Comments on: The legacy of Fukushima Brain candy for Happy Mutants Sat, 09 May 2015 11:23:14 +0000 hourly 1 By: Jeremiah Blatz Thu, 07 Mar 2013 06:21:00 +0000 The article you linked had estimates that were all over the place. It looks like it ranges from 6.7 to 80 cents per kWh, with most coming in under 10 cents. Note that this includes the cost of storing nuclear waste, so assuming we can figure out what to do with in in the next 50 years or so, that cost likely is the total cost, including externalities., which I in no way vouch for, puts the total cost of coal at nearly 30 cents per kWh. So, still cheaper overall than coal.

(Include rant here about thorium reactors, which apparently produce nuclear waste that’s only dangerously radioactive for 200 years.) 

I would love to have 100% renewable power. But more important to me is that we get the Earth carbon negative as soon as possible. Wind is looking like the real winner. It’s easy and preposterously cheap. But here’s the problem: current world wind power generation is 282 gW. The most aggressive estimates put 2020 production around 2 tW.* In 2009, the world consumed over 20 tW of electricity.** The total non-renewable human energy consumption in 2008 was 125 tW!***

Now, I think a reasonable goal would be to cut non-renewable energy consumption by 20% by 2023, and into increase wind capacity to, say, 8 tW. Most people would consider that practically impossible and insanely optimistic. It still leaves a power deficit of 92 tW! Something is going to have to fill that gap. Other renewables can contribute a lot, but some (like biofuel) are pretty much tapped out with our current technologies.

So speaking of current technologies, here’re my issues with new technologies:
1) They might not pan out. Grapheme is a toy. It’s currently produced by hand using scotch tape in quantities of square centimeters. We don’t have time to develop grid-scale grapheme ultracapacitor storage, or even vehicular-scale. There is a *lot* of money going into energy storage, but energy storage is hard. Currently, the only proven grid-scale energy storage mechanism we have is pumping water uphill. Algae-based biodiesel is promising, in that we can do it. But not promising, in that apparently we’d all starve to death if we tried to replace just transportation fuel use with biodiesel****. We need short-term solutions that we know can work.
2) It takes time to put things into production. Note the example above about the growth of wind power. It’s growing 30% year-on-year, which is incredible and awesome, and is nothing like enough. Over the next 30-50 years, we need a massive change in the way we generate and use power. We cannot wait to get over the “development hump” with new technologies. I’m sure that unless there’s a massive population crash, almost all of our power generation will be renewable in 70 years. That’s a historically unprecedented change, but we really don’t have a lot of choice. The problem is not what we do in 70 years, though, the problem is what we do starting now. I feel like we need to use every asset we have to get to carbon neutral (and negative), and shutting down nuke plants is in no way helping.


By: Cowicide Tue, 05 Mar 2013 19:24:00 +0000 You make some very good points, but I don’t think you’re accounting for the massive expense of nuclear power plants. We need to take that money and put it into a federal “Manhattan Project” dedicated to research and implementation of far more sustainable energy like wind, solar, storage of said energy, etc.

If we put a fraction of the money we spend on nuclear into things like graphene ultracapacitor R&D, we would make breakthroughs that put nuclear and fossil fuel practicality to shame.

The truth is, the only reason we don’t do this is because the fossil fuel industry is trying to milk their current infrastructure down to the last, proverbial drop. Global climate change isn’t going to wait for corporatist greed to subside; We need to act now and nuclear isn’t the affordable, sustainable answer.

By: Jeremiah Blatz Tue, 05 Mar 2013 04:15:00 +0000 Renewables are better than nukes. Fact. No debate. (I suggested as much above, but let me be clear.)

But, there are legitimate concerns about quickly switching to renewables wholesale, even for electricity generation. Don’t get me wrong, it can and should be done. But we have to significantly redo our electric transmission systems and deal with energy storage (which might involve resettling people who love downstream from hydro plants). 

To get over the hump, nukes are astoundingly better than coal (even with measures like “direct deaths per gigawatt-hour”), and what with climate change, better than natural gas.

Also, they’re really good at making hydrogen, which *may* prove useful in getting rid of fossil fuels for transportation. (To efficiently make hydrogen, you currently need a lot of electricity and really high temperatures. Hopefully in the future you can just make biodiesel from algae and be done with it.)

By: igor alcyon Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:37:00 +0000 Oh, and finally, the emergency workers who were not nuclear workers, like the fire fighters we could see trying to cool the whole mess with their hoses, are not included in the WHO report, ” because the information about their radiation doses was not available to the HRA Expert Group within the timeframe of its work”. But nothing to worry about I guess, it’s not like these people could have been seriously exposed. It’s not like they should have been included in a study of the effects of radiation exposure on emergency workers. It’s not like 2 years should be enough to get one’s hands on the information.

By: igor alcyon Mon, 04 Mar 2013 23:55:00 +0000 Yes, thyroid cancer doesn’t necessarily mean death. That was not exactly my point.
I meant that if nuclear workers have to consider substantively higher risk, and resulting significant absolute risks of thyroid cancer as “good news”, it means they are to expect horrendously bad news for a poorly paid job.

By the way, I just found this article about the WHO, its stance on the health risks of radiation exposure, and its links to the AIEA  :   Toxic link: the WHO and the IAEA 

By: Gerald Turnquist Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:30:00 +0000 Be careful not to confuse thyroid cancer with a death sentence. In fact the survival rate is near 100% if detected at stage I or II. I’m not trying to trivialize it because it can mean surgery (or even more radiation as a treatment to destroy the thyroid!) plus taking hormone replacement pills for life. So probably everyone that was in the area, especially children, should be checked every couple years. I’m guessing that is the type of cancer most likely caused by this type of accident since it is most often quoted and the accident released iodine 131 which collects in the thyroid can cause it. If you can stand another ‘glass half full’ fact, the half-life of iodine 131 is 8 days so probably no risk from that particular isotope if you wandered through there now.

By: wysinwyg Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:19:00 +0000 1. NH is relatively close to large metro areas including NYC (and upwind for most parts of the year).
2. We already have a nuke plant at Seabrook.  It is the reason electricity is probably more than twice as expensive in NH as in MA.  There were big protests against the plant and I’m not sure of the details but essentially it’s only been running on one reactor for years, hence the high prices.  Also it was designed to be able to withstand a fighter jet flying directly into one of the reactors which I imagine increased the cost a bit (the reasoning was that there is an air force base relatively close by).

By: wysinwyg Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:15:00 +0000 Should also mention the rebound effect if we’re talking about conservation, though.  We’d need a new economic system to start at conservation and go from there.  Not that I’m opposed to a new economic system, I just don’t think it’s very realistic considering the capitalist boosterism going on nowadays.

By: wysinwyg Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:08:00 +0000 @boingboing-180b3799ac728142c32020da35c7a5af:disqus Are you honestly citing the Soviet Union’s casualty statistics on Chernobyl?

It always cracks me up when people who would otherwise be talking about how the Soviets were a bunch of evil propagandizing liars completely trust the Soviet Union’s account of Chernobyl.


Sure, but when the meltdown occurred, everybody assumed that a lot of people would die rapidly from radiation poisoning.

Citations please?

By: wysinwyg Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:03:00 +0000  This is literally an argument I’ve heard from nuclear advocates (well, paraphrased): “Very dangerous radioactive waste isn’t radioactive for very long and the waste that is radioactive for very long isn’t very dangerous so nuclear waste just isn’t a problem at all.”

If you see the problem with that argument then you can understand why radioactive waste from nuclear is far worse a threat than the diffuse radioactivity released by burning coal.  Antinous’ comment about waste leaking into the water supply is a pretty good hint.

By: igor alcyon Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:38:00 +0000 You are right that if the baseline risk is 1%, then the risk is 1.2 % after a 20% increase. Of course.

I don’t think  it is particularly honest of you (and Walsh) to build one’s argument on a strawman, then go from here claiming that “hey the actual risk is way lower than what you thought” (not). I never thought a 20% increase of risk over baseline risk would mean people would have 20% chance of getting a cancer.

Besides, the lifetime baseline risk at age 20 for thyroid cancer in Japan is 0.2 % , not 0.02%. (see page 65 of the report).  Then for the youngest of the scenario 2 workers (not the most severely exposed, one should notice) the risk would be now 0.24 %.
I personnaly wouldn’t consider this “mostly good news” if I were the one exposed.

Further, what should one consider either a high increase of risk or a high risk for thyroid cancer ?   Is 1000% over baseline risk a high or low increase ? Is a probability of 2.2% of getting thyroid cancer in lifetime afer exposure high or low ?

Then, more importantly, how can the journalist simply ignore the fate of the most severely exposed workers (scenario 3 and 4) ? Most severely exposed, but not “brave” enough to be mentionned ?

If I am correct, for scenario 4 (12 workers according to TEPCO), the increase of lifetime risk for thyroid cancer is about 1650 % for people 20 years old ((LBR – LAR) / LBR) (see p. 65). They now have 3.5% chance of getting thyroid cancer in their life, instead of 0.2%. How good a news is that for them? They should have expected a 50% chance of dying for 12,000 yen a day ?

By: Coal Miki-Restall Mon, 04 Mar 2013 06:24:00 +0000 An increase of 20% over background is miniscule. If your chances of getting thyroid cancer in any given year were 1%, then the chances after a 20% increase would be 1.2% (not 21%, as I suspect you’re calculating it).

The actual chances are closer to 0.02% (and probably lower) which after a 20% increase is a whopping 0.024%.

By: Coal Miki-Restall Mon, 04 Mar 2013 06:16:00 +0000  What was also glossed over in most of the reports on this is that they reduced size of the cysts and nodes they were measuring for *in order to* increase the number of kids involved in longer term measurement. It was in essence a control sample.

By: igor alcyon Sun, 03 Mar 2013 22:35:00 +0000 The good news is that many japanese people have higher risks of suffering from cancers because of this catastrophy, but the increase isn’t as large as I might have feared ? How large were the increase that I might have feared  exactly ?

Also, Bryan Walsh wrote :

“The report also looked at the brave emergency workers at the Fukushima plant, who likely received higher radiation doses during the meltdown than anyone else in Japan. The news there, too, is mostly good: perhaps one-third of the workers face a higher lifetime risk of cancer, but that risk still remains low.”

But this is what the report really says  (p. 93 of the WHO report) :

“For about one third of the workers (Scenario 2), the relative increase over background for thyroid cancer is estimated to be up to 20% for the youngest workers. For less than 1% of workers (Scenario 3), the relative increase over background for leukaemia and thyroid cancer is as high as 28% in the youngest workers. For those few emergency workers who received very high doses to the thyroid (Scenario 4), a notable risk of thyroid cancer is estimated, especially for young workers.”

Up to 20% more chance of having a thyroid cander, that’s low ? And why does Walsh do not even take the pain to mention those “brave emergency workers” (his words) who were the most exposed ?  A good job at breaking down the statistics ? This is outrageous.

And also among the good news is this :

“63 workers exposed to higher radiation than logged in their records”

Good news all around. Really.

By: Ipo Sun, 03 Mar 2013 09:43:00 +0000  At the German coast, where I currently live, the wind blows every day and night.  When the wind is best, most, almost all of the wind turbines have to stand still because the power corporations have incentive not to build the grid necessary to transport that much energy to distant regions. 
Because, if renewable electricity is available, they have to use it, instead of producing it in their plants. By law. 

In this country wind energy by itself can replace nuclear power effortlessly once the infrastructure is built up. 
As it is, it takes 4.300 wind turbines to replace one nuke plant.  Wind produces only 6.2 percent of the electricity used. 

But an average German nuclear power plant produces 1.200 Megawatts and an average wind turbine produces 6 MW per hour.  That means that ideally 200 windmills could replace one nuclear power plant.  Yea, not really, but still… 
Germany is set to have coal plants all but gone within 20 years.  Russian gas, cleaner and cheaper than coal is designated to replace them and their job of making up the redundancy for what the renewables can’t deliver. 
If they play nice with Russia. 

Corn and rape for bio fuel has grown enormously because it is highly subsidized.  Bio fuel is hardly environment friendly.  It’s quite terrible. 
(If it’s legitimate rapeseed …something …Monsanto… something.) 

By: Ipo Sun, 03 Mar 2013 07:52:00 +0000 Maggie: “In Germany, which decided to phase out nuclear power in the wake of Fukushima, coal power is on the rise. And it’s rising faster than the increase in renewable energy.”

The use of coal in Germany has has risen less than Germany’s export of electricity has. 
That’s a decrease! 
Get it? 
This coal gets burned by some soulless international corporation because Germany still subsidizes it until 2018, two years before nukes are phased out, and centuries (millennia?) before the subsidies to the past, current and future nuclear industry run out. 
One way or another, we’ll all have a huge price to pay for storage of nuclear waste, while within ten to twenty years coal plants will no longer fit into the German energy system. 

Solar and wind energy in Germany have lowered the market price of electricity.   Photovoltaic for example delivers electricity exactly when consumption is peaking.  This demonstrably has a dampening effect on the price of electricity on the trading floors of the European Power Exchange (EPEX SPOT SE). 

This is imported coal burned for “export” electricity, financed in part by the German tax payer, who also finances renewable energy, but willingly.    

By: LennStar Sun, 03 Mar 2013 07:36:00 +0000 I would like to add that the current government tries it best to stop renewables in the hands of “all people” and instead subsidzes the most expensive form – wind energy offshore – because (I guess) its big-corporations-business. These corporation increased prices after they had a record black figure in the books 2 years ago.
Meanwhile the energy price on the European Energy Exchange has dropped due to renewables. In the last year it was lower in germany then in nuclear-France and more stable.
The reason for coal plants is mainly because the bring money to the bigs, while renewables bring money to the small people.

By: Ian Wood Sun, 03 Mar 2013 05:11:00 +0000

Energy savings from conservation outweigh that of any and all present green energy.

I’m glad someone mentioned this. 

Nuclear power is a short-sighted, brute force industrial solution for a post-industrial society that wants instant results. We’d much rather build a nuke plant so that shoe stores on 5th Avenue in Manhattan can keep their doors open and blast frigid air onto the sidewalk in July than change how we think about overall energy consumption. And if we can’t build a nuke plant, we’ll just increase coal and natural gas production and build more of those plants. It reflects the same centralized power structure that characterizes our politics. Even our renewable energy proposals are part of the same problem: massive wind farms! Thousands of acres of solar panels! Molten salt reactors!

White roofs, highly efficient appliances and electronics, hyperlocal power generation like solar windows and shingles…a concerted effort to implement hundreds of smaller, incremental improvements that reduce energy consumption combined with multiple sources of widely distributed alternative energy production is more likely to provide the necessary long-term results.

By: Ian Wood Sun, 03 Mar 2013 04:32:00 +0000 I saw the tokamak fusion reactor at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory when I was in 6th grade, shortly after they were commissioned in 1982. It was supposed to hit the fusion break-even point, but it was decommissioned in 1997 without ever reaching that goal. They built a spherical tokamak in 1999…but the damage was done. I grew up thinking I’d see fusion pretty much any day now, because I’d been in the room with the damn thing, and had to wear a radiation tag, and got told about how someone once left a wrench on the floor across the hangar and it had punched a hole right through the reactor wall when they powered the magnets up, and it was so cool and so Science! and then they shut it down and now I don’t believe anything anymore. Don’t even talk to me about flying cars, man. Don’t even.

By: AnthonyC Sun, 03 Mar 2013 01:45:00 +0000 If you want it, you have to, you know, actually fund it. Which, frankly, we aren’t, not really. Not the way we funded fission – and fusion is harder.

By: AnthonyC Sun, 03 Mar 2013 01:40:00 +0000 “radioactive waste that we don’t seem to know what to do with” You put it into one of several kinds of reactors that we’ve invented but aren’t using commercially, which can use that “waste” to produce more power, resulting in a much smaller volume of waste that only (a relative term) needs to be safely stored for a few centuries. several others.

If it’s still radioactive, it is still potentially fuel.

By: Ito Kagehisa Sun, 03 Mar 2013 01:28:00 +0000 Yep, and in countries where that sort of information is kept from the citizenry a bit more effectively (helloooo Japan and Russia) you can expect it’s rather worse.

By: Ito Kagehisa Sun, 03 Mar 2013 01:26:00 +0000 The LENR reactions that NASA is belatedly looking into are generally classed with homeopathy, chiropracty and the Westboro Baptist Church in BoingBOing threads – not of the body!

By: awjt Sun, 03 Mar 2013 01:12:00 +0000  What’s the difference?

By: Pag Sun, 03 Mar 2013 00:22:00 +0000  Sure, but when the meltdown occurred, everybody assumed that a lot of people would die rapidly from radiation poisoning. That didn’t happen. I didn’t hear about mutations in newborns either. So now the anti-nuke lobby has moved to “years down the road, these people will get cancer!” This prediction may or may not be right (it’s not like anybody is any good at predicting the long term future), but it seems like a pretty secondary effect considering the catastrophe that caused the meltdown in the first place killed 16,000 people.

I wish we could have a perfect and abundant energy source, like Tony Stark’s ark reactor, but we don’t. Every energy source has its downside, multiplied by the huge amount of electricity we all use. Even solar and wind power would be useless to Canadians on a cold windless night when everybody is heating their house at full strength. Nuclear seems to me like the best energy source we have for many situations, especially with more modern, safer reactors.

Stats show that nuclear is quite safe, but when it fails it does so in a spectacular manner. Fear of nuclear energy is like the fear of flying. Statistically, traveling by plane is much safer than traveling by car, but people are more afraid of planes because plane crashes make headlines.

By: eldritch Sun, 03 Mar 2013 00:19:00 +0000 Well let’s look at some actual numbers then, shall we?

According to this source, 99% of the 235,000 personnel involved in American atmospheric nuclear weapons received doses of less than 5 rem.

A sievert (Sv) is a more modern unit of effective dose that is equal to 100 rem. According to wikipedia, “One sievert carries with it a 5.5% chance of eventually developing cancer.” So for the above limit of 5 rem, we can easily extrapolate an increased chance of eventually developing cancer of 0.275%.

That’s pretty small, actually, especially when you consider the rates of cancer development not due to nuclear fallout for a comparable population segment from the same time periods as those atmospheric tests.

According to this chart by Randall Munroe, exposure in the Fukushima exclusion zone was comparable. He does note two Fukushima workers who received exposure higher than 5 rem, or 50 mSv. In fact, their exposure even exeeded 10 rem, or 50 mSv, which Randall informs us is the lowest dose clearly linked to increased cancer risk. This is also the limit for “emergency workers protecting valuable property”. However, the two workers fell well short of suffering 25 rem, or 250 mSv, which is the limit for “emergency workers in lifesaving operations”.

Now, of all the people exposed, how many will develop cancer? We don’t know. How much more likely are they to develop it than they were before? For all of them, even the two badly exposed workers, less than 1%.

Contrast to Chernobyl. According to wikipedia, 237 people suffered acute radiation sickness from that accident, of which 31 died withing a few months. According to Mr. Monroe’s chart, radiation sickness can occur at around 40 rem, or 400 mSv, and severe radiation sickness starts at around 80 rem, or 800 mSv.

Fukushima never came close.

By: B E Pratt Sat, 02 Mar 2013 23:59:00 +0000  It isn’t stupidity. It’s greed.

By: B E Pratt Sat, 02 Mar 2013 23:58:00 +0000  I always liked the old James G. Watt version, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, we’ll clean up tomorrow! We’re only the EPA!!”

By: Antinous / Moderator Sat, 02 Mar 2013 21:46:00 +0000

Fukushima was the second worse nuclear accident ever and, AFAIK, nobody died from the radiation.

This is an incredibly disingenuous argument. Cancer takes decades to develop. Look at the death rates and timetables for people who were exposed to fallout from nuclear tests in the US.

By: Antinous / Moderator Sat, 02 Mar 2013 21:26:00 +0000 There’s currently 1,000 gallons of radioactive waste leaking annually at a site in Washington.  When that gets into the water supply, there won’t be a water supply anymore.