Author Archives: radams

Outrage management – calming people concerned about low risks

Posted on May 7, 2013 by radams| 10 Comments

By Rod Adams

Dr. Peter Sandman is a communication specialist who has built a career teaching people in high-value, complex industries ways to do a better job of telling their story to customers, stakeholders, and the public. One of his key contributions to the field of risk communications that is especially important to nuclear professionals is a redefinition of the word “risk”.

While most of us have been taught that risk = consequences x probability of occurrence, Sandman determined several decades ago that there was a wide difference between perceived risk and the expected annual mortality that is determined by multiplying consequence times probability. He retitled classical “risk” and called it “hazard” and then defined the risk that people perceive as “outrage”. Here is the definition that Sandman coined in the 1980s:

Risk = Hazard + Outrage

He then separates risk communication into four tasks:

  • Precaution advocacy to warn people and encourage them to take action when the hazard is high, but the outrage is low.
  • Outrage management to calm people down when the hazard is low but the outrage is high.
  • Crisis communications when the hazard is high and includes a matching outrage.
  • Sweet spot in talking to people about a significant, but not particularly urgent risk.

Some nuclear professionals will immediately see that we urgently need to learn as much as possible about what Sandman has to say about outrage management.

After all, we work in a field of technology where 50 years of history has resulted in substantial and vocal outrage, even though the measured average annual mortality (hazard) of the technology has been incredibly low.

As a prime example of the immediate need to get better at outrage management, consider what has happened to the prospects for near-term growth in new nuclear power plants since March 11, 2011. Starting on that day, an event that could have been the plot line of a slow motion disaster film struck a six-reactor nuclear power station called Fukushima Dai-ichi. For weeks, the world was treated to breathless stories about the knife edge between continued life and prosperity and a radiological catastrophe that some panicked-looking television experts said was going to wipe out half of Japan. (I am exaggerating a little for effect.)

As you may recall, the story started when one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history was followed by a large tsunami that topped numerous engineered barriers over a large swath of the northeast coast of Japan. Japan is one of the most camera-endowed places on earth, so we were treated to dramatic footage of the wave that really could have come from a Hollywood movie set, but it was real. Cars, buses, and trains were washed away like so many toys. Buildings were swamped, people were screaming, and the water was filled with large pieces of rubble.

Within hours, however, network television turned away from coverage of that horrible event and from pleas to help the people who needed help to recover their lives and who would never recover some of their loved ones who had been washed out to sea. Instead, the cameras focused on the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station, whose buildings looked rather intact. According to the serious and breathless reporters, the station had lost all power and thus lost the ability to continue circulating water needed to complete the reactor cool down process and maintain a stable shutdown condition.

This post is not about Fukushima, so I’ll stop with this summary. Three reactor cores at the power station melted. Approximately 43 grams of I-131 and 4 kilograms of long lived Cs-137 were released into the atmosphere. The plant site is substantially damaged. At least four of the reactors are total losses that will require several decades’ worth of careful and groundbreaking work to clean up.

Large areas of land near the plant remain barricaded and uninhabited, but thousands of workers continue to work safely at the plant itself. There were no measured health effects more serious than a minor sunburn on two workers who waded into radioactive water without proper protective clothing. There are numerous scientific organizations gearing up for long-term studies of health effects from the release of radioactive material, but the early projections are for small, probably unmeasurable, increases in the incidence of certain types of cancers.

Outrage remains high. Only two of Japan’s 50 remaining reactors are operating and Germany has announced a decision to stop using domestically generated nuclear energy. Numerous projects that were in planning stages before the event have been shelved. No one mentions a “nuclear renaissance” anymore.

Fukushima measurably increased the Sandman–defined risk of nuclear energy, even though the event helped prove to at least some former critics of nuclear energy that the hazard part of the risk equation was quite a bit lower than expected.

There is an immediate need for nuclear professionals to become better at outrage management. In fact, it is a moral imperative because there are tens of thousands of people in Japan and around the world who are still suffering from the stress and trauma of the fear of radiation, even though it turns out that the plant’s numerous layers of protection and trained workforce kept nearly all of the radioactive material from reaching the public.

Because of outrage, Japan is burning additional coal, oil, and natural gas that is costing approximately $55 billion more every year to replace the output of the nuclear plants that are not operating—and polls show that many people are relieved that the nuclear plants are being kept from operating.

However, even many nuclear professionals would also recommend that we become expert at crisis communications because our “worst case scenarios” indicate that there are times when the hazards really are high.

I have been struggling for several years with the best way to communicate the message that even the worst possible event associated with a nuclear power plant that has been designed well enough to meet licensing standards that have been in effect since the earliest days of the technology is a relatively low consequence event.

It not only has a low probability of occurring, but even if everything that can reasonably go wrong happens, few, if any people will be harmed. The primary hazards from terrible accidents at a nuclear plant are economic losses for the owners, stress-induced illness in the general population, and enormous economic losses for the community if the government orders unjustified but mandatory property abandonment.

Of course, the worst impossible but imaginable event at a nuclear plant can be calculated to result in widespread destruction and tens of thousands of calculated deaths. All one has to do to make those scenarios seem real is to make unworldly assumptions based on magical mechanisms that cause large quantities of water, metal, and ceramic material to disappear without taking any heat with them.

If you do not believe my assertions, I suggest that you curl up during the next few evenings with the SORACA reports – NUREG 1935. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission spent tens of millions of dollars and more than half a decade to produce those detailed reports. Both the Commission and the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safety (ACRS) reviewed and approved them. However, they were released without any fanfare despite the following important findings:

  • Existing resources and procedures can stop an accident, slow it down or reduce its impact before it can affect public health;
  • Even if accidents proceed uncontrolled, they take much longer to happen and release much less radioactive material than earlier analyses suggested; and
  • The analyzed accidents would cause essentially zero immediate deaths and only a very, very small increase in the risk of long-term cancer deaths.

(Emphasis added)

Aside: I cannot explain why the NRC web page still labels this list as “preliminary findings” even after the final report has been issued. Perhaps no one bothered to tell the web master. End Aside.

This kind of safety did not happen by accident; it is certainly possible to design nuclear systems that carry the risk of causing widespread damage. Instead, the achieved safety came as a result of having tens of thousands of scientists and engineers who invested their lives’ work into devising systems and structures that could suffer the worst possible stresses and yet continue to perform their safety functions. Then they added some engineering margins to make the systems even more resilient.

We have also invested huge resources into training designers, operators, and maintainers and teaching them to put safety first. The systems engineering that has been invested into reducing the hazard of nuclear technology does not mean that accidents do not occur; it is more like the kind of engineering that goes into protecting race car drivers. Engineers understand that nature and physics can produce powerful forces that cannot always be resisted. Many components and layers of material may look like they have failed, but the precious cargo remains protected.

Objective analysis of Fukushima also supports the assertion that the hazard of the worst realistic event is substantially lower than the readily measurable and known hazards of coal, oil, and natural gas, the only other means of generating similar quantities of reliable, life-saving electricity.

Now that the hard work of reducing hazard is well in hand and continues to be the daily focus of thousands of people, it is high time for the communicators to get to work on reducing the outrage that causes risk to remain high for the public, the government, and the investment community. (As Sandman would say, we need to avoid calling this risk “perceived risk”. It is just as real as hazard and can probably be calculated with significantly more precision.)

With those thoughts clearly in mind, I highly recommend carefully studying and applying the lessons that Sandman offers for outrage management. While you are learning, keep in mind the fact that people of equal talent and social science understanding have spent several decades using techniques that he might call “precaution advocacy” to purposely increase outrage about describable but imaginary risks of nuclear technology.

Here are three 1991-vintage videos that together make up Part One of an outrage management training session. You can find links to more on his outrage management web index. While you are watching, you might notice that Sandman himself has been a victim of the precaution advocacy effort that has worked hard to make people deathly afraid of man-made radiation.

Risk = Hazard + Outrage: A Formula for Effective Risk Communication (Part One — 17:10) from Peter Sandman on Vimeo.

Risk = Hazard + Outrage: A Formula for Effective Risk Communication (Part Two — 17:10) from Peter Sandman on Vimeo.

Risk = Hazard + Outrage: A Formula for Effective Risk Communication (Part Three — 12:00) from Peter Sandman on Vimeo.

outrageandhazard 292x201
_____________________________

Note: The passages about Fukushima were added to the post on May 8, 2013, as a result of communication with Sandman, who offered the following comment:

“One point that is in my field: There’s nothing in your post that’s different from what you might have written before Fukushima. I grant you that there aren’t a lot of documented Fukushima deaths; that the principle health impacts of Fukushima so far are psychological; that arguably unnecessary evacuation exacerbated the damage. (So did government and industry dishonesty.) Still, Fukushima was a watershed.
…
I would question the credibility of any nuclear risk expert who didn’t recalibrate after Fukushima, and of any nuclear risk expert who didn’t mention Fukushima when opining about the risk.”

______________________________________

Adams

Adams

Rod Adams is a nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

→ 10 Comments

Posted in general media, Nuclear Energy Narrative, nuclear opponents

Ted Rockwell, Atomic Pioneer and Tireless Campaigner for Facts

Posted on April 2, 2013 by radams| 16 Comments

By Rod Adams

letters from lynchburg 190x160On Sunday, March 31, 2013, just a few months before his 91st birthday, Ted Rockwell passed away quietly in his sleep. His passing has stimulated a profound sense of loss among nuclear energy professionals.

For many of us, Ted was a visible and active reminder that our technology, as established as it might seem to some people, is younger than the duration of a single human life. Ted may not have been around when people first realized that uranium nuclei had the potential to provide a reliable, energy dense source of heat, but he was actively involved in the process of taming the “new fire” known as atomic fission and bringing it indoors to begin to serve some of mankind’s growing energy needs.

Rockwell

Rockwell

When Ted started his professional career, Enrico Fermi and his team had not yet assembled Critical Pile #1, the simple construction of graphite bricks and uranium metal that conclusively demonstrated that a fission chain reaction could be established and controlled. Ted became a nuclear energy professional within a few months of that experimental demonstration, serving during the Manhattan Project as a member of an elite Process Improvement Task Force at the Clinton Engineer Works, the facility that is now known as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Ted’s professional accomplishments are legendary; when he met Captain Rickover, he was in charge of the Radiation Shield Engineering Group at Oak Ridge. He then served as Admiral Rickover’s technical director during the development and construction of the USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear powered submarine, and during the development and construction of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the first commercial nuclear power plant in the United States. He was involved with the process to produce commercial quantities of zirconium and he was the assigned editor of the Shield Design Manual, a document that remains a basic reference for engineers more than 50 years after its initial publication.

In 1964, he and two of his colleagues from Naval Reactors left that organization to found MPR Associates, an engineering company built on the principles of excellence that they refined while working with Admiral Rickover. They had learned that one man can make a difference and that three men working together could build a formidable team to produce exceptional quality work.

Ted was the author of several books including The Rickover Effect: How One Man Made a Difference, and Creating the New World: Stories & Images from the Dawn of the Atomic Age, that should be a part of any collection on nuclear energy technology and history.

Though Ted stopped working full time at MPR several decades ago, he never got around to retiring. He was still actively writing and mentoring other nuclear energy professionals until the very end. He focused on several important nuclear energy topics including the health effects of low level radiation, using realistic assumptions to compute accident effects, the importance of agreeing on facts in order to achieve useful decisions, learning lessons from history and natural experiments, using nuclear energy to propel commercial ships, and the importance of sharing knowledge widely with as many different people as possible.

I had the good fortune to meet Ted at an ANS meeting nearly twenty years ago. He was a featured speaker at a session on the health effects of low level radiation organized by Jim Muckerheide in either 1994 or 1995. He has appeared as a guest on several Atomic Show podcasts and has provided a dozen or more guest posts on Atomic Insights. He was always generous with his time, his knowledge, and his vast experience.

Based on email correspondence with other nuclear energy professionals, my experience of Ted’s generosity was in no way unique; he was a mentor and an inspiration to dozens of others.

One of Ted’s many recent projects was serving as the technical editor for a not-yet-completed documentary about Admiral Rickover being produced by Michael Pack. His tireless efforts to share accurate information about nuclear energy technology are a good example for many people in the nuclear energy profession who are normally shy and retiring.

I think it is safe to say that the best tribute we can provide in memory of Theodore Rockwell is to continue his efforts against the spread of false information about radiation and nuclear energy by those who have been doing so for almost as long as Ted worked to correct that misinformation.

Ted Rockwell – Used fuel can be stored almost anywhere for at least 100 years

Ted Rockwell – There is nothing in the same class as nuclear

__________________________

Adams

Adams

Rod Adams is a nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

→ 16 Comments

Posted in Economic benefits of nuclear, Environmental Benefits of Nuclear, knowledge transfer, Nuclear History, Nuclear pioneers

Talking about nuclear energy at Hunt’s barbershop

Posted on March 5, 2013 by radams| 2 Comments

By Rod Adams

There are many benefits to living in Lynchburg, Virginia. Not only is it a scenically beautiful place with a diverse and growing economy that has continued its steady progress, even during the Great Recession, but it is also a place full of people who appreciate the value of nuclear energy technology.

Last week, I had the opportunity to evangelize about the importance of nuclear energy in a situation that might seem a little unusual for most places that are not Lynchburg. When I arrived at Hunt’s Barbershop, Glenda was busy with another customer, but she was also engaged in a conversation with that customer’s wife.

The waiting wife was a pleasant lady with an pronounced regional accent. She and Glenda were talking about grandchildren; there was an opening in the conversation for me to join in to mention my own granddaughter and the fact that we were looking forward to traveling with her across the country.

The lady waiting for her husband started talking about how much she and her husband enjoyed traveling, and asked me about my own journeys. We had a quick chat about how my wife and I had moved around the country during my naval career, and how I ended up in Lynchburg working for B&W mPower, Inc. She mentioned that she had once visited “The Plant,” and had been fascinated to learn about the fuel manufactured at the facility and how concentrated it was.

It turned out that this grandmotherly type had been an accountant, and active in local civic organizations before she and her husband retired. After retirement, she and her husband continued their habit of taking numerous cross country trips. We started talking about a number of energy-related topics; she was particularly interested in “backyard windmills.” She had heard people talking about how they could install a windmill and sell power back to the power company.

She said that she wasn’t sure how that would work because she and her husband had seen large wind installations on their travels. They had stopped a couple of times and had stood underneath the towers to see just how tall they were and how massive the blades were. She described how she and her husband had often wondered if those systems were doing much good; they had noticed that many of the blades were not even turning as they drove by.

That gave me a terrific opening to talk about how nuclear plants work reliably nearly all of the time, no matter what the sun and wind are doing. We talked a little bit about the nuclear Navy, and how I had been able to live for months at a time underwater. She was fascinated to learn how the ship had been able to run for 14 years on a tiny amount of fuel that would have fit in the space between us in the barbershop.

The timing of the conversation was fortuitous; earlier that day I had just been provided the link to a short video designed to illustrate, in a three dimensional, active way, the difference in the environmental footprint of a nuclear plant when compared to a wind farm. I had my phone with me, so I showed the below video to the woman as we talked more about what those wind turbines were doing and what they were contributing to the reliability of the electricity grid that supplies the country that she loved to visit.

.

The conversation lasted the length of a haircut, but it was a great opportunity to share my enthusiasm for nuclear energy with a curious member of a demographic group that is not always supportive of our technology. Engaging in such one-on-one conversations can be a great way to spread the word about the value of nuclear technology; I would not be surprised if that encounter encourages additional research and discussions.

Later in the same week, I enjoyed sharing a video produced by the Weather Channel titled A Mini Nuclear Power Plant around the office. As you might imagine, there were some happy, proud faces as my colleagues received visible evidence that their hard work was getting noticed. At least two of the people in my group make cameo appearances in the short clip.

.

There are times when it is tough to be an active nuclear professional. The days are long, the work can be frustratingly burdened by regulations and self-imposed work rules that seem almost purposely designed to impede progress, and people who are opposed to the technology are often loud enough to dominate the conversation. It is enough to make one feel completely unappreciated.

However, the reality is that plenty of people are interested in what we are doing. They are cheering for us to succeed and to make the world a cleaner, safer, more prosperous place. They want us to figure out how to stop the proliferation of wind turbines in pristine landscapes, how to slow the continuous build up of CO2 in the atmosphere—with its uncertain effects on the climate—and they want us to develop world leading technology that will help create good jobs here in the United States.

In Lynchburg, at least, we are making some progress on all of those fronts, but that does not mean it is time to rest. As was described here just last week, there are still plenty of people that are targeting our technology and telling the world that investing any resources into its development is a waste of money. It is up to us to prove them wrong.

Disclosure: Rod Adams is employed by B&W mPower, Inc., but his thoughts are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of his employer.

____________________________

Adams

Rod Adams is a nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Economic benefits of nuclear, Environmental Benefits of Nuclear, Renewable Energy, Small modular reactors

Virginia ANS section discovers hidden asset – Clay Condit

Posted on February 5, 2013 by radams| Comments Off

By Rod Adams

On January 31, 2013, about 30 lucky members of the Virginia section of the American Nuclear Society heard a series of informative tales from one of the many innovative pioneers of the First Atomic Age. Clay Condit, a man overflowing with personal memories of important nuclear energy milestones—like the initial start-up of the Submarine Thermal Reactor and the post accident analysis of the SL-1 tragedy—entertained the assembled members for a little more than an hour.

Clay retired from Westinghouse in 1992 after a 40-year long career in nuclear reactor physics and reactor operations. He spent most of that time at the 900-square-mile piece of the Idaho desert currently known as the Idaho National Laboratory. That site has been the home of 52 nuclear reactors.

Some of those reactors were carefully designed and maintained facilities used to develop new fuel materials, test new operational concepts, and/or train sailors for the US Navy. The Materials Test Rector (MTR), the Submarine Thermal Reactor (STR), the A1W prototypes for the USS Enterprise, and the Advanced Test Reactor fell into that category. Those facilities have provided decades of useful service, provided important practical training for more than 40,000 sailors, and have enabled such technological improvements as submarine reactor fuel designs that now last for the 33-year-long life of the ship instead of the two-year life achieved by the first core of the USS Nautilus.

Some of the other reactors built at INL—like the Integral Fast Reactor that evolved from the Experimental Breeder Reactor II—were also well-designed and maintained facilities that point the way to a reliable source of inexhaustible clean energy.

However, some of reactors built at the National Reactor Testing Station (one of INL’s former names) were rapid prototypes that were built quickly to test innovative concepts, some of which did not work out as well as the designers had hoped. As Clay explained, in the early days of the facility, there were two primary rules. First of all, any new project needed to pick a location that was at least five miles from any existing facility; secondly, the operators of any test reactor were required to notify the local sheriff to divert traffic on the through roads whenever they were conducting testing that might result in the release of any radioactive material.

From Clay’s point of view, the ability to move quickly and develop conceptual designs into operating machinery with few restrictions within the facility played an important role in the rapid improvement in nuclear energy technology. He stated that we need to find a way to reinvigorate nuclear technology development by reusing some of our existing assets of open spaces and readily available human resources.

After his retirement, Clay started devoting a major portion of his time to capturing and sharing knowledge about Idaho’s importance in the development of nuclear energy. He was instrumental in convincing the US Navy to donate the sail of the USS Hawkbill (SSN 666) to the town of Arco (the first community in the world ever to be lit by electricity generated by nuclear power), Idaho,  so that it could serve as the cornerstone of the Idaho Science Center. Clay is the founder, president, and primary tour guide of that facility, and he has been working for about a decade with other Arco boosters and INL veterans to create a destination where artifacts and stories about nuclear energy development at INL can be preserved and shared.

Talks like the one that Clay gave might be common for chapters that are near the national labs, but it was a unique experience for many of the Virginia section attendees, especially those who have never had the chance to attend ANS national meetings. Fortunately for us, Clay winters in Richmond; I hope we can convince him to be a more regular attendee at our meetings.

For show and tell, Clay brought a collection of artifacts and handouts, including a copy of a book titled Proving the Principle – A History of the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory 1949-1999. I highly recommend reading the online version of that book; it provides a fascinating look at the history of a dynamic facility peopled by thinkers whose achievements were often shrouded in secrecy.

I’ve read Proving the Principle, but Clay’s talk added depth and personalized some of the events. One of the real benefits of participating in local ANS sections is the opportunity to hear interesting stories from people with real world experiences that may never again be repeated.

Of course, speakers are not the only reason to attend ANS local section meetings; it is also good to swap stories with other people who share some of the joys and challenges of working in our profession.

There was a little bit of depressing news broken at the meeting. On January 31, the day that we met, local news sources reported that Virginia state Senator John Watkins withdrew his bill to end the existing moratorium on uranium mining. The diverse coalition that has formed to halt the development of one of the largest known deposits in the United States has—so far—successfully convinced political decision makers that uranium mining entails too much risk and too little reward. There has been a well-orchestrated campaign of misinformation that has not been effectively addressed by people who understand the minuscule level of public risk associated with properly regulated, modern uranium mines and the substantial rewards that can come from developing valuable fuel sources.

There is a glimmer of hope that Virginia’s governor will use his authority to allow state regulators to begin drafting rules so that legislators will be able to make more informed decisions about the protections those regulations will provide to local populations. I hope that the governor pays attention to the careful work that has already been done to address the scientific questions. He should recognize that a deposit of material that could provide 20 percent of the United States with emission-free electricity for more than 2 years is worth developing. Perhaps it will help if more people who understand the technology find their voices and begin more forcefully communicating accurate information.

Governor McDonnell believes that Virginia should become the “Energy Capital of the East Coast”. That is a worthy goal that will be easier to reach by expanding our already substantial nuclear energy competence to include mining the required fuel material.

____________________________________

Adams

Rod Adams is a nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

Comments Off

Posted in knowledge transfer, Local Sections, National Laboratories, Nuclear History, Nuclear pioneers

Building support for uranium mining in Virginia

Posted on January 14, 2013 by radams| 9 Comments

by Rod Adams

One of the single most valuable pieces of energy real estate in the United States is located a few miles outside of Chatham, Virginia, less than an hour’s drive from my home. Millions of years ago, natural forces concentrated about 119 million pounds of uranium in a relatively small volume of what is now a cow pasture. That is enough raw material to supply all of the nuclear power plants in the United States with all of their fuel needs for a little more than two years. If valued at today’s suppressed, post-Fukushima market price, the deposit is worth about $7 billion.

Unfortunately for the people who own the property and for the potential employees in the area where the deposit is located, it is currently illegal in Virginia to mine for uranium. The good news is that the moratorium on uranium mining is on the agenda for this year’s legislative session. The legislators will not be making a decision in a vacuum; there have been a number of carefully conducted studies performed during the past 18–24 months that provide valid scientific and economic information. Not surprisingly, there are also a number of groups that are actively pushing their own views of the situation.

Much of the rhetoric produced by the mining opponents has been unscientific storytelling aimed at spreading irrational fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The opponents have attempted to make the case that communities located dozens of miles away from a modern uranium mine are at risk of their water being contaminated with materials that harm their health. They have claimed that an underground mine would produce excessive noise, that a mine using rather mild solvents like carbonated water would produce noxious odors, and that a uranium mine extracting and shipping approximately 2,000 tons of metal per year would put an unmanageable burden on local roads.

It has been disturbing to read that communities full of people who should know better have decided to strongly oppose the uranium mine. Several cities and towns in the Hampton Roads area, which is home to a nuclear shipbuilding yard, several nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, more than half a dozen nuclear-powered submarines, and the two-unit Surry nuclear power station have decided that a well-regulated uranium mine located a few hundred miles away is an unacceptable risk.

One of the more frustrating arguments that the opposition has recently started to make is that hosting a uranium mine would lower property values for people living many miles from the site because of the supposed stigma that would be associated with the mine. The only possible reason for a widespread stigma that reduces property values is the negative public relations effort being conducted by the people opposed to the mine.

It is an argument that is almost as convoluted as the notion that a technology is “too controversial” to develop—when looking at the topic from the point of view of the very groups that have created the controversy.

On Sunday, January 13, 2013, the Roanoke Times published an op-ed titled Democrats should embrace uranium mining that was purposely aimed at breaking down barriers between the traditional factions associated with nuclear energy decision making.

Andrea Jennetta, who publishes Fuel Cycle Week and recently began blogging at I Dig U Mining, and I collaborated on that piece because we both understand the science, recognize the exceedingly low risk, and are well aware of the benefits of using uranium as a power plant fuel compared to using coal, oil, and natural gas.

We described the environmental benefits, the economic benefits, and the natural fit between uranium mining and Virginia’s history of nuclear energy enterprises. The state has been home to nuclear fuel manufacturing facilities for about 50 years, it hosts four commercial nuclear reactors, provides the technical headquarters for two nuclear plant design organizations, and supplies excellent educational institutions. Andrea and I know that uranium mining can be done safely and we are convinced that there are few places in the world more capable of safely hosting a new production facility. Here is the conclusion of our op-ed:

We puzzle over why Virginia Democrats automatically reject the findings of several economic studies on uranium mining in Pittsylvania County. Each shows a measurable improvement in the local economy and the creation of hundreds of new family-wage jobs, high-tech skills and increased funding for math and science education as a result of allowing the mine to be developed.

At the end of the day, we are urging Virginia Democrats to end the moratorium on uranium mining in the commonwealth. In doing so, they will be taking a huge step toward creating the kind of communities in Southside that reflect Democratic values: fighting climate change, providing equitable opportunities, building strong public education systems and creating prosperity for all.

Of course, I would be personally energized if the Republican Party decided that they wanted to compete to see which party could be the most supportive of safe extract of uranium. After all, that fuel is one of the basic components of a technology that offers a terrific opportunity for human society to increase its prosperity while reducing its current production of billions of tons per year of waste gases that have no place to go other than into our common atmosphere.

_________________________

Adams

Rod Adams is a nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

→ 9 Comments

Posted in uranium

Tagged ,

Looking forward to next 70 years of atomic fission

Posted on December 4, 2012 by radams| Comments Off

By Rod Adams

This past weekend the world quietly marked the 70th anniversary of the initial criticality of CP-1 (Critical Pile 1), the 55th anniversary of the initial criticality of the Shippingport nuclear power plant, and the decommissioning of the USS Enterprise, a 51 year-old nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Those events have put me into a reflective but incredibly optimistic mood.

Imagine how exciting it must have been to be in the nuclear field in the early years. Talented engineers and scientists moved the technological needle from a basic pile of graphite bricks with uranium lumps, to full-scale power production, in machines that lasted for many decades, over a brief span of less than two decades. They accomplished that progress during a period when calculations were made with slide rules and modest-capacity computing devices that filled entire rooms, and when drawings were created by rooms full of people using hand tools. They overcame the disadvantage of having lost almost an entire decade (1946–1954) during which only the selected few could think nuclear thoughts without risking incarceration.

By 1990, the annual electricity production in the United States from steam plants—whose furnaces were heated using the controlled fission chain reaction that Fermi and his team had proven—exceeded the entire amount of electricity produced each year by all of the power plants that were operating in the United States in 1960. That commercial milestone occurred less than 50 years after the basic physical process was proven.

Unfortunate slow down

Even by then, however, the growth in nuclear energy production around the world was slowing down as a result of many factors, including an increasingly well-organized and well-funded movement expressly aimed at halting the use of nuclear energy. Nuclear technologists bear some of the blame for the loss of support; they (we) failed to explain why we’re so darned excited about the possibilities offered by this fascinating new technology.

We also failed to notice that there were a large number of rich and powerful people who were not enthusiastic about creating a power source that could approach a goal of being so inexpensive that no one would bother measuring how much was consumed each month. As a group, we were so happy to be working with a material that stored 2 million times as much energy per unit mass as the most energy-dense hydrocarbon fuels that we overlooked the fact that many people enjoy enormous benefits from selling hydrocarbon fuels. It is a great business to be in; anyone who bought fuel yesterday is likely to buy fuel again tomorrow.

People whose livelihoods depend on moving mass quantities of material from deep underground, through capital-intensive processing plants, and into furnaces and engines around the world, were not so terribly excited about the reality that Fermi had shown us—how we could use a material that allows a man with a backpack to transport as much energy as a supertanker.

Listen to nuclear communicators

On December 2, 2012, I gathered a group of nuclear professionals who have taken on a shared avocation of communicating the wonders of atomic fission and the possibilities that its unique characteristics can provide. You can listen to that conversation at Atomic Show #191 – 70th Anniversary of CP-1, the First Controlled Fission Chain Reaction.

We spoke about the magical simplicity of Fermi’s design and about the fact that, unlike the enormously expensive and still elusive effort to harness controlled nuclear fusion, Fermi and his team could be supremely confident that their device would work on the first try. We spoke about how it would be possible for a group of high school students, given the proper materials, to build a working fission reactor that could be safely started and controlled.

We then discussed how incredible it might be if we could treat nuclear technology in a manner similar to the way that we have treated computer hardware and software technology. Kirk Sorensen, a forward–thinking nuclear technologist who is the co-founder of Flibe Energy, has given several talks to audiences in Silicon Valley, and always comes away energized by thinking about how far we could advance our energy production systems if we adopted some of the knowledge-sharing principles that pervade the Valley.

I’ve had that experience one time at a Google Tech Talk; it may be time to make that trip again, to help increase support for the truly exciting developments in small modular reactor development that are happening in a number of places in the United States.

Shippingport Atomic Power Station

Though we were all in agreement that we could be doing far more with nuclear energy than we are today, we were not the first people to recognize just how wonderful it was that people had learned how to access atomic energy. Here is a quote from President Eisenhower’s famous Atoms for Peace speech to the United Nations, given on December 8, 1953.

The United States knows that if the fearful trend of atomic military build-up can be reversed, this greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind. The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future. The capability, already proved, is here today. Who can doubt that, if the entire body of the world’s scientists and engineers had adequate amounts of fissionable material with which to test and develop their ideas, this capability would rapidly be transformed into universal, efficient and economic usage?

To hasten the day when fear of the atom will begin to disappear from the minds of the people and the governments of the East and West, there are certain steps that can be taken now.
…
To the making of these fateful decisions, the United States pledges before you, and therefore before the world, its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma—to devote its entire heart and mind to finding the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.

(Emphasis added.)

That is the vision that keeps me moving forward. I share it as often as I can on whatever pulpits I am offered.

Solving the trilemma

Along with the material endowment provided by nature (God, if you prefer), nuclear knowledgeable people have in their minds the capability that will help to solve what the World Energy Council describes in a recent series of reports as a “trilemma”.

.. simultaneously address energy security, universal access to affordable energy services, and environmentally-sensitive production and use of energy is one of the most formidable challenges facing governments—indeed some might argue that it is the most formidable, or even the most important. The World Energy Trilemma report, now in its fourth year, aims to help governments rise to the challenge of tackling this ‘trilemma’.

_________________________________

Adams

Rod Adams is a nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

Comments Off

Posted in Economic benefits of nuclear, engineering, Nuclear pioneers

Challenging scientific organizations to adhere to scientific methods

Posted on November 5, 2012 by radams| 2 Comments

By Rod Adams

Rockwell

For more than two years, I have been privileged to be included in correspondence about a battle for truth led by Ted Rockwell, one of the pioneers of nuclear energy and radiation protection. He continues to seek support of nuclear energy and radiation professionals in an effort to encourage the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) to do something that is apparently difficult for any large organization to do—apologize and take effective action to correct a continuing mistake.

NYAS book on Chernobyl effects rejects the scientific method

Here is a brief background of the error. It will be followed by a call to action.

The work selected as the December 2009 edition of The Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) was an expansion and translation of a report originally published in Russian and later translated to English under the sponsorship of Greenpeace International. The NYAS book, titled Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment comes to conclusions about the effects of the accident that are in stark opposition to the conclusions reached by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR).

Where the UNSCEAR report indicates that the total number of deaths caused by the accident through 2006 was less than 50, the book that the NYAS selected as its December 2009 Annals edition claims that there were 985,000 deaths attributable to the accident. It is difficult to comprehend the possibility that two scientific studies of the same event could differ by a factor of 19,700.

Fortunately, the authors of Chernobyl Consequences provide a reasonable explanation for the vast gulf between their conclusions and the conclusions reached by the scientific organizations that studied the accident’s effects. I am paraphrasing here, but the bottom line is that the authors, publishing sponsors and editors involved in the project had no intention of doing any scientific or statistical analysis. Instead they spent their time compiling as many anecdotes as they could find to support their preexisting mission.

Here are some quotes from Chernobyl Consequences that support my summary of their goals and methods:

(Causal thesis)
We believe it is unreasonable to attribute the increased occurrence of disease in the contaminated territories to screening or socioeconomic factors because the only variable is radioactive loading. Among the terrible consequences of Chernobyl radiation are malignant neoplasms and brain damage, especially during intrauterine development. (p. 2)
…
(Rejection of correlation requirements)
Why are the assessments of experts so different?
There are several reasons, including that some experts believe that any conclusions about radiation-based disease requires a correlation between an illness and the received dose of radioactivity. We believe this is an impossibility because no measurements were taken in the first few days. Initial levels could have been a thousand times higher than the ones ultimately measured several weeks and months later. (p. 2)
…
(Rejection of impact of other variables)
In independent investigations scientists have compared the health of individuals in various territories that are identical in terms of ethnic, social, and economic characteristics and differ only in the intensity of their exposure to radiation. It is scientifically valid to compare specific groups over time (a longitudinal study), and such comparisons have unequivocally attributed differences in health outcomes to Chernobyl fallout. (p. 3)
…
(Anecdote collection method)
The scientific literature on the consequences of the catastrophe now includes more than 30,000 publications, mainly in Slavic languages. Millions of documents/materials exist in various Internet information systems—descriptions, memoirs, maps, photos, etc. For example in GOOGLE there are 14.5 million; in YANDEX, 1.87 million; and in RAMBLER, 1.25 million citations. There are many special Chernobyl Internet portals, especially numerous for “Children of Chernobyl” and for the Chernobyl Cleanup Workers (“Liquidators so called”) organizations. The Chernobyl Digest—scientific abstract collections—was published in Minsk with the participation of many Byelorussian and Russian scientific institutes and includes several thousand annotated publications dating to 1990. At the same time the IAEA/WHO “Chernobyl Forum” Report (2005), advertised by WHO and IAEA as “the fullest and objective review” of the consequences of the Chernobyl accident, mentions only 350 mainly English publications. (Preface p. xi)
…
(Rejection of statistical methodology)
It is methodologically incorrect to combine imprecisely defined ionizing radiation exposure levels for individuals or groups with the much more accurately determined impacts on health (increases in morbidity and mortality) and to demand a “statistically significant correlation” as conclusive evidence of the deleterious effects from Chernobyl. More and more cases are coming to light in which the calculated radiation dose does not correlate with observable impacts on health that are obviously due to radiation.

(Emphasis added.)

Though Greenpeace International and its favored authors are free to print any material they want and people are free to read that material to reinforce their existing belief that radiation at any level is harmful, it is the responsibility of the scientific community to provide accurate information and to submit its work for independent peer review. The normal process of challenging assumption, correlating causes and effects, performing valid statistical analysis and accounting for confounding variables is what allows reasonably correct decision making.

Electronic version of NYAS book available for download

Though the decision to publish Chernobyl Consequences took place more than three years ago, it should not be relegated to the category of old news. The NYAS might have stopped printing the paper bound book, but the electronic version of the publication remains readily available for purchase or downloading by NYAS members. The publication web site contains links to several reviews and responses that are only available to people with academic subscription services or to people who care enough about the issue to lay out $39.95 for each letter to the editor. Just one of the linked responses is available to the public without additional fees; it is a devastating review written by M. I. Balonov of the Institute of Radiation Hygiene in St. Petersburg, Russia.

I purchased the response from Yablokov and Nesterenko to the criticism of S. V. Jargin so you would not have to. It provides more fodder for my assertion that the authors have specifically challenged the notion that the scientific method is important, and it includes a veiled accusation that should offend nuclear energy professionals.

In the Foreword, the Introduction and in Chapter II, it is mentioned that obliteration of those publications is not acceptable both from a moral and an ethical (note that in general, medical practitioners could only add short statements about their studies in numerous scientific and practical conferences) but also from a methodological point of view (when the sample number is very large, there is no necessity to use statistical methods developed for a small number of samples).

In this respect, criticizing us with the fact that our conclusions are in disagreement with those of IAEA (2006) and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR 2000) cannot but be surprising. The book itself was written as a counterpart to reports of official experts that may be connected to nuclear industry.

(Emphasis added.)

In response to Ted Rockwell’s sustained pressure, the staff of the Annals of the NYAS made some adjustments to the site hosting the book. They published what they described as a disclaimer that made it clear that the NYAS did not commission the book and that the opinions and conclusions are the responsibility of the authors, not the NYAS. However, the “disclaimer” also makes the statement that the book falls into the category of work deemed “scientifically valid by the general scientific community”.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences issue “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment”, therefore, does not present new, unpublished work, nor is it a work commissioned by the New York Academy of Sciences. The expressed views of the authors, or by advocacy groups or individuals with specific opinions about the Chernobyl volume, are their own. Although the New York Academy of Sciences believes it has a responsibility to provide open forums for discussion of scientific questions, the Academy has no intent to influence legislation by providing such forums. The Academy is committed to publishing content deemed scientifically valid by the general scientific community, from whom the Academy carefully monitors feedback.

That phrase “has no intent to influence legislation by providing such forums” was apparently selected to protect the tax exempt status of the NYAS, but it has no meaning in this instance. There is no pending legislation that could be remotely influenced by an honest discussion that evaluates the scientific merit of the December 2009 edition of the Annals of the New York Academy of Science. The discussion and resulting evaluation, however, would partially restore the scientific integrity of the organization as one that acknowledges that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own set of facts.

Challenge to integrity of scientific and technical professionals

There are many correct ways to do good science, and there is a method and a process that should be generally accepted as the way to glean truth, gather evidence, and evaluate causation. It is the responsibility of everyone who has a professional interest in properly informing the public about their subject to challenge those who seek to portray fiction as fact. It is especially dangerous for the truth to allow anyone to publish direct challenges to science and the professional integrity of thousands of people under the imprint of an organization like the New York Academy of Sciences.

Quiet pressure from a long-time member of the NYAS has not resulted in any effective action. Perhaps individual letters to the NYAS leadership sent by dozens of qualified professionals will have more impact.

___________________________

Adams

Rod Adams is a nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in accident, Chernobyl, nuclear opponents, Radiation

Tagged , , , , , ,

Uranium 233 is a valuable resource, no matter what Robert Alvarez believes

Posted on October 2, 2012 by radams| 17 Comments

by Rod Adams

Robert Alvarez has issued another misleading report about energy dense fuel materials, titled Managing the Uranium-233 Stockpile of the United States.

According to Alvarez’s report, the United States owns about 3400 pounds of U-233, which is one of two fissile isotopes of uranium. He portrays this resource, which has been in storage since the 1970s, as a hazardous stockpile that somehow puts the world at risk of a rogue group obtaining a nuclear weapons capability. Unfortunately, he is not the only person with this mistaken opinion. The Department of Energy is currently planning to spend nearly half a billion dollars to get rid of the United States’ carefully protected U-233 resources.

Alvarez’s report does not mention the fact that the stockpile contains as much potential energy as 23 million barrels of oil. At current world oil prices, that gives it a comparable energy value of more than $2 billion, even if it is not used for its highest and best purpose, as the seed for an expansive program of thermal spectrum breeder reactors.

Waste not, want not

My Depression Era parents deeply embedded the “waste not, want not” mantra into my brain. As a relatively prosperous adult, I must admit that I do not always spend as much time separating and consolidating materials for recycling as my parents did, but I still respect their teachings that one should not discard items or materials that have future uses. Short-sighted acts of disposal often destroy any potential value because of the difficulty associated with removing contaminants.

I’ve been writing and reading for nearly two decades about the impressive capabilities offered by using a nuclear fission fuel cycle that includes uranium 233 and thorium 232. As anyone who has read Kirk Sorensen’s excellent blog Energy from Thorium or listened to his passionate talks on molten salt reactors knows, U-233 produces about 15 percent more neutrons per thermal fission as U-235 or Pu-239. That difference is significant; it means that a U-233/Th-232 fuel cycle can achieve a conversion ratio greater than 1.0 in a thermal spectrum reactor, resulting in a self-sustaining fuel cycle that might never need any additional fissile material.

Light water breeder reactor

Sometime during the early 1990s, after I had been a nuclear-trained submarine engineering officer for about a dozen years, I learned about the demonstration reactor core that was installed into the Shippingport nuclear power plant. That final core was operated 1977–1982 as a Light Water Breeder Reactor.

That demonstration proved that a well-designed thermal spectrum reactor could use the extra neutrons produced by U-233 to turn thorium into a useful fuel material at a rate faster than the U-233 would be consumed. Unfortunately, one inherent disadvantage of nuclear fuel cycle knowledge development is that it takes a long time. After five years of power production, the light water breeder reactor core was still going strong, with no evidence of the loss of reactivity that accompanies conventional reactor materials as they consume the fissile materials in their low-enriched uranium fuel rods.

Because the project sponsors knew that they might not be able to continue funding the team that would perform the post-operation fuel material analysis, they stopped the experiment. There were no immediately scheduled follow-on cores because any potential customers would have wanted to wait until the final results were known. No large-scale production capacity was ever developed to handle the unique blend of materials involved in the LWBR process.

Analysis

The destructive fuel rod analysis that proved that breeding had occurred was not completed until five years after the experiment had been terminated, which was more than 10 years after the fuel fabrication had been completed. Here is a quote from section IX, Summary and Discussion of Significance from a report titled “Proof of Breeding in the Light Water Breeder Reactor (WAPD-TM-1612),” which was provided to the DOE in September 1987 under contract No. DE-AC11-76PN00014. (I have provided that detail just in case someone thinks it might be worthwhile to file a Freedom of Information Act request.)

The results demonstrate conclusively that LWBR was a breeder. They show that breeding can be achieved in a light-water reactor using 233U as fissile fuel and the naturally occurring, relatively abundant 232Th as fertile material. Thus, the Light Water Breeder Program which the Department of Energy pursued for more than twenty years has demonstrated and proven unequivocally that 233U-232Th breeders can be built, operated in light water reactor plants to produce electrical energy, and breed more fissile fuel than they consume. This means that the plentiful domestic supply of low and moderate cost thorium represents a potential resource for providing about fifty times the amount of energy which could be produced using current light water reactors and the domestic supply of low and moderate cost uranium. This light water breeder system could supply the entire electrical energy need of the United States for centuries.
…
The primary significance of proving breeding in LWBR is the demonstrated potential for greatly increasing our nation’s electrical energy generation capability for many years to come.

By the time those words were written at the end of the quietly submitted report, the leading proponents of the technology had either died (Rickover) or lost all of their influence on government programs (Radkowsky). Radkowsky, the creative designer of the fuel system, eventually started a company called Thorium Power (which is now operating under the name of Lightbridge) to attempt to commercialize his ideas.

A few years before Rickover and Radkowsky demonstrated the possibilities of using a U-233/Th-232 fuel cycle in conventional reactors, there were a couple of experiments conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that avoided the fuel fabrication and destructive testing issues described above. By dissolving the U-233 and Th-232 into molten salts, those experiments showed that it was possible to design liquid-fueled reactors that might be arranged to enable utilization of the world’s large thorium fuel resource. There is much to be learned about building durable molten salt reactors with closed fuel systems, but the learning process would be made less time consuming if the Department of Energy enabled effective use of the already existing inventory of special material.

Even if one agrees with Alvarez’s stated concern about the need to carefully protect the U-233 from all possibility of being stolen, I cannot imagine any system that is less likely to experience material theft than operating nuclear power reactors. Those devices are surrounded by thick shielding resembling a vault, and they are full of self-protective radioactive isotopes. Sarah Weiner, writing for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, characterized Alvarez’s well publicized report as “alarmism”, but she also supported the DOE’s plans to make it nearly impossible for the energy laden material to be put to any beneficial use.

Knowing what I know about U-233′s potential benefits, I was saddened by Matt Wald’s recent article titled Uranium Substitute Is No Longer Needed, but Its Disposal May Pose Security Risk. It is disturbing to think that so many people have such a huge misunderstanding of nuclear fission technology that they take action to make U-233 an expensive waste product, instead of more accurately treating it as a potent energy resource that would become more valuable the more it is used.

PS—I cannot resist the temptation to compare the DOE’s planned expenditure of $473 million to destroy the potential value in its U-233 stockpile with the $452 million that has been widely promoted as the government’s contribution to small modular reactor development.

______________________________________________

Adams

Rod Adams is a nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

→ 17 Comments

Posted in Department of Energy, Nuclear Fuel Cycle, nuclear opponents, thorium

Tagged , , , , , ,

Converting heat into electricity without moving parts

Posted on August 7, 2012 by radams| 17 Comments

by Rod Adams

I’ve been fascinated by nuclear batteries—also known as radioisotope thermal generators or RTGs—since I first saw a pacemaker battery in an exhibit at the Maryland Science Museum. As my wife and children will testify, I am one of those slow moving people at museums who insists on reading nearly every placard under every exhibit. I’ll never forget my feeling of wonder as I found out that 1/200th of an ounce of plutonium-238 could provide sufficient heat to that tiny battery to make it produce a continuous electrical current sufficient to run a heart pacemaker.

Since an isotope with an 87 year half life will still be producing about 90 percent of its initial heat after decaying for 14 years, those batteries were designed to be able to supply a heart patient for as long as they would be expected to survive. They did not need for an external power supply—with its attendant infection risks and they did not require additional surgeries to replace chemical batteries.

That museum experience fired my curiosity and encouraged me to find out more about the technology that allows the direct conversion of heat into direct current power. I found out that plutonium-238 was not the only possible isotope. There is a whole list of possibilities depending on the specific applications and measures of effectiveness.

I learned that pacemaker batteries were only one of several applications where a small amount of long-lived, reliable power was valuable enough to provide a positive cost benefit. Other applications include remote lighthouse power, navigational buoys, satellites, deep space probes, and communications facilities in remote locations.

I also learned that the batteries had a substantial body of experience that showed that they were dependable and needed little maintenance.

For a variety of reasons, including the sustained campaign against all things nuclear, RTG technology is virtually unknown and nearly all efforts to use nuclear batteries have been abandoned. About the only time that the topic gains much attention is when the leaders of a high-profile space program like Cassini or the Curiosity tell the public that their mission has been enabled by one or more RTGs.

The below video offers a detailed look at the construction and testing performed for the 110 watt RTG that is continuously charging the chemical batteries that supply more concentrated surges of power to the Curiosity rover.

There is one potential application of RTG technology that continues to intrigue me, especially as I learn more about the challenges that faced the operators at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station as they gradually depleted all of their available power supplies.

Though RTGs are not a huge source of concentrated power, they provide a steady stream of current that can recharge chemical storage batteries. A 100 W RTG, for example, provides 2.4 kilowatt-hours per day, but there would be no need to limit the inventory to just a single unit. There is also no need to compete with space applications for plutonium-238; shielding weight is not a major consideration in a large nuclear power facility. The most abundantly available isotope is strontium-90, an isotope that commercial nuclear reactors produce in large quantities.

Of course, that isotope is not readily available in the United States since we are not recycling our used nuclear fuel, but I would imagine that it could be purchased from the French, the Japanese, or the Russians.

RTGs, or their Stirling engine heat to power cousins, operate on a completely different principle than a diesel engine and do not need any external support to keep doing their job.

Though they would need only infrequent attention, there are plenty of nuclear-trained people available to ensure that emergency power RTGs would not run into some of the same difficulties that have given the technology a bad name in remote areas of the former Soviet Union.

I am sure that there are obstacles to overcome, and some of them may even be show stoppers, but just imagine how comforting it would be to know that a sustained, complete loss of electricity is virtually impossible at a facility with a few RTGs installed in the power system.

___________________________

Adams

Rod Adams is a nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

→ 17 Comments

Posted in News, nuclear technology

Implications of improved radiation protection standards for Fukushima evacuees

Posted on July 3, 2012 by radams| 28 Comments

By Rod Adams

The American Nuclear Society’s annual meeting for 2012 included a President’s Special Session titled Low-Level Radiation & Its Implications for Fukushima Recovery (Warning—the link leads to a 54 MB, 208 page PDF full of disruptive information that might change your opinion on the benefits of spending billions of dollars every year to keep radiation doses as low as unreasonably achievable).

The session was well attended and 200 printed copies of the 208-page compilation of presentations and papers were snapped up quickly. Unfortunately, I am not yet able to judge if the situation today is any more favorable to a rational reconsideration of current regulations than it was during the period between 1994–1999 when Jim Muckerheide, Ted Rockwell, Ted Quinn, Andy Kadak, and others arranged a sustained series of special sessions on the health effects of low level radiation at ANS annual meetings.

That series culminated in technical briefing papers that supported revised ANS and Health Physics Society (HPS) position statements in favor of taking new approaches to radiation protection and some acknowledgment by Nuclear Regulatory Commission commissioners such as Greta Dicus that the science being gathered supported the need for a reevaluation of the linear no-threshold model (LNT) model and the regulations that use it as their basis.

Unfortunately, that effort came to naught after the officially selected Committee to Assess Health Risks From Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation from the National Academy of Sciences decided that the evidence of no or positive effects from very low levels of radiation was not convincing enough. They refused to overturn their long-held assumption that the linear relationship between dose and damage was valid enough for government regulations all the way down to a zero dose.

Little changed in the radiation protection field as a result of the multi-year effort and more billions of dollars were spent—and collected by the recipients of the spending—each year for more than another decade to protect people from doses that have never been shown to cause harm to people. The LNT is used to justify such absurd regulations as requiring that the high level waste repository in the United States must designed to ensure that annual doses to the most exposed person will be less than 15 mrem per year. That is 1/20th of the average background radiation in the United States.

My curiosity about the conclusion reached by the BEIR VII committee was strong enough when I first read the report. I had attended a number of the special sessions at ANS meetings, become a member of Radiation, Science and Health and developed a high level of respect for Jim Muckerheide, Myron Pollycove, Jerry Cuttler, Sohei Kondo, and John Cameron, among others. I could not understand why the information those highly qualified and courageous scientists and engineers were developing and presenting was being ignored.

However, while working in Washington and living in Annapolis, Md., I developed a friendship with a member of the Uniformed Public Health Service. He served a tour of duty in the office of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that controls the expenditure of the funds that the U.S. government appropriates each year to support the Life Span Study (LSS) of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki conducted by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation. He told me that the senior government service (GS) employees that controlled that funding had established a small fiefdom. They had decided that they would do everything in their power to make sure that the money kept flowing to people that supported the status quo assumption. They made no secret of the fact that the LSS was their career ticket during conversations in the office.

After hearing that story, I more fully understood why the BEIR VII committee was so sure that the Life Span Study of atomic bomb victims—whose doses were given in a very short period—was considered to be a gold standard. It can be difficult to argue with funding sources that have a preconceived notion about the answers they expect to receive as deliverables. The thing that still bothers me, however, is realizing that a tiny group of functionaries can selfishly hold so much power over so many for such a small thing as a government job.

During the intervening years since the last sustained effort to bring sense and science to regulations and emergency response criteria associated with low level radiation doses, I have engaged in numerous conversations with nuclear energy professionals who have resisted—sometimes quite strongly—the idea that there is such a thing as a safe dose of radiation. Some were shocked to hear me suggesting that science showed that it was possible that radiation might even be beneficial at certain doses. Those concepts go against so much of their training and indoctrination.

The report produced for the 2012 special session should help reach these skeptical professionals, especially the ones who have nurtured the important nuclear philosophy that they are learning professionals who must always maintain a questioning attitude that is open to change if given new, reliable information.

Even though it is a big file at 54 MB, the President’s Special Session: Low-Level Radiation & Its Implications for Fukushima Recovery should be spread widely and reprinted often. Far more nuclear professionals have unfettered access to high speed data networks now than they did in 1999. Though the Internet was available and papers from the ANS sessions were posted on web sites, the network was not very fast or very ubiquitous in the small towns that host the workers at most nuclear power plants and national labs.

I hope that the plight of the evacuated residents of the Fukushima prefecture will encourage interested observers to recognize the deleterious effects of maintaining regulations based on an inaccurate model in the name of “conservatism” or “precautionary protection”.  If sensible rules prevailed, nearly all of the Fukushima evacuees would be able to return home and rebuild their homes, villages, and lives.

So far, I am more hopeful than optimistic. Perhaps some of you can convince me that this time is going to be different, and we really will see a gradual shift toward more rational radiation regulations.

_______________________________

Adams

Rod Adams is a nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

→ 28 Comments

Posted in Fukushima, hormesis, Meetings, position statements, Radiation

Tagged , , ,

Starting a new nuclear construction industry is hard work

Posted on June 6, 2012 by radams| 10 Comments

By Rod Adams

Construction at Vogtle units 3 and 4 and VC Summer units 2 and 3 is not going as well as many nuclear advocates would like. I’m not surprised, but neither are most people who have been involved in complex construction and technology projects that involve a lot of moving parts and numerous interested parties. Nothing that happens at those projects will change my mind that atomic fission is a superior way to produce heat and boil water. There is little chance that events at those individual projects will convince me that there is something fundamentally wrong with the advanced passive reactor plant design.

There are some important lessons that need to be shared widely so that the chances of them recurring is minimized, but it is difficult to completely eliminate the challenges that will inevitably be a part of all major construction projects. For the nuclear industry and all nuclear advocates, it is important to recognize that even if things were going perfectly, there would still be plenty of negative publicity coming from the professional opposition to what we do. We are involved in starting up a new nuclear construction industry, almost from scratch.

For the sake of brevity, I will put the current issues at Vogtle and Summer into three categories—backlog of design changes from the certified design, delays that were partially caused by licenses and permits whose issuance was resisted at every step of the process, and an error that resulted in laying concrete rebar that did not match the licensed standard requirements.

Licensing

Soon after the issuance of the AP1000 design certification and the associated combined operating license for Vogtle, the project leaders began the process of submitting design license amendments so that they could implement changes and refinements. Many of the requested design modifications are based on lessons learned during the construction of similar units in China. Unfortunately for the project owners, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has no process for handling license amendments that can keep up with the needs of a construction project.

The “one step” licensing process that is described in 10 CFR 52 (CFR–Code of Federal Regulations) results in the issuance of an operating license based on a certified design. The underlying assumption by the regulators is that the design is complete and will not be changed during construction. Any changes to the design as certified need an operating license amendment.

Even if the change is an improvement, it requires a rigorous NRC evaluation and approval process designed to prevent unintended negative consequences directly affecting reactor safety. The operating license amendment process is quite different from the one used to process changes when the owners build based on a construction permit and request their operating license after completing construction and low power testing.

The problem with one step licensing is that it is a poor assumption to believe that it is possible to build first-of-a-kind (FOAK) construction projects without making any changes to a design that was completely conceived on paper and inside computers. Reality often does not match models. In addition, construction codes and standards are continuously evolving; even though the process is slow, there are inevitably going to be changes that might affect a design that was first submitted for certification 10 years before construction actually started.

The backlog of potential changes for Vogtle and Summer developed because the leaders were understandably reluctant to submit any changes while the design certification work was still in progress. There is not much that the project leaders can do at this point other than to be even more reluctant than they already are to accept any suggestions that would require a license amendment.

With the clarity made possible by hindsight, the Part 52 one-step licensing process might not be the best choice for any FOAK nuclear power plant, even if similar units have been built outside of the United States. US licensing requirements are different enough to require what is essentially a new design and a different construction process.

The opposition’s strategy: delay

It is hard for nuclear advocates to fail to notice that the organized opposition—which did everything in its power to slow the licensing and permitting processes required for Vogtle and Summer—are engaging in “I told you so” crowing about the high cost of new nuclear plant construction. Every story about a potential cost overrun is accompanied by quotes from groups like Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and Arjun Makhijani’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. (Note: Makhijani is famous for fantasizing about a carbon free, nuclear free energy supply.)

Arjun Makhijani, the president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, said efforts to rush such a complex project to completion set the scene for delays and rising costs.

“The cost increase should not be a surprise; rather it is déjà vu all over again,” he said. “It would be much better if construction were suspended until all design issues were resolved.”

(Source: Augusta Chronicle (May 11, 2012) Price of Vogtle expansion could increase $900 million)

There is no secret to the opposition’s recipe for making any construction project excessively costly. All they have to do is to force schedule delays and costs inevitably increase due to financing, idle labor, labor force reconstitution, issues associated with supply chains, and inflation. Project managers are rarely applauded for missing deadlines, even if they adhere to a carefully prepared, logical schedule that gets pushed to the right (on a timeline) by external forces. Once delays have been imposed, costs will increase again if efforts are made to revise schedules and accelerate work to attempt to get back on schedule.

Supply chain issues are especially difficult to explain to people who have not worked in an industrial setting. When the parts that are needed are large and custom made, they need to be ordered months to years in advance. Once those parts are finished, the manufacturer needs to ship or needs to get paid for storage.

If the parts require special environmental controls to ensure that they do not deteriorate, storage charges increase dramatically. Suppliers who have to delay order shipments or who receive purchase orders several months after they expected the orders to arrive become more reluctant to do business. (That means that they start negotiations for the next order at a higher unit price.) Suppliers also logically delay investing in production capacity until after the orders—and the associated payments—actually arrive.

Rebar

The final current issue associated with Vogtle and Summer is a specific error that resulted in rebar (reinforcement bars of steel that strengthen concrete) being laid at both projects that did not match the concrete standard that was included as part of the certified design. Correcting the error will result in a several month delay at both projects while rebar is removed, new rebar is cut and the new rebar is laid. No concrete can be poured before that happens and there are many steps in the construction process that cannot take place until the concrete is in place. Management is going to be distracted.

The source of the error has not been determined and the results of the investigation may never be made public. What seems to have happened is that someone or some group on the project team decided to use a reinforced concrete standard that was updated after the license was approved. That standard specified a different rebar configuration. The design change was prepared, but never approved by the NRC. Somehow, the rebar was installed to the newer standard even though the license amendment had not been approved. I suspect that there was a communications breakdown that prevented the installers in the field from knowing the exact status of the design. It might have been as simple as a drawing or specification that specified a standard without specifying the exact revision of the standard.

It is going to be an expensive lesson. It is one that can be avoided by projects that have not yet begun construction. In nuclear construction projects, effective change control and effective communications plans are essential.

Reviving a slumbering giant of an industry is hard work. There will be plenty of successes to celebrate, but I would not be a “nuke” if I did not seek to learn as much as possible from the difficulties experienced by others and if I did not seek to document those lessons so that others can also avoid making the same errors. That is part of our learning culture.

_____________________________

Adams

Rod Adams is a nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

→ 10 Comments

Posted in lessons learned, nuclear opponents, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, PWRs, Westinghouse

Tape review of Vermont Yankee power struggle debate

Posted on May 2, 2012 by radams| 2 Comments

By Rod Adams

One of my college roommates served for a while as the manager of our football team; we would talk about the “tape review” sessions that were used by the team to evaluate past performance and to prepare for future opponents. Nuclear organizations, for their part, often have highly developed “lessons learned” programs and they practice the use of technical methods that have been successfully employed by other organizations.

In that spirit, I would like to offer a “tape review” of the recent radio debate “Vermont Yankee: Power Struggle” that Meredith Angwin wrote about so beautifully for ANS Nuclear Cafe under the title of Be Here Now and The Debate.

My intent is not criticism—Richard Schmidt and Meredith both did a great job and already scored a win for the pronuclear team. My goal is to contribute to continuous improvement, help our team get ready for the next time, and build confidence for anyone else who gets an opportunity to publicly engage on the topic of nuclear energy.

The “here and now” philosophy that Meredith wrote about is important. People need to recognize and deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it would be. We should challenge our opponents to base their decisions on what IS, not what is dreamed about. Balance is also important, naturally, since if everyone always thinks of only here and now, the future for our children will be pretty grim.

The predictable

We can make reasonable attempts to predict and influence the future so that it is closer to what we want. We can, for example, predict exactly when the sun will set every day. We can also predict its elevation angle based on time of day, day of year, and elevation. With those predictable numbers, we can chart the maximum power available to collect at any given time—while factors like clouds, snow, and shade from neighboring trees reduce the amount available.

During a debate, a good prop for that statement is an old celestial navigation book with a sun table in it. You can pick one up on the web or at a used book store. A few ancient implements that were used to measure the sun’s travel—perhaps a sextant or a sundial—might also help to illustrate just how much understanding mankind has had about the sun’s behavior and how long we have collectively owned that understanding.

Predictable nuclear

Unlike the scheduled operation of a coal, oil, gas, or nuclear plant, we usually have no real way to predict when and where the wind will blow or for how long. While we know how much it costs to run power cables from one point to another, we do not know specifically whose backyard will host those cables, along with the necessary towers and clear cut corridors, if we want to use someone else’s wind to back up our own.

In contrast, we can predict, based on demonstrated history, that completed nuclear plants can run for at least 50 years (the USS Enterprise recently celebrated its 50th birthday), and probably for 60-80 years. We know how much nuclear fuel has cost in the past and can do a pretty fair job of predicting the cost in the future. We also know that used nuclear fuel still contains 95 percent of its initial energy, and we know how to capture at least some of that energy through recycling. We have no way of knowing what natural gas prices will be in two years.

Walden Pond

During the debate, Richard did a good job in declaring that coal is the alternative in the world in which he lives and works; and in his next opportunity in a public forum, he should use his own experience with a solar energy system to concisely explain why solar can NEVER replace either coal or nuclear NO MATTER WHAT engineering improvements are made. It is perhaps even better to stress that point about solar than the true statement concerning coal and the way things work now. Alternatively, another possible response would be to allow an opponent like Michael Daley to attempt to win supporters (for pronuclear!) by describing—in detail—exactly what it means to live in a “100 watt house”.

Aside: I have visited Michael’s 100 Watt home website. I wonder if Michael and his wife actually live in the 100 watt cabin, or if it is just a writing retreat. His website describes it thusly: “Michael writes his books in a five foot by five foot tower room on a solar-powered laptop computer. He lives in Westminster, Vermont with his wife, award-winning children’s author Jessie Haas.” However, the solar cabin is in Putney, about five miles away from Westminster. End aside.

The Walden Pond–style of simple living might appeal to some, but most Americans would immediately see that day-to-day living in a space that is 12 feet by 16 feet is not quite their idea of the American dream. That is especially true if living there means constantly monitoring the charge level on the battery system and the fuel state of a noisy generator. In a debate environment, there is nothing wrong with letting the opposition try to sell their vision—especially if it is one that is not all that attractive.

Economics

Another topic in the debate where Richard and Meredith could turn the opposition’s assumed strengths into a negative for the audience is in the economic area. Michael Daley stated on several occasions that his reason for opposing Vermont Yankee was that Entergy would not agree to give Vermont a discounted rate on electricity. The details there are important; Entergy had been selling power to Vermont for 4 cents per kilowatt hour and wanted to start selling at a market determined rate. It was willing to sign a long-term contract for 6 cents per kilowatt hour.

Compared to the 20 cents per kilowatt-hour that Vermont power companies pay for unreliable wind and solar electricity, 6 cents per kilowatt hour is a huge discount. Armed with numbers and hard copy charts (if prepared carefully in advance), nuclear power supporters should always be willing to talk about economic comparisons with renewable energy advocates.

I’ll now turn the microphone over to others who might have had a chance to listen to the debate. What else should we learn from this engagement? What other facts should we be ready to introduce, what appeals to emotion should we use in addition to appeals to reason, and how should we respond when challenged that “we do not know” what might happen in the future—if in reality the topic under discussion is rather predictable for those who have already done the study and calculation?

__________________________

Adams

Rod Adams is a nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Entergy, nuclear opponents, View from Vermont, wind power

NAS study of cancer risks near U.S. nuclear facilities

Posted on April 4, 2012 by radams| 6 Comments

By Rod Adams

The National Academy of Science (NAS) has released phase one of a study titled Analysis of Cancer Risks in Populations Near Nuclear Facilities. The release officially opened a 60-day public comment period in which stakeholders can provide their inputs to help guide the next phases of the study. The project email address that should be used for submitting comments is crs@nas.edu.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission tasked the National Academy of Science to perform the study. The expenditure was considered to be a prudent investment because the existing study on the risk of developing cancer based on proximity to nuclear facilities in the United States is more than 20 years old. In the intervening years, there have been a number of attempts internationally to determine if there is a link between radiation released from nuclear energy facilities and cancer risks; the results of those studies have been inconclusive.

In cases like the announcement of a discovery of a cluster of childhood leukemia cases near the Sellafield facility in Great Britain, the news of results that seemed to indicate a problem received a great deal of publicity. News of the cluster’s discovery was broken during a television program that aired in November 1983. The careful science required to more fully understand the cause of the higher than expected rate of childhood leukemia took decades.

It is likely that few of the people who formed opinions about the radiation-related risk of cancer from the television story or the numerous repetitions of that story have heard anything about the study titled Childhood leukaemia, nuclear sites, and population mixing, which was accepted for publication in the British Journal of Cancer in October 2010. That study showed that there was a strong correlation between population influx in a formerly isolated rural area and the risk of childhood leukemia. That relationship has been found in populations near expansive facilities that had nothing to do with nuclear energy or radiation.

The effort to find out if there is a risk associated with living near a nuclear energy facility is full of scientific obstacles. Many of the challenges that are inherent in the task are detailed in the summary that the NAS released as part of the phase one scoping effort. The listed challenges include the difficulty in finding accurate data that relates cancer incidence to physical addresses, lack of any records related to population mobility in areas of interest, some uncertainty about radiation release data, and the expectation that any increases in cancer related to the measured levels of radiation will be so low as to be statistically hidden in the noise of normal variations.

Of course, scientists who have been tasked with finding ways to perform a study can almost always recommend several methods that might provide useful information—if provided with enough resources. This effort is no exception to that rule; the summary provides no fewer than four potential study designs, each with its own set of limitations and strengths. Not surprisingly, the summary also includes a recommended course of action that would involve a substantial effort in data gathering, modeling, and analysis—assuming that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission decides to proceed with the study.

The final recommendation in the summary is the development of processes for involving and communicating with stakeholders “to achieve effective collaboration with local people and officials and increase social trust and confidence.”

Dr. Arjun Makhijani, a man with a long history of opposition to the use of nuclear energy, strongly supports the effort and expects the NAS to find evidence of risk, especially to children. He intends to provide a substantial input during the comment period. I expect that other professional antinuclear activists will provide their comments and demand to be a part of the stakeholder engagement process.

A number of experts in the field of radiation biology are also preparing to provide comments. Here is an example comment from an e-mail list inhabited by people who have studied radiation health effects for decades:

If the U.S. NRC and these radiation protection folks would only look at the (20-year-old) cell biology evidence instead of their LNT [linear no-threshold] ideology and epidemiology, they would realize that they are trying to measure a cancer risk (radiation-induced DNA damage rate) that is six million (6,000,000) times lower than the spontaneous risk of cancer (i.e., natural DNA damage rate).

The numbers in that comment relate to the fact that the dose rate from licensed nuclear facilities in the United States is less than 1 mSv/year to the most exposed person. There is zero probability that a population exposed to such a dose will exhibit any increase in expected cancer risks. It is always possible, however, to expend a large sum of money and time performing studies and involving a number of stakeholders, many of whom tend not to reveal their actual stake in the matter.

The American Nuclear Society includes experts in the field of radiation biology who should take the time to read the phase one scoping summary, learn more about the proposed study methods, and provide informed comments. The most reasonable decision would be that there are any number of higher priority ways to spend the money and the scientific resources that would be needed to perform the proposed phase two study; it is unlikely to provide any new or useful information.

A more likely decision will be to perform the study, but perhaps a sufficient number of informed comments will prevent initial assumptions about risks from producing yet another study that seems to support the notion that radiation risk is always some number greater than zero—no matter how low the dose.

_________________

Adams

Rod Adams is a nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

→ 6 Comments

Posted in American Nuclear Society, News, Radiation

Can we repeat facts about Fukushima often enough to overcome fears?

Posted on March 7, 2012 by radams| 15 Comments

by Rod Adams

We are within one week of the one year anniversary of the Great North East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. That powerful punch from nature slowly destroyed four out of six of the nuclear units at Fukushima Daiichi while the world watched with rapt attention.

However, as many nuclear experts predicted at the time of the accident, the defense-in-depth strategy worked well. The end results have been far better than were predicted using some of the fantasy-inspired “worst case scenarios” propagated by antinuclear activists and by researchers working several decades ago – before much data had been gathered and digested.

The painstakingly-gathered empirical data from this unfortunate theory-to-practice exercise have validated the recently released State of the Art Reactor Consequences Analysis, which computed a one in a billion chance that an accident at typical licensed nuclear reactors would harm anyone in the general public.

The total quantity of long-lived radioactive isotopes released from all three of the melted cores was approximately 11 kilograms. None of the material stored in the spent fuel pools was released. There has not been, and never will be, any injuries more serious than a mild sunburn to two workers, from the radiation released into the environment from the melted nuclear fuel inside the plant pressure vessels and containment structures.

Despite the lack of any negative radiation health effects, there are people who relish in stimulating as much fear, uncertainty, doubt and stress about radiation and nuclear energy as they possibly can. They are working overtime to obscure any good news and to label the people who share truthful information as nuclear industry PR hacks, apologists, or even worse.

While participating in discussion threads associated with recent reports published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Time magazine and Scientific American, I have seen nuclear supporters accused of killing babies, being mere industry shills, and of being completely insensitive to the continued suffering of the Japanese people.

Unlike people who have been trained in nuclear sciences and engineering, facts do not matter as much to antinuclear activists as repeatedly telling the tale they want people to hear. Greenpeace has released a report titled Lessons from Fukushima featuring a chapter by Arnie Gundersen that claims that the nuclear industry is a prime example of regulatory capture, despite being one of the most tightly regulated industries in the US, Europe and Japan.

Karl Grossman, a man who has been making a living on the antinuclear lecture and book circuit since the Three Mile Island accident, continues to claim that Fukushima will be worse than Chernobyl. He also claims that Chernobyl has already killed nearly a million people, instead of the less than 100 reported by the UN Scientific Committee on the Effect of Atomic Radiation report as having died in the 25 years since the accident.

Like Helen Caldicott, Grossman continues to spout the belief that Yablokov’s thoroughly discredited book titled Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment is the definitive work on the 1986 accident. In the imaginary world where Caldicott and Grossman spend their time, the thousands of other researchers who studied the accident and came to completely different conclusions were either misinformed, bought by the powerful nuclear industry, or just plain lying.

The antinuclear opposition also spreads fear by describing effects using unfamiliar, frightening units. Instead of saying that a total of 11 kilograms of material (out of approximately 60,000 kilograms of fuel per unit) escaped from the reactor pressure vessels, people who discourage the beneficial use of nuclear energy say that the plants “spewed” 36,000 terabecquerels of radioactivity. (A terabecquerel of Cs-137 has a mass of 3.2 grams.)

If that number does not scare people thoroughly enough, some nuclear opponents compare the cesium emissions from Fukushima to the cesium emissions from the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The Hiroshima bomb produced its explosive power fissioning about 1 kilogram of U-235. The 6.3% fission yield for Cs-137 means that Little Boy, the Hiroshima bomb, produced a little less than 30 grams of Cs-137. (89 terabecquerels at 3.2 gms/terabecquerel).

In the eyes of people who hate nuclear energy, that means that the melted Fukushima reactors did not release a mass of radioactive cesium that is about half the weight of the backpack I routinely carry when I spend a weekend on the Appalachian Trail. Instead, those reactors released 400 times as much radioactive cesium as was released by The Bomb!

That is a great piece of propaganda. It sounds really bad while using very few words. Contradicting the scary statement with logical reasoning requires too detailed of an explanation to be useful to a newspaper or television show.

There is, however, reason to be hopeful that the end result of the Fukushima accident on nuclear energy will be less damaging to the ultimate success of the technology than the end result of the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents.

Unlike the period following the Three Mile Island accident, the public conversation has broadened considerably. Discourse is no longer dominated by broadcast television networks or major printed newspapers. It is not dominated by the people who have been able to spend years working their way to the front of journalist contact lists by always being ready with pithy, if often false, quotes.

Instead, people who understand nuclear technology are supporting each other, using a wider variety of media access points and are participating in active public outreach campaigns.

On March 8 at 10AM EST, the American Nuclear Society, a professional society with 11,000 members, will be holding a news conference at the National Press Club to announce the release of its long awaited report on the lessons learned from the accident.

I am looking forward to reading that report and then cooperating with other nuclear professionals to ensure that its factual material is repeated as often as the tripe that emanates from the mouths and keyboards of Caldicott, Grossman, Wasserman, Gunter, Lovins, and so many other professional opponents of nuclear energy.

Like many of my colleagues, I feel a sense of personal responsibility to do something to alleviate the suffering of the victims who have a far greater probability of negative health effects from irrational radiation fears than they do from radiation itself. Spending some of my spare time to ease their fears, reduce their stress and enable their safe return to their ancestral homes is an investment worth making.

There has been one result from the accident that I never would have predicted. A year ago, I could not imagine that two countries (Germany and Japan) that were famous for their technological skills and rational decision making would have decided to shut down undamaged reactors in favor of spending a growing share of their national income to make the fossil fuel industry increasingly richer. If anyone can think of ways to influence the decision process in those two key countries, I am listening.

 

Adams

Rod Adams is a pro-nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

 

→ 15 Comments

Posted in accident, American Nuclear Society, Earthquake, Fukushima, lessons learned, Natural disasters, nuclear opponents, Publications, Radiation

Not so strange bedfellows – Sierra Club accepts natural gas money

Posted on February 7, 2012 by radams| 14 Comments

By Rod Adams

On February 2, 2012, Time Magazine’s Ecocentric blog published a post titled Exclusive: How the Sierra Club Took Millions From the Natural Gas Industry—and Why They Stopped that has rocked the environmental community and the established energy industry. The story included the shocking news that the Sierra Club had accepted donations from Chesapeake Energy or its executives totaling nearly $26 million during the period from 2007-2010.

Some longtime members of the Sierra Club have expressed feelings of betrayal; Chesapeake Energy is one of the largest domestic natural gas producers in the United States with most of its production based on using the increasingly controversial technique of hydraulic fracturing (fracking). A number of concerned environmentalists and local chapters of the Sierra Club worked hard for several years to convince Carl Pope, Michael Brune, and the rest of the Club’s national leadership to take a principled stand against fracking.

What they saw instead was their national leadership promoting new technologies for producing natural gas alongside people like Aubrey McClendon, Chesapeake Energy’s chief executive officer, and T. Boone Pickens. The Club’s official policy on fracking was that it could be done responsibly and safely and that with plenty of regulation it could be a bridge to a renewable energy future.

Finally, as the industry matures, a series of best management practices will emerge, some already identified, some evolving with time. These best management practices should, to the maximum extent possible, be swiftly incorporated into regulatory requirements as they are developed. The Club opposes any unconventional or conventional drilling projects that do not comply with best management practices, even in regions where state or federal law may permit lower standards of environmental management.

The Club will use these standards as a yardstick for any regulatory reform efforts it undertakes or supports, and to judge which new drilling projects, if any, cause unacceptable environmental damage and warrant opposition.

Chapters are encouraged to press for effective regulatory frameworks to control the impacts of deep shale gas and may oppose specific projects that are inappropriately sited or that fail to comply with best management practices.

Board of Directors, December 21, 2009

Now, perhaps the disillusioned members will see the real politik reason why they did not get the support they expected from their globe-trotting leaders.

Michael Brune, who took over as the Sierra Club’s executive director in early 2010, published a blog post titled Sierra Club and Natural Gas that describes his decision to stop taking donations that are tightly linked to the natural gas industry.

By the time I assumed leadership of the Club in March 2010, our view of natural gas had changed—so I made sure our policy did, too. We created a strong natural gas campaign comprised of staff and volunteer leaders. Some chapters sought to establish tough safeguards at the state and federal level to protect their air and water; others sought to suspend fracking completely until those standards were in place. By mid-August 2010, with gas industry practices and our policies increasingly in conflict, I recommended to the Board, and it agreed, to end the funding relationship between the Club and the gas industry, and all fossil fuel companies or executives.

Unfortunately for Brune, words and videos published on the Internet do not disappear and can be recalled with a few simple searches. Before his action to stop taking natural gas industry funding in August 2010, Brune appeared on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money with some words that were welcome to the people who believe that natural gas is a terrific fuel for electrical power plants. That was not an isolated event; Brune made the following statement in November 2010:

Concerns about natural gas extraction have been on the rise not just in Dimock, but in places across the country, from West Virginia to Texas to Wyoming. And yet even given these important issues, natural gas still has a relatively lighter footprint than coal or oil. Gas is not a clean fuel, but it can be cleaner.

(Emphasis added.)

It would be difficult for Brune to prove that those positive words were not influenced by the generous contributions that Chesapeake Energy was providing to the Sierra Club.

This story, however, should not be seen as an isolated incident, but as part of a continuing effort within the energy industry to use whatever means are available to obtain a favorable position in one of the world’s largest, most profitable, and competitive commodity businesses. Here is a quote from an email written by Jim Gibson, a member of Chesapeake’s communications group:

Over the years, Chesapeake has been proud to support a number of organizations that share our interest in clean air and agree that America’s abundant supplies of clean natural gas represent the most affordable, available and scalable fuel to power a more prosperous and environmentally responsible future for our country.

Read that carefully. Here is my paraphrase: Chesapeake has supported a number of organizations that agree that natural gas is the best fuel to power our country’s future. Their funding efforts have not just been limited to the Sierra Club and have not just been limited to efforts to fight coal. Some free market focused observers find nothing inherently disturbing about efforts to obtain competitive advantage through arguably sneaky means:

Hey… this ain’t bean bag.

See… I could at least respect that. NG competes with coal, and you do what you need to do in order to gain an edge in a very competitive market. But jumping in bed with the Sierra Club? That leads to big problems, mostly because our recent success in natural gas exploration relies largely on fracking and other developing technologies.

Here is the important part of this story for nuclear energy advocates to understand. Our technology competes with both natural gas and coal for market share in the lucrative energy business.

The Sierra Club has a well known aversion to nuclear energy and has not been shy about doing all it can to halt the growth of nuclear energy and to speed the early termination of as many operating nuclear power plants as possible. The acknowledged financial relationship between the Sierra Club and the natural gas industry may be a partial explanation for the reason why an organization that has placed fighting climate change near the top of its priority list is such an ardent opponent to the most reliable form of virtually emission-free power in favor of a fuel that is only “low carbon” in comparison to coal.

We all might benefit from an improved understanding of the world if more journalists pull this thread to determine if there are other questionable financial relationships between groups with ardent stances against nuclear energy and industries that stand to benefit from reduced competition with nuclear energy developments.

Final note: I wrote about Chesapeake’s financial support for anti-coal efforts for Atomic Insights in December 2010.

_____________________________

Adams

Rod Adams is a pro-nuclear advocate with extensive small nuclear plant operating experience. Adams is a former engineer officer, USS Von Steuben. He is the host and producer of The Atomic Show Podcast. Adams has been an ANS member since 2005. He writes about nuclear technology at his own blog, Atomic Insights.

→ 14 Comments

Posted in Environmental Benefits of Nuclear, nuclear opponents