#antinuclear sensationalism

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From Nuclear Industry magazine (published by the Atomic Industrial Forum), November 1967.

Say it louder for those in the back.

Public understanding is a significant and understated problem area.

And we’re not talking about the general public here, the man in the street, who can be forgive a certain naivete. This is from people with scientific backgrounds.

Life-saving shipments of nuclear medicines, radioisotopes vitally needed for diagnosis and treatment, are routinely prevented from moving by bigots. It’s well known that shipments of fresh and spent nuclear fuel are often affected by protestors, but the virtual blockading of radioisotopes produced for medical, scientific, and industrial use mostly passes unremarked. Once again we see that the antinuclear crowd prefers to cause real harm to real people, rather than give up their notions of what is and is not proper.

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The wild boars in question love truffles and morel mushrooms. These fungi are quite unusual in that they concentrate the element caesium, which (being chemically similar to sodium and potassium) passes through most plants and animals without being retained. Truffle mycelium in particular tends to be deeper underground than mushroom mycelium, which is important because caesium deposited on the surface gradually sinks into the soil.

By EU standards, foodstuffs containing up to 1250 Bq/kg of radiocaesium are admissible for consumption by the general public. The assumption made is that 10% of the food consumed is so contaminated. Anyone whose food supply consists 10% of Schwarzwald wild boar must be considered exceptional!

It must be emphasized that this permissible level is far below that where any human health effects can be observed. Nevertheless, German law sets the permissible level of radiocaesium to 600 Bq/kg ― less than half the EU limit. The only purpose of this appears to be to keep people frightened of atomic energy, by telling them that Chernobyl has rendered their food unsafe to eat. A book entitled “Die Wölke”, in which a cloud emitted from a stricken nuclear power plant drifts across Europe, destroying civilization, is taught in the primary schools for the same purpose.

The fact that the boars themselves have shown no kind of ill effects should be indicative that there is no real danger. Indeed, the Swedish government has admitted that its action in condemning reindeer meat (the reindeer feed on plants which absorbed radioactive substances from Chernobyl debris) in 1986 and 1987 was unnecessary and harmful. (If anyone can find the original reference in the Dagens Nyheter we'd be grateful.) And the 2005 joint report of the French Academies of Sciences and Medicine strongly indicates that there is no benefit to such strict limits on radiation exposures at very low levels. (”Dose-effect relationships and estimation of the carcinogenic effects of low doses of ionizing radiation”, André Aurengo, rapporteur)

In case you were having any thoughts along these lines...

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Duck and cover! This narration-free film collage of newsreels, advertisements, and propaganda paints a picture of America at the dawn of the nuclear age that manages to be both chilling and hilarious. THE ATOMIC CAFE is an excellent example of the value of the film archive, stitching together images like the destruction of Hiroshima with a commercial featuring people drinking “Atomic Cocktails” for a type of dark humor that could only emerge in retrospect.

For this special Science on Screen event, we will be joined onstage for a special discussion by Dr. Can Kilic. Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University Of Texas. Dr. Kilic specializes in theoretical particle physics; extensions of the Standard Model; collider phenomenology; dark matter models and searches.

Science on Screen® is an initiative of the Coolidge Corner Theatre with major support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

“Narration-free”, but by no means narrative-free (or ‘value-free’, but is anything we humans do?), The Atomic Cafe is carefully constructed to convey a very definite message to the viewer. The purpose of the filmmakers is to hold up to ridicule the peaceful use of atomic energy to elevate the human condition (atomic cocktail, for instance, is not some bizarre 1950s fad drink, but a term used for a radioisotope preparation imbibed for medical diagnostic purposes), and to cast the pall of annihilation by nuclear war over everything.

We should not consider it a suitable selection for a “science” program, and we wonder what Dr Kilic’s contribution will be. Surely the University of Texas could have found someone more directly connected to the scientific, industrial, and medical uses of nuclear phenomena.

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Russia has cut off supplies of gas to Poland and Bulgaria over their military support of Ukraine. The European Union calls this “blackmail”, and that is exactly what it is. It was set up by hit pieces such as this in the German press, which represented the Kozloduy nuclear power station as “the next Chernobyl”. As a result of German political pressure, Bulgaria was forced to shut down their four VVER-440 units, although the two VVER-1000s were allowed to continue.

As can be imagined, this caused great discontent and strong objection from Bulgaria at the time. The political consequences just keep accumulating.

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Antinuclear propaganda is not just deliberately misleading, but horrifically cruel.

That day, Japan was hit with the 5th-strongest earthquake ever recorded, but the real legacy of this disaster is the ensuing nuclear disaster: a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns and releases of radioactive materials from the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.

Say it louder for the people in the back : the twenty thousand people who died in the earthquake and tsunami are irrelevant and won’t be missed. The real disaster was the nuclear power station accident that failed to expose anybody to dangerous amounts of radioactivity.

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It seems incredible that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania would stoop to slandering a nuclear power station located in a neighbouring country.

The video questions how Belarus can reduce its energy dependency on Russia by having Russia build a nuclear power station and supply fuel for it. This ignores the question of time scale. The recent large power outage in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan should make it obvious that importing a power plant which will last 60 years, or fuel which will last for 5 years, is a very different thing from importing electricity every second of every day. Belarus, as the video repeatedly informs us, is a poor country, and a client of Russia ; but the patron itself has limited resources, and with more lucrative markets for its gas, has good reason to encourage Belarus to generate its own power from uranium. Especially with the Baltic States having already announced their intention to disconnect their electrical systems from Belarus by 2025, having a large, stable power generator in the system is highly desirable to prevent sudden short-term disruptions. It should also be observed that, if the political situation were to change, fuel assemblies suitable for VVER stations are available from international suppliers.

Just exactly why being able to “see the cooling towers from a hot air balloon over Vilnius” would be disturbing is also unclear, at least, unless one is for some reason inclined to regard these constructions (and not those at coal stations?) as sinister. Claims that Ostrovets presents a nuclear safety hazard are dubious at best. The Russian nuclear industry has the strongest motives for remaining above reproach, and if that were not enough, the export of nuclear power stations is politically as well as economically important. Further, the alleged consequences of a major nuclear accident are well beyond the bounds of credibility, and involve obvious misrepresentations ― large circles are drawn as though an entire area would be affected, for instance, although they actually represent distances (and high estimates, at that) in the downwind direction.

So what could be going on here? Two possibilities immediately present themselves.

“Sour grapes” over the loss of its own nuclear power station, at Ignalina, which Lithuania was forced to shut down as a condition of admission to the European Union. This was equipped with two RBMK-1500 reactors, the same general concept as the infamous RBMK-1000, but substantially improved in design detail. As a result, the country went from being a major exporter of electricity (which contributed significantly to its balance of payments) to a large-scale importer. Claims that energy and fuel supply problems will soon be solved by solar panels seem to involve a serious leap of faith!

Concern over the buildup of Russian military forces in Belarus, and the overall attempt by Russia to reassert control over Central and Eastern Europe, much to the distaste of the people there. Considering how happy Germany has been to tie itself up with Russia via the Nord Stream pipelines, it very much appears that the desperate need for gas to support the Energiewende will serve to check any EU or NATO response, for instance, to further moves against Ukraine. The Lithuanians may be trying to mobilize German antinuclear sentiment to do what normal political considerations have so far failed to.

We may, however, bring to mind just for a moment the frankly terrifying mobile nuclear power plant developed in Belarus during the Soviet era. In order to optimize the thermodynamic performance of a closed-cycle gas turbine, the working fluid was nitrogen tetroxide, one of the most violent oxidizers other than halogens and halogen-oxygen compounds.

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We have mentioned before that the antinuclear campaigners, secure in the belief that nuclear energy is fundamentally immoral, never hesitate to make up reasons to oppose it which they know to be without factual basis.

They also love (as we have likewise observed) to create absurd, sensationalistic terms for things ― “mobile Chernobyls” for transport flasks containing spent nuclear fuel, for instance, or “sacrifice zones” for large tracts of land, on a small corner of which fuel storage casks might be parked (while a tract of land paved with PV panels is a “farm”). Another technique of propaganda which they don’t omit is to pick neutral–sounding names for their campaign organizations, to give the false impression that they are publishing objective information out of disinterested concern for the public good.

So we see a group which calls itself “Public Watchdog” warning of the “Yellowstone Effect”, in which fuel storage facilities will somehow send jets of radioactive water spewing into the sky. Never mind that the spent fuel isn’t hot enough to boil water, having first been stored for several years (under liquid water at ambient pressure) while most of the heat–producing isotopes decayed away. Never mind, also, that there is no mechanism for radioactive material to migrate from inside the fuel bundles to outside the casks. The public has no immediate way to know that the picturesque name, sure to evoke vivid images, is wrapped around a total fabrication. And so the stage is set for yet another wave of completely unjustified outrage against what is, by any reasonable evaluation, the safest and most environmentally (as well as economically) responsible means of producing large–scale energy which we possess.

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What about the executives of companies whose oil refineries & natural gas terminals exploded & caught fire, killing people, releasing toxic chemicals into the ocean, & blanketing large areas with poisonous smoke? The Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power station was far from the only industrial facility which was damaged. It was, undoubtedly, far from the only one where more could have been done to prevent such an outcome. What about real-estate developers & local officials who put housing in areas below the centuries-old tsunami benchmarks found all along the Japanese coasts?

While the prosecution claims at least 44 people died in connection with the incident, other estimates have put the number around 1,600.

What does the linked article actually say?

A survey by popular Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun said Monday that deaths relating to this displacement – around 1,600 – have surpassed the number killed in the region in the original disaster.

Close to 16,000 people were killed across Japan as a direct result of the earthquake and tsunami in 2011. According to the Mainichi report, 1,599 of these deaths were in the Fukushima Prefecture.

Causes of death in the aftermath have included “fatigue” due to conditions in evacuation centers, exhaustion from relocating, and illness resulting from hospital closures. The survey also said a number of suicides had been attributed to the ordeal.

In other words, as has already been established, the evacuation was not justified, because the harm from the actual radioactive releases would have been minimal by comparison.

So what about Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who personally interfered with the actions of the plant operators, forbidding them to follow their emergency procedures?

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Despite the blatant antinuclear fearmongering, you may be interested to watch “Solar Energy : To Capture the Power of Sun and Tide”.

I admit that I bought it largely because one of the seller’s photos showed a CANDU fueling machine in action, and despite the tone, the shots of Pickering Nuclear Generating Station in its original 4-unit form are of interest.

I had it transferred, however, not primarily because it helps to make the point that “alternative energy” has always meant “alternative to fission”, not “alternative to fossil fuels”, but rather because of the very interesting coverage of two French projects, the Rance tidal power station, and the Odeillo solar furnace. The discussion of Rance also helps to illuminate the topics of intermittent supply and energy storage, because a two-basin tidal barrage effectively functions as both.

The last five minutes or so of the film, however, is dedicated to an idea beloved of solar-energy advocates, that we can make energy supply, and thus society, more democratic by abandoning the social-collective model associated with central-station power, and instead making every household responsible for itself. Never mind that social behaviour, pooling of resources, and division of labour, are fundamental to our existence as humans. It should be obvious that, in such a situation, only the wealthy would have adequate energy supplies ― which deserves to be called undemocratic!

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Many people assume that radiograms pose a risk of harm because of the X-ray exposure involved. “Image Gently” campaigns rely on this perception, although it is very likely that they mostly protect the radiographers and radiologists, who historically have had a tendency to overexpose themselves in attempts to provide a high standard of care. Madame Curie is an often-forgotten example of this ― taking X-rays of wounded French soldiers during the First World War, she repeatedly overexposed herself to the point of burning her hands.

CT scans are assumed to be especially dangerous in this regard, because of the overall greater exposures they involved. In the case described here, however, a patient died from a complication completely unrelated to radiation : the outcome would have been the same if the X-ray machine had never been switched on.

Now consider this :

When South Korea introduced a national screening program for certain cancers, many providers tagged on a thyroid ultrasound for less than US$50 as part of a wellness check. Thyroid cancer diagnosis went up 15-fold in 20 years while mortality remained stable, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. An estimated one third of adults harbour tiny thyroid papillary cancers that remain asymptomatic through life. But virtually everyone in South Korea who was incidentally diagnosed with thyroid cancer underwent major surgery or radioactive iodine treatment, each carrying the risk of serious complications. All it took to expose these unaware patients to the risk of harm was the offer of a cheap test.

All kinds of claims have been made about massive numbers of cancers resulting from the Chernobyl and Fukushima reactor accidents. And yet, it appears that all that is necessary to create a surge in thyroid cancer rates is to test for it ― which was done in the Ukrainian and Japanese populations, where it hadn’t been done before. And testing for and treating such cancers has no net result in terms of mortality and morbidity!

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“To prove a point”?  What point?

“Security flaws”?  What flaws?

No damage was done.  The likelihood of any damage being done is minimal.  Reactor buildings are constructed to resist “missiles”, meaning chunks of steel expelled by steam explosions resulting from (the exceedingly remote chance of) catastrophic failures of the piping & other components which hold back the high-pressure, high-temperature water in the reactor cooling system.  It’s no exaggeration to say that you could hit one of these buildings with a cruise missile, or an airliner, & it would remain intact.

Fuel storage buildings are an even more baffling target.  Given that they are at atmospheric pressure, even demolishing the building would just make a mess.  There’s nothing to explode, & while the antinuclear campaigners like to bleat about the possibility of “fuel pool fires”, the fact is that no such thing can physically happen under the conditions obtaining at French plants, where the fuel is taken away for reprocessing, & the pools are thus at no danger of overcrowding.  (According to studies from the USA, even seriously overcrowded fuel pools pose no danger, as long as the fresher bundles which generate more heat are not packed closely together.)

What would be the point of “securing” against something which poses no hazard?

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Everyone knows the names, “Three Mile Island”, “Chernobyl”, “Fukushima”. They are repeated again and again, ad nauseam, to remind us all that nuclear power is unacceptably dangerous.

Maybe, you will say, the St Francis Dam is forgotten simply because 1926 was a long time ago. The great Ru River dam collapse cascade of 1975 may have killed a quarter of a million people, but even elsewhere in China it was largely unreported at the time ― no surprise that it is largely unknown in the Western world. But have you heard of Vajont, in Italy, which killed 2000 people in Italy in 1963? Or Teton, Idaho, eleven deaths in 1976?

This is not “what-about-ism”. This is a reminder that, when we weigh alternatives, there may be a thumb pressing down on one side of the scale. The plain truth is, there is no honest debate over “nuclear energy and alternatives”.

Now, the St Francis Dam, as is very common, was constructed primarily for water supply : electricity supply was a secondary function. Much of the world’s population, and more especially the urban population, lives near the ocean, but the cities mostly get their water from inland, at significant cost to the environment, and sometimes in human lives. Nuclear power stations, constructed primarily for electricity supply, can be used also to supply fresh water from the sea, through some combination of thermal distillation and reverse osmosis. In fact, in the 1960s, the Bolsa Island Project was planned and very nearly carried into effect, to supply the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California with fresh water from the sea.

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Here’s a misleading headline ― it should read “decontaminated”.

The only radioactive substance left in the water is tritium, in other words, radioactive hydrogen, which is formed by the action of cosmic rays in the atmosphere, making it ubiquitously present in seawater already. When tritiated water is added to tritium-free water (such as that from deep wells), an interesting phenomenon is observed : because of the interchange of hydrogen atoms among water molecules, the tritium disperses more rapidly than the physical mixing of the two volumes of water.

The fishermen have no reason to fear that their catch would be made radioactive. That simply doesn’t happen. But, unfortunately, they do have to fear that antinuclearites will convince people that it is somehow dangerous.

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“Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain”

Why do people feel the need to lie about atomic energy?

Better yet, perhaps, why do those being lied to so readily accept what they are told?

Recently, a story (we have chosen not to link to it, since it has already had more than enough exposure) has been circulating under the title we have used for this post, relating how a computer programmer fled the USSR after discovering that repeated computer crashes in a railyard were due to the shipment of trainloads of cattle, heavily contaminated as a result of the Chernobyl disaster, to slaughterhouses, to be diluted into the general food supply. The detail and specificity of the narrative are such as to give it a very authentic air, and it has been widely accepted and repeated. But to those who know the facts of nuclear science, it is clear that virtually every word is false.

According to the story, the crashes were the result of “bits flipping”, what are more formally termed single event upsets. SEUs can be a problem for modern semiconductor devices, which use transistors nanometers in size and operate at gigahertz frequencies. They are caused by the passage of cosmic rays, fast-moving nuclei from space, which plow through matter, leaving trails of destruction in their wake like atomic-scale tornadoes. The micron-scale transistors of the 1980s, containing millions of times more atoms and switching at much lower speeds, are hardly affected. But the fission products produced in nuclear reactors do not produce such rays. They are beta-gamma emitters. At the energy levels involved, beta radiation is absorbed within a few centimeters of air, and even super-intense sources of gamma radiation do not reliably produce SEUs. We see this in the fact that testing laboratories use much more costly neutron sources when evaluating the susceptibility of semiconductors. Even leading the affected cattle through the computer room would not produce the effect claimed!

Slightly more credible is the possibility that enough air ionization was produced to give rise to a “magic/more magic” situation. Remember, though, that ― in addition to being absorbed and scattered by atoms ― gamma radiation is subject to the same basic physical laws as all other radiation. Now, a train is not a point source, so the intensity does not quite drop off as rapidly as the inverse square until you get rather far away, but more rapidly than the inverse first power. In order for such a level of ionization to be present in the computer room, even if the train was parked on the closest track (since the ions recombine quickly, ionization does not accumulate beyond a steady state, which is reached within a few minutes at most), the level of beta radiation being absorbed in the air around the cattle would almost certainly have to be such that they would glow visibly.

It is also alleged that the same sequence of events repeated itself over a period of weeks. The most energetic fission products, however, have the shortest half-lives, and the energy produced falls off quite rapidly as they are used up by radioactive decay. Therefore, even if the unlikely scenario we have described did happen one night, or even two consecutive nights, it could not have continued any longer than that.

This is the quality of the information people accept as good reason for opposing atomic energy. We don’t normally find it productive to spend our time debunking antinuclear claims, but it would be irresponsible not to point out occasionally just how flimsy a pretext people will accept in one direction, when the overwhelming weight of expertise will not convince them in the other.

Here’s a real story about livestock and Chernobyl radiation : back in 2002, the Swedish authorities apologized for having, without adequate justification, condemned a large quantities of reindeer meat as unwholesome, to the great detriment of the herders, who mostly belong to the Lapp or Saami minority.

A railfan friend suggests that the story might not be a complete fabrication, assuming that the Soviet railways carried livestock in unit trains, using the same rolling stock over and over on the same route (concerning which we lack information). There is one kind of radiation which might have affected the computer : that from a defective radio set carried in a locomotive. Alternatively, she observes that, as trains pass by her house, ninety-nine will cause no more than a slight rumble, while the hundredth, by some phenomenon of sympathetic vibration, causes her entire house to rattle. That kind of thing could certainly cause a Soviet-built minicomputer to reset.

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At least one person has been killed as a result of this farcical storage of decontaminated water. (News stories from last year were unclear whether there was one incident of a person falling to his death from a tank, or two.) That is one more than could possibly suffer any health effects if it were released into the ocean.

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What actually ought to be the headline here is the allegation of fraudulent research (although the whole “personal food computer” concept sounds like something which should have been recognizable as a scam at the outset). But that doesn’t stir up the readers, does it now?

Apparently a disgruntled former researcher filed a whole raft of complaints, in the hope that something would stick. Some of them, such as discharging excessive quantities of nitrogen compounds (Miracle-Gro, in other words) have some relevance. But an electron accelerator doesn’t expose anyone to radiation unless it’s switched on.

A powerful proton or ion accelerator can be used to produce radioactive substances in small quantities, and certain isotopes used for research and medicine are made that way ― isotopes that can be made in a reactor are preferred, because they’re cheaper and more available, but for some purposes they will not serve. An electron accelerator, however, cannot. The only radioactive material that would reasonably be on-site, aside from radioactive phosphorus used as a tracer in agricultural experiments, would potentially be depleted uranium used as radiation shielding.