Sorry, but this Age op-ed makes my teeth grind.
A FEW weeks ago, a neighbour from our street left a message in our letterbox informing us that his wife A, had died, and that a memorial service would be held.
It was very sad to read. A was a delightful young woman. The couple had come to parties at our home, and she was elegant, charming and witty, even though she had little voice, weakened by the cancer in her throat. The reason she had cancer, and would eventually die, leaving her husband and child, was Chernobyl.
A and her husband had come to Australia from Poland. After one of the reactors at Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power station blew up in 1986, its plume of lethal fall-out was carried on the winds far and wide. Poland was next door; it shares a border with Ukraine, and A had been affected by the radiation.
The author then goes on to argue that nuclear power is too risky – disagreeing with claims that Western reactors are safer than Soviet ones – and we should use solar power instead.
For one, we are expected to take on trust that the cancer that caused the tragically premature death of the author’s friend is the result of Chernobyl, on the basis that a) she was in Poland at the time of the accident, and b) “Her husband said the doctors had told him that they had never seen such a cancer”.
For another, we are expected to infer because the author’s friend allegedly died as a result of Chernobyl, that Chernobyl is unacceptably risky. I presume the author never drives a car, or rides a bus, or uses a product delivered in a truck, because the fumes from each (ignoring the greenhouse implication) is known to cause the premature deaths of hundreds of Australians every year.
For another, the author completely dismisses the possibility that new reactors could be safer than Chernobyl. If he bothered to research the matter at all, he might appreciate that amongst the many differences between Chernobyl and Western (and modern Russian) reactors, the biggest is that reactors operating in the west have upwards of a metre of concrete and steel between them and the outside world, a feature not present in the Chernobyl design? Has he not considered that that might make a teeny tiny bit of difference?
The author then goes on to infer (and I’m slightly cynically paraphrasing here, admittedly) that because the government subsidized two-thirds of the cost of the solar panels on his roof, and he’s read about plug-in hybrid vehicles, the energy problem is solved. While there are a diversity of views about energy issues on LP, I suspect you’d get 100% agreement among the energy nerds that it’s just not that simple.
The author of this op-ed and I probably agree on one thing when it comes to energy issues – we need to think about risks. But can we have a rational discussion rather than a sad, but hardly evidentiary, anecdote about the death of somebody’s neighbour?
RELATED: Peter Garrett has approved a new uranium mine in South Australia near the existing Beverley mine. The Four Mile mine will use in-situ leaching to extract the uranium. Scott Ludlam has descibd the decision as delusional. Have at it.
Well, it might have been Chernobyl that caused her cancer. It might also have been an x-ray she got at her dentist’s. Who knows?
Ummm, yeah, a lotta op-ed page writers aren’t very familiar with the workings of Empirical Evidence, Collection of. This is not new (and I have to admit to being the type of reader who isn’t that alert to picking up the flaws in arguments like the one quoted. Thank God I’m not one of those laymen trying to debunk you-know-what.)
Robert, is this to be the LP thread on Garrett’s decision yesterday?
well, Robert, broadly, the author is blondingly, obviously right.
As I generally don’t burst into flights of abusive rudeness on LP (or anywhere elsewhere for that matter) that will be the extent of my comment.
Yeah these stories need a human element, but there’s no doubt that Chernobyl did cause a shedload of cancer.
The reason car-risk is more acceptable to people is because they have **some** personal control over it.
The reason car-risk is more acceptable to people is because it is an everyday risk, so commonplace that we don’t even think of it anymore. A nuclear disaster may be far less dangerous in aggregate, but it is rare and spectacular. For some reason, we seem more scared of rare and spectacular risks (think 9/11) than everyday ones (think smoking).
Robert posted “…we are expected to infer because the author’s friend allegedly died as a result of Chernobyl, that Chernobyl is unacceptably risky.”
Well, I think you would accept that the operation of that particular reactor on the day in question, was very risky indeed. With hindsight, all sorts of conclusions were drawn about operator error, graphite moderation, cooling systems, distortion of metal under extreme heat, the lack of outer sealing vessels to contain the escaping radionuclides, etc etc
Now you might say ad nauseam, but many died and many received extreme radiation doses. Add to that the initial Soviet attempt at blanketing of the disaster news. Must not lose face: lose a few lives, but must not lose face.
Then add to that the macabre monitoring of the radioactive plume as it drifted over parts of eastern and western Europe, over Scandinavia and Britain, out over the Atlantic; followed by a gentle arabesque to return over Wales to harm the sheeps.
Now quite possibly people draw entirely ignorant conclusions from the events, Robert. Fact is, it happened; it was a human and engineering disaster; and we’re all entitled to meditate upon it in our own way.
I’ll never forget the young family who returned to Bavaria from Melb just after the plume arose. Public health warnings were issued there: children are not to play in sandpits, home gardeners should not pick any of their fruit. This was as serious as a bad bushfire, and so much wider in its harms.
Sean, the only unequivocal evidence for cancers caused by Chernobyl is the kids who got thyroid cancer, which is nasty but very treatable.
Beyond that, there are projections for a few thousand additional extra deaths, but we’ll never know for sure. Why? Essentially, we don’t have a good model for the effects of low-level radiation, so scientists use something called the “linear-no-threshold” model for estimating the likely effects. Essentially, because we know high doses do cause significantly increased rates of cancer, we draw a straight line and say that low doses must slightly increase one’s risk. If millions of people have a slightly increased risk, a few thousand extra will die.
However, the evidence that this actually occurs is weak. For instance, natural radiation levels vary a lot depending on the composition of the soil and rock you live on, the water you drink, and your altitude. But there’s no evidence that people living in high natural radiation areas (many of whom are exposed to a lot more radiation than people around Chernobyl) have higher rates of cancer than the rest of us.
Paul: I’m puzzled as to why you can’t explain why I’m wrong without descending into abusive rudeness.
I lived the years of my childhood in the path of winds that frequently blew from the A bomb testing site of Maralinga in SA at the time of those several nuke explosions.
Along with thousands of others.
Many of who, most in fact, have like me, since moved out of the area and scattered over much of Australia.
I have never been the subject of an ongoing health study related to the diseases known to be caused by exposure to such radiation, nor has anyone that lived in the area been the subject of such a study or even statistical correlation, much less attempts at causation. At least as far as I know. The difficulties of conducting such research, if it were to be attempted, would be enormous.
But I do have, for what it is worth, an anecdote.
A friend of mine died from cancer a few years ago.
He came from the SE of SA, several hundred kms in a straight line from Maralinga, to live in Adelaide which is when we became friends.
But had lived his childhood, like me, in the path of the winds known to be carrying radiation.
And was the last of his siblings, several of them, to die of cancer.
Coincidence?
Direct result of Maralinga radiation?
In the absence of long term scientific medical studies who knows?
Actually, come to think of it, weren’t we assured there was no danger associated with those tests at the time?
So probably its just my suspicious mind.
‘Sean, the only unequivocal evidence for cancers caused by Chernobyl is the kids who got thyroid cancer, which is nasty but very treatable.’
No need to worry then. I’m with Paul Burns and Sean on this one.
Hi Robert,
OT: you know how they use water or graphite to reduce the speed of neutrons in reactors? The materials are called ‘moderat**s and the process is ‘moder***on’. Well, I made the mistake of using the full word in a post, so it’s gone into the sin bin: it is awaiting ‘m***ration’
The software possibly reacts similarly if someone uses an opposite of ‘extreme’, namely ‘mo**rate’???
just wondering….
Commercial insurance companies refuse to issue coverage to operators of nuclear reactors.
Greedy Capitalists Reject Money for Jam!!
…or maybe they know something about pricing risk…
On the plus side of the Garret decision, at least the SA mine will have environmental and OH&S procedures to keep it in line. More so than Nigeria for instance, one of the other countries known for uranium deposits, whose oil industry has poisoned rivers and the people who used to live on them.
I have a relative who contracted a rare, agressive, but luckily not mortal ovarian cancer at 30. Another relative died in their early teens of leukemia.
Neither of them ever lived near a nuclear reactor.
Didn’t live downwind of Maralinga (unless you count western Victoria as close enough).
See! Two cases unrelated to nuclear power or atomic weaponry. That’s data right?
Partly the problem is counting all cancers as one disease. Like calling all respiratory distress illnesses (Flu, Pneumonia, Colds) as a single disease. The other problem is assuming that there will be some “cause” of cancer. Sometimes shit just happens.
A good rule of thumb is that when vast amounts of money are involved, apply a healthy degree of scepticism to soothing claims that all is OK.
From the above article:
“At least 500,000 people – perhaps more – have already died out of the 2 million people who were officially classed as victims of Chernobyl in Ukraine, said Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine. “[Studies show] that 34,499 people who took part in the clean-up of Chernobyl have died in the years since the catastrophe. The deaths of these people from cancers was nearly three times as high as in the rest of the population.”
I’m not strongly anti-nuclear, but WHO has attributed 56 direct deaths to Chernobyl and estimated 4,000 extra cancer deaths. Your argument about better design & construction elsewhere is a better one than trying to downplay the seriousness of kids getting cancer.
Greep, one reason Garrett used to oppose uranium mines was because of their appalling environmental records, history of not meeting the required standards and repeatedly trying to cover up problems. This is in Australia. So while it’s definitely possible that Honeymoon will be significantly better run than Beverly, the odds are against that. Especially if you look at the detail of what’s proposed – the monitoring and reporting will be very similar to the failed Beverly system.
I’d go for an evidence based approach but unfortunately our government seems only interested in one sort of evidence – the dollar sort. Anything else falls into the round file for later attention.
Katz, same deal for uranium mines. Insurance is strictly short term and for a limited range of risks, and of course the big risks are not covered at all. They also fall under the “James Hardy Exemption” to liability laws, since they’re multinationals and already have a corporate structure designed to prevent recovery of extracted profits. But there’s always the taxpayer to pick up the pieces.
Chernobyl was like everything else in the Soviet Union, shoddily designed, shoddily built and shoddily maintained. It was designed in the 1960s and built in the 1970s. It’s silly to say that modern nuclear reactors are comparable. You might as well compare Trabants with modern cars.
Is this true? If it is true, might it have something to do with the fact that nuclear energy corporations tend to be run a bit on the socialistic side (sorry, Paul Burns) and don’t need to be underwritten by Lloyds of London or AIG (hmmmm, interesting reference there, Nickws).
That would account for the insurance problems then. Only poorly designed, shoddily constructed Soviet reactors can’t get insurance…
On the thyroid cancer issue, blame the post-disaster decisions made by the Soviet government. From the WHO:.
Nickws, if there is to be a nuclear power industry I want it run a bit on the socialistic side. Not the Soviet model to be sure, but also not the attitude to safety & infrastructure investment we see from, say, privatised railways.
My Mum (73) has had breast cancer and it seems like half her friends have now had it, too. She has also had brain cancer. Having the brain cancer worked out fine because it exposed a thyroid imbalance which has subsequently been fixed with medication. She is cracking on now.
My father has inoperable prostate cancer. It is being treated with radio therapy and he is statistically likely to die from something else before the prostate cancer gets him.
Who do I blame? Perth, WA is a long way from Chernobyl.
I’d just like to point out we had 8 nuclear reactors parked off Fremantle for the last week. No ill effects so far.
Robert: Bloody local cows!
“But for” the meltdown, the moo moos would have remained safe.
Robert
I’d largely agree. It seems to me that you missed the principal point. It really doesn’t matter whether the person you describe really did or didn’t contract cancer as a consequence of exposure to the Chernobyl disaster. If she did, then that is indeed tragic and every properly socialised person would wish that she had avoided it. IIRC the bulk of the Chernobyl-related deaths were people who went in to do the clean up and rescue though some estimates suggest that the number of people who will ultimately die prematurely as a result of Chernobyl may be as high as 90,000.
Let us make one or two observations however. Every rational human activity entails some risk of injury or premature death and cost, and some prospect of reward. Rational societies attempt to shift the balance away from the risk and cost side of the ledger and in favour of the reward side. Throughout all human history, human insight has been at best, partial, and more, we humans aren’t agreed on how to value things and so we have frequently, and still frequently, engage in practices that don’t apparently don’t optimise this balance. Humans have gone to war, allowed shoddy buildings to be constructed, allowed profiteering scoundrels to treat the commons (and sometimes people as well) as their personal property and so forth and humans have consequently suffered needlessly.
To return to the question of Chernobyl, one can see that Chernobyl was an especially good example of this. Chernobyl, most obviously, had no containment unit and thus, when it caught fire it was inevitable that the radioactive effluent would be released to the atmosphere. This in turn reflected the fact that for the prevailing government, the safety of its people was not a paramount concern — and perhaps not even a significant concern. The regime was unaccountable.
There was also virtually no safety culture at the plant, and the events leading up to the incident involved what amounted to an uncontrolled experiment in “I wonder what would happen if we did this?”
No contemporary plant would be built as Chernobyl was (in part because we have learned this as a painful lesson) and at least here in the west, our governments would never get away with it. Pointing to Chernobyl as an example of contemporary nuclear power makes as much sense as pointing to the first biplanes or the Titanic as an indication of the safety performance of contemporary aviation or shipping. I should note that we continue to use aircraft, even though most weeks there are serious aircraft crashes because we like the odds. We work these out by asking how many deaths and injuries per passenger mile are there. If they are low, and the benefit high, we hop on board. And risk is relative. If you were fleeing murderous bands of men with machetes in some failed state and a dodgy looking chap with a dodgy looking aircraft offered to fly you out of immediate danger, you might well think the risk worth it.
One therefore put Chernobyl into perspective. Per unit of energy output, far fewer people have been killed or injured as a result of nuclear energy production than is the case with coal. Over the next year in China alone, it’s quite likely that at least 3000 people (some of them little more than children) will dies in one kind of coal mining accident. A whole bunch more will get a bit closer to a life-terminating lung disease. The trucks carrying the coal will leave a toxic pall of PM that will slowly snuff out the life chances of people, and especially children in rural villages. And of course the effluent from coal-fired plants contains neurone destroying mercury, SO2 and radioactive particulates in sufficient quantity that we could extract commercial quantities of uranium ore from it. Worldwide, far more lives are shortened by resort to coal than resort to uranium, even allowing for energy output and even allowing for Chernobyl. And we can ensure that nothing on the scale of Chernobyl ever recurs …
Does that mean that nuclear energy is a sensible option? The answer to that, IMO, is “maybe, sometimes”. In some places, it may well be the most viable option, or indispensible at least in relation to baseload power. I’m not sure how a place like Japan could meet its needs without nuclear power or coal, or NG. Which should it use? Probably some combination of nuclear and NG.
Fran
Fantastic decision from Garret, it will be great for the economy.
Yep Robert, the thyroid cancers were cause by parental neglect ” if people had stopped giving locally supplied contaminated milk to children for a few months following the accident, it is likely that most of the increase in radiation-induced thyroid cancer would not have resulted.”
Think you could have phrased that better.
I wait with bated breath for the defence of in-situe leaching of uranium ores to begin.
No doubt when the local aquifers become radioactive the subsequent radiation induced cancers will be the fault of those who drink the water.
Huggy
“I’d just like to point out we had 8 nuclear reactors parked off Fremantle for the last week. No ill effects so far.”
Until they crash, sink or are bombed.
Speaking of bombing, would the effects of a Israeli/US airstrike on Iran’s nuclear program be less deadly than if their coal-fired or hydro power stations were targeted?
Re Garrett: “…forget extra-parliamentary movements, I’ll just get elected and change they system from withi…oh…sorry…”.
“Commercial insurance companies refuse to issue coverage to operators of nuclear reactors.”
A half-truth. In the US, where the anti-nuke people have spread this meme, the government provides free insurance for the operators; a relic of nuclear power’s pioneering days that congressional lobbying has ensured persists. In the UK the government insured them because they were state-owned, and this hidden subsidy was extended to artificially boost the price at privatisation (a typical Thatcher government maneouvre). In France they’re still state owned.
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So of course there’s no private insurance of these power plants – why pay for what the government gives free?
.
And Robert’s right. For Chernobyl just about everything that could go wrong – from the design stage on – did, with some really stupid decisions then being made by the Soviets. And remember Chernobyl is the biggest reactor ever built.
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Even so, the deaths will be a tiny fraction of Bhopal’s. They are far less than the annual loss of life due to coal-fired power station emissions, for example (FWIW, the traces of Radon in coal mean that is the biggest industrial source of radiation the general public is exposed to).
Huggy: It was the WHO’s quote, not mine, and you’ll note that I blamed the Soviet authorities whose responsibility it was to act.
As for in-situ leaching, the radioactive contaminant unenriched natural uranium and its trace decay products. The water will become chemically toxic well before it’d get dangerously radioactive.
Chav: the primary result of a (conventional) attack on Iran’s nuclear program would be a highly chemically toxic gas – uranium hexaflouride released into the air. This could potentially a lot of workers at the enrichment and conversion plants, but they are fortunately located in fairly isolated locations so the odds are that the gas would disperse before it reached heavily populated locations.
The Bushehr nuclear reactor is not yet operational, but the results of bombing an operational reactor could potentially be quite nasty. Would the Israelis be prepared to do it anyway?
Please point to evidence of the efforts of private US insurance companies to put and end to this particularly egregious example of socialism.
HuggyBunny @ 28 – aren’t the aquifers they’re mining already radioactive? Or is there something in the mining process that increases the radioactivity?
“I’d just like to point out we had 8 nuclear reactors parked off Fremantle for the last week. No ill effects so far.”
Are you sure?
Presuming you are referring to US nuclear warships or similar you may wish to check this out.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h948002p3n4xp51x/fulltext.pdf?page=1
A very brief summary:
US nuclear submariners were checked for cancers.
The report was not made public.
There was a release which basically said ‘no problem”
There were suspicions about methodology.
The report was obtained through FOI.
New calculations were made [they are explained in the article].
It seems nuke submariners may have significantly higher rates of cancer when compared to a similar cohort.
Could be a worry.
And the flipside of Katz’s incisive commentary is our inability to come to grips with the nuclear legacy
You’ll have to excuse my contempt for plans to expand the industry while such concerns are met with plaintive dismissal.
dk.au @ #35.
Makes my little whinge seem petty doesn’t it?
Or perhaps just reinforces it.
Although I’m a member of the Greens, I don’t agree completely with the party’s attitude to nuclear power. I think it should be considered as part of the solution to climate change (if one exists). However, I reckon Sen. Ludlum is absolutely correct to oppose the approval of the Four Mile mine. Acid leaching of any mineral deposit is not a good idea, particularly if the resulting contamination of the aquifer is radioactive.
As I understand in situ leaching is that you pump chemicals of one kind or another down a hole and you pump out some of it that has had some uranium dissolved in it.
see http://www.uraniumsa.org/processing/insitu_leaching.htm
Of course all the leachants stay around the mine site and never come to the surface elsewhere and find their way into some-ones drinking water. Believe that and you will believe any-thing.
Robert is technically correct, the uranium is not very radioactive, just a little bit and hey we all need some extra heavy metal and toxic leachants in our drinking water.
I guess the decision by Garret has really demonstrated that uranium mining is a very messy business no matter how you do it.
Chernoble has demonstrated that there are people who will go to any lengths to deny the dangers of nuclear power. They are even saying that the burning of coal is worse. You bet it is.
But the stunning logic of those who say we should implement another form of radioactive dissemination (nuclear power) because we have a really bad one (coal) in our midst is well – stunning.
Also: http://www.sea-us.org.au/pdfs/tmw00/TMW00-FSU-Asia.pdf (yes I know its the acid version)
Interesting that many who oppose methane withdrawal on the grounds of aquifer interference are also rabid supporters of nuclear energy.
Huggy
“I’d just like to point out we had 8 nuclear reactors parked off Fremantle for the last week. No ill effects so far.”
Hey Razor, maybe the radiation is affecting you thought processes. It’s widely accepted that cancer takes longer than a week to manifest symptoms. Is it rubbish day?
Anyway I think nuclear power has three show-stoppers:
Waste;
Fission;
Security
in order of importance. Waste is something that has never been addressed by the nuke industry and it’s something they’d really rather not talk about. The problem of fission and it’s associated dangers (cooling water, radioactive gases etc) is real but more easily deflected (aside from 3 Mile Island and Cherwhatsit the new ones are as safe as houses, don’t mention Japan). Security is the least potent as we haven’t really seen any evidence of fissile material being sold to naughty people or reactors being seized.
More questions should be asked about what a large scale implementation (i.e. fossil fuel replacement) of nuke power of would mean for the amount of waste and what new methods of disposal have been developed.a
So the (West) Germans, and other western Europoean govts, facing much lower exposures after the Chernobyl disater, were more careful with public health than the Soviet/Ukrainian authorities, stretched and hard-working though they were?
Why am I unsurprised? Still, I feel sorry for the parents and children close to the emissions.
Although some persons exposed may contract cancer not actually directly due to Chernobyl, there are likely to be others quite unsuspecting, whose cancer is mainly due to a low exposure. We don’t know the full story yet, on low exposures.
we may have had 8 reactors off freo but I bet we have a rash of pregnant women in 9 months time
Australia should have a full life cycle Uranium industry if it is commercially viable.
Razor: unlikely. Uranium enrichment is a capital-intensive industry that depends on three things – expert staff, access to the technology, and cheap electricity.
We have only one of those, and that advantage lasts only as long as we get it from existing coal-fired power plants.
Perhaps derrida derider at 30 would like to own up to his own half-truth and concede the US Government places what many see as an unrealistic low monetary limit on the insurance coverage.
Well, because the risks of nuclear power, healthwise and environmentally far outweigh any benefit.
Robert, many cancers are easily treatable. But often they have a boomerang effect. They come back. Its hard enough on adults who have cancer who understand what’s going on. I shudder to think how it affects kids who don’t quite grasp why they have to undergo the various medical treatments.
#42 “we may have had 8 reactors off freo but I bet we have a rash of pregnant women in 9 months time”
I’d be betting more on the chances of a rash of new babies in nine months meself
More people have died due to petroleum than due to any possible combination of nuclear accidents.
Many, *many* more due to coal.
Still many more due to hydroelectric. Or gas.
In fact, per megawatt-year, nuclear power has by far the safest record of any baseload generation technology every devised.
Fun fact: more radioactivity — including uranium, thorium, polonium et al — is released in European air by German coal-fired stations each year than Chernobyl released. A single ton of uranium replaces millions of tons of coal, folks.
Jacque@48
If the thorium and uranium were worth more money they could collect it at source and use it in their nuclear plants, thus serving two ends — power and abatement of toxics.
While there is a lot of uranium in coal, it would make a very low-grade uranium ore. At current prices you can’t extract it cost-effectively, even from fly ash.
Patrick;
Waste and security are bound together in a way. Radioactive waste is, in a meaningful sense, incompletely consumed nuclear fuel. If it is ‘hot’, it is because it still has energy.
Designs were being investigated in the USA for an “integral fast breeder”, which would use a compound fuel cycle to wring far more energy from the fuel. It had the property of both vastly multiplying the output per unit of fuel, plus rendering the resultant waste much less harmful.
However as part of the process, plutonium is produced and consumed; folk talked about what would happen if them terrsts got a hold of any. Despite the fact that it is far harder to make a useful plutonium-based nuclear weapon, this political consideration was enough to kill funding for IFR research.
While I personally suspect nuclear is the most rational solution to decarbonising the economy, I could easily be entirely wrong. I’d rather that the matter was left to the market to sort out. Solar or wind could be the most economical choice, but there’s no way to know for sure without some kind of market mechanism.
Sorry to intrude on a serious conversation but I am anxious to seek the permission of Nickws@2 to use the title “Empirical Evidence, Collection of” in pursuit of the useless task that some valid evidence be produced to back up assertions. I can understand he may want to retain it, but I think it should be shared around and become the starting point of many conversations on this and other blogs.
Jacques, every great energy infrastructure project has been intimately tied with political processes beyond simply the rational extraction of MWh. It took decades and decades to get coal and nuclear to the efficiencies they are today because they were ‘picked as a winner’ by some central agency. Why do you think ‘the market’ will sort it out this time by itself? These knee-jerk Hayekian retorts against central planning is such tiresome rhetoric.
My solution is simple: progressively retire the most polluting assets (coal fired power) and use a suite of policies to replace them in a manner that refrains from picking specific technologies. In the meantime, boost basic research funding (we’re good at that).
Robert@50
I assume you are correct otherwise I can see no reason why the coal companies emitting radioactive fly ash would not havoe found a means to harvest the actinides and turn a profit — no doubt while trumpeting their commitment to a cleaner environment. That’s why I made the point about the commercial value of the actinides.
Still, AIUI, since the highest grade ores are always exploited first, I wonder how poor the uranium ore containing material would have to become before the costs of recovery were comparable with the cost of recovery from fly ash? Would this occur before it became commercially feasible to reprocess spent fuel? I honestly don’t know. I recall reading some years ago that the Japanese had developed a means of extracting uranium from seawater. The point was that since the rivers persistently replenish the oceans, that this would be an inexhaustible supply, but IIRC the costs of recovery implied that uranium would have to be 3-4 times the then price of about $35 per pound to make it viable. Does anyone here know?
Oh, mediatracker, by all means apply the philosophy of science to crappy, manipulative agit-prop like the article in the Age RM based this thread on (notice how I was criticising MSM opinion writers, not whatever research paper you might be working on). Shucks, I wouldn’t want to lock you out of the debate.
But don’t act surprised if half the people on this thread were to accuse your argument of having the credibility of the Lavoisier Group’s opposition to climate change science.
Datum is the singular of data. An anecdote is not a datum though, for it to be a datum there would have to be some systmatic collection of the information, or scientific methodology.
One point to be made in support of Robert (and which does not necessarily imply any endorsement of nuclear energy) is that a person living in Poland until 1986 would have been exposed to any number of potentially carcinogenic pollutants from conventional industrial technologies and in the food supply. The Stalinist command economies of the USSR and Eastern Europe were environmental disasters on an epic scale.
I certainly believe nuclear power should pay the full costs of waste disposal and decommissioning – in fact I contend that the failure to make them pay for it has led directly to a failure to use better options for this. This cost is likely to keep it uneconomic unless we get quite desperate for a non-polluting source of baseload power.
But it really is annoying to see obvious bulldust about the dangers of operating nuclear plants, along with FUD about low-level radiation.
Let me give you an anecdote. About a decade ago a sewerage pipe from the toilets at Lucas Heights leaked into an adjacent creek. This was serious – the creek could have given nasty diseases to kids playing in it. But was that what led with the front-page news in the tabloids, and caused outraged press releases from green groups? No – it was the fact that the sewerage was “radioactive waste” because it had (barely detectable) traces of actinides in it. As seawater does.
It’s not just Chernobyl and the too-oft-noted environmentally disastrous credentials of the former Soviet Union that people should be worried about. Capitalist corner-cutting, bureaucratic incompetence and greed are features of the capitalist “free” west too…
At Elbmarsch, just outside of Hamburg in Germany, there are fears that radioactive leaks from the Krümmel nuclear power station and GKSS scientific research centre are causing abnormally high rates of childhood leukemia.
Also: “At the end of 2007, a national survey of nuclear power stations in Germany showed that the risk of contracting cancer rose dramatically for children living near a power plant.”
http://www.thelocal.de/national/20090707-20427.html
Wombo: there’s been a lot of these studies, some have shown an effect, others haven’t.
It’s interesting to watch Mike Rann’s reaction @35, in his rather dismissive reply he actually hints at the reason so many Aboriginal people feel betrayed by him personally, and by Labor politics.
The disappointment amongst them seems to be so incredibly deep and quite personal, and I think it’s because, for a time, he was seen to be a political figure who did have some sympathy for their situation, to which he refers in his response.
LaborSA let down Aborginal people in the 80’s particularly, and they continue to let them down now, in the far-north and in the Coorong too. If Mike Rann had any kind of understanding for the indigenous perspective he would, at the very least, tone down his rhetoric about mining. Spruiking the ‘worlds biggest hole in the ground’ as the financial salvation of a state is deeply insensitive to those people who have an enduring connection to that land.
The expanison of Uranium mining without being sympathetic to the scars of Maralinga is also quite cruel…the people dispossessed during that time moved east and took the stories of what they had seen with them, and those stories are still told. It’s all very well to be dismissive of anecdotal stories but when your cultural traditions have evolved via anecdote and you live a physically isolated existence, in an information vacuum, to be insensitive to the real fears of people and do little to address them, well, that’s just arrogance.
Oh, I dunno, furious, it worked pretty well for us in the 1840s, after all …
Apropos which, Mike Rann is almost enough to make me vote Liberal for the first time in my life.
Robert,
Whether or not the studies are indicative one way or another is kind of besides the point. The argument being made at Elbmarsch is that there have been leaks – subsequently covered up – which have resulted in harm (as opposed to mere the “in situ” effects of having a nuclear plant nearby).
So while pointing to the very real ineptitude and poor safety and environmental standards of the Soviet Union, my point is that we should also bear in mind that the same kind of problems exist and have existed across the board.
I have no doubt nuclear energy *could* be safe, in theory. But I have *absolutely no confidence* in that safe level of usage being maintained in a capitalist society where profit is the main motive, and environmental and social harm can be covered up (hell, where it’s even allowed to happen!) in order to protect the fiscal bottom line.
Even ignoring all of the enormous risks associated with nuclear power, the problems with radioactive waste storage alone, and the associated costs, simply convince me over and again that we’re simply better off forgetting the nuclear “option”, cutting all subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, and focusing solely on genuinely renewable, safe, energy sources.
Wombo@63
Your scepticism about nuclear power under capitalism is reasonable, but the reality in practice is that nuclear power is nowhere going to go anywhere without significant state financial support and intervention which makes it a lot more accountable than coal is in capitalist society. While there are pressures to protect the bottom line, and cut corners, the legal scope for the full coal use cycle to poison the commons and truncate the lives of the populace is far greater.
Now in Australia, given that even most conservatives don’t want nuclear it isn’t happening on any foreseeable timeline — so the qustion is moot, but there are places where nuclear will be the least evil — or at least part of it, and here we ought to focus our efforts on ensuring they do things properly.
Here’s an interesting first hand account of touring a nuclear power plant.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/rant/torness.html
The guy’s got a few Hugos and Nebulas under his belt so he’s certainly not making it up.
Great article N(65): Sounds awfully expensive to build, like the sort of money you could get a helluva lot of commodity steel and mirror ikeasseembled into vast desert solar thermal powerstationage instead.
But that’s not the point of the article, which is somewhat engineer porn: I especially liked the “cats’ cradle of cables that are designed to damp out or absorb the forces of an earthquake or a major impact” as the foundations, (I might do that for the backyard recording studio, in case the teenager ever turns metal and has a drummer in the band).
I’m intrigued how “A stack of these (fuel) tubes, bolted together and held under tension by internet rods, can be assembled into a fuel rod”: teh intertubes I’d heard of, but ‘internet rods’?
That’s very cool guys.
However, British nuclear power plants are rather different to ones in the rest of the developed world.
As noted in the article, they were very thermally efficient but horribly complex.
Given that the fuel is extremely cheap but precision pipework is very dear, they optimized for the wrong thing.
When I am busy writing posts sometimes I have to give up reading them. As it happens I was writing one on why nukes are going to be part of our future when I wasn’t reading this one. I’ll put it up in a minute.
Chernobyl is history and sad as it might be has pretty much nothing to do with the future. Barry Brook, whose interview on Counterpoint inspired my post, says Three Moile Island hurt no-one and shouldn’t happen again. He says this of modern plants:
They will be the better, he says, for being factory manufactured in modules and shipped to site, as is now happening in China and India.
That doesn’t mean we are home free and I don’t pretend that I’ve addressed all issues in my post.
I did read somewhere in the last few days that global warming is costing 300,000 lives each year. I tend to be sceptical about such figures in part because they don’t count the other side of the ledger, lives not lost in places where it is very cold. But global warming and CC will exact their own toll in human lives as we proceed, especially if we don’t successfully mitigate.
New post is now up.
I’ve got to go to the city to see my dentist, so I’ll have to be on my bike soon.
Your bike? ah … a low emission fuel cycle …
Now here’s an exciting new fuel technology.
And even if the concept is never fully um…fleshed out, you gotta admit the first sentence of para 4 is probably the single greatest quote in public relations history.
Thpfff, nothing to hide nothing to fear and so on.
The good thing about that technology Nabs is that our robots could just be programmed to retreat west, and then we win: a kind of Russian winter for bio-fueled invaders.
PS: Our robots will run on sand and rocks and blowflies.
L’armée marche à son estomac, n’est vrai?