Renewing Plymouth's License
There is a lot of spent nuclear fuel sitting at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth, MA. Approximately 2600 assemblies, in fact. It's been building up since 1972. Their license expires in 2012, but they'd like to extend it for another twenty years. While safety issues regarding the plant's operation don't appear to be in question, safety from terrorist attack does. Dr. Ed Lyman from the Union of Concerned Scientists said at a forum on Thursday night:
If terrorists hit Pilgrim hard, the reactor itself could release up to five million curies of radiation and the waste pool could release a staggering 25 to 30 million curies. To put it in perspective, the Chernobyl accident is estimated to have released two-and-a-half million curies.
So why are they considering adding even more to the waste already on site? Apparently nuclear energy is solely responsible for our quality of life in the United States. Dr. Gilbert Brown of UMASS Lowell said:
He may be right. But how will our quality of life be affected if one of our nuclear plants is attacked by terrorists?
"Fact: a well-planned terrorist attack on nuclear plant with ground, air or water forces can result in a core meltdown containment failure or large Chernobyl-type radioactive release, and anyone who says otherwise is either misinformed or lying. If Indian Point were hit, up to 44,000 fatalities within 50 miles from the place of exposure would occur, along with up to 500,000 cancer fatalities in the long-term and economic damages exceeding two trillion."
If terrorists hit Pilgrim hard, the reactor itself could release up to five million curies of radiation and the waste pool could release a staggering 25 to 30 million curies. To put it in perspective, the Chernobyl accident is estimated to have released two-and-a-half million curies.
So why are they considering adding even more to the waste already on site? Apparently nuclear energy is solely responsible for our quality of life in the United States. Dr. Gilbert Brown of UMASS Lowell said:
In my reality space, nuclear energy is not only a safe way, but an environmentally safe, sound and economical way to make electricity. Most people don't have a quality of life a tenth of what we have."
He may be right. But how will our quality of life be affected if one of our nuclear plants is attacked by terrorists?
posted by Sara Ch. at 7:24 AM
11 Comments:
There's too much spent fuel onsite. Let's reprocess it. Let me assure you that no utility likes paying a fee every year to have the government do nothing about the spent fuel which they technically own and are obligated to manage. If the DoE abandoned Yucca Mountain, the NRC licensed the CANDU 6, and utilities built CANDUs, we could handle the spent fuel problem and replace a significant amount (actually, come to think of it, almost all) of our coal capacity by allowing the light-water and CANDU operators to buy and sell fuel among themselves. Needless to say, regulation of this process would be necessary, but that's basically how we should manage the fuel cycle.
The quote is not specific enough for me to respond to, except that I can tell you quite certainly that I am not lying and don't know what he's referring to. If he's talking about a hydrogen bomb going off next to the containment, he would be right. If he's talking about flying an airliner into the containment, a breach would not happen.
Let's look at the deaths. Immediately, using their numbers, a worst-case scenario terrorist attack would kill as many people as coal burning does in a little under a year and a half. Over time, the same worst-case scenario attack would kill as many people as coal burning does in 16 years and 8 months. Of course, this doesn't count coal accidents. Unless this happens more than once every 18 years, nuclear energy still has an advantage, even under their worst-case scenario which probably doesn't hold up to scrutiny (again, I don't know, because I can't examine it).
Is nuclear energy solely responsible for our quality of life? Electricity is responsible for quite a lot of it. Nuclear power plants can produce large amounts of electricity without killing thousands of people.
I'd also like to remind you that getting rid of everything worth attacking leaves us with nothing to defend.
You haven't heard? We fight them in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here! What a brilliant strategy! The citizens of Bali, Madrid, and London can see the wisdom of our ways close up!
The war on terrorism is a misguided, testosteronic attack on the symptoms of global poverty and long-standing territorial and religious wars. It is not something we should be pursuing.
Anyway, back to the topic...
Unfortunately, the realm of nuclear energy is definitely within the realm of the "war on tur" and must be discussed thus, as the post that inspired these comments has done. This is, in fact, on the subject.
I apologize for not remembering one of my blogspot tags ....
I will post anonymously at this time.
Ed Lyman has a career at stake, (his own),
in specifically revisiting a 1950's inability to compute realistically.
Let me explain.
People do not understand what a "worst case" supposition is,
or why it was used.
Lacking the computer resources in casual use today,
our engineering corps of past decades
could only "surround" a math problem,
by finding the areas where it did not apply.
It's like trying to find out where Akron is,
by first determining
that it is NOT in Florida,
it is NOT in Baja,
it is NOT in Ontario,
and it is NOT in Malaysia.
This allowed them to cut their computations down,
to only those cases lying in a rough circle,
whose perimeter is Florida,Baja,Ontario, & Malaysia,
allowing themselves to NOT have to compute
math cases OUTSIDE that circle.
Did their computation have ANYTHING to do with
Florida,
or Baja,
or Ontario,
or Malaysia?
No.
Those are simply the worst case suppositions.
They then worked backwards, to the much smaller
expected cases, which became their answer.
ED LYMAN IS GIVING YOU 1/2 THE COMPUTATION
AS IF HE IS FINISHED,
WITHOUT EVER DOING THE SECOND PART.
This is an intentional misuse of a scientific tool,
to reach a Public Relations conclusion,
by doing only half the science,
AND THEN CALLING A PRESS CONFERENCE!
Now on to the actual computations that Ed Lyman reworked.
The way the scenario is handled, is to take the "source term"
(some nuclear bulk material)
To hypothetically choose an artificial "dispersal path"
(mentally have it exploded, or burned, or
cut into small chunks & thrown in the air by hand)
and then use statistical methods to see where the chunks
distribute themselves.
While computing, it is assumed that nobody intervenes to
change anything, so the normal mitigations that
will ALWAYS happen, are purposely left out,
It is as if we see the fire department coming to
put out this imaginary fire, frozen in time,
like Keanu Reeves in the Matrix,
while the little chunks are STILL ALLOWED TO FALL,
just like Keanu's bullets.
IT IS A NONSENSE SITUATION.
THEN WHY DOES ED LYMAN MAKE A SPEAKING CAREER,
OUT OF HOODWINKING YOU, THAT IT COULD HAPPEN?
In my mind, THAT, is the deepest question to be raised
by the entire antinuclear blog'n'email network.
That is: "Why is this network in existence?"
My answer to you is this:
because Ed Lyman needs work.
If you didn't understand my first explanation.
Here's another.
Inside a vial
in a refrigerator
in a vault
in the deepest basement
of the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta
is one of the two remaining live samples
in the entire world, of the smallpox virus.
(the other is in Switzerland)
If That vial was carefully thawed,
and a single molecule was given in a
small syringe, to each of 44,000 volunteers,
who then went out, and injected their best friend
with a single virulent molecule,
44,000 deaths would occur.
SO WHAT?
IT"S PURELY IMAGINARY.
Harry,... Dog on the River
Oh, and Sara....
I hate to be a noodge,
but it's
"Plymouth"
not
"Plymoth"
Har D.R.
Thanks, Harry! Fixed my spelling. Also, I appreciate the very thorough explanation, but I still don't think those numbers are nonsense. Sure, there are a lot of circumstances that could affect actual numbers, but a worst-case scenario is just that.
How would this worst-case scenario actually happen? Specifically, what would be used to do what to what?
Let's really examine worst case scenario...but let's examine it in light of already occurring realities and possible alternatives(aka - coal)
The EPA's Clean Air Task Force put out a report in 2004 that found that nearly 26,000 US deaths a year can be attributed to the ambient particulate emissions in the atmosphere from coal-burning power plants. This is roughly one Chernobyl accident every two or three years.
Considering we have had only one Chernobyl accident in the past twenty, I would suggest that there is no comparison here.
In addition, we are talking about a nuclear industry that has moved way beyond the capabilities of 1986. Nuclear science has come a long way in helping alleviate the very real problems of waste, safety, and security.
Ed Lyman should have his PhD recalled. He is a joke in the professional community. Even major anit-nuke organizations shy away from him because he jury-rigs his own data and gets caught at it all the time.
Harrydog again...
Sara, you apparently missed what I was pointing out.
If one molecule of smallpox was distributed to each bloodstream in the human population
of North America (the worst case scenario) it would depopulate the continent.
BUT...
For that to happen, you have to suspend reality in a hundred different ways.
How did you GET the smallpox virus?
Did the CDC suddenly open all its vaults and let you in?
How did you know where to look,
and what to do, to thaw and extract it?
How did you manage to get it into the hypodermic needles?
Did you have 10,000 helpers?
How did 10,000 helpers fit inside the CDC vault?
Where did you get the needles, to inject everyone...
(there is no ready supply of 250 million hypodermics)
How did you keep it alive, until it was injected, travelling across America?
How did your injection corps disperse, on what transportation system?
Were there no traffic jams?
Etc.
Etc.
Do not pull back from understanding, and say:
"Oh , those are trivialities, any one of them
might happen, or not happen."
In the real world , that would be a decent counter argument....
BUT
In the world of "worstcase scenarios"
ALL OF THE SURROUNDING CONDITIONS
ARE POSITED TO HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED,
HELD AT NOMINAL ZERO EFFECT
until the computation is done.
The computation is NOT done to gain the worstcase number,
which is a limit. (did you take calculus...?)
In calculus you use zero as a limit.
Do you want all your calculus problems to have an answer equal to ZERO?
You are NOT interested in the limit.
The limit is merely a computational tool.
The limit is NOT an answer.
To get an answer, you must use the limit, to regress to an answer,
using accuracy-enhancing iterations.
This is where Lyman bails out.
I have read a paper,
done by the man who INVENTED the calculation
that Lyman misused,
and this guy got an answer of three fatalities!
3
Not 44,000.
Go figure!
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