Germany made a decision to close their nuclear power plants, and attempt* to replace their output with renewable generation (mostly from wind), this actually involved the burning of more fossil fuels , not less. environment fail. well done Germany. this wasn’t caused by wind power, wind power was caused by human stupidity.
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This is true and, posting what is late at night for me, I had forgotten; but also note the “100% replacement” assumption.
The highest risk is going to be to people in mountainous areas where most of the available iodine comes from the atmosphere.
What we now need is a calculation on how much I-129 would be produced by a nuclear exchange (probably India-Pakistan or a one sided attack on Iran by Israel) and how this would affect the overall iodine isotope ratios. Unfortunately I’m far from competent to carry this out.
It is of course much easier and more reliable to make a gun-type bomb with uranium. But you need a lot of uranium and it is dangerous to handle. For plutonium, if you have access to a few things, you can make a bomb which is relatively safe to handle. It won’t have a high yield but it will spread nasty crap everywhere.
All you have to do is to get it into somewhere like the NYSE. Few people will be killed, the building may not even collapse, but the financial system will melt down quite a bit while a lot of expensive people and equipment are decontaminated.
An industrial or medical irradiation unit with a pack of conventional explosive (or thermite, if the stuff can be volatilized by heat) will do that job too. The R in CBRN is there for this kind of threat.
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But you know, when it comes time to renew the license, somehow the small matters of rust and embrittlement and obsolescence are put aside beause it would just be so expensive to dismantle the old reactor and build a new one.
So we have these old rustbuckets getting licensed to operate for almost a whole century now.
But the bigger issue is that the fuel recycling system that was going to make them so much more better, has never been built. So they have 40-50 years’ worh of spent fuel (a grand mixture of actinides and fission products) simply being stacked in the cooling pools. It adds up to literally tons of the most lethal isotopes, of which olny about half have decayed while in storage…
i’m just going to file that one under famous last words. Or perhaps specious claims. A power reactor is always going to contain multiple critical masses, and you cannot control its geometry if it gets too hot.
Turns out, weapons are relatively small sources compared to reactors (and associated fuel pools). In a weapon, you have at most a few kilograms of fission product, while the reactor has hundreds of tons.
And of course I-131 is the isotope of most concern, since it bioaccumulates and it is so very hot. But with its 8 day half-life, it will be effectively all gone in less than a year. I was just wondering out loud in this thread about I-129, because any of that isotope we create now will be in the biosphere forever (millions of years is forever to us).
After Chernobyl, Brits were fools and were pouring out contaminated milk. Russians instead dried it and stored it away. A year later, the powdered milk was not hot anymore and could be used.
The millions-years half-life isotopes are virtually harmless, except for making greenies break out in hives because millions-years. It’s the mid-life ones, the Sr-90 and Cs-137, that are of concern. The short-lived ones can be waited out, the long-lived ones don’t shine anywhere close to being important, the mid-lived ones are pests.
You can however introduce passive(!) measures to make sure it won’t get That Much hot. (The old reactor designs rely on active measures, which can fail too easily. See Fuckupshima.)
Besides, things at criticality tend to keep themselves subcritical by the virtue of thermal dependency. Expand with heat, get the nuclei further apart, lower the k and you’re subcritical again. This effect is responsible for the pulsing nature of longer-term criticality accidents, where an isotope in aqueous solution goes critical, releases neutrons and heat, goes subcritical again, cools down and goes critical, and this repeats a few times.
You can use this thermal expansion effect for maintaining criticality. Some reactor designs, e.g. the pebble bed ones, are built around this.
Add the issue of opposition to building newer, safer reactors. The greenies are one of the principal reason of safety issues with the old reactors.
Same contributing issue with said greenies. Could get better in the future as robotics is now far beyond the point where automated reprocessing plants can be built (if possible made as matrix of small microplants, so when something fails you can just pour concrete into the failed hot cell and be done with it), and the pain of “renewable” resources will sting enough to be felt.
How much of that scary figure are the non-issue millions-of-years ones?
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If, just hypothetically, you were to separate the isotopes of potassium … a one-banana-equivalent dose becomes an 800-banana-equivalent dose. Not sure what the health effects of that would be, but it would certainly show up on the old geiger counter. K-40 gives off quite energetic gamma radiation. Millions of years, no, a billion years. I have 142,174 Bq/g K40Cl on the back of my envelope.
I guess you heard the one about the load of wood ashes that set off an alarm at a local dump (in Vermont, was it?), because people burn wood there, and the trees had soaked up Cs-137 from somewhere, and of course it was concentrated in the ashes.
So anyhow, iodine is much much more strongly accumulated, and I was just thinking about it… And, yes of course, in 500 or 600 years all that cesium will be nonradioactive barium, and all the strontium will be, what, zirconium? Mostly harmless.
But for now, the nuke industry is being, and has been, unacceptably careless in its management of the crap leftover from its activites. And I would say it’s human nature, and that the responsible parties will, in the future, behave just as irresponsibly. It was nice to hear that the Russians had a little more common sense, btw.
But I am definitely not one of your greenie-weenies, afraid of the radiation from my cell phone, or all obsessive about the half life of plutonium(isotope)…
(ha, an interesting personal anecdote - In a chem lab exercise (several decades ago), we were doing something or other with iodine, and the prof had obtained some I-131, which we were supposed to track in the product with a scaler/ratemeter. I was always a slacker in the lab, and when I attempted the exercise several weeks late, we could no longer find any iodine in the sample.)
[edit] … an 8000-banana-equivalent dose. Natural K is 0.012% K-40.
Someone (not I) did a BOTEC shortly after Fukushima blew up. Simply based on the facts, nameplate power outputs, distribution of fission products, and how long it had been operating, along with some simple assumptions (that all the spent fuel was still onsite, for example), this person calculated that Fukushima had about 2 metric tons of Cs-137 on hand. How much of this escaped into the environment? Cs and Sr and I and Xe are relatively volatile, compared to the transition metals, and soluble in water, etc. The answer depends on how many of the fuel assembly capsules have been breached/broken and contents exposed.
And as we have discussed here, the I-131 is gone now. The Xe has flown, and infinitely diluted into the air (it was never much cause for concern, but interesting as a tracer). And of course the actinides and metals mostly stayed behind in the wreckage and corium on the site. So you mostly have those two pesky isotopes to worry about, Sr-90 and Cs-137.
Yes.
The Sr-90 is a bone-seeker. Less abundant but more problematic. Can be sequestered as insoluble material easier than caesium.
Cs-137 is of a lesser concern; its biological half-life is about a month. So if you don’t get much of it from the environment all the time, any short-term interal exposures will rectify themselves fast.
Both get immobilized in the environment, to a significant degree, by multiple mechanisms. Strontium will form fairly insoluble sulfates, caesium gets absorbed in clay minerals.
So the actually bioavailable amount is only a tiny fraction of the volatilized/dissolved, containment-breaching and biosphere-entering materials.
AFAIK it wasn’t the active measures that did for Fukushima. It was the Japanese government trying to damp down the crisis and preventing Tepco from helicoptering in emergency generators. By the time someone had levered the geriatrics in charge out of their chairs, it was too late.
Fukushima was a cultural foul up more than a technical one. In Japan, there is nearly no equivalent of “screw the general/politicians/bureaucrats, let’s fix the problem first and argue later.” (Exc ept in automotives. Soichiro Honda eventually beat the bureaucracy, and the technical director of Toyota nearly got fired because he introduced an ambitious robotic assembly plan, but kept his job when it worked.)
Then it was a combination. Safety design with a fully passive layer would not need the generators, so it would not fail even if both the active systems and the bureaucracy failed.
Also, I did not hear about this one aspect of the mishap. Details, please?
Same in Chernobyl…
I’d prefer sitting next to a nuke plant than to a chem plant. You can buy a cheap Geiger for $20 or so (at least pre-F. I got the DRSB-01 for that cost) and see when the nuke plant burped. Chemical contamination detection is way WAY more costly.
Also, a nuke burp won’t kill you, unless you’re right next to it. See the lethality of criticality accients, which is surprisingly low - as long as you’re not Right Next To The Blue Flash, you’re okay for the time being, maybe with a cancer in two decades, maybe not. See also the lethality of the Chernobyl itself; most of the casualties were beta burns, similar to bad sunburns, from wading through contaminated water or gazing into the exposed reactor guts. (Or shutting down a hydrogen generator or draining turbine oil into an underground tank while walking next to a big chunk of fuel, or so…)
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Sorry, can’t help. It came up in a lecture on nuclear safety. I just went back to some earlier reports and there were many, many foul ups and claims of government interference, so this may just be one of many. But the core argument - that the Government and Tepco colluded in trying to keep things quiet - remains.
I have to say that Chernobyl was a great deal less lethal, in reality, than Bhopal. And it was the purest luck that Buncefield wasn’t the biggest ever industrial disaster in the UK. I remember in the same lecture the lecturer commenting that the excess deaths due to Chernobyl were almost all due to dislocation of communities, and that less precipitate action by the authorities in both Chernobyl and Fukushima might have been a much better idea. After all, people live on Dartmoor in the UK, on fractured granite, and the radon levels would result in an evacuation if it wasn’t “natural” radiation.
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Yup. The thick skulls in management have to get hammered into that some things won’t go away and will get worse if not addressed while they are still small. Same in Chernobyl, where the iodine was distributed by far less than soon enough.
On the other hand, many other issues will just go away if not prodded into, which may make it a tempting default strategy…
Maybe they need some advisors who are able to distinguish between the “let it fizzle out” vs “act N-O-W!”…
Definitely yes. That’s what led me to the nuke vs chem plant thought. And many more mishaps big and small.
Oh, that fire! I completely forgot about this one, had to look it up…
Definitely that. But “something had to be done”… So we’re going from wall to wall, from the “sweep it under the rug” extreme to “demolish the building instead of throwing out the rug” when it burns through…
That. Many places are naturally so radioactive it’d turn a greenie purple, and there are no mandatory evacuations and exclusion zones. And the linear non-threshold model is still used despite no effects detectable at the lower dose rate end, complicating everything…
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That’s kind of papering over the quite pertinent point that we live in a world where the streets are filled with people driving old model-T’s, while Mercedes SLS are conspicuously absent.
[quote=“Aloisius, post:20, topic:59095, full:true”]
A modern nuclear reactor literally can not melt down. [/quote]
FWIW, you’re not talking about modern grid infrastructure, you’re talking about designs that still exist mostly just on paper. Those ideas may eventually offer a path to a cleaner future, but here and now, more nuclear remains a hard sell because no-one wants to decommission their model-T’s, people want to build more model-T’s, and it’s so expensive that there isn’t much scope for testing new ideas, so the model-T remains the nature of nuclear, and there isn’t an obvious and cheap way forward away from here to there. 
I hope we get there, but my feeling is that the money won’t add up the right way, at least not in the near future
Isn’t it at least in part because greenies meanies screaming they don’t want any new cars (not even to replace the old cars) because cars are bad?
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The first molten salt reactor was built in the 1960s. Pebble bed reactors have been built in China and Germany. Liquid metal reactors are used in submarines. Lead-cooled fast reactors have been built in the US and Russia.
I’m not even talking about the hypothetical reactors here.
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You’re also not even talking about modern grid infrastructure. There are real working experimental reactors in universities too, but scaling up from those experiments and tests and oddballs to cost-efficient grid infrastructure… it’s not trivial and it’s not cheap, and to date it’s still mostly just ideas on paper. I think you’re really overstating where the technology actually stands today.
We agree that it should be technically possible to build great nuclear, but as I said, the necessary finances and incentives don’t seem to be in place for it to actually happen. At least not yet.
I don’t even know how to respond to this. We know more about how to connect large multi-GW power plants to the power grid. Their load is predictable and we’ve been doing it for decades. Hell, our power grid was built for them. Tens of millions of distributed solar panels? Now that’s hard to manage, but that has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power.
Well, China is currently building 30 pebble bed reactors, so for some the financial incentives are already there. Sure, the one they first built was at a University, but I’m not sure how a 250 MW nuclear power plant is “mostly ideas on paper.”
I’m not necessarily pro-nuclear, but I will say that if Greenpeace (and the Soviets with their half-assed plant) hadn’t effectively destroyed nuclear energy development in the US, our CO2 emissions would be a fraction of what they are today.
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When the nuke industry makes a realistic effort to remove their spew from the environment (and please note that they did not mind at all the cost of separating isotopes in the fuel), and sequestering it, then I shall join you in criticism of the greens.
Since I don’t expect them to filter the Pacific for Cs-137, I’m basically on the greens’ side.
And please note that all fission technologies produce fission products regardless of what route they take in making them. And no human culture has demonstrated that it can maintain security over that crap for 500 years. Even the ancient Egyptians. Those pyramids were stripped of their goodies within a few centuries of construction…
