In a government report published March 5, 2012, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced that China will "put an end to blind expansion in industries such as solar energy and wind power in 2012."

The most interesting part of the report to me was the last two sentences, that deserve careful reading, in view of some of the glowing promises and predictions that have been written about solar and wind during the past several decades. A great deal of important information is revealed in just these few words:

"The operating hours of wind power generating units plunged by 144 hours in 2011, despite an increase of 48% in on-grid wind power output."

"The operating hours of solar power generating units also declined, in spite of the tripling of installed capacity of solar PV power."

How about THAT?!

Ted Rockwell

There is a lot of chatter about how fast windpower is growing. We're told that windpower is the fastest growing source of electricity, and that we could live on nothing but breezes and sunshine forever, if we really wanted to.

But lets not get so involved in the various specifics as to lose the basic truth here: windpower needs spinning backup, ready to leap in at any instant. Therefore, the only way that windpower can sell electricity is to replace a source that was already reliably doing the job, and make that reliable source less efficient. This is true whether that reliable source is coal, gas, hydro or nuclear. Windpower can never add to our energy supply.

I'm not smart enough to figure out how to shut down my site for a day, but let me just say here: IT IS ESSENTIAL TO THE BASIC CONCEPT OF THE INTERNET THAT IT NOT BE CENSORED OR INTERFERED WITH BY ANY OUTSIDE AUTHORITY.

This is the citizen's last chance to communicate freely. It must not be abridged!

Ted Rockwell

The

[This is an up-date on some previous discussions we've had here]

How Much Is Science, How Much Prudence?

U.S. Regulatory Report NCRP-136 examined the question of establishing permissible radiation limits. After looking at the data, it concluded that most people who get a small dose of nuclear radiation are not harmed by it, and in fact are benefited. Thats what the science said: Most people would benefit by receiving more radiation.

But curiously, the reports final conclusion was just the opposite. It recommended that our regulations should be based on the premise that any amount of radiation, no matter how small, should be considered harmful. It made that recommendation just to be conservative or prudent.

Lets think about that. Why is it prudent do just the opposite of what the science indicates? Why is exaggerating a panicky situation considered prudent? Ive never seen a good answer to that question. Whatever the reasoning, thats where weve ended up.

Weve had three uncontrolled releases of radioactivity from serious malfunctions of nuclear power plants: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. In each of these, fear of radiation proved to be much more harmful than the effects of radiation itself. And announcing that no amount of radiation is small enough to be harmless was certainly effective in creating and nurturing phobic fear of radiation, when none was justified by the facts.

In addition, the problem is aggravated by the fact that weve been told for sixty years (two human generations) that nuclear terror is infinitely more dreadful than any non-nuclear threat, particularly when you blur the distinction between power plants and bombs.

But what Fukushima tells us is that this abstract, academic position looks very different when youre telling people they cant go home perhaps for years, because, well, it seems more prudent that way, even though radiation hasnt actually hurt anyone there.

Radiation expert Professor Wade Allison, author of Radiation and Reason, has cast the question in a new light. He suggests, lets set the permissible radiation limit the same way we set all other safety limits. Not by asking how little radiation we can get by with, but how much can we safely permit? Theres no intention of lowering the safety margin, and it will not be lowered. Thats not the issue. Its a matter of working with the scientific data, rather than from a generic fear not supported by the science.

Prof. Allison concludes that setting the permissible radiation limit, with a good margin of safety, results in an annual permissible level about 1000 times the current figure.

To see a brief video of Prof. Allisons talk to the Japanese people, click on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj8Pl1AiOuA&feature=youtu.be

Ted Rockwell

New lessons are beginning to emerge from Fukushima. Each new concern leads to additional safety requirements. But some contradictions are beginning to raise questions: Amid tens of thousands of deaths from non-nuclear causes, not a single life-shortening radiation injury has occurred. Not one! And while some people in the housing area are wearing cumbersome rad-con suits, filtered gas-masks, gloves and booties, there are many people living carefree in other places like Norway, Brazil, Iran, India where folks have lived normal lives for countless generations with radiation levels as much as a hundred times greater than forbidden areas of the Fukushima homes.

At Fukushima this is no abstract issue. People are being told they cannot return home for an indeterminate period perhaps years. And efforts to decontaminate their home sites may require stripping off all the rich top-soil and calling it RadWaste. People who were evacuated have been reduced to economic poverty, clinical depression, and even suicide.

There is good scientific evidence that, except for some hot spots, the radiation levels at these home-sites are not life-threatening. The current restrictions are based on a desire to be conservative. No matter how well intended, this conservatism is cruelly destructive. The respected radiation authority Wade Allison, author of Radiation and Reason, has proposed that the current annual radiation dose limit be raised 1000-fold, which he says is still well below the hazard level of clinical data on which he bases his proposal. Other radiation protectionists are beginning to feel unhappy about the harm their rules have caused and are joining in the cry for quick action as the Japanese head into winter.

Its time that the draconian measures be revoked. A simple declaration of the known health facts about radiation from the proper authorities would be a good first step.

Ted Rockwell

As of March 2011, U.S. 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 coals 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. Theyve 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 100The 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)

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

Ted Rockwell

Use of Collective Radiation Dose as a Measure of Good Practice or of Casualty Magnitude

This essay was written some time ago, but the history seems to need repeating, as people increasingly misuse cumulative or collective dose. Adding up individual radiation doses is like adding up temperatures. It gives a figure with no physical meaning.

NRC uses as a prime measure of the severity of a casualty, or the efficacy of good plant operation,

the total collective radiation dose in person-rem, multiplying trivial individual radiation doses by large

numbers of people to predict many induced cancer deaths. That process has been repeatedly

condemned as scientifically indefensible. Yet current policy presumes that, in the absence of more data,

this is the prudent course. That contention is wrong on both counts: there is no lack of applicable credible

data and the data show persuasively that low-dose radiation is not harmful. And use of this unwarranted

practice continues to have serious detrimental effects.

NCRP-121 specifically warns that collective dose should not be used to predict death or injury from

low-dose radiation:

The summation of trivial average risks over very large populations or time periodshas produced a