Re: [cdn-nucl-l] Rockwell: Nuclear Power Safety Record

[Bill Garland <garlandw@mcmaster.ca>]

Good stuff.  This info (and a lot more) is available on
Ted's blog site

www.learningaboutenergy.com.  I have added a link on

www.nuclearcanada.ca and on my
www.nuceng.ca site
to Ted's blog site.

Bill
 At 03:54 PM 05/11/2011, Jerry Cuttler wrote:
> Ted gave this handout at the
> recent ANS conference in Washington, where he received a W.B. Lewis
> award.
>  
> From: mbrexchange-bounces@list.ans.org
> [
> mailto:mbrexchange-bounces@list.ans.org] On Behalf Of Gene
> Cramer
> Sent: November-05-11 2:21 PM
> To: mbrexchange@list.ans.org
> Subject: [MbrExchange] Nuclear Power Safety Record 
>  
> Nuclear Power Safety Record 
> http://www.learningaboutenergy.com/2011/11/the-nuclear-power-safety-record.html
> Posted: 04 Nov 2011 12:43 PM PDT
>
> As of March 2011, Naval Reactors have run 6300 reactor-years,
> driving 528 reactor cores on 220 ships over 145,000,000 miles without a
> single radiological incident  or injurious radiation exposure to
> crew or public.  Because of the shielding from the hull and the
> seawater, crews at sea generally get less radiation, living within 100
> meters of an operating nuclear reactor, than their families at
> home.  All of the radiological information about the ships and
> associated shore facilities is released to the public in documents in
> which the detailed data are accumulated without a break since
> 1954.
>
> With respect to the international nuclear power industry at large,
> John Ritch, the Director-General of the World Nuclear Association, made
> the following statement to the science editor of station NDTV on 24
> October 2011:  “Perhaps I would think this problem is more serious
> if we had been besieged by many large fatality accidents in nuclear
> power. But I think I am correct in saying that in fourteen thousand five
> hundred reactor-years of civil nuclear power production we have not seen
> a fatality apart from the limited number of deaths that occurred as a
> result of the Chernobyl accident...Very few industries have produced such
> beneficial results with such an extremely low toll of damage to the
> environment or the public.  This industry has an amazing record of
> safe performance and beneficial contribution. That basic fact is much too
> little appreciated by the public.”
>
> During the same period, the following non-nuclear accidents
> occurred:
>
> Banqiao Dam Failure:  One of 62 hydroelectric dams in
> Zhumadian Prefecture in China that failed catastrophically or were
> intentionally destroyed in 1975 during Typhoon Nina.  An estimated
> 172,000 people were killed, 11 million people lost their homes, and about
> one-third of the electric power capacity of the national grid was
> destroyed.  The resulting damage to the farmland is not
> reported.
>
> Bhopal Pesticide Factory Release:  A leak of methyl
> isocyonate gas from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya
> Pradesh, India in 1984 led to 558,125 injuries, including 38,478
> temporary and partial, and 3900 severely and permanently injured. 
> An estimated 3000 died within weeks and another 8000 have since died from
> the incident.  Some believe these official estimates grossly
> understate the situation.
>
> Deaths from Coal:  From coal’s air pollution alone, there
> have been 30,000 deaths per year in the US, 500,000 per year in
> China.  These figures do not include deaths of coals miners, the
> destruction of stream beds destroyed by pushing mountain-tops into stream
> beds, the effect of mercury and other toxins on fish, etc.
>
> BP Oil Spill:  The environmental and health impact of this
> event has not been estimated.  And there are many other spills that
> have received little attention.
>
> The fact is that it is simply not true that nuclear radiation is
> uniquely hazardous, even when totally uncontrolled releases
> occasionally occur.
>
> Another fact is that unwarranted fear of harmless levels of radiation
> has caused unprecedented damage.  People are afraid to return to
> their homes and businesses.  They’ve terrified themselves, their
> friends and their children.  The health effect of such widely
> enforced terrorism is itself devastating.  The effect on the economy
> is paralyzing.  
>
> In Fukushima, amid thousands of non-nuclear deaths, international
> investigation under IAEA concluded:
>
> "To date no health effects have been reported in any
> person
> as a result of radiation exposure from the nuclear
> accident"
>
> But the Government is concerned about letting people return to their
> homes.
>
> There is no defensible scientific basis for discouraging people from
> living where radiation levels are “high,” when they are still lower
> than the highest natural radiation levels in Iran, Brazil, Norway, India,
> China and other regions where people have dwelt healthfully for countless
> generations with backgrounds hundreds of times higher than deemed
> “permissible.” 
>
> More fundamentally, why should radiation level be the prime
> consideration as to where and how one chooses to live?  Many
> people make decisions that increase their radiation dose many-fold by
> moving to mountainous regions, or by cladding their houses in brick or
> stone, or by visiting radioactive health spas.  By what authority do
> the radiation protection police have their particular concern outrank all
> others?  Are we going to let them strip the natural soil off the
> ground in Japan, to lower the radiation background to some arbitrary
> number?
>
> Why should we fear “nuclear waste”?  The only way it can harm
> anyone is if it is eaten.  It is not in soluble form, so we store it
> in shielded cans until it is needed to be recycled as fuel in a reactor
> designed for that purpose.  This is not difficult; the process has
> been demonstrated, but it Is currently cheaper to just store the used
> fuel until needed.  Non-nuclear industry produces millions of times
> more lethal doses of other poisons.  The main difference is that the
> nuclear material gets less toxic every day, and after a few hundred
> years, becomes no more toxic than some natural ores.  But the
> non-nuclear wastes maintain full toxicity forever.  Fukushima and
> 9/11 have shown that we should design the plants to perform under even
> more extremes of conditions, and these improvements have been underway in
> America since immediately after 9/11.
>
> Putting radiation numbers in perspective:
>
> Marshall Brucer, “the father of nuclear medicine,” in his canonical
> Chronology of Nuclear Medicine, shows how widely radiation
> backgrounds vary.  On page 323, he lists various radiation
> background levels (with cosmic ray contribution removed) from New York
> City at 0.62 mSv/year to SW France up to 876; to the potash fertilizer
> area in Florida up to 1750.  He notes, “If you live in one place on
> earth, your background may vary from day to day by a factor of ten, or
> even 100…The inside exposure rate can change by a factor of 10 within
> hours, just by opening windows.”  He notes that building with brick,
> rather than wood, can nearly double your daily radiation dose, but that
> the radioactivity of  bricks and concrete is also highly variable:
> from 0.05 to 4.93 mSv/yr for bricks, and from 0.29 to 25.4 for
> concretes.  “A factor of 10 daily variation [in radiation dose]
> marks the diets of most people.”  [mR in original, converted here to
> mSv]
>
> People have lived healthily for millennia with natural radiation up to
> following mSv/yr:
>
> Ramsar, Iran (260), Kerala, India (35), Guaripari, Brazil (35), Yangiang,
> China (5.4)
>
>  Ted Rockwell 
>
> What Should We Learn from Fukushima?
> http://www.learningaboutenergy.com/2011/11/what-should-we-learn-from-fukushima.html
> Posted: 04 Nov 2011 12:24 PM PDT
>
> The first thing we should learn from Fukushima is that no one - not a
> single person - received any injury from the radiation from
> Fukushima.  When asked recently how many persons might have their
> lives shortened by the radiation, LNT-advocate Abel Gonzales replied
> bluntly: "None."
>
> The doses received by operators in Fukushima are all below the doses
> received from background radiation from high natural background areas
> elsewhere in the world, where people have lived healthily for countless
> generations.
>
> The conservative regulators of the International Atomic Energy Agency
> Expert Fact Finding Mission stated it this way:
>
> "To date no health effects have been reported in any person as a
> result of radiation  exposure from the nuclear
> accident"
>
> In view of the 25,000 deaths from non-nuclear causes, it does not
> seem reasonable to think of that tragedy as a nuclear
> catastrophe.
>
> But there are certainly lessons that the international nuclear community
> should learn from this, and that lesson-learning is now underway
> throughout the world.  We will discuss that in another
> post.
>
> Ted Rockwell
>
>
>
>  
>
>  
>