Anyone who has the lightest familiarity with nuclear power knows that it is impossible to steal fuel from an operating reactor. Even assuming a terrorist knew how to shut it down, there is still the problem of very high level radiation within the reactor core that would be fatal in a matter of minutes for anyone who attempted to break in. (Our brave terrorist - pardon the oxymoron - would find this a very unpleasant way to enter paradise.)
The same goes for hijacking the spent-fuel truck or train on the way to the reprocessing plant. After storage for at least five years at the power plant site, the "spent" fuel is still highly radioactive and thermally quite hot. Hijacking 44,000-pound fuel containers - designed to smash into a concrete wall at 60 mph or fall onto a spike from thirty feet without rupturing - is a bit difficult to do surreptitiously.
This leaves us with raiding the reprocessing plant (bad idea) or stealing the fuel from shipments to the power plant (best bet). Assuming that the militants can make off with a huge truck, monitored as all valuable shipments are with global positioning electronics and probably guarded, and that no one notices this cargo with the huge radioactive symbols all over it, the hijackers must plan ahead to make sure their plutonium reclamation plant is near by. Typically the price tag on such a facility is in the hundreds of millions, or billions of dollars - and, of course, they've got to hide this construction from the prying eyes of swarms of government inspectors looking for something to inspect... or, even more difficult to avoid, the office-supply salesmen in the four surrounding counties.
Assuming the truck is hijacked and taken to the secret $100 million facility, the problems are just starting for our ill-intentioned thieves. Now they must cut up the fuel assemblies and dissolve them in nitric acid. After that, the chemical processes to separate the plutonium from the uranium are devilishly tricky - in part because an almost-certainly fatal criticality accident can occur quite easily when the plutonium is in a liquid form. But let's assume that our "clever" terrorists are successful in refining out the plutonium and have shaped it for a bomb. Two big problems:
The first is obtaining the explosive charges necessary to "implode" a sphere of plutonium in on itself - essentially taking a hollow globe and compressing it down to a golf or tennis-ball-sized solid... well, almost solid. Regular explosive won't work, as the charge must have different characteristics as it "burns" to maintain the shape of the shock wave that is doing the compressing. Then there is the matter of the initiator, or trigger - the device that produces a stream of neutrons to start the reaction inside a one-tenth microsecond envelope when they are needed. This was considered by the Manhattan Project team (approximately 130,000 personnel, including arguably the best physicists and engineers in the world) as one of the most difficult items to design. Polonium 210 and beryllium must be mixed thoroughly - but this must occur within the aforementioned 0.0000001-second time frame. But let's suppose they are able to do all this. Sorry, still no cigar.
For you see, problem two, the plutonium they liberated from the Imperialist Yankee Running Dogs is not suitable for making a decent bomb. Since BWR and PWR reactors "burn" fuel slowly, Pu239 is created not only from the U238, but also from the Pu240 isotope. While not a fissionable isotope (which wouldn't make much difference in small concentrations), it is a spontaneous neutron emitter, which bodes ill for aspiring bomb makers. Even a very small amount of Pu240 is sufficient to throw off the timing of the necessary bomb reaction by starting it before the implosion is complete - causing the bomb to fizzle. Oh, you'll get an explosion of sorts - perhaps sufficient to flatten a city block or two - but not as awful as what you could do with ammonium nitrate and a little fuel oil, a la Oklahoma City. (The 1947 Texas City blast - where 512 were killed - was also a fertilizer explosion, which didn't require any plutonium at all.)
Terrorists are, in my mind, among the most despicable of humankind. But this isn't to say they are stupid. If they want to kill people and spread fear, there are a lot of easier ways to do this, and they know it. Poisoning the water supply, blasting a hole in a dam, setting oil storage facilities afire when the wind is blowing toward a heavily populated area - the list goes on and on. But building a dud bomb from hijacked plutonium isn't one of them.
Showing posts with label nuclear power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nuclear power. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Saturday, April 9, 2016
The Dirty Bomb's Dirty Little Secret
Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with nuclear power knows that it is impossible to steal fuel from an operating reactor.
Is there a nuclear threat to Western civilization? No question. As long as there are nuclear weapons and Islamic terrorists who would murder thousands of innocents without conscience, such a possibility exists. Actions to prevent this are a subject far afield from hormesis, but one possibility might be to offer a higher-than-market price for plutonium to be blended into MOX, rendering it unusable for weapons, as a fuel for power reactors.
MOX is mixed oxide fuel composed of 7% plutonium mixed with depleted uranium. Currently about 2% of reactor fuel is MOX. A very good discussion of MOX and the use of reactor-grade plutonium in weapons can be found online at the following address: www.nic.com.au/nip42.htm.
Is there a nuclear threat to Western civilization? No question. As long as there are nuclear weapons and Islamic terrorists who would murder thousands of innocents without conscience, such a possibility exists. Actions to prevent this are a subject far afield from hormesis, but one possibility might be to offer a higher-than-market price for plutonium to be blended into MOX, rendering it unusable for weapons, as a fuel for power reactors.
MOX is mixed oxide fuel composed of 7% plutonium mixed with depleted uranium. Currently about 2% of reactor fuel is MOX. A very good discussion of MOX and the use of reactor-grade plutonium in weapons can be found online at the following address: www.nic.com.au/nip42.htm.
Monday, April 4, 2016
Five Million Miles on a Pound of Plutonium?
In the early 1950s, when I was an almost-teenager reading all the popular magazines on science and mathematics I could read at the drugstore newsstand, there were articles on "atomic propulsion" for every conceivable vehicle from motorcycles to space ships. (Well, maybe not motorcycles.) A lot of the concepts were just that: concepts. Grandiose ideas sold magazines but would probably not have done much to power your fishing boat.
Only a few years later we learned the horrors of exposure to radiation. I can remember reading - even before age thirteen - not only the heart-rending stories of A-bomb victims, but also about the unfortunate Japanese fishermen who were accidentally exposed to H-bomb test fall-out. I thought they all had died. (Although billed by the press as "Lethally Exposed," except for the one who died from acute radiation sickness, none of the other twenty-two was a cancer fatality as of twenty-five yars after exposure.) [Kumatori, T. Ishihara, T., Hirshima, K., Sugiyama, H., Ishii, S., and Miyoshi, K. Follow-up studies over a twenty-five-year period on the Japanese fishermen exposed to radioactive fallout in 1954. The Medical Basis for Radiation Preparedness, Hubner, K.F., and Fry, A.A., editors, Elsevier, New York, 1980.]
It wasn't long after this that the "atomic power" articles, and much of the interest in nuclear technology, dried up. The Linear No-Threshold hypothesis was soon to send all of those ideas into the black hole of radiation avoidance - which later became radiation hysteria. Did we miss the "nuclear vehicle" boat because of our fears and the rules imposed on the nuclear industry? "What might have been" is truly an impossible question to answer. Thousands of independently acting entrepreneurs would have answered it for us, had they been given the chance.
Neither the pressurized water reactor (PWR) nor the boiling water reactor (BWR) - the mainstays of the U.S. nuclear power industry - are adaptable to smaller scale, mobile applications. A variation of the CANDU reactor principle would come closer by using low-boiling-point compounds such as CFCs to spin a turbine, but even that is a stretch for anything smaller than a large bus. (Not to say that it couldn't be done if technology is given a chance.)
But why worry about atomic-powered anythings? What we're currently using is working out pretty well, isn't it? True, but let's look for a moment at how we fuel our vehicles. And though I don't think we are in danger of "running out of oil" any time soon, it is logical to assume that the energy cost of obtaining oil will increase as the oil-bearing strata become more and more difficult to access.
If we take your politically incorrect sports utility vehicle out on the open road with one pound of gasoline in it, the heat energy content of the fuel will propel you about three miles. By comparison the heat energy in one pound of plutonium would take you some 5,420,000 miles down the road - using the same efficiency figure as the gasoline engine. [The efficiency would be lower using today's technology. But even at half or a quarter the already-low efficiencies of internal combustion engines, the incredible heat content of many radioactive isotopes makes for unbelievable comparisons to all fossil fuels.]
Since this is about thirty times more than the typical mechanical life of a vehicle, it is likely that any nuclear-powered vehicle would be fueled for life at the factory.
All well and good, you might say. But what about the lack of adaptability of power-plant technology to mobile vehicles? Good question. There are other nuclear technologies, besides trying to shrink a power plant, that would be interesting to explore. One of these is the radioisotope thermo-electric generator or RTG.
The RTG is based on a very simple physical principle known as thermoelectricity. ["Simple" in practice, as anyone can connect different types of wires together; the theory, known as the Seebeck effect, is a little more complicated.]
If you take two wires of different materials and connect their junctions in a loop, a current will flow when the temperature of the "hot junction" is greater than that of the "cold junction." In the RTG, a radioisotope supplies the heat, while a "heat sink" - such as you might find on the rear of a high-powered stereo amplifier - cools the cold junction. Any number of junctions can be connected in series (known as thermopile) to produce whatever voltage is desired, while connections are paralleled to increase the current flow. The inherent low voltage of the device can be increased with a dc-to-dc or dc-to-ac converter. [Transformers, used on alternating current circuits, do not work for direct current. A "dc-to-dc" converter chops the dc, making it appear to be ac, transforms it to a different voltage, and then rectifies it back to dc.]
An obvious advantage of the thermo-electric generator is its total lack of moving parts - since electrons don't count.
The Manhattan project scientists had inadvertently discovered this "warmness" of the plutonium 239 isotope. [Actually all radioactive isotopes generate heat as a byproduct of decay - but both the rate and the type of decay emissions are important. You really wouldn't want to cozy up with a strong gamma ray emitter.]
Project experimenters supposedly used the plutonium received from the Hanford reservation - gleaned and refined at an almost unbelievable price - as hand warmers. While alpha particles lose their energy too quickly to penetrate the skin, these atomic "shot-puts" collide with and agitate atoms with which they come in contact, hence the feeling of warmth.
As we might expect, the rate of decay of the isotope has much to do with an isotope's heat-producing potential. While bomb-grade plutonium 239 (with its 24,110-year half-life) is okay for hand warmers, another plutonium isotope (atomic weight 238, with a half-life of only 87.7 years) is the candidate of choice for our extraterrestrial deep-space probes. Plutonium 238 can really kick atoms around, to way beyond the boiling point of water. [Spacecraft power supplies operate at approximately 800 degrees Fahrenheit. RTG temperatures can exceed 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit.]
This is not new technology. All deep-space probes must have some sort of nuclear power supply, as none of the alternatives are able to supply usable amounts of power for the years it takes to complete these missions. Batteries are out of the question for even short missions, and solar panels don't work well, since the energy available drops off as the square of the distance from the sun. A ten-by-ten-foot collector for Earth-Moon operations, for instance, would swell to tennis court size for missions to Jupiter, and blossom to the equivalent of more than two football fields for exploration of Neptune. Moreover, Earth-based solar cells are not easy to mount efficiently, even with a solid terra firma foundation. How about trying to maneuver football-field sized collector banks - structures and deployment mechanisms - in a zero-gravity environment? [Fuel cells would be find, except that the weight of the fuel - and its containers - would't allow for much else on the voyage. We might want to note, thanks to the science eduation given by the mission and movie Apollo 13, most of us are now well aware that fuel cells must carry their own oxidizer - which, in the case of oxygen, was not readily available in interlunar space.]
While the RTG has been the only practical choice for deep-space missions, anti-nuclear propagandists have portrayed it as a hazard to the entire human race because of its use of plutonium fuel. The misguided protesters wring their hands over seventy-two pounds of plutonium that they contend might somehow be released into the atmosphere and over the effect that might have on humankind. However, they totally ignore the fact that two to three tons of various vaporized (and hence, breathable) plutonium isotopes were injected into the biosphere by the Nagasaki bomb and the hundreds of above-ground tests just after World War II; yet the last time I looked, the human race was still alive and kicking.
While spacecraft have shown the reliability and longevity of the RTG, why haven't there been applications in transportation utilizing this technology? [Another very successful use of the plutonium RTG was in pacemakers. From 1973 through 1987, 155 radioisotope-powered pacemakers were implanted in a Newark Beth Israel Medical Center study. With a half-life of eighty-seven years, the nuclear devices outlasted battery operated devices - which required surgery for re-implantation - by many years and were ultra-reliable. And although "it has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt that there is no increased risk of malignancy in this group of patients" few, if any, new nuclear devices are being installed. Why? It's our good friend, the Linear No-Threshold hypothesis. See "The Nuclear Pacemaker: Is Renewed Interest Warranted?" American Journal of Cardiology, Oct. 1990.]
It certainly doesn't require a rocket scientist to conceive of an RTG automobile that would have both a generator and auxiliary batteries available for acceleration and hills - yet would recharge itself, both while driving and while sitting all day in a parking lot. But if you remember the story about the Goianians, you may have already considered the possibility of being stoned whenever you pulled your Plutoniumobile out of the garage - not to mention having to deal with swarms of bureaucrats from every imaginable protective agency who would be on the spot to make sure no alpha ray is loosed on the public. With incentives like these for the buyer, entrepreneurs are not exactly standing in line to enter this market.
Want to get 5,420,000 miles to the pound? Me too. Sorry to say that's never going to happen, because the long-standing and difficult problem of squeezing actual energy from potential energy is fraught with some inconvenient impossibilities. But if we are to approach the theoretical limits of physical science, it will take an understanding of the real dangers of radiation, and getting the government out of the policing business. Plus, no doubt, many billions of dollars in research and development costs; but that's what capitalists do: invest their money to make profits from producing things that cause our lives to be more satisfying.
Oh, and not to worry. Manufacturers of nuclear-powered vehicles are not going to fry their customers with gamma rays any more than Campbell's would put botulin toxin in the soup.
It's not good for business.
Only a few years later we learned the horrors of exposure to radiation. I can remember reading - even before age thirteen - not only the heart-rending stories of A-bomb victims, but also about the unfortunate Japanese fishermen who were accidentally exposed to H-bomb test fall-out. I thought they all had died. (Although billed by the press as "Lethally Exposed," except for the one who died from acute radiation sickness, none of the other twenty-two was a cancer fatality as of twenty-five yars after exposure.) [Kumatori, T. Ishihara, T., Hirshima, K., Sugiyama, H., Ishii, S., and Miyoshi, K. Follow-up studies over a twenty-five-year period on the Japanese fishermen exposed to radioactive fallout in 1954. The Medical Basis for Radiation Preparedness, Hubner, K.F., and Fry, A.A., editors, Elsevier, New York, 1980.]
It wasn't long after this that the "atomic power" articles, and much of the interest in nuclear technology, dried up. The Linear No-Threshold hypothesis was soon to send all of those ideas into the black hole of radiation avoidance - which later became radiation hysteria. Did we miss the "nuclear vehicle" boat because of our fears and the rules imposed on the nuclear industry? "What might have been" is truly an impossible question to answer. Thousands of independently acting entrepreneurs would have answered it for us, had they been given the chance.
Neither the pressurized water reactor (PWR) nor the boiling water reactor (BWR) - the mainstays of the U.S. nuclear power industry - are adaptable to smaller scale, mobile applications. A variation of the CANDU reactor principle would come closer by using low-boiling-point compounds such as CFCs to spin a turbine, but even that is a stretch for anything smaller than a large bus. (Not to say that it couldn't be done if technology is given a chance.)
But why worry about atomic-powered anythings? What we're currently using is working out pretty well, isn't it? True, but let's look for a moment at how we fuel our vehicles. And though I don't think we are in danger of "running out of oil" any time soon, it is logical to assume that the energy cost of obtaining oil will increase as the oil-bearing strata become more and more difficult to access.
If we take your politically incorrect sports utility vehicle out on the open road with one pound of gasoline in it, the heat energy content of the fuel will propel you about three miles. By comparison the heat energy in one pound of plutonium would take you some 5,420,000 miles down the road - using the same efficiency figure as the gasoline engine. [The efficiency would be lower using today's technology. But even at half or a quarter the already-low efficiencies of internal combustion engines, the incredible heat content of many radioactive isotopes makes for unbelievable comparisons to all fossil fuels.]
Since this is about thirty times more than the typical mechanical life of a vehicle, it is likely that any nuclear-powered vehicle would be fueled for life at the factory.
All well and good, you might say. But what about the lack of adaptability of power-plant technology to mobile vehicles? Good question. There are other nuclear technologies, besides trying to shrink a power plant, that would be interesting to explore. One of these is the radioisotope thermo-electric generator or RTG.
The RTG is based on a very simple physical principle known as thermoelectricity. ["Simple" in practice, as anyone can connect different types of wires together; the theory, known as the Seebeck effect, is a little more complicated.]
If you take two wires of different materials and connect their junctions in a loop, a current will flow when the temperature of the "hot junction" is greater than that of the "cold junction." In the RTG, a radioisotope supplies the heat, while a "heat sink" - such as you might find on the rear of a high-powered stereo amplifier - cools the cold junction. Any number of junctions can be connected in series (known as thermopile) to produce whatever voltage is desired, while connections are paralleled to increase the current flow. The inherent low voltage of the device can be increased with a dc-to-dc or dc-to-ac converter. [Transformers, used on alternating current circuits, do not work for direct current. A "dc-to-dc" converter chops the dc, making it appear to be ac, transforms it to a different voltage, and then rectifies it back to dc.]
An obvious advantage of the thermo-electric generator is its total lack of moving parts - since electrons don't count.
The Manhattan project scientists had inadvertently discovered this "warmness" of the plutonium 239 isotope. [Actually all radioactive isotopes generate heat as a byproduct of decay - but both the rate and the type of decay emissions are important. You really wouldn't want to cozy up with a strong gamma ray emitter.]
Project experimenters supposedly used the plutonium received from the Hanford reservation - gleaned and refined at an almost unbelievable price - as hand warmers. While alpha particles lose their energy too quickly to penetrate the skin, these atomic "shot-puts" collide with and agitate atoms with which they come in contact, hence the feeling of warmth.
As we might expect, the rate of decay of the isotope has much to do with an isotope's heat-producing potential. While bomb-grade plutonium 239 (with its 24,110-year half-life) is okay for hand warmers, another plutonium isotope (atomic weight 238, with a half-life of only 87.7 years) is the candidate of choice for our extraterrestrial deep-space probes. Plutonium 238 can really kick atoms around, to way beyond the boiling point of water. [Spacecraft power supplies operate at approximately 800 degrees Fahrenheit. RTG temperatures can exceed 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit.]
This is not new technology. All deep-space probes must have some sort of nuclear power supply, as none of the alternatives are able to supply usable amounts of power for the years it takes to complete these missions. Batteries are out of the question for even short missions, and solar panels don't work well, since the energy available drops off as the square of the distance from the sun. A ten-by-ten-foot collector for Earth-Moon operations, for instance, would swell to tennis court size for missions to Jupiter, and blossom to the equivalent of more than two football fields for exploration of Neptune. Moreover, Earth-based solar cells are not easy to mount efficiently, even with a solid terra firma foundation. How about trying to maneuver football-field sized collector banks - structures and deployment mechanisms - in a zero-gravity environment? [Fuel cells would be find, except that the weight of the fuel - and its containers - would't allow for much else on the voyage. We might want to note, thanks to the science eduation given by the mission and movie Apollo 13, most of us are now well aware that fuel cells must carry their own oxidizer - which, in the case of oxygen, was not readily available in interlunar space.]
While the RTG has been the only practical choice for deep-space missions, anti-nuclear propagandists have portrayed it as a hazard to the entire human race because of its use of plutonium fuel. The misguided protesters wring their hands over seventy-two pounds of plutonium that they contend might somehow be released into the atmosphere and over the effect that might have on humankind. However, they totally ignore the fact that two to three tons of various vaporized (and hence, breathable) plutonium isotopes were injected into the biosphere by the Nagasaki bomb and the hundreds of above-ground tests just after World War II; yet the last time I looked, the human race was still alive and kicking.
While spacecraft have shown the reliability and longevity of the RTG, why haven't there been applications in transportation utilizing this technology? [Another very successful use of the plutonium RTG was in pacemakers. From 1973 through 1987, 155 radioisotope-powered pacemakers were implanted in a Newark Beth Israel Medical Center study. With a half-life of eighty-seven years, the nuclear devices outlasted battery operated devices - which required surgery for re-implantation - by many years and were ultra-reliable. And although "it has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt that there is no increased risk of malignancy in this group of patients" few, if any, new nuclear devices are being installed. Why? It's our good friend, the Linear No-Threshold hypothesis. See "The Nuclear Pacemaker: Is Renewed Interest Warranted?" American Journal of Cardiology, Oct. 1990.]
It certainly doesn't require a rocket scientist to conceive of an RTG automobile that would have both a generator and auxiliary batteries available for acceleration and hills - yet would recharge itself, both while driving and while sitting all day in a parking lot. But if you remember the story about the Goianians, you may have already considered the possibility of being stoned whenever you pulled your Plutoniumobile out of the garage - not to mention having to deal with swarms of bureaucrats from every imaginable protective agency who would be on the spot to make sure no alpha ray is loosed on the public. With incentives like these for the buyer, entrepreneurs are not exactly standing in line to enter this market.
Want to get 5,420,000 miles to the pound? Me too. Sorry to say that's never going to happen, because the long-standing and difficult problem of squeezing actual energy from potential energy is fraught with some inconvenient impossibilities. But if we are to approach the theoretical limits of physical science, it will take an understanding of the real dangers of radiation, and getting the government out of the policing business. Plus, no doubt, many billions of dollars in research and development costs; but that's what capitalists do: invest their money to make profits from producing things that cause our lives to be more satisfying.
Oh, and not to worry. Manufacturers of nuclear-powered vehicles are not going to fry their customers with gamma rays any more than Campbell's would put botulin toxin in the soup.
It's not good for business.
Wednesday, January 6, 2016
Radiation: Fear Versus Reality
Some observers believe there will be a million people with direct and backup assignments to guard the nuclear industry by the year 2000. - Ralph Nader, 1975
Most people believe that radiation - the kind that comes from nuclear power plants - is not only dangerous, but cumulatively so. A little now, a bit more later - it all adds up with life-threatening consequences. We have been convinced over many years that all radiation has the ability to cause cancer, and the more we get of it, the more likely we are to develop the disease. There is also a prevalent idea that radiation causes mutations in humans because of its damage to our DNA. (This will also be shown to be false, even when the radiation levels are very high, as in the Japanese cities bombed at the end of World War II.)
So how did we come to "know" these things? Where did we get our fear of radiation? That's an interesting question.
It's not one of those innate fears like the fear of heights or growling animals. How could we be born with a fear of something we can't feel, smell, see or otherwise sense?
It's not something your parents taught you. Did your mother ever say, "Darling, be sure to look both ways when you cross the street, and watch out for gamma rays"?
I suggest that our fear of radiation comes from two sources. First is its invisibility and lack of any kind of "early warning" altering us to a dangerous presence. If gamma radiation were seen as purple flashing lights, we could see its presence and avoid it, much as many of us must do to prevent being sunburned. In this way radiation is similar to the plague and other scary germ-borne diseases: We tend to fear any kind of invisible killer - as well we should. Being rational beings, however, we don't stay inside under oxygen tents because the Ebola virus is active in Africa or because a Nile virus-bearing mosquito might be in the neighborhood. We make a "risk versus benefit" analysis in order to live a normal life, and we save our irrationality for radiation.
The second reason is an almost total lack of knowledge of radiation, how it is measured, and its effects at various levels. The common knowledge is that all radiation is dangerous, period. Most science textbooks don't add much, if anything, to this dearth of knowledge. Typically there will be a picture of a nuclear plant with a caption reading: "Concrete and steel walls four to five feet thick protect workers from deadly radiation." If we were to see a newspaper article stating that "Mrs. Jones is wearing a special protective suit to ward off the poison darts," we would rush to the next paragraph to find out what kind of darts? How many? How poisonous? Where are they coming from? But as regards nuclear "darts," we just nod our heads and think, "Well, all radiation is dangerous."
Most people believe that radiation - the kind that comes from nuclear power plants - is not only dangerous, but cumulatively so. A little now, a bit more later - it all adds up with life-threatening consequences. We have been convinced over many years that all radiation has the ability to cause cancer, and the more we get of it, the more likely we are to develop the disease. There is also a prevalent idea that radiation causes mutations in humans because of its damage to our DNA. (This will also be shown to be false, even when the radiation levels are very high, as in the Japanese cities bombed at the end of World War II.)
So how did we come to "know" these things? Where did we get our fear of radiation? That's an interesting question.
It's not one of those innate fears like the fear of heights or growling animals. How could we be born with a fear of something we can't feel, smell, see or otherwise sense?
It's not something your parents taught you. Did your mother ever say, "Darling, be sure to look both ways when you cross the street, and watch out for gamma rays"?
I suggest that our fear of radiation comes from two sources. First is its invisibility and lack of any kind of "early warning" altering us to a dangerous presence. If gamma radiation were seen as purple flashing lights, we could see its presence and avoid it, much as many of us must do to prevent being sunburned. In this way radiation is similar to the plague and other scary germ-borne diseases: We tend to fear any kind of invisible killer - as well we should. Being rational beings, however, we don't stay inside under oxygen tents because the Ebola virus is active in Africa or because a Nile virus-bearing mosquito might be in the neighborhood. We make a "risk versus benefit" analysis in order to live a normal life, and we save our irrationality for radiation.
The second reason is an almost total lack of knowledge of radiation, how it is measured, and its effects at various levels. The common knowledge is that all radiation is dangerous, period. Most science textbooks don't add much, if anything, to this dearth of knowledge. Typically there will be a picture of a nuclear plant with a caption reading: "Concrete and steel walls four to five feet thick protect workers from deadly radiation." If we were to see a newspaper article stating that "Mrs. Jones is wearing a special protective suit to ward off the poison darts," we would rush to the next paragraph to find out what kind of darts? How many? How poisonous? Where are they coming from? But as regards nuclear "darts," we just nod our heads and think, "Well, all radiation is dangerous."
Tuesday, January 5, 2016
Lois, Call Clark!
All of this makes one continue to wonder: where are the journalists and the investigative reporters? They may not have taken biology and physics in college, but are they unable to grasp the ramifications of changing the way radiation is viewed by major scientific organizations? Or do they think that their "environmentalist" buddies will get upset if they are involved in jerking a major plank out of the platform of those who want us to fear and distrust all technology? (What would the anti-nukes do if they couldn't scare Maude and Harry with stories of radioactive clouds and plutonium mega-deaths?)
Whatever the reason, a major discovery - that is inspiring a worldwide movement - has been totally ignored by the popular media. How important is the story? Myron Pollycove, M.D., Visiting Medical Fellow on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, calls hormesis "the issue of the decade." As you will see, the evidence is incontrovertible. It is no challenged. It is ignored for whatever reason: ignorance, ideology, or indolence.
We have touched on what the taxpayers might save if the government policymakers were to understand that low-level radiation is harmless; but there are positive effects that those who have studied hormesis believe are even more compelling.
The potential benefits to health and vitality are phenomenal. As we shall see, a random dosage of radiation reduced cancer mortality by forty percent in 15,000 nuclear workers, compared with their fellow workers who were not exposed. While cancer is the disease commonly associated with radiation - and consequently there are more data in this area of study - there was also a reduction of 26% in deaths from all causes in 28,542 exposed nuclear shipyard workers when weighed against co-workers with only normal background exposures. The latter investigation, which we will look at in some detail in chapter 19, indicates that there is a beneficial effect to the entire immune system, which, if properly understood and maximized, could lead to the reduction of infectious diseases and possibly prevention of immune-system dysfunctions.
Since the 1950s, uses of nuclear technology outside of medicine and industrial instrumentation have been stifled because of the fear of radiation. (Smoke detectors are about the only consumer good that have escaped demonization by anti-nuclear activists because, in my opinion, they realized they could get annihilated by risk statistics on this one.) [I recently found that Ralph Nader proved me wrong on this. He actually came out against smoke detectors because of the tiny speck of americium that has saved thousands of "real lives."]
What about community or even residential power plants taking advantage of the technology advances that have occurred over the past forty years? What about nuclear vehicles that would be fueled at the factory for twenty years?
The science for many nuclear miracles is either already available or within reach of technological development. But the pervasive fear of low levels of radiation keeps these advances from being used for the benefit of humanity.
For more than thirty years, the "energy crisis" has been a convenient excuse for those who want more government control over energy resources, but the "crisis" is phony as a three-dollar bill. There is, and has been, readily available energy which is denied us solely because of the manufactured fear of low-level radiation.
This resource is not the promise of fusion, which seems to get further away every year, but the available-with-today's-technology breeder reactors that turn "wastes" into incredibly valuable fuel. Where, pray tell, do the advocates of environmentally pristine electric-powered vehicles think they are going to get the electricity to run those cute little things? A recent newspaper article warns that it would take at least a dozen full-scale (1,000 megawatt) power plants to replace the energy from gasoline and diesel engines in the transportation industry for the city of Los Angeles alone.
Available fuel from power plant "wastes" (which still have more than 95% of their original energy in a readily available form) and thousands of tons of "depleted" uranium currently choking our enrichment facilities could power the United States for many decades using available breeder reactor technology. Other uranium resources could fuel our country for centuries. But, as Edward Teller points out, the "breeding" of thorium - a source as common as dirt (actually it is dirt) - into a usable fuel (Uranium 233) could easily provide energy for 100,000 years.
[Each square mile of the earth's surface averages 2.5 tons of thorium in the first food of depth.]
* * *
Radiation hormesis - just as in the case of nuclear power - will be opposed by radical "environmentalist" leaders who oppose all technological progress and the transfer of its benefits to the multitudes, whom they consider to be unwelcome intrusions on the "Green" concept of nature. But both hormesis therapy and nuclear energy will ultimately become commonplace in our world, because they are based on scientific truths that the doomsayers and propagandists can mask only for so long. The question is: "How much unnecessary human misery will occur before truth and reason prevail?"
So let's take a look at how we developed this fear of radiation.
Whatever the reason, a major discovery - that is inspiring a worldwide movement - has been totally ignored by the popular media. How important is the story? Myron Pollycove, M.D., Visiting Medical Fellow on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, calls hormesis "the issue of the decade." As you will see, the evidence is incontrovertible. It is no challenged. It is ignored for whatever reason: ignorance, ideology, or indolence.
We have touched on what the taxpayers might save if the government policymakers were to understand that low-level radiation is harmless; but there are positive effects that those who have studied hormesis believe are even more compelling.
The potential benefits to health and vitality are phenomenal. As we shall see, a random dosage of radiation reduced cancer mortality by forty percent in 15,000 nuclear workers, compared with their fellow workers who were not exposed. While cancer is the disease commonly associated with radiation - and consequently there are more data in this area of study - there was also a reduction of 26% in deaths from all causes in 28,542 exposed nuclear shipyard workers when weighed against co-workers with only normal background exposures. The latter investigation, which we will look at in some detail in chapter 19, indicates that there is a beneficial effect to the entire immune system, which, if properly understood and maximized, could lead to the reduction of infectious diseases and possibly prevention of immune-system dysfunctions.
Since the 1950s, uses of nuclear technology outside of medicine and industrial instrumentation have been stifled because of the fear of radiation. (Smoke detectors are about the only consumer good that have escaped demonization by anti-nuclear activists because, in my opinion, they realized they could get annihilated by risk statistics on this one.) [I recently found that Ralph Nader proved me wrong on this. He actually came out against smoke detectors because of the tiny speck of americium that has saved thousands of "real lives."]
What about community or even residential power plants taking advantage of the technology advances that have occurred over the past forty years? What about nuclear vehicles that would be fueled at the factory for twenty years?
The science for many nuclear miracles is either already available or within reach of technological development. But the pervasive fear of low levels of radiation keeps these advances from being used for the benefit of humanity.
For more than thirty years, the "energy crisis" has been a convenient excuse for those who want more government control over energy resources, but the "crisis" is phony as a three-dollar bill. There is, and has been, readily available energy which is denied us solely because of the manufactured fear of low-level radiation.
This resource is not the promise of fusion, which seems to get further away every year, but the available-with-today's-technology breeder reactors that turn "wastes" into incredibly valuable fuel. Where, pray tell, do the advocates of environmentally pristine electric-powered vehicles think they are going to get the electricity to run those cute little things? A recent newspaper article warns that it would take at least a dozen full-scale (1,000 megawatt) power plants to replace the energy from gasoline and diesel engines in the transportation industry for the city of Los Angeles alone.
Available fuel from power plant "wastes" (which still have more than 95% of their original energy in a readily available form) and thousands of tons of "depleted" uranium currently choking our enrichment facilities could power the United States for many decades using available breeder reactor technology. Other uranium resources could fuel our country for centuries. But, as Edward Teller points out, the "breeding" of thorium - a source as common as dirt (actually it is dirt) - into a usable fuel (Uranium 233) could easily provide energy for 100,000 years.
[Each square mile of the earth's surface averages 2.5 tons of thorium in the first food of depth.]
* * *
Radiation hormesis - just as in the case of nuclear power - will be opposed by radical "environmentalist" leaders who oppose all technological progress and the transfer of its benefits to the multitudes, whom they consider to be unwelcome intrusions on the "Green" concept of nature. But both hormesis therapy and nuclear energy will ultimately become commonplace in our world, because they are based on scientific truths that the doomsayers and propagandists can mask only for so long. The question is: "How much unnecessary human misery will occur before truth and reason prevail?"
So let's take a look at how we developed this fear of radiation.
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