The 50th Carnival of Nuclear Energy Blogs is posted at Next Big Future. Several bloggers discuss lessons learned from Fukushima, or Fukushima's probable effect on the future of nuclear energy. Others describe controversies about the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl. One blog post at Next Big Future uses Union of Concerned Scientists reasoning (linear no-threshold) for radiation to decide whether commercial aviation or Chernobyl has caused more cancers and killed more people by cancer over the last 25 years. Radiation exposure from people taking airline flights is more deadly by far--with this reasoning. The Union of Concerned Scientists comes up with 9000 excess cancer deaths from Chernobyl. Same reasoning gives 100,000 deaths from commercial aviation radiation over the same time period. Both sets of reasoning are fallacious. They are built on the Linear No Threshold model. Once again, the Carnival contains everything. You'll be encouraged as Barton looks forward to molten salt reactors, angered along with Adams as he looks at the NYAS report (it starts with the admission that scientific and statistical methods were not followed), interested in the consolidation of nuclear generating companies in the U. S. (Exelon-Constellation), and eager to follow the latest news from Vermont. Come to the Carnival! Have a good time!
I would compare the Union of Concerned Scientists' estimate of mortality associated with the 1986 Chernobyl accident (9,000 over 50 years or more) to the National Research Council's 2009 findings that US fossil fueled electric power plant mortality is on the order of 18,000 to 20,000 per year, mostly from sulfurous coal particulate fallout. Chernobyl was unique in terms of the scale of release of radionuclides from a reactor design (RBMK) no longer permitted to be built, coal generated toxic SO2 particulates are routine worldwide. A conservative extrapolation of the human health related damage from the electric sectors of China & India and other non-OECD nations would be on the order of 333k (1/3 million) premature deaths from fossil fuel emissions worldwide per annum. Thus coal would be nearly 2000 times more dangerous in terms of human health using UCS's own projections.
ReplyDeleteHidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12794
Mortality figure ~@3 minute mark on podcast:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12794#podcast