Open Thread 15

http://www.grist.org/list/2011-04-14-wind-turbine-suffers-catastrophic-failure-no-one-is-irradiated

LOL
MODERATOR
This only got through as it is on the OT, where some commenting rules are relaxed. Normally, a comment like this would be deleted as a violation of the citation rule. You need to supply more than just a throwaway comment and a link.

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@Hank

What current numbers are you comparing the table to? Is there some data of yearly fallout for locations as far away from fukushima as denmark is from chernobyl?(or are you not referring to the fukushima numbers?) Some clarification would be welcome.

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Following

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I’ve been puzzled why wind farm builders have been welcoming the carbon tax if renewable energy certificates are to be phased out as Garnaut insists. Isn’t it better from their point of view to have a 20% mandate instead?

A $25 carbon tax will penalise a Mwh from pulverised black coal by that amount since it generates a tonne of CO2. That’s 2.5c per kwh. However RECs have been selling recently for $33 a Mwh for large scale wind. Thus the immediate incentives will be similar. However as coal stations retire the question must arise about the cost and reliability of a growing gas/wind combo. My guess is that wind integration costs get steeper beyond a certain point maybe 10% or 20% of total Mwh. Meanwhile gas will get expensive with both increasing carbon tax and raw fuel cost.

Unless somebody can predict the exact parameters it seems unknowable at this stage whether wind and solar can get to 20% on their own just with carbon tax. My hunch is that it won’t without some major upheavals like new subsidies or mandates. Well before then major electricity users like aluminium will be complaining about costs as coal stations retire. Next question; what about the other 80%?.

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I’m wondering if anybody has thoughts on the work of Dr. Steven Wing on re-evaluating the health impacts of radiation exposures in the 10 mile zone surrounding Three Mile Island. Steve Wing is an associate professor of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) Gilling’s School of Global Public Health. Here is his CV and list of publications. As described in a 2003 paper (and on Wiki), he says he was first asked to look into research findings by lawyers working on a court case by 2,000 plaintiffs (regarding radiation releases from TMI). As described in the paper, he “was wary of beaming involved in the lawsuit,” mainly because he felt the trend in the media was to see such claims as alarmist (a “product of radiation phobia”) and related to an effort to extort money (and he was cautious not to associate himself with such “interested” perspectives). The title of the 2003 paper laying this background is titled: “Objectivity and Ethics in Environmental Health Science.”

So what did he find regarding health impacts of TMI (and his review of the Columbia study cited here and here)? His findings were published in the Environmental Health Perspectives Journal in 1997: “A reevaluation of cancer incidence near the Three Mile Island nuclear plant: the collision of evidence and assumptions.” Dr. Wing highlights short follow up, estimates of low dosage (which he and others have questioned), and selectivity of health impacts (such as categorizing leukemia and childhood cancers separately) as evidence of weak (and unreliable) assumptions in earlier research. When he attempts to correct for these weaknesses (and draws on different models) he gets a different result. His summary of research findings can be read in the following UNC press release from 1997 (emphasis added): “He and colleagues conclude that following the March 28, 1979 accident, lung cancer and leukemia rates were two to 10 times higher downwind of the Three Mile Island reactor than upwind … [Wing states:] ‘The cancer findings, along with studies of animals, plants and chromosomal damage in Three Mile Island area residents, all point to much higher radiation levels than were previously reported. If you say that there was no high radiation, then you are left with higher cancer rates downwind of the plume that are otherwise unexplainable.'”

Thought I would include this here, since many people assume (depending on whether you take the Columbia Study to be accurate or not) that there were no health consequences from TMI. Wing’s reluctance to be involved in this research, and his subsequent publications on ethics and objectivity, and on-going professional work on the issue, would seem to indicate the contrary (or at least considerable uncertainty on the issue). If anybody knows any differently, please provide a follow-up, commentary, or rebuttals to this research. When I do a citation search for the 1997 article, I find the following in more recent journals:

– “Epidemiological studies of leukaemia in children and young adults around nuclear facilities: a critical review” (Radiation Protection Dosimetry, 2008). Agrees there is a higher incidence of cancer, but states the reason for this is not yet known: “Many studies were launched to investigate possible origins of the observed clusters around specific sites, but up to now, none of the proposed hypotheses have explained them.”

– “Three Mile Island epidemiologic radiation dose assessment revisited: 25 years after the accident” (Radiation Protection Dosimetry, 2005). It also finds problems with earlier assessments, “This commentary suggests that the major source of radiation exposure to the population has been ignored as a potential confounding factor or effect modifying factor in previous and ongoing TMI epidemiologic studies that explore whether or not TMI accidental plant radiation releases caused an increase in lung cancer in the community around TMI.”

– “The cancer epidemiology of radiation” (Oncogene, 2004). Puts TMI assessments and re-evaluation by Wing (et. al.) in context of other studies, most specifically cohort studies of atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, radon exposure among hard rock miners, and workers in nuclear weapons programs in former USSR. Study takes issue with findings on lung cancer at TMI (by Wing), but suggests “The degree of carcinogenic risk arising from low levels of exposure is more contentious, but the available evidence points to an increased risk that is approximately proportional to the dose received.”

– “Long-term follow-up of the residents of the Three Mile Island accident area: 1979-1998” (Environmental Health Perspectives, 2003). A comprehensive account that provides the following conclusion: “Although the surveillance within the TMI cohort provides no consistent evidence that radioactivity released during the nuclear accident has had a significant impact on the overall mortality experience of these residents, several elevations persist, and certain potential dose-response relationships cannot be definitively excluded.”

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John Newlands,your next and final question is a good one.That 80% is the deal breaker.
That is where the funny money schemes and the bottom of the garden dreaming come unstuck.

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I think we’re a bit smug in Australia since we seem to be avoiding the worst of the global downturn. Much of that must be due to the fact that every day we send numerous boatloads of rocks to China, some of which come back as climate change. When the global Peak Oil/Peak Debt contagion affects China they won’t buy so much from us then we’ll struggle just like Europe and the US.

Neil I think wind would have to be more than half the wind/OCGT combo to compete with pulverised black coal even after carbon tax. On checking this I see LCOE cost estimates are all over the place. $45 per Mwh black coal plus $25 carbon tax is $70. OCGT is $105 to $130 (some say more) plus say $18 carbon tax (from .75t CO2) is about double the cost of black coal. Unless gas balancing of wind can be minimised we’ll still be using coal just paying more for it.

That’s why when carbon tax fails to drastically cut emissions I think they will bring back RET maybe make it it 40% this time.

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John Newlands,
I think you are missing the dynamic nature of electricity pricing in at least in SE Australia. OCGT only has to operate when the price is high(peak demand) or if there was a lot of wind capacity when demand was high and wind output low. Coal would be competing with wind during off-peak periods and with OCGT during peak periods, unless the power stations can start and stop once or twice a day. Coal will be able to compete where it has a bulk consumer such as an aluminium smelter.
Why would wind be able to compete with coal? because operating costs are lower than OCGT during peak demand, and it can afford to sell off-peak at close to zero, whereas coal has to pay for fuel and a CO2 tax during off-peak periods.
This may well result in more expensive electricity than having 80% generated from coal, but the market is pricing electricity in 30min blocks not 10 year blocks.
If we had nuclear and OCGT instead of wind and OCGT coal would be in a similar disadvantage during off-peak periods when nuclear would keep operating whatever the price.

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“Solar thermal with storage would be competing for peak power against OCGT not against wind or nuclear.”

To give the Devil his due, that is probably the sanest statement about an application for solar I’ve seen to date. However having said that, cheap enough, thermal storage with the capacity to be economical useful could more easily be recharged by spare heat from a reactor, making the point of using solar moot.

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DV82XL, on 17 April 2011 at 10:46 AM — Please spec it out. What is the waste heat source that would recharge the molten salt thermal storage?

I had thought that the approximately two-thirds of the thermal was simply lost except for the little bit used in district heating schemes as exemplified by (coal fired, mostly) thermal generation in Germany.

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Hmm there’s potential for nuclear/renewables cohabitation there. Off peak power from a reactor could charge up a storage medium, and then be utilised to back up renewables when they don’t match demand.

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“but the availably of such storage would make it cheaper to recharge from nuclear, making a renewable-based system uneconomic.”

By the same token its cheaper to use coal for recharging.

I understand that everyone here is trying to quantify coal whose externalities are unacceptable even if it were free on paper.

That is pretty much t he same argument the anti-nuclear crowd makes. Nuclear waste, the costs of decomissioning, the costs of meltdowns both level 7 or level 5, death of innocent civilians (children most vulnerable).

PV and modern wind has no externalities, but its problem is pretty much all on paper ($$$). Even the installation casualties can be eliminated with CHEAP safety standards (rope and harness).

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DV82XL wrote:

This calibration was based primarily on a group of Chernobyl emergency workers known as liquidators. In other words they looked for chromosomal aberrations to estimate dose levels, based on data from a high-level exposed group. No justification was mentioned for this method, and the details of this critical part of the study are sketchy indeed.

There is extensive discussion of this in the paper, and why authors are drawing on this approach. It’s not to make hard and definitive associations between dose levels and cancer incidence (this is difficult and near impossible to do without adequate monitoring of exposure levels around the accident site, and comprehensive follow up with residents). Instead, they use this approach to disprove a faulty a priori assumption of early studies that they suggest leads to an erroneous result … namely, that there was no environmental release of radiation at TMI above normal background levels for the area. They provide two lines of evidence to discount this assumption: 1) anecdotal reports of hair loss, dead pets, vomiting from residents at time of accident (which they associate with higher than background levels of radiation exposure), and 2) cytogenetic analysis of 29 persons who lived near TMI and “reported erythema, vomiting, diarrhea, and other symptoms at the time of the accident.”

Why does this matter … Wing provides more detail in a follow-up comment (pp. A 546 – A 547): “Both Talbott et al. (1) and Hatch et al. (3,4), who reported on the Columbia University studies of cancer incidence, began with the assumption that the maximum possible radiation doses from the accident were well below average annual background radiation levels. Even if standard radiation risk estimates are underestimated by an order of magnitude or more, such doses would be associated with very small increases in cancer in a general population with heterogeneous susceptibility (2). Given the measurement constraints of epidemiologic studies, it would not be possible to detect an accident-related increase in cancer at the dose levels assumed by these authors. Thus, when they find increased cancer rates among residents assumed to have received relatively higher radiation doses from the accident, such as the significant linear trend in female breast cancer (1), the authors must conclude that the association is not due to the exposure they are studying.”

There thus appears to be a problem of definition and assumptions here, and not one of measurable results and conclusions. The problem remains, if we are to take Talbott and Hatch (reporting on Columbia studies) as definitive, how are we to explain higher cancer incidence levels among downwinders when compared to other populations (sharing similar age, gender, and socio-economic factors … but differing only in geographic exposure to radioactive plume). Claiming that there is a detection bias, or that residents are somehow imagining their “cancers” doesn’t really do it for me. Most researchers accept these epidemiological facts, they simply explain them with different models and assumptions (or don’t explain them, as is the case with Talbott and Hatch).

DV82XL wrote:

In short, nothing in the studies posted above support any measurable increase in cancers in the TMI ‘downwinders’ population that cannot be dismissed as experimental error, detection bias, or statistical noise.

I appreciate that you looked at the other sources in the original post. I did not include them to suggest they confirmed the analysis by Wing. Quite the contrary. I’m interested in what readers here have to say about Wing. They were not cherry picked, but were included as the most recent papers citing Wing (1997), and as some measure of the response of peers to the paper (a crucial aspect of “peer review”). One of them disputes his analysis with respect to lung cancers (I indicated this in my summary). But they also appear to agree on the broader questions raised by Wing … the work is unfinished on health impacts and there are unanswered questions in the epidemiology (and I indicated where this was the case in my original comment). If it was only statistical noise or detection bias, I am not sure why other researchers are repeating it, and also expressing concern with data that appears to have no explanation.

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Renewables are the answer, Germany keeps doubling installed PV capacity almost every year or two, nearly keeping pace with moore’s law! this follows the popular prediction on PV prices. This from a country with low avg solar irradiation, sure its peak power for now, but eventually when storage is mastered with hydro or biogas it has the potential to be the only base load the planet would ever need in the foreseeable future. In the meantime wind plays an important role too, maybe even a natgas stopgap if needed.

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/03/new-record-for-german-renewable-energy-in-2010??cmpid=WNL-Wednesday-March30-2011

The only REAL problem is cost, scale is perfect since it is basically silicone and energy PV itself net energy producer.

There is no need to saddle future generations with nuclear waste.

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DV82XL wrote:

The bottom line is that without proper dosimetry, and reliance on uncontrolled sources for critical data AND given the small amplitude of the actual deltas, it is difficult to see what if anything is present in terms of some effect that can reliably be assigned to the event at TMI NPP.

This is the crucial point … is it not? And it would seem to apply equally well to studies showing no correlation, as well as those suggesting a strong relationship between dose levels and cancer incidence. Should we throw out all research on TMI because the proper dosimetry was never done, or try and establish better methodologies for working with the material that was collected (and acknowledge where there are weaknesses and where this is likely to show up and trend in conclusions). In fact, it’s the paucity and inconsistency of the data that leads Wing and others to search for other methodologies for arriving at more accurate results (or approaches that better account for unexplained findings or anomalies).

You claim the deltas are small, but that assumes that conservative estimates for short range projections are correct, and will continue to hold for long range projections (as well). That’s a lot of assuming (and a lot of wishful thinking on conservative estimates), when it’s measurable and repeatable (or independently verifiable) results that we are after. And this debate (in the peer literature) is all about that … coming to reliable conclusions about the health impacts of the accident at TMI today, and in the future (and closing the gaps on outstanding questions).

For those who haven’t downloaded the article, here’s their statement on delta curves (from the abstract), and where they think this points with respect to future research, on-going questions, and revised conclusions: “Considering a 2-year latency, the estimated percent increase per dose unit +/- standard error was 0.020 +/- 0.012 for all cancer, 0.082 +/- 0.032 for lung cancer, and 0.116 +/- 0.067 for leukemia. Adjustment for socioeconomic variables increased the estimates to 0.034 +/- 0.013, 0.103 +/- 0.035, and 0.139 +/- 0.073 for all cancer, lung cancer, and leukemia, respectively [see Table 2 and 3 on pg. 55]. Associations were generally larger considering a 5-year latency, but were based on smaller numbers of cases. Results support the hypothesis that radiation doses are related to increased cancer incidence around TMI. The analysis avoids medical detection bias, but suffers from inaccurate dose classification; therefore, results may underestimate the magnitude of the association between radiation and cancer incidence. These associations would not be expected, based on previous estimates of near-background levels of radiation exposure following the accident.”

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@Environmentalist :

Your statement on the replacement of older reactors is somewhat oversimplifying the actual situation. The only unreplaceable part of a nuclear reactor is the pressure vessel. It is the only part that receives neutron doses and continuously ages because of them (neutron embrittlement), while the other materials are regularly replaced. The pressure vessel integrity is surveilled by a dedicated program, in which pieces of the steel and welds from which the pressure vessel was built, are irradiated in the reactor core under the same neutron flux as the pressure vessel itself. Since the capsules in which these samples are irradiated are slightly closer to the core than the vessel itself and they are put in the reactor from startup, they actually run ahead of the vessel ageing (this is called the lead factor). Every 3-4 years, a capsule is drawn from the reactor and the mechanical properties of the samples are tested in a laboratory, from which they derive what the expected lifetime of the vessel can be. It is mostly because these datasets did not exist when the first reactors were built that reactor lifetimes were set at 30 years for many reactors. Now we know that, at least for what the vessel is concerned, the safe exploitation of many plants is assured for over 60 years.

Of course, there is one more thing that cannot be changed, at least not in practice, which is the general layout of the reactor. Certain choices that were made (such as the location of the spent fuel pools or the availability of water and passive safety features) definitely have been much improved in today’s designs. The initial investment cost for a nuclear plant is indeed the capital contributor to the cost of nuclear power, while the fuel cost is more important for fossile power. However, taking into account the statistics of nuclear accidents and their consequences, expecting utilities to replace an older power plant for a newer model only for those reasons would be like expecting you to replace your car every time a new model comes out with better airbags. If one would consider his/her chance of dying in a car accident sufficiently large, he/she would probably do it… Accidents with nuclear power plants are hard to compare with car accidents, I agree, but your chance of dying in your car is still quite large.

As for PV and wind, they surely should be a bigger part of the energy mix, but it is my conviction that a balanced energy mix, including nuclear and even fossil, is our best option.

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The real problem with solar is that its not there 80 to 90 percent of the time depending on how sunny your area is. In my country, the Netherlands, not very sunny, the best performing PV installations, the ones that are decent at converting diffuse insolation, and have ideal installation angles and enthusiast everyday cleaning, get about 1000 kWh/kWpeak per year. This is about 12 percent capacity utilisation (0.12 capacity factor).

Our single, old, primitive nuclear plant, Borssele, gets 7000 kWh/kWpeak per year. 7x as much. and it lasts longer (60 years operating licence). This means this power source IS there 80% of the time. Whereas solar isn’t there 88% of the time. This is unacceptable, so the practical alternative is the burn a lot of natural gas. I don’t see how that’s sustainable, too much greenhouse gasses, importing from unstable countries/dangerous regimes, not good. I worry a lot about this fossil fuel lock-in. Its one of the reasons I like nuclear so much.

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On plutonium I was at the hardware store looking at a display of smoke detectors ( I was looking for a CO detector as I use firewood). The cheaper ‘ionisation’ type alarms have less than a microgram of Americium 241 a decay product of Pu 241. It is removed before making MOX fuel I gather to reduce gamma ray emissions.

The price of optical or non-ionising smoke alarms generally seems to be a little higher. The radiation symbol is usually minuscule so millions of people may be unaware they are in effect using plutonium. I understand old alarms can be legally thrown in the garbage and like mercury in CFL bulbs the dilution is adequate.
Refs http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf57.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium

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I’ve got about 370,000 Becquerels of Am-241 hanging in my house, in smoke detectors (10x 1 microcurie).

Here is a link to the Manhattan bomb builders that handled lots of plutonium and subsequently received quite large doses due to plutonium. Plutonium turns out to be so dangerous that fewer of the plutonium workers died than would be expected from average US population. In fact it is so dangerous that the level of mortality in the plutonium workers is similar to that of non-plutonium workers. Gee.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9314220

“Twenty-six white male workers who did the original plutonium research and development work at Los Alamos have been examined periodically over the past 50 y to identify possible health effects from internal plutonium depositions. Their effective doses range from 0.1 to 7.2 Sv with a median value of 1.25 Sv. As of the end of 1994, 7 individuals have died compared with an expected 16 deaths based on mortality rates of U.S. white males in the general population. The standardized mortality ratio (SMR) is 0.43. When compared with 876 unexposed Los Alamos workers of the same period, the plutonium worker’s mortality rate was also not elevated (SMR = 0.77). The 19 living persons have diseases and physical changes characteristic of a male population with a median age of 72 y (range = 69 to 86 y). Eight of the twenty-six workers have been diagnosed as having one or more cancers, which is within the expected range. The underlying cause of death in three of the seven deceased persons was from cancer, namely cancer of prostate, lung, and bone. Mortality from all cancers was not statistically elevated. The effective doses from plutonium to these individuals are compared with current radiation protection guidelines”

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@Robert Lawrence – The toxicity of Pu is greatly exaggerated, as toxic metals go, arsenic,cadmium, mercury and beryllium beat it hands down as an acute systemic toxin, and polonium among others is more radiotoxic, although this somewhat dependent on specific isotope. From a purely chemical standpoint, Pu is about as poisonous as lead.

Botulinum toxin is the most acutely toxic substance known, with a median lethal dose of about 1 ng/kg when introduced intravenously and 3 ng/kg when inhaled.

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DV82XL wrote:

So perhaps the answer is that rather than construct a house of cards out the poor data available, it might be better to admit that little can be determined with a reasonable level of confidence with available tools.

I agree with you. This is a fair assessment. But the risk of building a “house of cards” around the null hypothesis seems to me to be an equally likely risk and has a far greater potential to cause harm (and mislead) than statistical assumptions looking at evidential anomalies and following a cautious and precautionary principle (which you are comfortable writing off as FUD). [deleted personal appraisal of probabilities, not supported by evidence]. Instead of turtles all the way down, it appears we will have to be content with assumptions (and hope that no great damage gets buried in the statistical noise).
MODERATOR: edited

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Others in South Australia will be interested in a new website by Ben Heard called Decarbonise SA. This will promote nuclear power as a replacement of fossil fuels in our state. It will be well worth supporting.

http://decarbonisesa.com/

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Enviromentalist, on 17 April 2011 at 3:16 PM — Recycling spent fuel rods is done in France, Russia and Japan. I think China either does now or will soon.

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