The BBC produced a documentary broadcast on september 15, examining nuclear safety in light of the Fukushima events. It’s a generally pro-nuclear piece, but there are certainly images in here, particularly of Japanese exclusion-zone refugees, that would have to give almost anyone pause..
The program presenter is a nuclear physicist who tells us he is completely neutral in the argument. I’m posting the whole thing here since so many people seem to be angry with me for perceived anti-nuclear bias. ( I think I’m a nuclear realist, actually – but more on that in the future)
Below, a recent, very similarly formatted investigation on Australian “60 Minutes”, had a different perspective – which includes impacts on the rescue workers who responded to the disaster, and illnesses other than thyroid cancer, which BBC focuses on exclusively.
I am posting also a short rebuttal to the BBC piece, by investigator Goddard’s Journal who has been doing some analysis of the available media and literature post-fukushima. He does a good job of pointing out some major weaknesses in the BBC piece. I think there is an argument to be made for some kind of nuclear generation using advanced processes, as BBC mentions – but, to their credit, they make it clear that none of these alternatives currently exist.
Good article.
You wouldn’t expect any real nuclear critique from the Royal Charter TV (the only one publicly run in the UK: BBC) of a state which supports and relies on nuclear power, would you?
Here one of the German public broadcasters (subtitled) about the aftermath in Japan => ZDF: Frontal21
You would hardly see such reports on BBC.
I’m nuclear agnostic. There are lower impact and renewable sources of electricity out there, and we ought to eventually wean ourselves off of nuclear. For the Navy, nuke propulsion seems to be a way to go that provides tactical benefit, allowing ships to be at sea for long deployments.
Let’s remember the real lesson of Fukushima: a first-generation BWR that is hit by a 26-foot tsunami will melt down. I think that we can extrapolate that lesson to any nuclear power plant. However, 26-foot tsunamis are pretty rare and completely unknown in many parts of the world, so the Fukushima accident has no relevance to nuclear power plants in such locations.
Peter, I think that it is reasonable to be suspicious of nuclear power under certain circumstances. Some of the older plants out there don’t strike me as acceptably safe. But modern systems are quite robust. Moreover, we have greatly improved our knowledge of many of the risk factors involved, and we can take that into account in future designers. But we need a safety regime that aggressively replaces older plants with newer plants, and the high political obstacles to building new nuclear plants bias utilities towards keeping old ones running too long.
Let’s not forget that there’s a lot of emotionalism surrounding nuclear power issues, which tend to interfere with rational analysis of the issues. Moreover, there are a lot of outright myths regarding nuclear power issues, the most egregious of which is the claim that “we don’t know what to do with the waste”. That statement is *politically* correct, but *technically* incorrect.
The *real* lesson of Fukushima is that the nuclear industry was caught out again because of incompetence / profit over safety. They built a nuke in an extremely active earthquake zone which is regularly hit by tsunami and they put backup generators in the basement.
Of course, tsunamis are not the only reason nukes can fail catastrophically – that’s just a silly talking point from the nuke cult to distract from the obvious fallibility of greedy humans and their fallible machines. All it takes is alignment of an ‘impossible’ event or two and a nuclear reactor starts uncontrollably pumping deadly radiation in to the environment.
Yeah, people tend to get “emotional” when they are forced to leave their homes forever or their children are born deformed or they develop cancers. People are funny like that.
> …the claim that “we don’t know what to do with the waste”. That statement is *politically* correct, but *technically* incorrect.
Ooh, an internet expert has worked out what no one else has – apart from digging a very deep, very expensive hole in a geologically stable feature, burying it and hoping for the best for the next ~1 million years. Do tell! Preferably using technology that exists and that is technically / economically viable. 😉
I just watched your rebuttal and, as always, it’s excellent. All of your points are very well-developed. I’m a little chary of the 985,000 death figure for Chernobyl, because they’re comparing actual deaths over a gigantic area with the number of deaths that they project would have occurred had not Chernobyl blown up. Yet, isolating the effect of Chernobyl seems impossible to me. Remember that just four years after Chernobyl, the Soviet Union collapsed, leading to dramatic social and political changes that put lots of stress on specific groups of people. In some places, quality of health care diminished as funding sources dried up or were switched around.
There are just too many confounding variables to permit us to put much faith in that 985,000 figure. I agree that the thyroid cancer figures alone are absurd, and that a proper accounting would including the entire area subjected to radioactivity from Chernobyl, which was gigantic. Nevertheless, a bottom-up analysis, looking at changes in mortality for specific factors, is the only way to do this; the top-down analysis just doesn’t have any reliability.
Otherwise, your comments are quite telling and really nail down some crucial points. Most useful was the graph of mortality over time, showing how long it takes radiation-induced cancer to manifest itself.
At some point I’ll wade into the nuclear thing with a vid of my own. I have a lot to say.
but the big barrier to nuclear has ALWAYS been financial – it is a mischaracterization to say that nuclear protesters or greens shut the industry down. It died because a bunch of utilities went belly up, due in large part to nuclear snafus.
Peter, thanks for providing something level-headed and rational on nukes. BTW, why didn’t the narrator visit the birth-defects ward at the Kiev hospital that they showed in The Battle of Chernobyl?
The script for the BBC piece could have come directly from the Nuclear Energy Institute. Anyone familiar with the talking points used by nuke propagandists will recognise much of the content: focus on thyroid cancer which is amongst the most treatable; distract from the nuclear disaster by talking about the tsunami; try to portray evacuation as an irrational response to the radiation; point out that no one has died from the radiation – while failing to mention that it will take years or decades for cancers and deformities to develop. It’s propaganda of the worst kind.
80,000+ Japanese have been evacuated from their homes. Many, perhaps all, will never return home. Does it seem likely that the Japanese government / TEPCO would have evacuated all those people with all that entails if they could have made an argument that it was safe? Al-Khalili’s suggestion that people should stay is revolting. He’s a marvellous demonstration of ‘the bravery of being out of range’. Let’s see him take his wife and children to live there.
I think Al-Khalili gives a hint of the mockery or sneering tone directed at mental health problems that result from radiation contamination. It’s a common theme from the nuke shills and useful idiots – insinuate that anyone who suffers ill-health due to the stress of constant fear is not a ‘real’ victim. There has already been an increase in suicides in the areas affected by the fallout – but not the tsunami disaster zones. This is just another good reason to despise the nuke lobby, their tactics and their acolytes.
Al-Khalili’s attempts to downplay the effects of Chernobyl were sickening. Absolutely disgusting denial of reality, almost identical to George Monbiot and Mark Lynas in the UK. The nuke lobby has been very successful here recently. Here are some indicators of where the truth lies:
* WHO / IAEA 2006 (The Chernobyl Forum) = 9000 – “…there may be up to 9,000 excess cancer deaths due to Chernobyl among the people who worked on the clean-up operations, evacuees and residents of the highly and lower-contaminated regions in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine.” http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr20/en/index.html + http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/who_chernobyl_report_2006.pdf
* International Agency for Research on Cancer = 16,000 – “…about 16,000 cases of thyroid cancer and 25,000 cases of other cancers may be expected due to radiation from the accident and that about 16,000 deaths from these cancers may occur.” http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2006/pr168.html
* Union of Concerned Scientists = 27,000 – How Many Cancers Did Chernobyl Really Cause? http://allthingsnuclear.org/post/4704112149/how-many-cancers-did-chernobyl-really-cause-updated
* TORCH (independent scientists, commissioned by the German Green Party) = 60,000 – “…the worldwide collective dose of 600,000 person sieverts will result in 30,000 to 60,000 excess cancer deaths.” http://www.chernobylreport.org/?p=summary + http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/topics/dokbin/118/118559.torch_executive_summary@en.pdf
Estimates keep going up as far as 985,000 offered in the NYAS publication, mentioned in the rebuttal video. But anyone who knows nothing of the subject would now think only a handful of people died as a result of Chernobyl if they simply accepted this BBC propaganda fiction.
As for Al-Khalili’s claim to being completely neutral, we should judge him on his output not his self-serving claims. He’s not likely to say anything else! He’s another physicist, like David MacKay, who claims impartiality while doing nothing but boosting nuclear. I guess we should expect nothing less from people whose profession is so closely tied to the nuclear industry. Also, he is associated with http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/ which has close ties to the nuclear industry.
Sadly, this is another example of how the BBC is sometimes used as a vehicle for those with an agenda. They’ve provided plenty of air time to ACC deniers in the past. Looks like they’re now toeing the pro-nuke UK government line….
P.S. Good news elsewhere:
* One of UK’s largest energy companies, Scottish and Southern Energy, ends involvement with nuclear power to focus on renewable green energy. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-15034767
My beef with nuclear reactors is mainly the waste they generate and the problem it presents with clean up and storage. Also I have the biggest problem with older plants and where certain plants are cited. The newer generation is a lot safer than the one at Fukushima. But then again, if they do go wrong, they can go horribly wrong…
So not a fan of nuclear reactors. But they will probably play some role with transitioning away from fossil fuels.
But I am looking forward to developments like the thorium reactors he mentioned. They have the potential to be a lot cheaper and safer than current uranium based reactors. As thorium in itself can’t sustain a nuclear reactor, cut of the external source of neutrons and the reactor will shut down. So if they can deliver on these kind of promises they would be interesting.
But as these technologies aren’t available yet, I prefer to err on the side of caution and use nuclear reactors as least as possible, or not at all:
http://www.realsceptic.com/2011/09/24/is-nuclear-power-safe/
I’m looking forward to your video on the subject.
Thorium reactors are vapourware, used by the nuke industry to distract from what they are trying to sell now and in order to perpetuate the industry.
They’ve been using the same tactic since day one: the *next* generation of nukes will be infallible and “too cheap to meter”. They never deliver on their promises.
Renewables are already cheaper than nukes, produce no toxic waste and offer zero chance of destroying societies due to catastrophic failure. What’s left to debate?!
I’m not entirely sure if they are actually vapourware. Research is being done, and some of it looks promising, but it’s not exactly around the corner.
My position on these types of reactors can be compared to my position on fusion. Very interesting and promising technology, but also not around the corner.
So suffice to say I won’t be relying on both to help us transition from fossil fuels. And as such I won’t include them in any feasible plan (as that would need technologies that are available and work). But please don’t mind me looking forward to some nice results. 😉
Now I’m not actually debating that we should go nuclear, or should wait till certain technologies are available, far from it. My post is more aimed as a musing on existing nuclear reactors and potential new technologies. As such it is aimed at getting feedback and ideas from others, to help me refine my own position and make me think.
On the practical side I’m all in favour for implementing existing renewable energy sources: wind, solar, biomass, hydro, wave, and what not. As they are existing feasible solutions to get us off fossil fuels. And these technologies I prefer.
I only mention nuclear as it might help during the transition as there could be cases where renewables don’t provide enough energy. But suffice to say a nuclear reactor wouldn’t be the first option I’d consider.
> Research is being done, and some of it looks promising…
Thorium nuclear has been researched for 50+ years by multiple countries without result. It’s vapourware until someone unveils an economically and technically feasible commercial MSR / LFTR. All we have at the moment is YouTube videos and PowerPoint slides telling us how wonderful it is.
Meanwhile, we should have started mitigating carbon pollution 20 years ago. Let’s not lose site of the urgency with which we should now be acting. Talking about some wonder technology (according to the nuke fan club) is a distraction from what needs to be done with the technology that works *now*.
> I only mention nuclear as it might help during the transition…
There’s nothing “transitional” about new nuclear reactors. They soak up billions of $$$s in capital, they require a massive infrastructure to support them, they take 10+ years to deploy, they need fuelling for 50+ years, they continually add to a growing mountain of highly toxic waste that needs storing somewhere securely for at least 100,000 years.
Nukes don’t mitigate climate change – they exacerbate it.
I’m not disagreeing with you on this. I specifically said we should not wait with phasing out fossil fuels and replace it with currently available renewable energy technologies. As we simple don’t know if these new technologies will become available, or when, or how feasible they are when they become available. I find these potential technologies interesting and hope they will become available (if we can ‘burn’ nuclear waste it will be worth the effort)
Considering we need to act now waiting is not an option. And it’s not something I’m arguing for.
Apologies, I didn’t intend for you to think I thought you were disagreeing with me. I’m simply hammering home my point. 🙂
I think that even discussing thorium nukes, etc. is a pointless distraction. See:
* Thorium Fuel: No Panacea for Nuclear Power. “Research and development of thorium fuel has been undertaken in Germany, India, Japan, Russia, the UK and the U.S. for more than half a century. Besides remote fuel fabrication and issues at the front end of the fuel cycle, thorium‐U‐233 breeder reactors produce fuel (“breed”) much more slowly than uranium-plutonium‐239 breeders. This leads to technical complications. India is sometimes cited as the country that has successfully developed thorium fuel. In fact, India has been trying to develop a thorium breeder fuel cycle for decades but has not yet done so commercially.” http://www.ieer.org/fctsheet/thorium2009factsheet.pdf
Even if a thorium LFTR / MSR design is produced that becomes commercially viable, it is *decades* away. Decades that we don’t have. And by the time it arrives, what will solar cost? It’ll be as cheap as roof shingles. And grid-scale storage will be in place. Why would we need multi-billion $$$ power plants that offer massive central points of failure then?
I believe that thorium is just another propaganda ploy by the nuke industry. It’s another ‘utopia’ that is just around the corner if we give them just a few more billion $$$s for research. That’s how they’ve marketed their product from the very beginning – the *next* version will be ‘perfect’… and that distracts us from what they are selling *now*.
Yeah I noticed you were hammering the point. 😉
Again, nothing with what you say I disagree. The technology is indeed decades away from being usable. Hence my example of fusion, also a technology that will take decades to develop. It also has been in development for about the same time as the thorium reactors. But we are a resourceful race and I wouldn’t be amazed we got both working, although it will take some time (granted, they are further along with fusion).
And I never intended it to be a distraction (readers of my blog and people who follow my videos know I prefer the direct implementation of renewable energy). I only mentioned, for example thorium reactors, as the type of technologies that if they will work as advertised as something we could consider using. But the main thing that makes me consider these types of reactors is that they can help us get rid of all the nuclear waste we have.
I won’t recommend it as a replacement for renewables. And someone advocating it as a technology we should wait for, or as a technology (almost) ready for implementation, will get slammed down by me just as hard as some of the fossil fuel nonsense I encounter:
🙂
I’m certainly not suggesting we stop research, but I totally oppose nuclear being used for commercial electricity production.
Even without the expense, the waste, the catastrophic risk, and the weapons proliferation, nuclear is still undesirable because it is anti-democratic. It concentrates wealth and political power in to the hands of the state and the wealthiest few.
Nuclear = fascist. Renewables = democratic.
A great speech from a man who is sadly no longer with us:
* “Solar energy is the energy of the people. To use this energy does not require big investments of only a few big corporations. It requires billions of investments by billions of people. They have the opportunity to switch from being a part of the problem to becoming a part of the global solution.” http://www.rightlivelihood.org/scheer_speech.html
That’s a good response to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill!’. I’ll check out your other vids.
Cheers,
David.
Collin, the waste issue was, from a strictly scientific viewpoint, pretty well resolved way back in the 1970s with a lengthy report from the American Physical Society examining all aspects of the problem, concluding that disposal in bedded salt or stable hard rock formations was a reliable method. That led to the development of the WHIPP project, which was meant to prove the concept. And in fact, WHIPP *did* prove the concept; all the technical data it produced demonstrated quite plainly that it was a safe and reliable means of disposal.
So why was WHIPP shut down? Simple: Harry Reid, majority leader in the Senate, is from Nevada, where Whipp is located. NIMBY arguments and political heft, not technical or scientific arguments, determined the fate of WHIPP.
One other thing: people misunderstand the dangers imposed by high-level rad waste. Lots of people like to point out that this stuff remains radioactive for millions of years. That’s true, but what they’re forgetting is that the amount of radioactivity diminishes with time. Yes, that stuff is very dangerous today, but the health threat it imposes diminishes exponentially. 10,000 years down the road, you’d have to inhale a lot of dust from it to impose any risk. You could eat some of the dirt and run a significant risk, but it wouldn’t kill you outright. The real issue is population dose. If, after 10,000 years, the whole mess was splattered all over the place, and lots of people were exposed to it, then there’d be a significant public health issue.
Meanwhile, we’re manufacturing stupendous quantities of materials that are also toxic, materials that remain toxic forever, and our disposal plan for these materials is to spray them on our crops. There are also huge industrial facilities busily manufacturing an invisible substance so deadly that a single touch kills instantly. And how are they disposing of this horribly dangerous substance? In their inhuman lust for profit, these greedy bastards have built a huge, elaborate system that feeds it into our homes, exposing our children to it. Every year, hundreds of Americans die agonizing deaths from this industrial effluent, but nobody raises a peep of protest.
Ah, so the “scientific” solution is to dig a hole, drop the waste in and hope that it does not leak out for the (up to) 1 million years that it remains dangerous. That’s so sciencey!
Anyone who wants to grasp how ludicrous this plan is should watch http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/
Also, Germany’s planned sites for a repository in salt mines didn’t manage to remain stable for 50 years, let alone 1 million. Their failure to find a geologically stable repository in their country played a big part in Germans rejecting nuclear power.
Here’s the nuke industry’s 100,000-year plan for waste storage:
1. first 40 years: take large salary and then take large pension
2. next 99,960 years: dead
P.S. It’s WIPP – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant – not “WHIPP”.
I know they can make very good storage facilities for nuclear waste. The problem though is you need to maintain those, with existing technologies, till the waste stored in them doesn’t provide a danger anymore. And like you mention this takes more or less 10.000 years (there is longer lived stuff being produced but I’ll ignore it for now).
That is an awfully long time and a lot can happen during it. Even small leakages in containment is something you need to take into consideration. Now technologies of shortening the lifespan of this waste will be developed in that time frame. But that will only deal with the material itself, not any other contaminated materials or the storage facility itself.
As such I find it quite the legacy to give to future generations, and dealing with this waste, and the eventual clean up, has the potential to be very expensive.
So I rather use it as less as possible till we have a way of actually dealing with the waste and ‘destroying’ it. Or we might just be trading one problem (CO2) with another (nuclear waste).
Collin, these repositories are not intended to have infinite capacity; the plan has always been to fill one up to capacity, bulldoze millions of tons of rock and soil into the mine, seal it up with thousands of tons of concrete, and then cover the whole entrance area with big boulders. The only people with the technical capability of penetrating such a repository would also have the technical capability to deal with the rad waste.
Moreover, the whole point of these repositories is that they’re situated in geological formations that have not changed in millions of years. There are plenty of places on this earth that have undergone rapid change, and plenty of places that have not changed at all. There are rocks in Canada that are 3 billion years old. Australia is a very old continent, with very little happening there in millions of years. People have difficulty appreciating “deep time”, the idea of geological processes taking place over millions of years.
I agree that it’s a bad legacy to leave to future generations, but climate change is definitely a worse legacy. We don’t have any snow-white options here, just lighter and darker gray options.
I’m also in agreement with you that we should give it lower priority than solar PV, wind, hydro, and geothermal — but I also give it higher priority than coal, and coal supplies nearly half the electricity in the USA.
Oh, and on a lighter note, my own proposal for dealing with rad waste is to make it a feature, not a bug. We also produce humongous quantities of coal ash every year; with just ten years’ supply of that coal ash, we could make enough “cinder blocks” to build a pyramid ten times larger than the ones at Giza. So build a monster pyramid and seal the rad waste inside, making it the Ninth Wonder of the World. Put it in downtown Las Vegas — they’d love that kind of thing. Do this over and over again and millions of years from now, visiting aliens will scratch their heads wondering about the religious beliefs of these long-dead people. And for real permanence, we could give it aluminum siding!
The problem I have with what you just said about sealing the waste is that it’s a hard thing to do. Even if you use geological formations that have been stable for very long times. It doesn’t mean they are failure free and absolutely fool proof.
As indicated by the example given by BlueRock of the leak in one of the storage facilities in Germany. This one is built in an abandoned salt mine, meaning it is stored in a bedded salt formation. Which you indicated as reliable.
The leak isn’t big in this case, but it has raised serious concerns on how reliable these type of storage locations are.
Collin, what BlueRock is NOT telling you is that the Asse II facility was never used for high-level waste: it was used for weaker stuff. No spent fuel went into it. Moreover, their storage standards were much, much lower than the standards for spent fuel disposal. The stuff was just in drums: no vitrification, no big thick containers, no careful positioning, just truck the barrels in and dump them in the mine. Furthermore, the mine was already leaking long before they started dumping rad waste in there, and they KNEW that it was leaking water.
Would you refuse to buy a brand-new electric automobile because a jury-rigged, twenty-year-old electric contraption failed to work?
The Asse II experience has no relevance to high-level rad waste storage; it’s a completely different set of circumstances.
What Asse II was *not* used for has nothing to do with what is being discussed – the failure of Germany to find a stable geological feature that will remain stable for hundreds of thousands of years. Gorleben has been disputed for decades and is still considered unsuitable.
This is just an example of how difficult it is to build millennial-scale storage facilities for radioactive waste. Your suggestion that it is a solved or trivial problem is ignorant nonsense.
lol. You’d have thought I’d learned by now: never believe anything you say.
> …the Asse II facility was never used for high-level waste…
“After media reports in 2008[1][2] about brine contaminated with radioactive caesium-137, plutonium and strontium politicians accused the operator of not having informed the inspecting authorities.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Asse_II
At least you’re *consistent*. 😉