses" in and out of systems depends ..

.. on its chemical form. Although your assertion may be true for tritiated water, or for the tritium ion, there would be rather little point to tritium labelling in biomolecular studies if organically bound tritium easily diffused out of cells. Substantial quantities of anthropogenic tritium have been produced and released by power reactors. Photolysis in plants, as the first stage in photosynthesis, provides an obvious opportunity for anthropogenic tritium to become organically bound; once bound, such bound tritium can spread through the food chain.

[hunter]

38. There is no good evidence for the bioaccumulation of tritium except...

...in cases of delibrately manufactured molecules containing tritium. Generally the concentration of tritium within any living creature is consistent with the levels of tritium in the creature's environment.

The most typical form of tritium waste, which is tritium as water, does not seem to get concentrated in biological system. So far as my quick research shows, the bioaccumulation and concentration of tritium has only been demonstrated for tritium compounds specifically created for medical and research purposes.

I would be very interested in any reputable research that does not support this assertion. Any biological process that concentrated tritium collected from water molecules would be quite remarkable.

Keywords for your search might be "Organically Bound Tritium" (OBT) and "Hydrogen Tritium Oxide" (HTO)

[struggle4progress]

39. INVITED EDITORIAL: Welsh tritium (J. Radiol. Prot. 21 333-335)

<snip> As described in the paper there have been unexpected levels of tritium in fish caught in the Bristol Channel in the vicinity of the outfall of the discharge from the Cardiff factory. This tritium is 'unexpected' because the levels in sea water in the area have been measured at around 10 Bq/l <4> and a greater part (90%) of the uptake into fish has been shown to be organically bound tritium (OBT) rather than as part of the body water.

The synthesis and purification of tritium labelled molecules involves a number of intermediate steps in which other compounds are produced which are, presumably, of less commercial value. Together with significant quantities of tritiated water (HTO) these compounds have been discharged into Cardiff Bay since the early 1980s. For the most part, discharges of tritium from nuclear plants eventually result in tritiated water in the environment and the uptake into biota of tritium from tritiated water is fairly well understood. However, the organic compounds which are discharged present a different substrate and their biokinetics in the aquatic milieu are not easily predictable. Herein lies the uncertainty and the problem.

Liquid discharges from the Cardiff plant have not been that high (the maximum annual level of 827 TBq was in 1986; currently less than 100 TBq/year) and all well within authorised limits. However, authorisations for discharge have been set on the basis of models which assumed release of tritiated water (HTO) alone to the sea and some uptake into OBT from the hydrogen pool. The levels of OBT found in fish and shell fish in this area do not appear to fit this model. OBT levels in benthic fish have been close to 120 kBq/kg (in 1989) and are currently about 20-50 kBq/kg. To put this in perspective, this is more than two orders of magnitude greater than the tritium concentration found in fish near much larger discharges of tritium, e.g. Sellafield. Tritium has also now been found at a similar concentration in eels in a nearby river as well as in ducks and wildfowl.

Clearly, as only a small proportion of the tritium discharged is in an organically bound form and the levels persist, the food chain is not necessarily simple and is now the subject of several research projects as outlined in the paper by Williams et al. Early results suggest some interaction with the contents of the sewer system into which the discharges are made. However it is of some interest to examine the impact of the possible uncertainties in the dosimetric tritium models and the implications for the critical group in the Cardiff area. <snip>

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0952-4746/21/4/002

[NNadir]

50. I always like it when people quote radioactivity in Becquerel's.

10 Beq/l. How terrifying. Gasp.

Pathetically telling too.

How many Becquerel's are in a typical liter of seawater far, far, far, far, away from those mean old nuclear plants?

This is the great fun of watching the clueless google, because they link all sorts of things about which they clearly have no clue.

I have many, many, many thousands of micronanopicocuries, and billions upon billions of femtobequerels in my basement air. I have more than my share of zeptorads of exposure too. I'm sure I'm dying and in fact, during a lifetime of exposure to radiation, I'm getting closer and closer every damn day to the time I will die.

The radioactivity in my basement originates in the same place as the bulk of the radioactivity in seawater, and it scares the shit out of every living thing on the planet just to think of it. I just can't believe the official indifference to this serious matter.

Now, for fun, let's have a quiz. My most including a reference to Shakespeare and language (#29) contains a scientific error. Shakespeare of course, didn't have google and so Twain thought he couldn't possibly have faked the language of kings any more than he could have faked being a physicist. Let's see if our new found radiation experts, can find it through googling.

Frankly, like a chemist working with irritants, I'm becoming too sensitized to read many more of these malapropisms, and so have skipped much written here after my last post. Ambien is a far less pernicious soporific. (Like John Lennon, "I just had to look.") Still, I invite our radiation experts to point out where they have previously caught my error, or at least now to identify it. It should be pretty simple. There aren't all that many sentences involved.

[struggle4progress]

51. A serious student of science would read entire sentences, rather ..

.. than picking a single phrase (such as "10 Bq/l") out of context and making nonsensical noise around the phrase.

My post was in continuing response to your apparent earlier claim that diffusive transport governs tritium levels in biota and hence that tissue levels track ambient environmental levels, a claim which I suspect is untrue. As evidence against your claim, I provided material from a scientific journal, describing "unexpected levels of tritium" where "levels in sea water .. have been measured .. around 10 Bq/l" and the isotope is fish is "organically bound .. rather than .. part of the body water." Anyone who reads the editorial in its entirety should see its point: simplistic models of tritium compartmentalization don't work. So your diffusion claim appears to be wrong.

[NNadir]

53. Are tritiated fish localized?

I'm sorry, I don't really read to much of this stuff any more, certainly not in bulk. I just pick one, go straight to the ridiculous part, pick it out, and make fun of it.

Unquestionably, if there is 10 Beq/l of tritium in water, some of it will be exchanged with living matter, at least if there is chlorophyll around. I had no idea that fish were immobilized by having organically bound tritium in their flesh, but I stand corrected.

No much for my idea that even the worst idiot couldn't localize millicurie quantities of tritium. Apparently the worst idiot, if he focuses on paralyzed fish, can do this quite well. I was wrong.

The power of the worst idiots is amazing.

I'll let you know if I ever need your definition of a "serious science student." With profoundest apologies, I think I'll skip worrying about it for the next several decades, though.

[struggle4progress]

54. Ya do git grumpy when yer bluff gits called. eom

[hunter]

55. Nevertheless...

From what I've read bioconcentration factors (BCF) for tritium seem to range from less than 1 (no concentration) to maybe 7. The most common figure, which you reported, is not more than 2.

Typical bioconcentration factors for toxic chemicals like PCBs or DDT are very much greater, with reported ranges of 200 to over a million.

Many radioactive pollutants have much higher bioconcentration factors than tritium. Tritium is important because it is very difficult to contain. But in the wider picture it is not a particularly dangerous pollutant.

[struggle4progress]

56. Your thesis is: "bioconcentration factors" accurately reflect hazard? eom

[hunter]

58. Of course it's not my "thesis."

I do a lot of flying by the seat of my pants here on DU, nothing so formal as a "thesis." (I don't have time to do anything else, this is merely a diversion from the code I should be writing...)

Mostly I don't find reported bioconcentration factors of tritium to be alarming because they are so small compared to other toxins. For example here's what an EPA fact sheet on mercury says:

"Bioconcentration factors of 63,000 for freshwater fish, 10,000 for salt water fish, 100,000 for marine invertebrates, and 1000 for freshwater and marine plants have been found."

http://www.epa.gov/OGWDW/dwh/t-ioc/mercury.html

Numbers such as these make reported bioconcentration factors for tritium seem rather trivial.

Tritium is a minor component in the stew of radioactive particles we live in. The fact that most of these radioactive particles are natural doesn't give us license to increase the levels by some arbitrary amount, but it does give us some general picture of how dangerous this pollution might be. We can for example compare cancer rates in less radioactive places to cancer rates in more radioactive places. The problem with all these studies is that radioactive particles are not the only cause of cancer. Here, for example, is an EPA list for other nasty things you might find in your well water:

http://www.epa.gov/OGWDW/hfacts.html

The Environment & Energy forum here on DU has got me thinking about what drove me away from anti-nuclear activism. Part of it is that I was used and abused by various anti-nuclear activists I trusted, but it now seems to me that a bigger factor was my work as a medical lab assistant in the 'eighties. I remember very well how scary the AIDS epidemic was, especially when I started working in blood banks.

When I first started working in medical labs, safety was rather lax. I figured my eyeglasses were enough to protect my eyes from splashes, and I knew people who didn't wear gloves when opening blood tubes because it slowed them down. By the time I stopped doing medical lab work in the early nineties we were all wearing gloves, buttoned down lab jackets and face shields.

I was also meeting a lot of people who were dying of AIDS.

Somehow "Bioconcentration Factors" are suddenly a lot less scary when you are dealing with things like viruses and bacteria that reproduce.

My nightmares shifted away from radioactive waste to pathogens.

[struggle4progress]

60. So you'll make the argument until somebody calls you on it ...

... and then bravely declare you have no definite point of view that could be the subject of precise discussion?

The natural interpretation of your text "Many .. pollutants have .. higher bioconcentration factors than tritium .... in the wider picture it is not .. particularly dangerous ..." seems to be that we could determine what is "particularly dangerous" by considering "bioconcentration factors" ...

[hunter]

63. The very article you cited about the Welsh tritium concludes...

"Even so, the health impact this exposure will have had over the last 20 years could be expected to be undetectable, especially bearing in mind the possible size of the critical group. Nevertheless, the first of the reliable epidemiology studies on the population of Cardiff has yet to be reported and as the pathway for this concentration in the food chain is uncertain, some precaution in terms of abatement technology should be (and, apparently, has been) exercised."

That doesn't mean people won't be dying from this, it only means we can't tell. We cannot (yet?) extract a signal from the noise. There is no black-and-white answer, no "subject of precise discussion."

My original well read but unresearched seat-of-the-pants "point of view" was that tritium was not an especially troublesome environmental toxin compared to others. Now that I've looked into the matter a little more, my overall opinion is unchanged. I can agree that ...some precaution should be exercised.

If I'm talking about the hazards of nuclear waste, and especially waste that would be sent to Yucca Mountain, tritium is probably not the sort of nuclear waste I'd talk about first.

[NNadir]

57. I wouldn't call it grumpy. I'd call it amused.

As for a bluff being called, one would have to know what is and is not a bluff.

Such knowledge is clearly not an issue here.

I've been laughing all day about the tritiated fish that "isolates" tritium. Keep 'em coming. They're precious.

[struggle4progress]

61. At present, your post is the first to use the word "isolates."

[struggle4progress]

42. SRS studies did show uptake in forests irrigated with tritiated water. eom

[struggle4progress]

43. Organically bound tritium (Health Phys. 1993 Dec;65(6):698-712)

<snip> Metabolic reactions in plant and animal organisms with tritiated water as a reaction partner are of great importance in this respect. The most important production process, in quantitative terms, is photosynthesis in green plants. The translocation of organically bound tritium from the leaves to edible parts of crop plants should be considered in models of organically bound tritium behavior. Organically bound tritium enters the human body on several pathways, either from the primary producers (vegetable food) or at a higher tropic level (animal food). Animal experiments have shown that the dose due to ingestion of organically bound tritium can be up to twice as high as a comparable intake of tritiated water in gaseous or liquid form. <snip>

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8244715&dopt=Abstract

[hunter]

45. The same tritium captured in sugars by photosynthesis...

...is released again as water when these sugars (or other plant products) are decomposed. Hydrogen (or tritium) derived from water in biological systems is fairly flighty stuff, not comparable to things like mercury or strontium or caesium.

Caesium can get very concentrated in a food chain. It accumulates in muscle tissue. This is very bad. For example, if you eat cows that contain radioactive caesium, you will become much more radioactive than the cows you are eating.

Marine systems, where the food chains tend to be much longer than those on land, tend to concentrate toxins to a much greater extent. A good example would be the high mercury levels in salmon, tuna, and swordfish.

So far as I can tell, you just don't see exceptional concentrations of water-derived tritium in food chains.

To quote the article you cited "Animal experiments have shown that the dose due to ingestion of organically bound tritium can be up to twice as high as a comparable intake of tritiated water in gaseous or liquid form."

That part "up to twice as high" is an interesting limit. Toxins like mercury or strontium-90 have no such limits.

[struggle4progress]

47. The claim in #29 was that 3H is of no concern, because it allegedly ..

.. quickly diffuses out of cells. I pointed out that this argument is invalid for organically bound tritium. I pointed at least one obvious mechanism by which tritium can become organically bound. In response to this, you claimed tritium cannot become organically bound without a substantial effort by some synthesizer and asked for evidence. I provided several links, including some evidence showing that tritium inventories in wildlife tissue can be somewhat higher than expected by the simplest compartmental model and gave an indirect reference to an SRS study that indicates permanent uptake of tritium does occur in forests irrigated with tritiated water (which study I leave to you to find for yourself). This, I think, debunks the claim that tritium tissue levels essentially equilibrate with the environment by diffusion, as well as your claim that organically bound tritium is unlikely to occur.

Most of your post seems simply to be an effort to change the subject.

[hunter]

48. I'm no friend of tritium...

And I'm not trying to change the subject. I would not claim that tritium tissue levels "essentially equilibrate with the environment by diffusion," but situations where tritium is concentrated seem to be very rare, and are scientifically interesting.

I stand by my assertion that man-made radioactive wastes are not fundamentally different from other sorts of toxins we spread throughout earth's environment.

The promethium argument that nuclear energy is a kind of fire we shouldn't be playing with is an appeal to superstition that is harmful to both sides of this argument.

[struggle4progress]

49. Yawn. eom

[NNadir]

59. Keep 'em coming.

This is great.

"Organically bound tritium?" "Higher than expected?"

I'll bet those trees in the forests are all dying from this tritium, because as we all know, it must be highly concentrated since it is in trees. In fact, if one stands next to a tree that has been exposed to tritium, and one is a radiation paranoid, one will be immediately killed.

Or is it just possible that the tree itself is diffuse? That some branches are (gasp) on the top and some wood is in the roots?

Or is the claim now that all chemical bonding results in concentration?

Let's take the coal so ignored by anti-nuclear anti-environmentalists. Is the claim now that when carbon is burned and injected into the atmosphere which it is causing to collapse, that it has not diffused because it is chemically bound, now to oxygen?

Now, it's been sometime since I took a P-Chem course, but I hope that people are still teaching the concept that substances can be dilute in solid phases as well as gaseous phases.

It is amazing, just amazing to imply that because tritium is fixed in cellulose is something other than diffuse.

I really have to go back over the other posts and read the links. I'll bet that all of the interpretations are as spectacularly misinterpreted.

This is hilarious.

This is getting better and better. Please keep posting. This is precious. Concentration by tritiated fish, and now triated wood... The best part is the apparent complete absence of a clue about how penetrating a beta particle from a tritium decay is.

I never knew that tritium could be so much fun.

By the way, I'm still wondering if any of our new tritium experts can find the real scientific error in post #29.

Here, let me google it. No it's not on google. I guess our tritium experts will have trouble finding it.

No sweat. I just googled an article that would be as much fun to misinterpret. I'm hoping for a fabulous commentary on this one:

http://penguin.bio.miami.edu/leo/PDF%20articles/fulltext.pdf

[struggle4progress]

62. OK. Drink a half cup of HTO and get back to me. eom

[NNadir]

64. The scientific error in post #29: The nuclear stability rules.

I certainly haven't had the time to go through all the typically tortured tedious theatrics that have characterized responses to my remarks on this thread, although I have sampled a few, and they have been amusing indeed.

While time will not permit me to go individually through each grotesque distortion produced by my antagonists, I have noted elsewhere that my own post #29 contains a scientific error, one I suspect that, as usual, has gone right over my antagonists tiny little heads.

Because I promised in response to PM to identify my error, I will do so now.

People who have taken a reasonably rigorous introductory college level chemistry course - few of whom, if any, have been inspired to join Greenpeace - are probably familiar with the difference between "thermodynamic stability" and "kinetic stability." Thermodynamic stability refers to matter that is in its lowest energy state at a set of given conditions of pressure and temperature. A mixture of the elements carbon and oxygen at 25C and 101250 Pa (1 atmosphere) of pressure is in its lowest energy state, for instance, when almost all of the carbon is present in the form of carbon dioxide. If the carbon is not present as carbon dioxide, the mixture is thermodynamically unstable: As we know well, under the right conditions, this mixture will release energy, heat and light, what we normally call "fire."

However, it is quite possible to have a mixture of carbon and oxygen under many conditions and observe no reaction whatsoever. Piles of coal for instance, usually do not spontaneously ignite. A pile of coal sitting in earth's atmosphere is not thermodynamically stable, but it is kinetically stable - what we call metastable. We say that such a mixture is "kinetically stable." This is because in order for the mixture to reach its lowest energy state, carbon dioxide, it must first overcome an "activation energy" barrier; to reach its lowest state, it must first pass through a higher energy state. This is why applying heat to a mixture of coal and air causes fire: The heat provides the energy to overcome the activation barrier; thereafter the heat released by the burning coal provides activation energy for even more coal to react. Without exposure to heat, a mixture of carbon and oxygen left for a very long time will slowly, over eons, reach equilibrium wherein the majority of it is in the form of carbon dioxide. However, unless sufficient activation energy is provided, the reaction proceeds so slowly as almost to be unobservable.

There are many metastable systems in the universe. De Beers advertising aside, for instance, diamond at ordinary pressure and temperature, is thermodynamically unstable: All of it is slowly converting to graphite after being removed from the kimberlite pipes in which it formed. Diamond is actually only stable under conditions extreme heat and pressure such as are found deep in the earth. The kimberlite pipes are actually ancient volcanic streams of magma that have transported the diamonds to the surface during their flows.

(Here is the phase diagram for carbon: http://phycomp.technion.ac.il/~anastasy/teza/teza/node5.html)

If one applies certain catalysts to diamond (a catalyst is something that lowers the activation energy barrier), one can make diamond explosively decompose to give graphite.

People are not generally aware of this, but the same type of situation applies to atomic nuclei. It happens that no two nuclei in the table of nuclides http://atom.kaeri.re.kr/ can have the same atomic mass number (the number of protons + the number of neutrons) without one spontaneously, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, decomposing to give the one that is lowest energy. For a long time, this was suspected, but not observed. There are many pairs of elements on earth in natural deposits that contain isotopes of the same mass number. I recently discussed two of them here, ruthenium-100 and molybdenum-100. Another such pair is xenon-136 and barium-136. All four of these isotopes are found naturally on earth, and none of them are normally thought of as being radioactive. However, the development of very, very sensitive instrumentation has revealed that two of these isotopes are unstable, and they decay very, very, very slowly to form the other two. Both molybdenum-100 and Xenon-136 are actually radioactive, they are decaying to give respectively ruthenium-100 (via the intermediate technetium-100) and Barium-136 (via the intermediate cesium-136). The half-lives for these reactions are well over a trillion years each, so slow that normally we do not notice them. No radiation paranoids, for instance, are afraid of molybdenum. What they don't know won't hurt them.

It is easy to determine from a pair of two nuclei having the same mass number which one is unstable with respect to the other. The heavier one is always the one that is unstable. When the unstable nucleus decays to the stable one, it releases energy. The amount of energy is exactly equal to the difference in their masses as described in the famous Einstein relationship E = mc^2. The difference in this energy is the difference in the mass defect, the mass defect being a measure of the mass of a bound nucleus comprised of neutrons and protons and the mass of the an equal number of free neutrons and free protons.

Thus when I wrote in post #29 that tritium is the "third lightest nucleus known" I was wrong. Protium (hydrogen-1) is the lightest, followed by the deuteron (hydrogen-2). However tritium (hydrogen-3) is unstable; it decays via beta emission to give helium-3. Since tritium is unstable, it is necessarily heavier than its daughter nucleus. Thus helium-3, which is stable, is the third lightest nucleus, not tritium. Tritium is the fourth lightest nucleus.

This, I am sure, has little bearing on the rather absurd issues of diffusion, tritiated fish and tritiated trees that were discussed with such pixilated gravity elsewhere in this thread. Still for reasons of precision, it must be pointed out that I have made a mistake. This aspect of my post #29 was wrong.

Sorry, boys and girls.

[struggle4progress]

65. Your posts often contain so many errors, that finding them all ..

.. could threaten to become a full time enterprise. Frankly, I don't find it worth the effort.

One of your more recent gems may serve, perhaps, to illustrate this; it is a glaringly inappropriate misuse of mineralogical terminology to attempt to discuss biochemical reactions:

"The oxidation state associated with mercury toxicity is ... strongly siderophilic, meaning it likes to bind to sulfur."

Tsk tsk ...

[NNadir]

66. Oh well then...

I agree that it certainly would not be a useful enterprise for you to try to read my posts. I can't recall an occassion where you've ever managed to get the point of one of them. You have never once been able to answer the simple questions, although you've apparently spent many hours poring over my mosts to try to poke holes in the irrelevant points. For the record I did confuse chalcophiles and siderophiles and your point is? Oh I know, because this excuses the fact that you are unable to produce a person who has been killed by nuclear waste? I do from time to time write off the top of my head, without spending the time to google. It's how I made the error in calling tritium the third lightest nuclei, and also how I caught it.

You are claiming to be a tritium expert, by the way, not a google geologist.

I may glance over some of yours from time to time, though, when I need to unwind. Your posts have a certain je n'ai sais pas quoi... tritated fish who prevents diffusion has to be the best, but many others have approached that level.

I love your stuff. I'm still giggling about the fish. I'll probably be laughing over this one for weeks and weeks.

[struggle4progress]

67. My point regarding "chalcophiles" and "siderophiles" is not so ..

.. difficult to understand: the Goldschmidt geochemical classification is based on relative elemental fractionation in mineral melts, such as the asteroids and smelter slags that Goldschmidt originally investigated; the classification contemplates temperature regimes at which biological molecules would dissociate and the CHON would escape as gas (being "atmophiles" in the Goldschmidt view); it follows that the Goldschmidt classification cannot provide significant insight into and has no place in any discussion of biochemical mechanisms.

When you spout this sort of nonsense, I am strongly tempted to regard it as evidence of ignorance or of bad faith, because I have difficulty imagining other explanation. And for some of your arguments, I really see no explanation except bad faith: for example, when I disagree with your discussion of tritium diffusion, your reaction consists of a series of bizarre misrepresentations, such as (#59) an implication that I am asserting "that because tritium is fixed in cellulose is something other than diffuse."

[hunter]

68. There's an interesting article in the June 2005 Scientific American

"Doubt is Their Product" by David Michaels. He was a Clinton appointee, "assistant secretary of energy for environment, safety, and health," so I'm certain he is unworthy of respect having suffered Monica's oral sex by association, but he says some interesting stuff, especially about the regulation of beryllium in the workplace under the Clinton administration as compared to the Bush administration. (Be-9, the most common isotope of Beryllium, has a half life of, OMG, forever!!!!!)

In the software industry we call this sort of thing "FUD" short for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. (If you are using Internet Explorer to read this, then you are a victim... Get thee to firefox!)

If you are so inclined, you might wear out your mouse-clicking finger spreading Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

Google FUD is perhaps the lowest form of the art. To be really good at FUD you need a doctorate and a few fellowships. Then you can drive those fast cars and really fast women. They give you a VISA and you never see the bill.

But FUD is not the exclusive domain of any political group, right or left, green or dirty-rotten-brown-nicotene-nuclear-waste-oxytocin-stained-fingers.

Since the original post was about Yucca Mountain, I'll present an idea that may or may not be correct, but is certainly worthy of discussion:

After a thousand years of radioactive decay, nuclear power plant waste probably isn't any more dangerous than a lot of other toxins we are now spewing.

Remember, many common toxic wastes (like beryllium) have a "half-life" of forever. It could very well be true that one thousand year old nuclear waste is no more dangerous than the radioactive ore it was made from.

Let the FUD games begin... or not.

[struggle4progress]

30. Actually, Ce-137, the isotope involved in the Brazilian accident, IS ..

.. a major isotope in spent fuel, and it is responsible for much of the early hazard presented by spent fuel.

Although you object to calling Ce-137 "reactor waste," the nuclear industry, beginning about thirty years ago, started propagandizing food irradiation precisely because the industry believed reprocessing spent fuel to remove Ce-137 could be used to transfer the liability for the Ce-137 hazard to other parties.

If nothing else, the Brazilian accident certainly suggests clearly (if in an extreme manner) that it is prudent to limit unnecessary exposure to Ce-137.

[NNadir]

31. I would agree that it is necessary to limit "unnecessary" exposure.

I think reasonable people everywhere agree that one should limit "unnecessary" exposures to many thousands of things.

I for instance think that we would limit unnecessary exposure to mercury - which is why I support nuclear power.

The accident at Goiana was unnecessary exposure, certainly

I have never denied that Cs-137 is a major constituent of spent fuel either. I have written quite extensively about what fission products are.

However it is complete lunacy to insist that the creation of something is the same as exposure to it. That the world produces millions of tons of gasoline which is hardly the same thing as saying people will drink it.

The attachment of the Goiana incident to commercial nuclear power is a demonstration of exactly how weak and pathetic the anti-nuclear argument is. As it happens, no one is arguing to distribute fission products in slums. I certainly am not. No one is arguing to increase exposure anywhere. I wrote a long discussion of the mineral pollucite - which exists in some of the oldest rocks on earth - demonstrating just one of many options to prevent unnecessary exposure to radiocesium isotopes. This went over the heads of those whose claim to justification for their irrational fear of the word "nuclear" depends on the claim that the existence of radioisotopes is identical to exposure to radioisotopes, but what can you say. It's not like you can expect such people to be rational.

At the very same time as I was discussing things like the chemistry of pollucite, I challenged to radiation paranoid to tell me how they intended to remove the billions of curies of radiopotassium from the seas, since the quantity of radiopotassium dwarfs - and always will dwarf no matter how much nuclear power is generated - the amount of radiocesium on the planet. What I got back as I recall was some precious gibberish about how radiopotassium was less dangerous because it was more dilute than radiocesium. I didn't want to suggest that we could provide the same dilution by simply dumping Cesium in the ocean, because I didn't want their tiny heads to explode. (This is not, btw, a claim that dumping Cs in the ocean is a good idea.)

Not one illiterate radiation paranoid can produce an fatal incident of radiocesium killing a person in the United States as the result of commercial nuclear power. From the carrying on and crying about it, you would think that it was at least as dangerous as volatile mercury from coal plants, but it is not.

Now, if someone is making the argument that radiotherapy should be banned because of Goiana, this would be less weak. However, such a person would have to address people who are dying and want radiotherapy. Of course, certain types of radiotherapy are now available because of the nuclear energy industry, but it is not necessary for radiotherapy to exist in order to justify nuclear energy. The justification for nuclear energy is very, very, very much simpler - except apparently for simpletons - it's called global climate change.

Given the low level of thinking we expect from the radiation paranoid, we would not, of course expect them to think about the number of lives saved by radiotherapy and compare to them to the lives lost at Goiana. They don't do comparisons apparently. For them, everything exists in isolation.

[struggle4progress]

33. Who claimed "Nevada .. bears zero responsibility for nuclear materials"?

[struggle4progress]

34. You claim: "The .. legislature of Nevada is .. declaring .. lives lost ..

to coal are worthless .. compared to .. lives .. lost to .. 'nuclear waste' "

It appears that once again you misrepresent the views of those with whom you disagree. It would perhaps be more accurate to assert that Nevada legislature has complained about the science and politics of Yucca Mountain. What in the article at the top of this thread, or what other material, supports the idea that the Nevada legislature has made any such comparison?

[struggle4progress]

35. You didn't ask for a reactor waste example, and the post to which you ..

.. are responding does seem to have claimed the materials are reactor wastes.

The Brazilian nuclear medical material sources, under discussion, having been abandoned, can be reasonably described as nuclear medical wastes.

[struggle4progress]

36. Who argued "nuclear power .. should be banned because .. Goiana"?

[jpak]

40. Jeez - I just got off the phone with the company that supplies my

radioisotopes.

The rep said they have their own cyclotrons to make tritium and 14C and none of the other isotopes I use come from reactors.

wrong again...

[GumboYaYa]

41. It doesn't matter how far you try to narrow the inquiry, there

will be examples that can be cited. The first question was whether anyone could cite an example of a death caused by nuclear waste, which was easy. Now it has changed to "reactor waste" since the first question was so easily handled.

If you are looking for examples of the mishandling of reactor waste, you need look no farther than the fuel reprocessing plant in Gore, Oklahoma. It's 22 year record includes killing one man and injuring lots of others, not to mention emitting excessive amounts of pollutants into the Arkansas River. There are plenty more examples of these types of problems with nuclear power.

It is very difficult to take anyone seriously when they so adamantly refuse to acknowledge that which is obvious to anyone who has looked at this issue. Nuclear waste and radioactive materials, when mishandled, can be a big problem. We can not assume that everyone is going to use and dispose of nuclear materials properly. Proper use and disposal of nuclear materials requires worldwide cooperation that simply does not exist. That is why we should minimize the number of nuclear plants being built and focus on conservation and other sources of power IMO.

[jpak]

44. Biggest-"Fib"-Ever

"there are millions of people on the planet who think that such (radiation) therapy should be banned."

Who are these "millions"???? Where do they reside???? What organization represents them???? What are the names of their leaders or spokespersons????

Second biggest "fib"...

"The alternative is coal."

Global wind and PV generating capacity will most certainly overtake global nuclear generating capacity by 2020 - and global nuclear capacity will most certainly decline between 2010 and 2020.

Again - global wind generating capacity will increase by 8000 MW and global PV module production will exceed 1100 MW this year alone - both are growing exponentially by double-digits each year.

Reality.

[Massacure]

52. How can you say? Your not a psychic.

[hunter]

46. Overall, it's my opinion that Yucca Mountain is boondoggle.

Burying stuff in the desert is a very primitive response to this sort of problem.