Touché! Yes, restricted societies, ones without controls over political decisions, like Chernobyl, (we call them checks and balances) can lead to faulty theory and inadequate controls over design and construction. Contrast Chernobyl with Fukushima, though, and how many fatalities followed the tremendous earthquake and tidal wave! Do you count the two (three?) Japanese plant failures among the 99? With TMI and Chernobyl, I can't recount 95 or 94 other nuclear power plant failures. ("Incident" is another term. I had one incident, when I started up a reactor too fast and got an automatic insertion which shut the reactor down. No damage, and after careful examination of system status we completed the startup. It was an incident, but definitely a successful interlock, not at all a "plant failure".
I have worked in a nuclear power plant, as a professional Electrical Engineer and HV Project Manager, it was one of the most interesting and safe points of my career - Whether the climate goons like it or not, nuclear power is the future, for now fission, at some future point, fusion
Thanks, Al, for posting this article. I worked in a propulsion plant in the biggest nuclear poser complex in the world (possibly in history) with eight nuclear reactors that operated singly or in combination with others. The USS Enterprise has now been decommissioned for maybe ten or twelve years, and maybe someone can bring an update on the status of dismantling and disassembling the nuclear components. Enterprise was commissioned in 1958 or 1959. A big portion of my time aboard was during an overhaul. Details may still be classified, but I don't think pointing out that within a few days of shutting down the reactors, the frequency of cooling down decay heat increased, and we maintained systems essentially open to the atmosphere. (I'm uncomfortable giving more details, but, believe me, it was safe.) In 2023 I got a PET scan (good news--my cancer had not metasticized, and I'm doing fine six months after radiation treatment backed up with Fenbendazole--and based on my Geiger counter readings, I got significantly more radiation, and of higher-energy particles, within an hour of the PET injection than I did during my entire three-plus years working daily in the nuclear propulsion plant.
because of the long life span of radioactive disintegration the amount released is important. these elements are persistent in the environment and accumulate in the food chain.
For much of the first 100 years, the radioactivity from spent fuel is dominated by two fission products — Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 .
you are wrong about the effects of ionizing radiation on biological systems, and your treatment of the waste issue is sadly a misdirection. also you didn't consider the facts about the environmental impact of uranium fuel fabrication, and the fact that long lived radioactive isotopes accumulate in the food chain for generations. ingested radioactive material causes cell damage to the organs they invade.
Onecloud, I don't think your criticism is quite fair. If you would become familiar with the stringent controls on nuclear waste disposal, and by this I mean within the deep mines in geologically stable Arizona and Colorado, your stress levels would I'm sure be assuaged. As the article mentions, the greater volume of radioactive waste, like the steel in pipes and construction materials, has relatively short half-lives. As I recall, iron has a half-life of 2 years, so after 14 years would have no detectable radiation. A good friend of mine put much of his career into storing the longer-lived isotopes in Arizona. People in the nuclear industries are serious about safety, and that includes responsibly keeping waste from harming people and the rest of the environment.
aside from the storage of waste, the health effects from 60+ years of environmental contamination from the use of uranium fuel is not addressed by the industry.
Sorry, but I don't see your point. Mining removes uranium from the environment, and spent uranium fuel is stored isolated in sealed deep-underground mines. Help me understand what you mean by environmental contamination.
there have been at least 99 (civilian and military) recorded nuclear power plant failures from 1952 to 2009.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone has expanded in subsequent years. When the Ukranian exclusion zone is added together with the neighbouring Belarusian exclusion zone, the combined area makes up an approximate 1,550 square miles (4,000 square kilometers)
plutonium-239, according to experts, has spread over a hundred-kilometer zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Its half-life is 24,000 years.
"there have been at least 99 (civilian and military) recorded nuclear power plant failures from 1952 to 2009." I wonder if some of these "failures" were just routine shutdowns for scheduled maintenance. What is your source, so we can check it out.
Touché! Yes, restricted societies, ones without controls over political decisions, like Chernobyl, (we call them checks and balances) can lead to faulty theory and inadequate controls over design and construction. Contrast Chernobyl with Fukushima, though, and how many fatalities followed the tremendous earthquake and tidal wave! Do you count the two (three?) Japanese plant failures among the 99? With TMI and Chernobyl, I can't recount 95 or 94 other nuclear power plant failures. ("Incident" is another term. I had one incident, when I started up a reactor too fast and got an automatic insertion which shut the reactor down. No damage, and after careful examination of system status we completed the startup. It was an incident, but definitely a successful interlock, not at all a "plant failure".
I have worked in a nuclear power plant, as a professional Electrical Engineer and HV Project Manager, it was one of the most interesting and safe points of my career - Whether the climate goons like it or not, nuclear power is the future, for now fission, at some future point, fusion
Thanks, Al, for posting this article. I worked in a propulsion plant in the biggest nuclear poser complex in the world (possibly in history) with eight nuclear reactors that operated singly or in combination with others. The USS Enterprise has now been decommissioned for maybe ten or twelve years, and maybe someone can bring an update on the status of dismantling and disassembling the nuclear components. Enterprise was commissioned in 1958 or 1959. A big portion of my time aboard was during an overhaul. Details may still be classified, but I don't think pointing out that within a few days of shutting down the reactors, the frequency of cooling down decay heat increased, and we maintained systems essentially open to the atmosphere. (I'm uncomfortable giving more details, but, believe me, it was safe.) In 2023 I got a PET scan (good news--my cancer had not metasticized, and I'm doing fine six months after radiation treatment backed up with Fenbendazole--and based on my Geiger counter readings, I got significantly more radiation, and of higher-energy particles, within an hour of the PET injection than I did during my entire three-plus years working daily in the nuclear propulsion plant.
because of the long life span of radioactive disintegration the amount released is important. these elements are persistent in the environment and accumulate in the food chain.
For much of the first 100 years, the radioactivity from spent fuel is dominated by two fission products — Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 .
you are wrong about the effects of ionizing radiation on biological systems, and your treatment of the waste issue is sadly a misdirection. also you didn't consider the facts about the environmental impact of uranium fuel fabrication, and the fact that long lived radioactive isotopes accumulate in the food chain for generations. ingested radioactive material causes cell damage to the organs they invade.
https://open.substack.com/pub/martysmith/p/the-waste-of-time?r=z1g4l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
"If DNA gets damaged, it can be repaired by various mechanisms, including chemical reversal, excision repair, and double-stranded break repair."
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/dna-as-the-genetic-material/dna-replication/a/dna-proofreading-and-repair
still . . .
Onecloud, I don't think your criticism is quite fair. If you would become familiar with the stringent controls on nuclear waste disposal, and by this I mean within the deep mines in geologically stable Arizona and Colorado, your stress levels would I'm sure be assuaged. As the article mentions, the greater volume of radioactive waste, like the steel in pipes and construction materials, has relatively short half-lives. As I recall, iron has a half-life of 2 years, so after 14 years would have no detectable radiation. A good friend of mine put much of his career into storing the longer-lived isotopes in Arizona. People in the nuclear industries are serious about safety, and that includes responsibly keeping waste from harming people and the rest of the environment.
aside from the storage of waste, the health effects from 60+ years of environmental contamination from the use of uranium fuel is not addressed by the industry.
Sorry, but I don't see your point. Mining removes uranium from the environment, and spent uranium fuel is stored isolated in sealed deep-underground mines. Help me understand what you mean by environmental contamination.
there have been at least 99 (civilian and military) recorded nuclear power plant failures from 1952 to 2009.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone has expanded in subsequent years. When the Ukranian exclusion zone is added together with the neighbouring Belarusian exclusion zone, the combined area makes up an approximate 1,550 square miles (4,000 square kilometers)
plutonium-239, according to experts, has spread over a hundred-kilometer zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Its half-life is 24,000 years.
"there have been at least 99 (civilian and military) recorded nuclear power plant failures from 1952 to 2009." I wonder if some of these "failures" were just routine shutdowns for scheduled maintenance. What is your source, so we can check it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country
See "how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife"
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife