Review of Radiation by Robert Gale and Eric Lax - and why we should probably build more nuclear power plants.

Since the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima radiation has achieved an even worse reputation than it had previously. To what extent is this reputation deserved? Speaking more broadly, how great a risk does radition pose to us, and in what ways does it help us?

Robert Gale and Eric Lac, the authors of Radition, starts by stating a few facts that everyone should know but which many people probably do not know. First, radiation is present everywhere. It is in the ground, in the air, in the food that we eat, and in ourselves. There is no way you can avoid radiation (this holds true for non-ionizing as well as ionizing radiation). Second, raditation can kill you. Depending on the type of radiation and the dose received radiation may cause a cell to turn into a cancer cell if mutations occur to an “unlucky” set of genes. If a higher dose is received radiation can kill cells and induce radiation sickness. The powers of radioactive material can also be used to cause substantial explosions as with the atom and hydrogen bombs. What I suspect many people don’t know is that radiation can also save you. Radiation therapy have saved millions of people, and emergency exit signs which shine even when there is no electricity have save many more people still. CT scans allows us to detect cancers and other things inside the human body which helps doctors enormously.

Radiation is generally categorized as either ionizing or non-ionizing. Ionizing radiation have enough energy to rip away charged particles or molecules. If that molecule happens to be in the DNA in one of our cells, that cell may become a cancer cell. Non-ionizing radiation, such as microwaves form cell phones, or the visual part of the spectrum that we can actually detect with our eyes, cannot cause this type of damage to cells. Ultraviolet is right on the border between these two, with some ultraviolet rays containing enough energy to rip apart molecules which is why you can get skin cancer from overexposure to the sun. This also means that there is no plausible scientific theory explaning how microwave radiation, which has less energy than ultraviolet rays, from cell phones cause cancer. Togehter with the fact that brain cancer has not increased since cell phones came into use is why I have no problem with letting my children use cell phones. The authors however, focus mostly on ionizing radiation

Gale and Lax starts with the basics, desrcibing what alpha, beta, and gamma radiaiton is and then going into depth about the amount of radation that an average person receives and the interesting discussion on whether exposure to small amount of radiaiton is bad, neutral or even good for you (hormesis). Regarding exposure the authors note that people are quite inconsistent in their fears. For instance, taking a CT scan which many people even demand will give you the same does of radiation as being 6km from ground zero in Hiroshima. Also people tend to be skeptical about being scanned with x-rays on airports, forgetting that they will receive much more radiation during the upcoming flight...

But what do the authors say about the hot topic of nuclear energy. In short they say, while there are of course safety issues, it is better than coal generated power in pretty much every aspect. Renewable sources (sun, wind, water) also have problems associated with them, mainly that they are expensive and that they cannot provide a steady stream of electricity without which our economy cannot function.

What about nuclear accidents though? Lets start with the most recent accident, Fukushima. It is certainly interesting to note that, though some people did receive a large dosis of radiation not a single person have died from radiation expsure till this day. According to wikipedia, the predicted number of Fukushima related cancers range from 0-100, many of which will be possible to treat. The tsunami on the other hand killed approximately 20.000 people. The media coverage often suggets that the Fukushima accident was the big news. This simply reaffirms that people (and the media) have substantial biases in their fears. It is of course more or less impossible to tell people to stop being afraid of shark attacks or flying or anything that has radiation in its name, but lets not base public policy on irrational fears...

Wait you say, what about the Thernobyl accident? Well partly because that reactor exploded (due to a clear design flaw), 10 times more radioactivity was released compared to Fukushima. However, this should also be copared with atmospheric atom bomb tests which releases 200 times more radioactivity than the Thernobyl accident did. These are now banned, however, prior nuclear tests have caused high levels of radioactivity in the environment on a global level.

Estimates of the number of casualties following Thernobyl vary widely and largely depends on whether one thinks that exposure to low doses of radiation increases cancer risks, which is a controversial topic. We are also dealing with a very high basal rate of cancers. Since 38% percent of all women and 45% of all men will be diagnosed with cancer sometime in their life, even say a 0.5 percent increase mean thousands, or millions of people... Bottom line, Thernobyl was a bad accident, and similar mistakes should of course be avoided in the future, however, should we abandon a cheap energy source that almost zero pollution because of one poorly designed reactor and one reactor which was only almost able to survive a major natural disaster?

No one who disputes that nuclear power is associated with some risks. However, what are the alternatives? It is striking how many people simply ignores this question. I often hear environmentalist say that they want the entire society to be based on renewable energy. I fully share that ambition, however it is currently not a feasible alternative which means that we have to chose between nuclear energy and burning of fossil fuels to get sufficient energy. If we don't use nuclear then we have to generate or buy fossil fuels. Yet no one talks about what type of pollutants are released from fossil fuel burning power plants. The authors convincingly show that pollutants from coal burning power plants induce much more harm than waste from nuclear power plants. In one year one coal burning power plant releases 720 tons of carbon monoxide, a toxic gas, 50kg of lead which is poisonous to us as well as to the fish in the lakes where a lot of smoke lands, 80kg of mercury, 10.000 tons of sulfur dioxide which results in acid rain, and 3.7 million tons of CO2. This waste is released directly out into the environment, not burried in a mountain like nuclear fuel. In addition, coal plant workers as well as coal miners develop lethal lung cancer much more often than other people.

 

To sum up the argument for building more nuclear power plants; Yes, there are risks associated with nuclear power but taking into account energy costs and the waste produced nuclear power is currently the best feasible alternative available.

The authors also discusses another controversial issue, namely whether or not we should radiate food to kill of pathogens. In a single year there are 2 billion cases of food poisoning in the world, mainly in the developing world. This number could be drastically reduced by radiating the food which would kill of the bacteria. Yes, some nutrients would be lost but food lose more nutrients when you cook it and that is not controversial. The bottom line is that radiating food can save many lives, particularly in the developing world and there seem top be no rational argument against doing this, if there is I hope that someone will enlighten me.

All in all, radiation is a great and accessible introduction to the field of radiation, a field associated with a substantial lack of knowledge and as a result many irrational fears among the public.

Irrational fear 2: Nuclear power

Last time I wrote about pesticides and how we are worried to death about 0.01% of the pesticides that we ingest (the synthetic ones) instead of the 99% which seem to be as bad if not worse. Another area which I think is often associated with irrational fear is nuclear power. The word "nuclear" seems to elicit a knee-jerk kind of reaction in many people. Take for instance Nuclear Magnetic Resonance imaging (NMR for short), a very powerful and quite safe diagnostic method. People were very reluctant to use this method, seemingly only because it had "Nuclear" in the name. In part because of this fear they have now changed the name to Magnetic Resonace Imaging (MRI for short), and the technology has been a major boost to diagnostics as well as to research.

The following arguments are to a large extent a reflection on Richard Muller's (see picture below) paper with the title "The witch of Yucca Mountain". I can warmly recommend the article but if you want the same information in video format you can go here and forward to 47min and listen to the rest of the lecture (it is very entertaining).

It is no secret that we are facing an energy crisis. I am personally not convinced that CO2 emissions is an important contributing factor when it comes to Global warming, however, the fact of the matter is that our fossil fuels will eventually be used up and when there is none left we will need a different source of energy. Fission of uranium and plutonium is not an endless source of energy, however, it would provide us with energy for quite a while. Yet many countries do not want to build these Nuclear power plants, largely because of what I think is irrational fear…

Before I encountered Muller I associated nuclear power plant accidents with Chernobyl (see picture). However, Chernobyl was not a typical nuclear power plant. Its design was the worst imaginable and as Muller explains in his lecture such a design is completely prohibited today. The worst case scenario for a modern nuclear power plant is the nuclear meltdown. For a meltdown to occur, it is required that 4 different independent security systems which are inspected regularly, break down simultaneously which is not at all likely. If however, the highly unlikely worst case scenario would occur, and the radioactive material would penetrate meters of steel and concrete and go into the ground and the gases escape we would still not have anywhere near the same levels of radioactivity that were present after Chernobyl because the radioactivity leaks out into the ground instead of being blown up into the sky. I can understand that people want Nuclear Powerplants to be safe, however, there seems to be some sort of obsession here. People seem not to worry about other types of dangers. What if a chemical plant blew up? What is the worst case scenario there? Or what about the laboratories where they deal with the Ebola virus, what would happen if all their security systems broke down?

There is also a major concern about nuclear waste. The plutonium waste coming from a nuclear power plant has a half life of about 24.000 years meaning that after 96.000 years 1/16 of the radioactive waste will still remain. The question which does not yet have an answer is, where are we going to store this waste? In United States, Yucca Mountain, a place with very few earthquakes, was chosen as an ideal storage site. If the unthinkable would happen at Yucca Mountain, and all the radioactive waste would leak out, it would still be in small non-water soluble glass-pellets, so it would not mix with the ground water. Furthermore, even if Yucca Mountain was filled to its capacity limit and all the radioactive waste leaked out into the ground water and then out of the pellets in which it is cotained (this scenario has already passed into science fiction), the water would still not reach even a fraction of the radioactivity levels present in the Los Angeles drinking water! The drinking water that the citizens of Los Angeles are drinking is from the Colorado river which flows through many valleys with Granite. Granite contains some fraction of percentage of uranium which is slowly dissolved in the drinking water, thus making it radioactive. Because there is no agreement on where to store the waste today, today the radioactive material is simply sitting in a building next to the nuclear plant, not an ideal storage site.

To sum up, instead of storing the nuclear waste in the safest imaginable location where it has virtually no chance of leaking out, and even if it would leak out it would not be a major disaster, it is stored in buildings next to the power plants, which is a much less safe location, all because of the irrational fear among the public.