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Page added on October 21, 2013
Radiation Superstition
Nearly a million people each year die of breathing particulates from burning coal; the climate temperature may increase 2°C this century; more than a billion people have no electricity. Yet within our reach is a solution to these global crises of increasing air pollution deaths, climate change, and the growing populations of nations trapped in energy poverty.
The welcome growth of the global middle class increases energy demand. If the world’s economy prospers enough to allow everyone to enjoy just half of the electricity benefits that Americans now take for granted, world electric power generation will triple. Most electricity will come from coal burning, which grew 8% worldwide in 2011. Germany leads the way, building more coal plants. Wind and solar power are too intermittent and too expensive to displace coal worldwide.
Nuclear power is the solution within reach; it’s safe and affordable, with low environmental impact. Yet opposition to it borders on superstition, defined by Merriam-Webster as a “belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation … a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary”. Let’s explore evidence.
People rationally fear possible accidents spreading deadly radioactive materials. Indeed massive doses of radiation did kill 38 emergency workers at Chernobyl, and the fallout of short-lived iodine resulted in 4000 cases of thyroid cancer and 15 deaths. However there is no evidence of the thousands of hypothetical deaths predicted by extrapolation of deadly exposures to lower radiation doses. Opponents of nuclear power have now hyped this death number up to one million, without observable evidence.
Using simplistic mathematical extrapolations from the effects of high-radiation accidents, nuclear power opponents claim that no amount of radiation is safe — not even the low-level natural radiation that comes from the sky and from earth’s radioactive potassium, uranium, and thorium created billions of years ago. Potassium is in our food and our bodies. Rocks contains the thorium and uranium that decays to radon or fuels electric power plants.
Reporting about the Fukushima accident created hysteria without basis. A UN scientific committee charged with investigating the accident’s health effects reported in December that no radiation health effects have been observed among public or workers, and it cautioned against extrapolation to predict health effects of low-level radiation. Radiation superstition causes great harm. Japan is wasting billions of dollars preventing repopulation of radiologically safe areas. Hundreds have died from evacuation stress. Importing liquified natural gas to replace nuclear power has driven Japan’s balance of trade negative.
People unnecessarily fear low-level radiation from accident-dispersed material, buried waste, or medical procedures. EPA required Yucca Mountain engineers to limit accidental releases to just 1/20th of natural radiation for 10,000 years. Dental X-ray technicians routinely drape lead blankets on patients to protect them, but it would take over 10,000 such X-rays to observe any health effect.
Prolonged radiation exposure is safe at natural environmental levels; each cell rapidly repairs DNA strand breaks: one per second per cell. Early life evolved when the natural radiation rate was 3 times greater than now. Today people living in places where natural radiation is 5 times normal exhibit no more cancers. People living in mile-high Denver get more cosmic radiation, but exhibit no more cancers.
Radiation dose rates are as important as doses. High radiation rates overwhelm natural cellular defenses. Doses deadly to Chernobyl workers would have no effect if spread over a lifetime. Cancers are destroyed by multiple concentrated radiation treatments, allowing time between for less-irradiated tissue to recover. In 2012 MIT radiation researchers discovered no DNA damage from exposure rates 30 times as great as natural radiation, and Lawrence Berkeley Lab scientists actually observed how low-level radiation stimulated repair within cells. Long-term, low-dose radiation is benign.
Nuclear industry and shipyard workers exposed to low-level radiation developed fewer cancers. Accidental contamination of building steel by recycling a medical radiation source exposed 8000 Taiwan residents to radiation 7 times natural levels over 30 years, and cancer rates were dramatically reduced. Last year the Dose Response Journal and the American Nuclear Society published compendia of articles evidencing how low-level radiation is benign or healthful.
The vague radiation regulation, “as low as reasonably achievable” encourages ever more costly impediments to affordable nuclear power. This could be fixed with “as high as reasonably safe” limits that are set with evidence, as practiced for other environmental hazards. Nuclear power can solve our energy, climate, and poverty crises. Should we forsake the future of the planet by clinging to a superstition?
You can explore links to the evidence, beginning at the reference section of THORIUM: energy cheaper than coal, at http://www.thoriumenergycheaperthancoal.com/notes-and-references.
18 Comments on "Radiation Superstition"
bobinget on Mon, 21st Oct 2013 11:39 pm
A Chinese city of 11 Million turns on its central heating plant.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/china-smog-photos-pollution_n_4137675.html
Wanna go for a bike ride or run?
FireJack on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 12:35 am
3rd gen nuclear power plants (and ones still being designed today) are supposedly much safer that the 2nd gen (ie fukashima, 3 mile) plants. They still take years and billions of dollars to build though. Decommissioning is expensive and I’m not sure if 3rd gen plants are cheaper in that area.
DC on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 12:58 am
What a trash website EC is. Anyone here still doubt it?
Q/You can explore links to the evidence, beginning at the reference section of THORIUM: energy cheaper than coal, at http://www.thoriumenergycheaperthancoal.com/notes-and-references.
AHahah stop it please!
Dave Thompson on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 1:06 am
Paints a rosy picture this clean energy source of the nuke type. What is done with the waste? Oh that’s right “they will figure that out”, whoever “they” are is yet to be determined. Anybody up for moving back to Chernobyl as of late? How about that Fukushima place? Who insures those plants? State Farm? Geiko? No that would be the Government because no insurance company would be that stupid to take such a risk.
J.R. on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 2:10 am
“Today people living in places where natural radiation is 5 times normal exhibit no more cancers. People living in mile-high Denver get more cosmic radiation, but exhibit no more cancers.”
Making a case for more radiation, are we?
Desperation makes a poor defense for a weak argument.
Nuclear power = Bad Idea
Bad for humans, bad for environment, bad for the biosphere, bad for the future.
Why ANYBODY would advocate the creation of a toxic waste lasting a half-million years is unfathomable. We don’t need the energy THAT badly. Nobody does.
BillT on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 2:24 am
Is The Energy Collective owned by GE? Sure reads like it is. Pure bullshit in mega loads! We have 300,000 tons of used death rods laying around all over the planet, that will need care, for our lifetimes and that of our grand kids and theirs.
GregT on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 2:52 am
Radiation Superstition? What a load of crap.
“Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment is a translation of a 2007 Russian publication by Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Nesterenko. It was published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009 in their Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences series”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-book-concludes-chernobyl-death-toll-985-000-mostly-from-cancer
Kenz300 on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 3:54 am
Fukushima The Coming Global Disaster – YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3QZ6MGPBog
Norm on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 3:55 am
I take it this author lives at Fukushima? Practicing what he preaches?
GregT on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 4:35 am
Thanks for the link Kenz.
More people need to be aware of the truth about nuclear energy, instead of being brainwashed by the industry into believing that all is well.
My wife spends a great deal of her time with cancer cases. She says that most of the people in her profession are convinced that the vast increase in cancer rates are associated with nuclear bomb testing after WW2. Hard to prove, I know, but there is a growing body of physicians, and scientists that are saying the same thing.
DC on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 6:58 am
I have long felt it takes a special kind of chutzpah to claim that wastes from our nuclear technology, the most toxic substances to ALL life-period, are somehow, not that big of a deal. A superstition, is believing breaking a mirror means 7 years bad luck. Fear of radiation poisoning from poorly built and indifferently maintained NPPs and fallout from the US WOMD death machine-are not.
J-Gav on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 8:41 am
“Germany leads the way, building more coal plants.”
“Nuclear power is the solution within reach; it’s safe and affordable, with low environmental impact.”
I don’t what rock this guy’s been living under for most of his life but I invite him to crawl back under it.
antiwarforever on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 11:14 am
Absolutely. My neighbour has a sticker “no to nukes” at the rear of his diesel guzzler. Seems the irony is lost on him.
ghung on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 1:28 pm
Of course, humans will be much wiser in their use of this new round of energy abundance, and the planet can absorb the waste of a few billion more middle class consumers, no problem.
Too bad we can’t mail a few billion becquerels to these folks.
steveo on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 1:37 pm
“Nuclear power is the solution within reach; it’s safe and affordable,”
I like to quote Arnie Gundersen in response to that “It is like trying to end world hunger by feeding them caviar”.
Nuclear power has consistently proven to be the most expensive way the generate electricity.
Additionally, GE’s advanced boiling water design and Westinghouse’s AT1000 both suffer from the same drawback as the 1960s “gen II” designs – they still use a zirconium clad, 5% enriched Uranium fuel rod that limits burn time of the fuel. This results in up to 90% of the fissionable material remaining in the spent fuel.
Kenz300 on Tue, 22nd Oct 2013 1:50 pm
Energy Collective — an infomercial for the fossil fuel and nuclear industries — pushing to keep the status quo and their profits secure……
They feel threatened by the success of alternative energy sources and will do anything to keep their hold on energy production secure.
Wind, solar, wave energy, geothermal and second generation biofuels made from algae, cellulose and waste are safer, cleaner and cheaper when you add in the cost of environmental damage.
The cost to dismantle nuclear power plants and store the nuclear waste FOREVER is too high a price to pay.
BillT on Wed, 23rd Oct 2013 3:02 am
I suggest that Fukushima send a few spent fuel rods to this guy’s home for him to take care of for the rest of his short life.
HARM on Wed, 23rd Oct 2013 8:25 am
This was great. Reminds me of the old-timey “too cheap to meter” nuke propaganda we read about in school.
That said, I sure hope someone out there is at least experimenting with a few Gen-IV molten salt reactor designs that can “burn” spent (but still very radioactive) fuel rods from all the Gen-I thru III reactors. Not to mention the thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste piling up all over the world, much of which will outlive your great-great-great-great grandchildren x 1000.