Safety of Nuclear vs. Gas: Guest Post by N Nadir

The Prisoner's Dilemma

My blog post The Prisoner's Dilemma and New Types of Nuclear Energy Reactors was posted at The Energy Collective.  (The post originally appeared at ANS Nuclear Cafe.) In this post, I compared the types of support given to current and advanced reactors.

N Nadir wrote a comment on the post, and he has generously allowed me to use his comment as a guest post.  (I posted another one of his comments as a guest post in August: Vermont is Part of the World. )
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The Best in Terms of Risk

Yes, it (nuclear) is the very best form of energy in terms of risk.

Nuclear energy need not be perfect; it need not be risk free to be better than everything else, it merely needs to be better than everything else, which it is.

There is no form of energy ever invented by humanity that has ever, at any time, produced as much energy as nuclear energy has produced with as small a loss of life.   Zero.   None.

The problem that nuclear has, and no other form of energy has, is that all other disasters - and there are too many to mention - go down the memory hole rapidly, whereas any problem with nuclear plants is rehashed over and over and over ad absurdum.

Gas Explosions and Oil Wars

Memorial Window

The Piper Alpha oil platform explosion took place around the same time as the Three Mile Island meltdown.    Quick, without Google, how many people were killed at Piper Alpha?    How many at Three Mile Island?   How much oil gas and coal has been burned to run websites where people carry on about Three Mile Island?   How much oil, gas and coal has been burned to discuss Piper Alpha?

How many major gas explosions took place this year?    How much attention did they get compared to say, Fukushima?    How many gas explosions took place in the same year as Fukushima?    How did they compare in direct injury and death to Fukushima?   How long will any of these gas explosions be remembered or discussed?

We can go further:

How many oil wars have there been?    How many nuclear wars?

How many people die each year from oil, coal and gas waste?   How many people have died from the storage of so called "nuclear waste" in the more than half a century of commercial nuclear reactions?

The Impossible Standard for Nuclear

Nuclear's problem is not technical, nor is it even rational.    Nuclear energy suffers from being held to a standard that no other form of energy can meet, with the result that we continue to cause huge losses of life, property, and the ecosphere because of our irrational fears of it.

Quite frankly, the pressurized water reactor has unquestionably been the greatest and safest large scale energy device ever invented.    As reported by Jim Hansen in Environmental Science and Technology nuclear energy, dominated by this kind of reactor, is responsible for saving 1.8 million lives.    It might have saved more, were it not for fear and ignorance.

One might build different kinds of reactors with different advantages (and disadvantages) when compared to the LWR but the great engineering success of the LWR is nothing to be ashamed of.    What people should be ashamed of is their picayune objections to this fine technology that limited its expansion and use.
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N Nadir is a well-known blogger about energy: for a long time, he blogged at Daily Kos.  A few years ago, Charles Barton of Nuclear Green described and listed many of his posts.

Radiation Superstition: Guest Post by Bob Hargraves

Radiation Superstition by Robert Hargraves

Nearly a million people each year die of breathing particulates from burning coal; the climate temperature may increase 2°C this century; more than a billion people have no electricity.  Yet within

our reach is a solution to these global crises of increasing air pollution deaths, climate change, and the

Coal Mine, Wyoming

growing populations of nations trapped in energy poverty.

The welcome growth of the global middle class increases energy demand. If the world's economy prospers enough to allow everyone to enjoy just half of the electricity benefits that Americans now take for granted, world electric power generation will triple. Most electricity will come from coal burning, which grew 8% worldwide in 2011. Germany leads the way, building more coal plants. Wind and solar power are too intermittent and too expensive to displace coal worldwide.

Nuclear power is the solution within reach; it's safe and affordable, with low environmental impact. Yet opposition to it borders on superstition, defined by Merriam-Webster as a "belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation ... a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary".  Let's explore evidence.

People rationally fear possible accidents spreading deadly radioactive materials. Indeed massive doses of radiation did kill 38 emergency workers at Chernobyl, and the fallout of short-lived iodine resulted in 4000 cases of thyroid cancer and 15 deaths. However there is no evidence of the thousands of hypothetical deaths predicted by extrapolation of deadly exposures to lower radiation doses. Opponents of nuclear power have now hyped this death number up to one million, without observable evidence.

Low-level radiation

Using simplistic mathematical extrapolations from the effects of high-radiation accidents, nuclear power opponents claim that no amount of radiation is safe -- not even the low-level natural radiation that comes from the sky and from earth's radioactive potassium, uranium, and thorium created billions of years ago. Potassium is in our food and our bodies. Rocks contains the thorium and uranium that decays to radon or fuels electric power plants.

Reporting about the Fukushima accident created hysteria without basis. A UN scientific committee charged with investigating the accident's health effects reported in December that no radiation health effects have been observed among public or workers, and it cautioned against extrapolation to predict health effects of low-level radiation. Radiation superstition causes great harm. Japan is wasting billions of dollars preventing repopulation of radiologically safe areas. Hundreds have died from evacuation stress. Importing liquified natural gas to replace nuclear power has driven Japan's balance of trade negative.

People unnecessarily fear low-level radiation from accident-dispersed material, buried waste, or medical procedures. EPA required Yucca Mountain engineers to limit accidental releases to just 1/20th of natural radiation for 10,000 years. Dental X-ray technicians routinely drape lead blankets on patients to protect them, but it would take over 10,000 such X-rays to observe any health effect.

Prolonged radiation exposure is safe at natural environmental levels; each cell rapidly repairs DNA strand breaks: one per second per cell. Early life evolved when the natural radiation rate was 3 times greater than now. Today people living in places where natural radiation is 5 times normal exhibit no more cancers. People living in mile-high Denver get more cosmic radiation, but exhibit no more cancers.

Thorium, Energy Cheaper than Coal
Available Through Amazon

Radiation dose rates are as important as doses. High radiation rates overwhelm natural cellular defenses. Doses deadly to Chernobyl workers would have no effect if spread over a lifetime. Cancers are destroyed by multiple concentrated radiation treatments, allowing time between for less-irradiated tissue to recover. In 2012 MIT radiation researchers discovered no DNA damage from exposure rates 30 times as great as natural radiation, and Lawrence Berkeley Lab scientists actually observed how low-level radiation stimulated repair within cells. Long-term, low-dose radiation is benign.

Nuclear industry and shipyard workers exposed to low-level radiation developed fewer cancers. Accidental contamination of building steel by recycling a medical radiation source exposed 8000 Taiwan residents to radiation 7 times natural levels over 30 years, and cancer rates were dramatically reduced. Last year the Dose Response Journal and the American Nuclear Society published compendia of articles evidencing how low-level radiation is benign or healthful.

The vague radiation regulation, "as low as reasonably achievable" encourages ever more costly impediments to affordable nuclear power. This could be fixed with "as high as reasonably safe" limits that are set with evidence, as practiced for other environmental hazards. Nuclear power can solve our energy, climate, and poverty crises. Should we forsake the future of the planet by clinging to a superstition?

Background of this post:

This post first appeared on Rod Adams blog, Atomic Insights.

On Adams' blog, you can follow many related links about this post.

The post was written as an op-ed, but rejected by a large number of papers, despite its reasonable length and tone, and Hargraves' impressive resume.

On my own blog: Monday Blue Ribbon to Robert Hargraves
Vermont Yankee Explained (the animation) by Robert Hargraves
Plus, Hargraves excellent suggestion that Vernon leave Vermont and join New Hampshire (what's a river, anyhow?)


Hargraves Resumé:

Author: THORIUM: energy cheaper than coal
Energy policy study leader: ILEAD@Dartmouth
Vice president: Boston Scientific
Management consultant: Arthur D Little
Vice president: Metropolitan Life
President, DTSS
Assistant professor of mathematics: Dartmouth College

PhD, physics, Brown University
AB, mathematics and physics, Dartmouth College

Guest Post on San Onofre by Nuclear Engineer Ken Schultz. Steam generators not a safety issue

Combustion Engineering steam generators
are similar to this Westinghouse version

I recently blogged about how I "told you so" about the San Onofre Steam Generators: Steam Generator Thoughts and Future. I told you so. I noted that the new steam generators have problems, and I referenced my previous predictions that the SONGS plants will be restarted with lower water speeds and lower power output.

On October 9, the NRC held a public meeting near the plant.  (Here's the L A Times report.) At the NRC meeting, a set of panelists expressed their views on the steam generator issues, followed by questions from the audience.  One of the panelists was Ken Schultz, who is a nuclear engineer and a registered professional engineer in the state of California. Dr. Schultz has graciously allowed me to use his opening statement as a guest post.  A summary of his statement might be: "Steam generator tube ruptures at San Onofre will not be a safety issue."

Remarks to NRC Pubic Meeting, Tuesday 9 October 2012 on San Onofre Steam Generator Tube Leakage

Dr. Kenneth R Schultz, Ph.D., P.E.

Hi, I’m Ken Schultz and I live in Leucadia about 25 miles downwind of San Onofre.  I am a Registered Professional Nuclear Engineer and retired a year ago after a 40 year career at General Atomics, working on a variety of nuclear projects.  I have never worked for Southern California Edison nor for San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.  I have no financial ties to either of them and am not being paid to attend this meeting, something I’m get used to being retired.  My knowledge about SONGS comes from my general training as a nuclear engineer and from the press.  I am the chair of the local Section of the American Nuclear Society, which is the professional technical association for people working in all aspects of nuclear energy.  Our members include people throughout Southern California, including people working at SONGS.  My remarks today are my personal opinions and do not necessarily represent positions of the ANS

We are here to discuss the NRC’s current regulatory oversight status of SONGS.  I have interacted with members of the NRC during my career and have always found them to be technically skilled, extremely conscientious and critical of all data and conclusions given to them.  In my interactions with them on advanced nuclear reactor designs, they were always interested in new designs with improved safety characteristics, and encouraged their investigation.  I have no doubt that the NRC staff are applying the same skills and dedication to their oversight of San Onofre.

I am concerned that the press is saying the NRC thinks this may be a long investigation.  I think it’s important to keep perspective that the size of the investigation is consistent with the size of the risk.  A case in point is the SONGS steam generators situation.  These are clearly important pieces of equipment and cost a great deal.  They appear to have been incorrectly designed and to be wearing out prematurely.

Now, everything in a nuclear power plant must be investigated from a safety perspective, but the steam generators appear to not be a serious safety issue.  Based on the tiny radiation dose that resulted from the failure of the Unit 3 steam generator tube, I estimate that even if all the 515 steam generator tubes that are affected by the premature wear problem were to fail simultaneously, the radiation released to a person standing at the worst place on the site boundary for the full duration of the accident would result in a dose of less than 1 µSv.  Let’s put that in perspective. Low doses of radiation are a natural part of our environment.  Life on earth evolved in the constant presence of low level radiation.  Every year each of us living in Southern California receives about 3,000 µSv of radiation from cosmic rays, radioactive minerals in the earth and our food, and from medical and dental x-rays.  If we live at higher elevation, like Denver, we’d receive about 6,000 µSv/year.  If we fly a lot we’ll get an extra 2,000 µSv/year.

So that extra µSv from a steam generator accident would be like spending less than a day in the mountains, or taking less than one airline flight.  I don’t see this as a safety issue.  Further, there is growing scientific evidence that low level doses of radiation are not only not harmful, but may be beneficial in stimulating the body’s cellular repair systems. Again, I don’t see the steam generator problem as a safety issue and urge the NRC to proceed with their investigation.

Law School Professor Explains Why the State Never Really Had a Case Against Vermont Yankee

Cheryl Hanna of Vermont Law School spoke on WCAX about the court case about Vermont Yankee. The state of Vermont never had much of a case to start with.

I have tried to embed the clip of her interview. If I have not succeeded, here's the link to the three minute video on WCAX.

Meanwhile, Tony Klein, head of the Vermont House Natural Resources and Energy Committee, has always been committed to the fight against Vermont Yankee. But....in a Vermont Digger article, Klein speaks about the court case:

“Was there disappointment? Yes. There was disappointment. Was there surprise? No. There was no surprise that the federal courts would rule in our favor. I never entertained real hope that that was going to occur.”

Klein didn't have hope that the Vermont law was constitutionally valid and would stand up in court? And he admits this? (It's worth reading the comments on that article.)

The Nuclear Safety Paradox: Guest Post by Jeff Schmidt

This is a guest post by Jeff Schmidt on an important subject: The Nuclear Safety Paradox. Schmidt's previous guest post was Flawed Analogies, describing common but misleading ways of describing nuclear plants.

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Over the past several months, a thought has been at the back of my mind about nuclear safety. I feel is important to enter this issue into the ongoing discussion about Nuclear Power in our country.

There are many people who are opposed to new nuclear. They look at the events that have unfolded over in Japan, and worry that the same can happen here, unless we quickly move away from nuclear power. To that end, they actively seek to slow or block the certification of new designs, and the construction of new power plants.

Rod Adams of the Atomic Insights Blog has recently posted an example: "Friends of the Earth" seeking to stall certification of the AP1000 design . The AP1000, for folks who are not familiar with it, is a new design by Westinghouse Electric (a subsidiary of Toshiba), which adds an emergency passive cooling system to the Light Water Reactor. This cooling would operate in the case of a complete loss of electric power for active cooling, as was the case in Fukushima.

A passive cooling system uses basic physics to work. Passive cooling systems do not require any outside intervention, like electric power, fuel, or other inputs. They work automatically, and always work because those principles of physics never change. Examples of passive cooling techniques include convection in the cooling fluid, air cooling, gravity-fed water cooling, etc). Such passive cooling will keep cooling the reactor from melting down for an extended period of time, when no outside power is available for pumping cooling water.

This is, objectively, a good safety improvement over previous designs, such as those at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, or any of the reactors currently in use in the U.S. (I would add that GE-Hitachi Nuclear also has a new design for the BWR which adds passive emergency cooling, which they are trying to put into the market, and I believe other companies and researchers have other ideas for passive cooling systems in new designs).

So, why don't we have any of these new, safer designs in the U.S.? Largely because we can't get any new designs certified or built.

The Paradox

I have come to believe that in the U.S., we have a Nuclear Safety Paradox - namely, that because of our concern for safety, we are keeping older, less safe designs in active service longer, because new designs have not, and are not, being certified and built. I realize that many of the people who are opposed to nuclear, and are attempting to block forward progress, truly feel that no nuke is good, no nuke can be safe.

In contrast, I believe that most Americans, like myself, do have faith that engineers can create safer designs, in time. I also believe that, while there is probably some good opportunities to put solar and wind power to use in our country, we are not at the necessary technology level to try to deploy Wind and Solar on the scale necessary to completely replace nuclear. We may get there some day, or we may not, but we need much bigger advances in technology to get to a total renewable solution, compared to building safer nuclear reactors.

Now, I don't think the older designs present a large safety threat - after all, there has only been one meltdown in U.S. reactor history, Three Mile Island, and that was, in the end, from a safety perspective, a non-event. But there is still a risk that certain circumstances, very rare, but not impossible, can come in and cause loss of cooling to the old reactors, and that in some circumstances, they might not handle the loss of cooling as gracefully as a reactor which has a passive cooling system. None of us want to face the prospect of having to evacuate a 10 or 20 mile zone around a nuclear plant for 6 months, or a year, or potentially longer. None of us want to see a situation where one natural disaster is followed by a nuclear incident that makes cleanup and repair of the damage from the natural disaster be delayed for long periods.

In particular, I don't think Vermont Yankee presents a big threat to Vermont, as I think Meredith has made many good arguments over the past several years about the safety of even the "old" generation of nuclear plants. Nuclear plants here in the U.S., including Vermont Yankee, have added some additional safety features to, e.g. prevent building up hydrogen gas and resulting hydrogen explosions - safety features apparently lacking at the FD reactors in Japan. We have already made upgrades, well BEFORE the Fukushima reactor meltdowns and explosions, to address some of the exact scenarios that the Japanese ran into. That tells me that to a large extent, our engineering and regulatory systems are very actively working to prevent such a disaster.

The Missing Conversation

However, I suspect that we'd be having a much different conversation if there were plans to be building new nuclear power plants around the country, and in Vermont. Nuclear Power currently provides about 20% of the electricity generation in the United States. To take that offline, we need something to replace it. We could build natural gas (and, in fact, that is happening), but natural gas is not without its problems, either - environmental damage, deaths from gas explosions , and supply which, while ample in the short term, does not promise long term security.The Natural Gas marketers themselves only claim a 100 year supply , and that is including speculative, undiscovered resources. Also, that 100 years is only if we don't increase exports and domestic consumption. We can't expect "cheap" natural gas to last forever. Wind and Solar may someday be able to supplant nuclear power, but there are enormous technical and financial challenges, larger than even for Nuclear, in trying to do a truly massive build-out of Wind and Solar.

I've heard some people compare Fukushima Daiichi (and before that, Chernobyl) to the Titanic. They like to say that "The Titanic was a New, Safer Design - until it sank on it's maiden voyage." But we didn't stop designing or building ships because of the Titanic, and I think everyone would agree that large commercial ships have gotten much, much safer - both as a result of improved design, as well as improved operational practice, over the years. I truly believe that with iteration (that is, the design and construction of new generations of technology after learning lessons with previous generations), all technology gets better with time.

This is almost surely to be true of Solar and Wind as well, but today nuclear reactor technology is better positioned to provide that power than Solar and Wind. As well, I'd rather see the market pick winners and losers than a system that hamstrings one solution (nuclear), while pushing forward another solution, based upon an inflated sense of risk and fear.

I've had the privilege of growing up in a period of extreme technological advancement in nearly every field of engineering, but perhaps none is more illustrative of the power of iterative improvement as computers and electronics. Since the 1970s, we've probably had close to 40 generations of computer technology (about one generation per year). Computers have gotten staggeringly faster, with more storage space, better reliability, more RAM, amazing graphics, very high speed networked communications, high quality sound, much smaller physically, and all at orders of magnitude lower cost. This is the result of lots of iterative improvement.

Where are the Iterations? Where are the New Nuclear Plants?

If there had been built, in the last 10 or 20 years, a gigawatt or two of new, safer nuclear power plants in Vermont, I bet Meredith, nor anyone else, would be trying to keep Vermont Yankee running, because there would be something better in place already, and it would just be time to retire that particular plant. The most natural way to get rid of old nuclear power plants is to build new, improved nuclear power plants to replace them. Without replacement, the result is (and we are seeing this all over the country) that we keep older plants online longer (however, those older plants are upgraded and updated with new safety features, new pipes, new turbines, etc, to keep them as safe as possible).

The most natural way to make nuclear safer is to increase the rate of iteration of generations of the technology. Of course, we need to go at a slow enough pace that we aren't risking disasters, but I think we can do better than 30 years per generation. I think the key is what standard we hold the NRC to: we can enable iterative improvement not by giving it a mandate to ensure 'perfect' safety, because they really can't ensure perfect safety, but rather, our standard should be, "Are the new designs being considered at least AS SAFE OR SAFER than any current designs".

That is how you achieve progress in any field of engineering - not, "Is it perfect, right now", but "Is it better than what we already have". Perfection is a goal we are always chasing, never achieving. This is why computers can keep getting better and better and better, and why nuclear reactors could keep getting better, and better, and better.

Ending the Paradox

Let's end the nuclear safety paradox by getting new, safer reactors built to replace the older reactors, and by giving the NRC the resources, people, and mandate to improve and speed up the certification process. We should enable a fairly rapid iteration of improved generations of nuclear reactor technology. As with other technologies, new improved generations will fairly quickly replace the old generations, leading to ever safer nuclear reactor designs.

AP 1000 illustration courtesy of Westinghouse through Wikipedia

Vermont Yankee photo also Wikipedia.