Bill Gates has fully realized the potential of nuclear and he has spoken often and a lot on the issue. Here are a few videos that are well worth watching.
The Gate Notes: Nuclear Energy after Fukushima (click on the link, video can not be embedded here)
The Gate Notes: An Energy Briefing with Daniel Yergin: Nuclear Energy
And here are two videos embedded.
A video clip worth watching!
A powerpoint presentation made by professor Majia Holmer Nadesan is getting some attention around the web, in the presentation she claims that the Japanese authorities, among others, lied and covered up information about the Fukushima accident. So let's have a look at it.
Helen Caldicott declined to answer questions at a lecture...
The recently started Nuclear Literacy Project has a welcome entry, a person with knowledge in the field of radioactivity and nuclear engineering reports on a visit to an anti-nuclear seminar with Helen Caldicott. The person, PhD student Kallie Metzger, entered the meeting with some hope of a good discussion where there would be room for incorrect statements to be straightened out.
What Kallie found, however, was that the renowned anti-nuclear activist was more keen on scaring people into thinking like herself, and questions from the audience were responded to in a hostile and arrogant manner, if at all.
...attended by Kallie Metzger, Ph.D student in nuclear engineering.
After watching a few videos with Helen Caldicott, including her infamous TV-debate with George Monbiot from last year, we are, unfortunately, not surprised about her behaviour. The good news is that Kallie went to listen to Caldicott, and reported about it. We need more people like Kallie who attends these kind of meetings and try to raise relevant questions when remarkable claims are being stated. If Caldicott continues her tour in the same arrogant manner her audience should diminish rather quickly down to the die-hard fans of her outrageous claims.
So the hero of the week is Kallie Metzger. Read her account of the Caldicott seminar here. Then ask yourself: will you be our next hero?
It has been a busy day here at the NPYP center, where the members of Nuclear Power Yes Please held a press conference. They recently discovered a devastating text by Professor Chris Busby, where he shows that their criticism of his research is completely unfounded. The NPYP Scientific Director Mattias Lantz had attacked Professor Busby's articles about Fallujah (here, here, and here), by making a comparison of the sex-ratio (i.e. the number of boys born vs number of girls born) between the Iraqi city of Fallujah and his own city of birth, Avesta in Sweden. According to Lantz the variations in Avesta were as large, or larger, than the ones in Fallujah, so he reasoned that one could not claim that the variations in Fallujah were due to depleted uranium (DU). Professor Busby turned the data from Avesta around, and showed that Lantz had used the data in a dishonest way, even trying to hide an obvious correlation between increased sex-ratio in Avesta and the 2003 war in Iraq. Professor Busby's eminent rebuttal can be found on the LLRC web site (here). Below is the figure made by Lantz, with Professor Busby's hand-written notes that give evidence of the dishonesty of Lantz.
The plot with sex-ratio for Avesta where Professor Chris Busby could reveal the scientific dishonesty of Lantz and his NPYP cronies.
– ”I never even thought of the correlation,” a humiliated Mattias Lantz said at the press conference, ”but Professor Busby clearly shows that the deviating sex-ratio in Avesta around 2004 is due to the DU-weapons used in Iraq. Furthermore,” Lantz continued, ”this means that all of our past criticism of Professor Busby falls apart, just like a house built from a deck of cards. I now realize what an omnipotent genius he is. He is right about everything, even when he cheats with statistics.”
– ”And he is a great musician!” Gender Issues Director Nils Rudqvist adds.
– What does this mean for the future of NPYP?
– ”This changes everything.” says Policy Director and NPYP founder Michael Karnerfors, ”We have been wrong about all these issues; about radiation effects, nuclear power, cell phone radiation, chem-trails, dowsing, crystal healing and the HAARP experiment. Therefore, we will now turn sides in the debate on all these issues, and we will join Professor Busby, Mona Nilsson, Lennart Hardell and all the other serious researchers in their noble quests. From now on, scrutinizing alarmist claims, checking statistics, or asking the simple question 'Is this relevant?' has no place in what we consider to be a serious debate. Google was created to find the scary claims, not to scrutinize them. Many people are scared about radiation. From now on we will help them to maintain that status.”
– What about your close ties to the nuclear industry?
– ”We will pay back every penny of the funding we got from those bastards,” says Financial Director Christoffer Willenfort, ”and those of us who are employed by the nuclear industry will submit letters of resignation today, we are all done with it.”
– And the organization?
– ”The first reaction was of course that we should dismantle NPYP and join other groups, but after some intense brain storming we decided that it is better to continue, although under a different name.”
– ”Yes, from today we are Nuclear Power No Please,” confirms the Public Relations Director Johan Kreuger, ”and here is the new logotype!”
An embarrassing silence grew in the press room, until somebody in the audience dared pointing out an obvious error in the spelling.
The first version of the new Nuclear Power No Please logotype.
– ”C'mon people, give us a break!” Kreuger burst out. ”We have been wrong about so many things for years, so how can you expect us to get every tiny detail right immediately?”
– What is Lantz' status within the organization, can he continue to be a member?
– ”Well,” says Karnerfors, ”at first we thought that he had to go. We were all very disappointed with him and felt that we needed to distance ourselves from him and the dishonesty that he brought upon us. But we are all to blame. It was certainly Lantz who would initiate the studies of Professor Busby's claims, but we all started to act like stupid physicists and make independent double checks of numbers and other details. That was of course foolish of us, we should have trusted Professor Busby from the beginning without asking any questions.”
– So you now believe in Professor Busby's claims?
– ”How can you not, after what we have been through?” Reactor Technology Director Johan Simu says. ”Professor Busby has an expertise in so many scientific fields, not only in radiation effects. A few months ago he introduced a new definition of the term 'spontaneous fission', and with it he showed that TEPCO is lying about the status of the reactors in Fukushima. With the new definition, the reactors must clearly be active in a critical configuration. My personal reflection at the time was that this is utter nonsense. But now, after Professor Busby's proof of our dishonesty, I am all for it. The effects will be tremendous; all courses in reactor physics will have to be revised, and the commercial codes used today for criticality calculations have to be changed. But that is not all, recently he also showed that Einstein is wrong.”
– What?
– ”Yes indeed, Professor Busby's interpretation of the twin paradox is quite convincing. He has also promised to explain quantum mechanics on Youtube, something that we are all looking forward to. It is about time that somebody settles the issue whether that cat of Schrödinger is alive or not, the world deserves to know. Furthermore, this poor creature has been in this un-collapsed wave function state for so long, it is clearly a violation of animals rights that needs to be brought to an international court. Professor Busby's expertise also in legal matters will be very helpful in order to bring the perpetrators to justice.”
On the way out from the press room we manage to get hold of Mattias Lantz for a personal comment, he looks tired and stressed out.
Our reporter Kazue Avril gets a moment with a humiliated Mattias Lantz at the NPYP press conference.
– Will you apologize to Professor Busby and the other people that you have attacked over the years?
– ”No, of course not!” Lantz responds rather agressively. ”Earlier we would have done such a thing, or corrected our statements if they were found to be in error. Now when we have changed sides in the debate we will follow the established customs of our new friends. Apologies or amends are out of the question. Instead we move on forward, though in the opposite direction as before.”
– How did you react when it became clear that you had been so wrong about Professor Busby?
– ”I felt awful, of course. Not so much for my unfounded attacks on Professor Busby, but on a personal level it is devastating. In the plot that Professor Busby turned against me there is also a peak with high sex-ratio in Avesta during the 1970's when I was born. This puts the question about my gender at stake, maybe I was supposed to be a girl? This will take years of psycho-therapy to sort out.”
Then he excuses himself and pushes through the crowd towards the entrance, stopping every now and then, asking people if they know where he can get hold of a good beret.
We get a private interview with Industry Liaison Director Johan Kihlberg.
– ”Former Industry Liaison Director, if I may! The title does not exist any more now that we have severed the ties with the nuclear industry.”
– So, what is your title?
– ”Alarmist Organizations Liaison Director.”
– Ok, ok, so how was the error of Lantz discovered?
– ”We knew for a while that something was not right. Lantz has of course always been obsessed with Professor Busby. Certainly the money from industry and Socialstyrelsen kept him motivated, but there was also something else, some sort of...envy. And during the last few months he has become more and more deranged. You could find him at late hours in his office, but he would not deliver any new blog posts or forum entries. If you met him in the corridor you could hear him mumbling weird things for himself.”
– Weird things?
– ”Yes, phrases like 'eminent scientists', 'Bramhall is not a pushover', 'ICRP doesn't get it', or 'there must be a third event' were often repeated. Things like that. Then, a few days ago in the coffee room he made no sense at all, trying to convince us that 'the alarmists get laid more often than we do' and that we should buy a boat, or two. Last Friday we discovered that he had asked the market analysis division for an evaluation about entering the field of anti-radiation pills, and there were follow up plans for major investments in this field. When this was found out we decided to check his computer. It turned out that for the last month he had used the computer for only one thing, to visit the 'Dishonesty' page on the LLRC web site, over and over again.”
– So what did you do?
– ”It was the first time that any of us saw that web page, and after reading it we realized that it was all over. A crisis meeting was held, thereafter we summoned Lantz in order to have him explain himself. There was an intense discussion, with harsh words being exchanged in all directions, but finally we could agree on a strategy and decided to call for the press conference.”
– These plans that Lantz had initiated for anti-radiation pills, how far had he gone with them?
– ”Actually, very far,” Kihlberg responds with some excitement.
– So how did you stop it?
– ”We didn't. The analysis shows that we can make a huge profit even if we sell the pills at half the price compared to what Busby and his friends had in mind. We have some connections in Japan that will help us with the promotion, there are many ways to scare people into becoming your customers. For instance the Japanese TV-channel NHK has been very helpful by making an alarmist documentary in which the credibility of ICRP is undermined. We are also considering to buy the recently closed candy factory in Gävle. In that way we can have a local production directly in the areas that were most affected by the Tondel study.”
– You mean the areas that were most affected by the Chernobyl fallout?
– "No, by the Tondel study."
– Ah, whatever. So you will manufacture and sell pills in order to raise money for the suffering children?
– ”What do you mean? We have to make up for the losses now that we have stopped the funding from the nuclear industry. We are the good guys now, we need to make a living. Just look at Green Audit, the Cancer and Birth Defects Organization, and so on. They are registered as companies, not as charities, why should we be any different? Why live on secret funding from evil companies when we can make as much money in the open by exploiting the gullible, the naive, and the vulnerable? To have funding from the industry in order to change people's opinion is a difficult task, it is much easier to get money directly from concerned citizens in order to help them preserve their already established views. Busby is of course a huge inspiration in these matters, but we are also looking at other options.”
– What kind of options?
– ”For instance, Joseph Mangano and his Radiation and Public Health Project is a good example. They have managed to recruit celebrities like Alec Baldwin and Christie Brinkley for the fundraising. And they are very successful, just look at the suits of Mangano! So we hope to be able to do something similar from a Swedish perspective, if we can get stars like Manne the Clown and Solveig Ternström on our team, then we are all set.”
– So the future is bright...?
– ”Yes, brighter than ever. This has been a severe crisis situation for us, but thanks to Professor Busby we are finally on the right track. An event like this does not happen every day, but today it did indeed happen.”
An old news article is circulating around that states that 68 tons of fuel has melted in reactor number 1 and that it was close to breaching the bottom of the containment. The article is several months old but for some reason I have seen it pop up again on facebook so I though it is worth examining the article briefly. In particular I want to examine this statement.
Only 37 centimeters of concrete remains between the fuel and the vessel's outermost steel wall in the most damaged area, TEPCO said.
This wording is repeatedly used by anti nuclear sources to imply that a much worse disaster was very close to happening. What the articles fail to mention however is that there is A LOT more concrete between the ground and the molten core. The reactor building itself is a very thick concrete structure. Will Davis, on his excellent blog Atomic Power Review, talked about this the first time the news about the number one vessel failure showed up last November. Some of what he wrote is worth repeating and I hope he doesn't mind me repeating it here and also posting a picture from his blog.
The NHK report indicates a melt depth of about 2.1 feet(64 cm, my note /Johan). The distance to the ground is roughly eighteen times this depth from the dry well interior floor to grade. Below is a drawing from WASH-1082 which I've marked to show the distance from the dry well floor to the grade outside, which on the particular plant shown is 39' 0"(11.8 meters, my note /Johan). I do not presently know the exact measurement at Fukushima Daiichi No. 1 but it is likely within ten percent of this measurement... meaning that in the worst case that TEPCO is describing, by its own data, the core material may have melted only about as much as 5% of the distance to the grade.
I encourage everyone to read the rest of his blog as it is by far the best information source for the Fukushima accident.
I also want to add this picture of the mark I containment that schematically shows the thick concrete even more clearly! Picture found at the blog "The capacity factor".
So we see that there is a tremendous amount of concrete below the shell of the containment structure. The hints and suggestions that the core would only have to melt another 37 centimeters for a unnamed disaster to take place is obviously false. In reality the shell of the containment is integrated into a thick concrete structure and the molten core would have to melt through several more meters, likely around 10 meters, to get out of the reactor building itself.
The cleanup of the containment is going to be a very hard and messy job, much worse than the cleanup of TMI was. But the core is still a long long way from the ground.
/Johan
It has always mystified me (and I think I can speak for all of us in NPYP) that someone can be anti-something when it comes to energy. Lets suppose for instance that someone declares himself to be anti-chemical energy, the logical follow up question to the fellow would of course be "what kind of chemical energy?". The question is logical because there are so many different ways one can extract chemical energy, everything from burning cow dung in huts to the engine in your car to high tech gas turbines to dynamite. Our friend there probably didn't even think of those distinctions when he made his statement, but what if he did? Let's say he rebukes by stating he really means that he is anti coal. Even that statement can be challenged, it must by necessity be conditional otherwise it is moronic. If he is anti coal because of air pollution, then would he change his mind if there was a solution to the pollution? If someone developed a filter that reduced pollution levels to insignificant amount is fossil fuels then ok? Logically he should think so. If he is anti coal because of the immensely destructive coal mining, would he change his mind if environmentally sound mining practices where developed? The guy is presumably actually anti air pollution or anti dirty mines, not anti chemical energy or anti coal. He just never bothered to go through the chain of reasoning to understand what he really opposes in chemical energy.
Same can be said of any energy source, there is no rational reason to be against the energy source itself, rather one is against some undesirable effect due to the present application of the energy source. NPYP are not fans of coal by any means, but I dare say that if there was solid solutions to its problems, then none of us would oppose its use. There just isn't any justifiable reason to oppose it if the problems are solved. There is no other way to rationally look at energy production.
The advantage with digging deep and specifying exactly what one is actually opposed to means opening up to the possibility of finding solutions! If someone simply state that they are anti windmills then the discussion pretty much ends right there. If the person instead states that the noise from windmills is disturbing then the discussion can turn to possible solutions to reduce noise. Everyone wins on that! There is no reason to be horribly emotional about the whole thing and cling to an anti-something idea so hard that one blocks any fruitful discussion and becomes blind to solutions.
A discussion goes no where until one gets to the core of the argument, which is, what properties of a specific energy source makes you oppose it and and how can it be improved so you no longer oppose it?
The frustrating thing in the nuclear debate is that the discussion never seems to reach that point. Ask leading environmentalists that exact question and they will squirm like a worm on a hook.
If someone specifies that they are opposed to nuclear energy due to the waste problem. Fine we say, but what exactly do you mean by the waste problem and what effect does the waste have that you find repulsive? If you are bothered by the possibility that the waste will hurt future generations, then lets discuss how to safely dispose of the waste. If you are anti nuclear because you are bothered by the safety of nuclear installations, then specify what level of safety is safe enough (obviously there must be a level where an activity is considered safe enough, otherwise the person in question would never get out of bed to shower for fear of slipping and dying) and lets discuss how to reach that.
But the discussion always ends before reaching that point because the "anti person" generally never seems to be interested in solutions to the posed problems and they are usually not even able to state clearly why they consider the issue as a problem in the first place. This is not only valid for the nuclear debate, one sees the same tendencies in all kinds of discussion where there is a clear anti side. Anti genetic engineering, anti cars, anti meat, anti space exploration, you name it! It seems very hard for people to go past the simple emotional attachment of being against something and instead engage into a meaningful discussion about the issues. It is too easy to just be opposed to something, it is damned much harder to actually find solutions.
So to move the nuclear discussion into a more fruitful direction it would be enlightening if some nuclear opponents could specify what conditions nuclear would have to fulfill to be an acceptable energy source. Believe it or not even we have such conditions. I don't think for instance anyone in NPYP wants to see more RBMK reactors built (the type of reactor at the Chernobyl plant) and just to speak for myself I have quite strict demands on what nuclear energy should be in the long run to be an acceptable energy source. I am not anti nuclear, but I am certainly anti towards some ways of extracting nuclear energy.
To summaries and to state the challenge again clearly.
I just had to make a quick post about this excellent article.
The world has forgotten the real victims of Fukushima
It was at this point, at around day three, that I realised that something had gone seriously wrong with the reporting of the biggest natural disaster to hit a major industrialised nation for a century. We had forgotten the real victims, the 20,000-and-counting Japanese people killed, in favour of a nuclear scare story.
/Johan
Activity is not very high here lately so I though I would provide you all with some nice weekend reading material.
First is the article "Energy as the ultimate raw material" by the nuclear energy pioneer Alvin Weinberg. Weinberg used to think of the big picture and this article showcases that. He outlines a few approaches to a asymptotic state of civilization, a state where humanity is using resources at a rate that is practically infinitely sustainable. In such a state humanity uses a lot of energy in order to produce the necessary raw materials from common rock, seawater etc.The article is from 1959 but well worth reading even today.
The second article is a blog post from Will Davis over at Atomic Power Review, "Vogtle COL approval vote indicates perspective on "nuclear renaissance". I selected it because in it Will describes some the various reactors that where developed during the first decades of nuclear energy. In my opinion it speaks volumes of how restricted the view of nuclear energy has become, nuclear power today is pretty much identical to light water reactors, but that is just a fluke of history and some day tinkering with other designs will charge on at full speed again.
As the third article I give you Gismags "Feature: Small modular nuclear reactors - the future of energy?". Aside from a few glaring technical errors or statements that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, it gives a good overview of the developments going on with small modular reactors.
I also end the post with a small section from Freeman Dysons book "Disturbing the universe". A fantastic book by a fantastic scientist! Any spelling errors are mine since I wrote out the paragraphs below.
The fundamental problem of the nuclear power industry is not reactor safety, not waste disposal, not the dangers of nuclear proliferation, real though all these problems are. The fundamental problem of the industry is that nobody any longer has any fun building reactors. It is inconceivable under present conditions that a group of enthusiast could assemble in a schoolhouse and design, build, test, license and sell a reactor within three years. Sometime between 1960 and 1970, the fun went out of the business.
The adventurers, the experimenters, the inventors, were driven out, and the accountants and managers took control. Not only in the private industry but also in the government laboratories, at Los Alamos, Livermore, Oak Ridge and Argonne, the groups of bright young people who used to build and invent and experiment with a great variety of reactors where disbanded. The accountants and managers decided that it was not cost effective to let bright people play with weird reactors. So the weird reactors disappeared and with them the chance of any radical improvement beyond our existing systems.
We are left with a very small number of reactor types in operation, each of them frozen into a huge bureaucratic organization that makes any substantial change impossible, each of them in various ways technically unsatisfactory, each of them less safe than many possible alternative designs which have been discarded. Nobody builds reactors for fun anymore. The spirit of the little red schoolhouse is dead. That, in my opinion, is what went wrong with nuclear power.
- Freeman Dyson
/Johan
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The spent fuel pool at Fukushima #4
Friday, May 11th, 2012A former DOE assistant secretary for renewable energy, Robert Alvarez, has lately been spreading a lot of fearmongering about the stability of the spent fuel pool in reactor 4 at Fukushima. From the start of the accident a lot of question marks regarding the pool has been floating around, including the statement from the NRC chairman Jaczko that the pool might have run dry. Later is was however shown that the pool was never in any danger, it was never damaged in the earthquake and tsunami and it never ran dry. TEPCO released footage from the pool itself and its clear that it is intact and full of water.
The new rumors spread by Alvarez is that the spent fuel pools are in danger of collapsing and that somehow the entire cesium content of the spent fuel would spread uncontrollably, rather silly considering that not even the Chernobyl accident managed to spread more than 20-40% of the cesium inventory of the reactor despite exploding and burning in open air for days. No amount of zirconium fire can approach that.
Akio Matsumura has picked up on the issue and added some "spice" to it.
Many of our readers might find it difficult to appreciate the actual meaning of the figure, yet we can grasp what 85 times more Cesium-137 than the Chernobyl would mean. It would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival.
Chernobyl, as bad as it was, will likely not cause more than a couple of thousand extra fatal cases of cancer and so far no increase in cancer rates, except thyroid cancer, has been seen. Even if one where to assume that somehow magically all the Cesium would be released from all the pools, and assume it causes consequences 85 times as bad as Chernobyl, its still hard to see how it would be the "end of our civilization". If one assumes 85 times as many people where to die then the accident would be about half as bad as the Banqiao hydropower disaster, China still exists as a nation! The Chernobyl exclusion zone is now a thriving wilderness and that makes it hard to understand how it would "destroy the world environment". Chernobyl was in no way pleasant, but 85 times Chernobyl isn't the end of the world. Amusingly Matsumura also quotes this from Alvarez:
The total spent reactor fuel inventory at the Fukushima-Daichi site contains nearly half of the total amount of Cs-137 estimated by the NCRP to have been released by all atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, Chernobyl, and world-wide reprocessing plants (~270 million curies or ~9.9 E+18 Becquerel).
Well uhmmmm, civilization didn't end and the world environment didn't collapse due to that, so why would half again as much make the world kick the bucket? No this isn't rocket science Mr Matsumura, but it seems you fail to grasp it anyway.
TEPCOs reply to the issues is a strong statement that the pool is in good health and that it could handle another earthquake of the same magnitude. Further the pool has been reinforced to the extend that it is even stronger now than before the accident.
The upper part of the Reactor Building of Unit 4 was damaged due to a hydrogen explosion. We confirmed the items below and affirm that the building, including its spent fuel pool will not collapse should another earthquake occur.
1) We measured the distance between the water surface of the spent fuel pool and the floor surface of the building, and confirmed that the building has not tilted.
2) Our analyses show that the building, including the spent fuel pool, will not collapse even if an earthquake equivalent (seismic intensity 6) to the Tohoku-Chihou-Taiheiyou-Oki Earthquake occurs in the area.
3) In addition, we have improved the seismic safety margin by 20% by reinforcing the bottom of the spent fuel pool.
4) We will regularly check the reactor building and the spent fuel pool four times per year to confirm their soundness.
Rod Adams mentions on his blog Atomic Insights that a detailed technical response to Alvarez claims are in the works and it will be very interesting to read it. The #4 spent fuel pool has obviously turned into a disappointment for the anti nuclear crowd since it never ran dry, it never released any activity and it seems to be holding up very well, so they continue to make up more and more fantastic scenarios on how it will fail.
More about the whole thing can be read on Idaho Samizdat and at Atomic Power Review.
Tags: Cesium, Cs-137, Fukushima, Reactor, spent fuel pool
Posted in Bad Science, Commentary, English, Fukushima, Nuclear Power? Yes Please, Uncategorized | 47 Comments »