[cdn-nucl-l] Re: FP Solomon; "Dams are worse"; Some Lessons from Fukushima;Fw: Learning About Energy

[Bill Garland <garlandw@mcmaster.ca>]

Jerry,

"Interesting" indeed.  The over-response to radiation
concerns and the under-response to earthquake and tsunami concerns become
clear when you consider what it is that people are really worried
about.  People are worried about themselves and their offspring
dying.  They want a safe, clean environment now and in the future,
them want to save the planet ..... for themselves and their
offspring.  Yes they are concerned for other people farther away but
not nearly as much as they are worried about themselves and their
offspring.  We bemoan such blatant and narrow self-interest but we
would be foolish to deny its existence and to take it into account. 
Look around; from the most extreme environmentalist to the most extreme
capitalist, the marketing people everywhere tap into this narrow
self-interest in a big way.  'Twas ever thus, I suspect.

Still, there is hope.  I suspect it was your unrelenting efforts
that have helped turn some people, like Solomon, around.  Well
done.

Bill

At 12:24 PM 03/04/2011, Jerry Cuttler wrote:

 
As the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident (human failure) approached, our Energy Probe friend, Lawrence Solomon has another interesting article in the Financial Post that compared hydroelectric dam failures (green energy) with the worst nuclear failure.  The radiation scare seems to trump all other scares.  He points out that its our LNT assumption of radiation carcinogenesis that is the culprit, and we refuse to give it up.
 
It is interesting how interest in the tens of thousands who died from the earthquake and tsunami seem to be ignored compared with the assumed/imagined health risks from the damaged nuclear plants that will not happen.
 
Jerry
----------------------------------

Lawrence Solomon: Dams are worse

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/04/01/lawrence-solomon-dams-are-worse/
 
Apr 1, 2011 – 7:58 PM ET | Last Updated: Apr 1, 2011 10:38 PM ET

 

Reuters

Even the Chernobyl disaster may have killed just 15 people in the general population.

A forgotten 1975 Chinese disaster killed 230,000 people

Japan’s ongoing disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant, now in its agonizing third week, has led many to conclude that nuclear is the most dangerous way to generate electricity. Not so. Nuclear is not the most dangerous, not by a long shot. That distinction unambiguously belongs to large hydroelectric dams.

The most catastrophic dam failure in history occurred in China in 1975, with the near-simultaneous failures of the Banqiao and Shimantan dams. The “August 1975 disaster,” as the Chinese call the horrors associated with the dams’ collapse, drowned 26,000 people, according to the Chinese government. Another 200,000 lives were lost in its aftermath. Records from the days following the dams’ collapse describe the chaos:

“East of Xincai and Pingyu, the water is still rising at the rate of two centimetres an hour. Two million people across the district are trapped by the water…. In Runan, 100,000 who were initially submerged but somehow survived [by clinging to trees, rooftops, etc.] are still in the water. Forty thousand people have been rescued; 200,000 are sick with diarrhea and other related illnesses. There’s no medicine. In Shangcai, 300,000 people are marooned on the dam, on rooftops, and elsewhere. Twenty communes have been engulfed by flood waters. Many people haven’t eaten anything for days. In Shangcai, another 600,000 are surrounded by the flood.”

Four days later: “The disease morbidity rate has soared. According to incomplete statistics, 1.13 million people have contracted illnesses, including 80,000 in Runan and 250,000 in Pingyu; in Wangdui commune alone, 17,000 people out of a total population of 42,000 have fallen ill, and medical staff, despite their best efforts, can only treat 800 cases a day.”

In all, 11 million were affected by the disaster, which came of a severe storm and unprecedented rainfall, leading to flooding that overwhelmed the two dams. Shimantan was built to withstand a flood so rare that it would come but once every 500 years; Banqiao was built to withstand an even rarer event — a once-in-a-1,000-year flood. The flood that arrived in August of 1975 was a once-in-a-2,000-year flood.

When the dams failed, they unleashed a tsunami six meters high and 12 kilometres wide that inundated 29 counties and municipalities. The scale of the disaster compares to that of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan. It cannot compare to the consequences of the radiation leaks from Japan’s Fukushima reactors, which, though dangerous to nuclear workers, are likely to cause no casualties among the general population.

Neither can it compare to either of the two other serious nuclear accidents that have occurred, at Three Mile island, which led to no deaths, and at Chernobyl, where United Nations agencies such as the World Health Organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation have been steadily decreasing death estimates with the passage of time. Because the dead bodies have simply not materialized, the UN agencies now outright dismiss the very high estimates of death that came from organizations like Greenpeace, saying of them, “These claims are highly exaggerated.” The maximum number of deaths that the UN agencies estimated in 2005 was “a few per cent…. Such an increase could mean eventually up to several thousand fatal cancers.” Even here, the UN agencies expressed doubt that these predicted deaths could be substantiated. “An increase of this magnitude would be very difficult to detect, even with very careful long-term epidemiological studies,” it reported. The difficulty stemmed from the theoretical model that the UN was using to project deaths — known as the “linear no threshold” model, it amounted to a guesstimate that even the scientists who uphold it acknowledge to be unproven and unprovable.

Three years later, the UN distanced itself even further from claims that the Chernobyl accident could have killed many in the general population — the UN’s Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation found only 15 fatalities from thyroid cancers. “Among the general population, to date there has been no consistent evidence of any other health effect that can be attributed to radiation exposure,” it reported. Because the theoretical models diverged so much from reality, it decided to set them aside. “The committee has decided not to use models to project absolute numbers of effects in populations exposed to low doses because of unacceptable uncertainties in the predictions,” it stated.

While deaths from nuclear accidents are hard to find, those from dams are not. Italy lost 2,000 people in a 1963 dam failure, France 400 in a 1959 failure. Smaller dam failures have led to lower losses of life in the U.K., the United States and Germany. The future will likely make the hazards of dam building more evident still, particularly in China, the world’s most aggressive dam builder.

According to the Chinese government itself, some 37,000 dams — 40% of its total — are at risk. In the decade ending in 2008, 59 dams were breached either due to torrential rains or shoddy construction. In 2008, Sichuan, home to 90% of China’s dams, suffered a devastating earthquake that damaged some 1,800 dams and left 69 of them in danger of catastrophic collapse.

Near Sichuan, situated atop two fault lines and upstream of Wuhan, population 10 million, lies the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest. If the Three Gorges dam failed catastrophically, as dam experts fear it might, the tsunami that would be unleashed would precipitate the world’s largest man-made disaster, with a death toll in the millions.

Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe, an anti-nuclear organization, and the author of The Deniers.

The extent of damage wreaked by the 1975 floods was first revealed in the West by Dai Qing in her 1998 book, The River Dragon Has Come. To read more of her description, click here.

Third in a series
Next: The real problem with nuclear power

------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: meneleyd
To: nuclear_education_outreach@googlegroups.com
Cc: Canadian Nuclear Discussion List
Sent: Saturday, April 02, 2011 2:44 AM
Subject: Re: Some Lessons from Fukushima; Fw: Learning About Energy

Jerry: This is a painful truth, but also is very old news indeed.
Humans haven't changed one bit.
My favorite example is New York city, at the time when horse power was being replaced by motor power. There was a great deal of opposition to the new-fangled motor cars, even though the horse manure was piled high in the vacant lots, littered the streets, and ran into the gutters by the ton every time it rained. Have you ever wondered why people wore galoshes in those days?
Our problem, too, shall pass.
Dan
On 2011-04-02, at 2:10 AM, Jerry Cuttler wrote:

See the sentence that I highlighted in red below.
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Learning About Energy
To: jerrycuttler@rogers.com
Sent: Friday, April 01, 2011 4:37 PM
Subject: Learning About Energy

Learning About Energy

---

Some Lessons from Fukushima

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 03:40 PM PDT

After working for 68 continuous, full-time years in nuclear technology, mostly in nuclear radiation and safety. I find people asking my opinion as to the degree of danger posed the radiation and radioactivity from the battered nuclear reactors in Japan.  This is what I've been telling them.    Next post will explore the specifics of this in more detail.   The numbers are all-important.

Ted Rockwell

A lot of wrong lessons are being pushed on us, about the tragedy now unfolding in Japan.  The scare-talk about radiation is not helpful.  There will be no radiation public health catastrophe, regardless of how much reactor melting may occur.   Radiation? Yes.  Radiation catastrophe?  No.  Life evolved on, and adapted to, a much more radioactive planet,  Thus today, a bit more radiation is generally beneficial, not harmful.  Statements that there is no safe level of radiation are an affront to science and to common sense.  The radiation from Fukushima is expected to be about like that from the Three Mile Island (TMI) incident, where ten to twenty tons of the nuclear fuel melted and slumped to the bottom of the reactor vessel.  This is the scenario that initiates the mythical China Syndrome, that postulates that the molten fuel burns its way into the earth.  On the computers and movie screens of people who make a living “predicting” disasters, TMI is an unprecedented catastrophe.  In the real world of TMI, the molten mass froze when it hit the colder reactor vessel, and stopped its downward journey at five-eights of an inch through the five-inch thick vessel wall.  And there was no harm to people or the environment.  None.

Yet today, we have radiation protection zealots in Europe and America telling their citizens near Fukushima to defy Japanese instructions and leave their shuttered homes, to wander, homeless and panic-stricken, through the battered countryside—to do what? All to avoid a radiation dose lower than what we get from a ski weekend in Colorado (a low cancer area, incidentally.)

Everyone involved with nuclear power anywhere has design and operating lessons to learn from Fukushima.  For investors, the important point is that some of the nuclear plants were swept with a wall of seawater that may have instantly converted a multi-billion dollar asset into a multi-billion dollar liability.  That’s bad news.  But it’s not unique to nuclear power.  If  Fukushima were a computer chip factory, would we consider abandoning the entire computer industry because it was not tsunami-proof?  It would be ironic if American nuclear power were phased out as unsafe, without having ever killed or injured a single member of the public, to be replaced by coal, gas and oil, each proven killers of tens of thousands each year.

UPDATE AS OF 09:00 P.M. EDT, FRIDAY, MARCH 18:

A World Health Organization spokesman said that radiation levels outside the 20-kilometer (12-mile) evacuation zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan are not harmful for human health. He said the WHO finds no public health reason to avoid travel to unaffected areas in Japan or to recommend that foreign nationals leave the country. He also said there is no risk that exported Japanese foods are contaminated with radiation.

The lessons from Japan involve tsunamis, not radiation.

                                      Theodore Rockwell, Member, National Academy of Engineering

Dr. Rockwell’s classical 1956 handbook, The Reactor Shielding Design Manual, was recently made available on-line and as a DVD, by the U.S. Department of Energy.