Arnie Gundersen, the sole engineer of Fairewinds Associates, continues to tell lies about the radiation released from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants. He also continues to lie about the potential effects and seeks to spread fear and uncertainty where neither one are justified. He is a dangerous man on a mission to make money by harming the industry that once employed him – until he was fired for poor performance of his assigned duties.
He recently appeared on Democracy Now, a liberal news program that recognizes the ills of unfettered capitalism and an economy that is dependent on using the atmosphere as a waste dump for massive quantities of fossil fuel waste. Unfortunately, the presenters and producers at Democracy Now also have a huge blind spot regarding the use of atomic energy. They think of it as something to fear and attack instead of recognizing it as the most powerful tool in the tool box for reducing that dependence on burning fossil fuel and dumping the waste into our shared atmosphere.
I know enough about the rules of journalism and libel to recognize that calling someone a liar produces a risk of legal action, but, by definition, a liar is someone who tells lies. I also recognize that Gundersen has apparently attracted some major backers; his publicity machine and the continuing improvements on his organization’s web site and his video productions do not come cheap. That adds to the risk of writing an article that directly accuses him of lying.
However, when talking about the radiation released from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants Arnie has stepped into territory where his words can be fact-checked; his statements can be compared to measurements and shown to be false.
For example, in the above video, Mr. Gundersen makes the following claim:
The amount of radiation released was clearly as much as Chernobyl, but most of it headed out to sea.
(Emphasis added.)
Here is a direct comparison of the amount of radiation released by the two separate accidents from the science blog of Nature. Nature is one of the most respected sources of accurate information on the planet.
Indeed, the total estimate delivered to the International Atomic Energy Agency in June states that Fukushima has released 1.5×1016 becquerels (Bq) of Cs-137—about a fifth of the Cs-137 from Chernobyl. The total radioactive release from Fukushima is currently estimated at about 5.5% of Chernobyl, which spewed an incredible 1.4×1019Bq.
The Fukushima fallout is notable for what it doesn’t contain. Some very nasty contaminants like strontium-90, americium-241, and various plutonium isotopes are all absent in any significant quantity because the concrete vessels around the reactors appear to be largely intact. In Chernobyl, the explosion and subsequent fire spewed these extremely dangerous isotopes far and wide.
(Emphasis added.)
Mr. Gundersen also makes the following bold prediction that puts him way outside of the realm of the accepted science of radiation health effects.
My estimate is that over the next 30 years we’re going to see about a million cancers as a result of this.
Quoting from a Nature article titled Japan’s post-Fukushima earthquake health woes go beyond radiation effects
A year out, public health experts agree that the radiation fears were overblown. Compared with the effects of the radiation exposure from Fukushima, “the number of expected fatalities are never going to be that large,” says Thomas McKone, of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health.
And some, including Richard Garfield, a professor of Clinical and International Nursing at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, go a step further. “In terms of the health impact, the radiation is negligible,” he says. “The radiation will cause very few, close to no deaths.” But that does not mean that the accident has not already caused wide-reaching health issues. “The indirect effects are great,” Garfield says.
(Emphasis added.)
There is a vast gap between a prediction of “very few, close to no deaths” and “we’re going to see about a million cancers.”
Here is a description of some of the indirect effects that worry Richard Garfield and many other caring people who understand science, engineering, modern industrial society, and medicine.
Of course, no matter how prepared a country is a massive disaster is devastating for individuals. People who lost their homes, villages and family members, and even just those who survived the quake, will likely continue to face mental health challenges and the physical ailments that come with stress, such as heart disease. “Much of the damage was really psychological—the stress of not knowing, of being relocated,” U.C. Berkeley’s McKone says.
Experts on the ground in Japan agree. “Mental health is the most significant issue,” notes Seiji Yasumura, a gerontologist at Fukushima Medical University’s Department of Public Health. Stress, such as that caused by dislocation, uncertainty and concern about unseen toxicants, has been linked to increased risk for physical ailments, such as heart disease. So even if radiation risks are low, “people are still worried,” he says. And that can also lead to unhealthy behavioral changes, “including dietary choices, lack of exercise and sleep deprivation”—all of which can have long-term negative health consequences. Many of the survivors are elderly, whom either lost a partner or even an entire family. As after the Kobe earthquake of 1995, the Japanese government has created housing for these disconnected older adults. But, as Garfield notes, “the government can’t buy you a new family.”
There are also what Garfield calls, “the immeasureable, imponderable” effects of the disaster. Those who relocated from the prefecture report having experienced discrimination and, especially immediately following the accident, were considered somehow “contaminated.” Traditional Japanese values also prize stoicism, which means that people who are suffering mental or even physical distress might be less likely to seek the care they need.
Those negative health effects are, to a large degree, produced by purposeful acts of spreading lies aimed at increasing fear so that people will be motivated to march against the restoration of power production from the 48 undamaged reactors that remain shut down.
Japan should not be experiencing another summer of severe power shortages and Japanese people should not be forced to make drastic cuts in their consumption and lifestyle. They should not be paying fossil fuel companies more than $100 million per day in extra fuel costs to supply less power than the nuclear plants could provide. The extra demand on fossil fuel in Japan is helping to keep prices up in world oil markets, so all of us are being affected. For everyone who does not sell oil or natural gas, those effects are negative.
Arnie Gundersen’s selfishly motivated campaign to build a career for himself by damaging the industry that decided to stop employing him more than 20 years ago is causing real harm to people around the world. He has been engaging in an international press push to get his worried face on as many news programs as possible. I suspect that he is seeking to increase his visibility and marketability for his one man consultancy – Fairewinds Associates. That consultancy produces antinuclear reports for hire in areas well outside of his trained expertise – like the one that the Friends of the Earth commissioned from him to determine the cause of the steam generator failures at San Onofre.
For people who do not understand the intricacies of the nuclear energy industry, it seems kind of logical to hire a man with a Master of Science in Nuclear Engineering to produce such a report. However, there is nothing in the nuclear engineering curricula at most schools that would provide someone with the technical skills required to analyze the material and mechanical performance of steam generators.
The plant owner has hired dozens to hundreds of specifically trained experts to be able to understand what happened; how can anyone believe that a single consultant with a degree in nuclear engineering, no professional engineering certification, and experience as a “nuclear industry executive” that ended more than 20 years ago, is capable of providing a reasonably accurate cause determination?
I do not mind helping Arnie Gundersen get his name into the press and into the conversation. I think it is important to share as much truth about his knowledge level and motivation as possible. If he wants tell lies and spread fear, uncertainty and doubt in public, he deserves whatever publicity he can capture. I just hope he realizes that pure celebrity comes with a price; it cannot be a reliable source of income and influence when some of know that is what he is seeking.
This was one nail-in-in article! I’d like to see nuclear organizations such as ANS and NEI prominently take up your mantel to debunk Arnie before he incurs any more unchallenged damage. It’s hard to believe he has more media-pull and access and regard than such professional organizations who’d dutifully correct his harmful accusations! It’s bad enough he and others of his ilk and most green groups take zero responsibility for exacerbating evacuation response panic and misery with their blatant falsehoods. There’s usually a penalty for shouting fire in a theater. I also believe there should be some kind of urgency prompting via international humane groups to get Fukushima residents back home and to kill these persistent malicious news reports that regions of Fukushima will be forever as untouchable as the radioactive “Forbidden Zone” from Planet of the Apes.
James Greenidge
Queens NY
Well, to give Arnie a little bit of credit it would seem he did stumble on to the cause (at least partially) of the SG degradation at San Onofre, but then it was pure luck has he listed all probable (as well as unprobable) causes for the tube degradation and then concluded that they all contributed to the failure.
Wish somebody would pay me to write reports like that, too bad I have integrity, work ethics and morals!?
Nice going as usual Rod!
What is ethical about promoting a faulty design that have had an accident? My guess is that you think all thees mark1 reactors are good and safe? Then not to speak about that people are left to virtually fend for them self’s?
Rod you go there to farm and live. I would like to see you living next door to the girl who is loosing her teeth. I am sure she is lying too, right.
To build something like a nuclear power plant and not know the average height of a tsunami is reckless. You probably want this to continue, reckless business I mean.
What do you think of Einsteins thought, “Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water.”
Nice Rod. How much do you fetch from the industry? Is it good business?
Hi Rod:
Like you I criticize Gundersen for lying about the science of health physics, nuclear engineering, etc. Unlike you, I criticize when the pro-nuclear people do it too. I tried to post this (this version is edited) on the ANS Cafe but it was deleted (wonder why?):
—–
Dear ANS Governance:
I did not attend the recent ANS meeting, but learned about an alarming aspect over the internet. The President’s Special Session topic was “Low Level Radiation and It’s Implication For Fukushima”. It was co-chaired by the President Eric Loewen and Ted Rockwell.
Based on a description of the event it appears that the speakers were all against the science of health physics and its LNT theory, which applies not only to radiation but to other genotoxic substances. It appears that the speakers were “cherry-picked” based on political ideology rather than the science of health physics.
I submit that this practice has violated ANS’s Code Of Ethics Fundamental Principle:
“ANS members as professionals are dedicated to improving the understanding of nuclear science and technology, appropriate applications, and potential consequences of their use.
To that end, ANS members uphold and advance the integrity and honor of their professions by using their knowledge and skill for the enhancement of human welfare and the environment; being honest and impartial; serving with fidelity the public, their employers, and their clients; and striving to continuously improve the competence and prestige of their various professions. ”
It is ironic that when the New York Academy Of Sciences published a “cherry-picked” report on the radiation effects of Chernobyl, Mr. Rockwell was instrumental in raising attention to the matter. However, as late as 2011, Mr. Rockwell has shown his own bias and has denounced (erroneously) the scientific consensus. As a member (former?) of the American Parapsychological Association, he clearly shows a propensity for pseudo-science.
Dr. Loewen is associated with the George C. Marshall Institute, the same organization which propagandized against the carcinogenicity of tobacco and is currently waging a propaganda war against the science of climatology and climate change.
This session did not represent the state of the science of radiation health effects, nor did it adhere to the ethics of the ANS.
Can the ANS learn from the tobacco industry?
I look forward to your response describing what actions you will take to remedy this situation.
—
“The best answer to free speech that happens to be incorrect is more speech that exposes truth and science to show just (how) wrong other interpretations might be.”
Rod Adams 9/13/10
Wow, could Bob here get any more pathetic and desperate in his attempts to spread nonsense?!
Way to go Bob! I’m sure the ANS will gladly jump on your bandwagon now that you’ve accused its outgoing President of being a tobacco lobbyist.
Did you know that the incoming ANS President was associated with Sandia National Lab? And we all know that Sandia has worked on nuclear weapons. Thus, the incoming ANS President is practically Dr. Strangelove!
Now that we have that tidbit of information, we can dismiss any and all Special Sessions that he will organize as being the product of a psychotic warmonger out to kill us all. At least, this is how the logic works in Bob’s World.
Bob, are you even a member of the ANS? Are you a member of the HPS? Have you ever read the position statements on the risks of low-level exposure to radiation that have been published by these professional societies?
If the best argument that you can make is to accuse others of being psychics and tobacco company cronies, then you have already lost the debate. But then again, I don’t expect much more from somebody who doesn’t even know what a review article is.
Please, Bob, crawl back under that rock. Please tuck tail and return to your pathetic blog, which nobody reads.
I’d like to respond to Mr. Applebaum’s comments about the LNT model. I’ll start off by saying I don’t know much about that topic, but what I found interesting about his post is that he seemed to me to have the analogy a little backwards in his mind. He compared this issue to the tobacco industry, and tried to make those who are refuting the LNT model equate to the tobacco industry. I think there’s a fallacy in that logic.
The tobacco industry was entrenched in the idea that tobacco is not harmful because if it was harmful there would be a huge impact on sales and jobs.
The RP industry is firmly entrenched in the idea that low doses of radiation are harmful because if we accept the idea that it is NOT harmful then thousands of RP/HP professionals will not be needed.
The tobacco industry ignored any evidence of harmfulness, just as the RP industry ignores any research against the LNT model.
The tobacco industry stared smear campaigns against those researching the harmful effects of tobacco, just as the RP industry starts smear campaigns against those who refute the LNT model.
Again, I don’t know much about the scientific investigations, but it seems to me that there is a level of common sense that could be thrown in. If low levels of radiation are as harmful as the industry says they are, why does the government allow us to receive, on average, 600 mrem/year? You’d think they’d be protecting us from the exposure we get EVERY DAY? No RP professional has ever been able to adequately explained this logical fallacy to me.
Think about how much better off the nuclear industry would be if the public could believe that low levels of radiation are actually safe? The fear and stress could be all but eliminated.
“Why does the government allow us to recieve…”
In the area of carcinogens, the government regulates companies, not people. If you want to smoke 36 cigarettes / day, go ahead. That is just the way our democratic system has implemented it. If you want to change it, vote for whoever will do so.
Is that adequate?
What if I want to smoke 36 joints a day?
Do you think that the DEA would mind?
Of course, being besides the point…I would like to watch ONCE you smoke 36 joints. can get away with it California I suspect.
I’m no fan of Gundersen, and I think his claims about Fukushima’s radioactivity releases are wrong. But the issue of his lying isn’t quite so clear-cut.
There are other estimates of Fukushima radioactivity release that are much larger than the ones Nature cited. For example, Stohl et al in the Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Nov. 2011 (www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/11/28319/2011/
doi:10.5194/acpd-11-28319-2011) estimated that the cesium-137 released at Fukushima was 36 PBq, about 42 % of the amount released at Chernobyl. When it comes to total radioactivity, which is dominated by radioactive noble gases, Stohl et al estimated a Fukushima release of 16.7 Exobecquerel, which is a smidge larger than Nature’s total Chernobyl figure of 14 EBq. (it’s also larger than the total radioactive noble gas inventory that they estimate for all the stricken Fukushima reactors, about 12 EBq, so go figure!) Anyway, Gundersen could point to the Stohl paper to defend his statement against charges of lying.
It’s hard for me to sort out the various estimates of Fukushima radioactivity release at this point. I’m waiting for the UNSCEAR report on Fukushima, due next year, for an authoritative figure.
Bob Applebaum is a stanch supporter of the status quo in matters of radiation protection and claims that his position is backed by science and endlessly berates those that continue to analyze the issue if their finding does not support this view. Now, apparently he is demanding that it never be questioned even by those like the American Nuclear Society who’s membership are certainly qualified to examine the subject, and who it can be assumed can weigh all evidence before coming to a conclusion. He then astonishingly claims that their temerity is even suggesting that the issue of the impacts of low dose radiation should continue to be reviewed is a violation of that organization’s code of ethics.
One is forced to wonder if Applebaum is as sure of his own position as he claims to be.
One would think that if LNT was as firmly established as he asserts it is, then it should be able to withstand the sort of criticisms that were raised in the ANS Special Session without needing calls for the topic to be placed off limits by this organization by fiat. The fact that he has done nothing except attack the panel’s members and demands that the issue be suppressed speaks to an obvious lack of confidence in the model he supports.
Mr. Adams bias is well known in his effort to sale small nukes. Does he think telling lies about Mr. Gunderson will help him in his goal to sale the small nuke idea? This article is very low in ethics and I do not believe will help him with his goal.
@Gene Stone
You are right that my “biases” in favor of nuclear energy and the use of smaller nuclear plants where appropriate are well known. They should be, I remind people of that fact on a regular basis. I also frequently explain exactly how I came to my conclusions about the benefits of nuclear fission energy when compared to all other available forms of energy.
I realize that telling the truth about someone else’s lies is sometimes considered to be playing dirty, but there is nothing unethical about telling the truth. If you take a look at my resume, which is available via a link in my author blurb on every post I publish, you might notice that I once taught ethics at the college level. The specifics of the research I did to prepare for that teaching assignment are starting to blur for me, but I remember well enough to know that every ethical framework we covered included strong approval for integrity, even if it caused discomfort to people who had less integrity.
Rod
This post made me think about why I usually don’t call people “a liar.” I had a vague understanding of the legal action business, but my real reason is whether I think they are lying or merely not telling the truth. To me, “Lying” means you KNOW something is not true, but you say it anyway. That could be as simple as “my husband isn’t home right now” when actually he’s working and doesn’t want to be disturbed. Or it could be much worse. Either way, it’s a lie if the person knows he is saying something that is not true.
I think a lot of what the opponents say isn’t a lie by that definition. They believe what they are saying. It isn’t true, but they have heard it repeated (maybe by themselves) and maybe they have just reached the point of believing their own lies, but anyhow..there it is. They are saying what they believe to be true.
On the other hand, the words “he lied” are very powerful and the opponents use them on all occasions. “Entergy lied under oath” (no, they didn’t, and they have been cleared by about three investigations). “I am sick of the lies of the nuclear industry.” SIgn on the road near a public meeting “Entergy lies ahead.” “The NRC has to stop lying to us.” , Etc.
Nobody sues the nuclear opponents. Nobody even notices
Does Gundersen know he is not telling the truth? Frankly, I am not sure. When I debated him, he seemed pretty darn convinced of everything he said, even the stuff I could completely refute within thirty seconds. Anyhow, something for me to think about.
Thank you for the post.
Liar or idiot? At the end of the day, does it really matter?
I dunno Meredith. When anti-nukes were running around getting in the faces of Fukushima evacuees and shouting “you’re going to die!” I’d be pretty hard pressed not to call them liars in light all the evidence, as also most their off-the-wall vaporware fear tales which reason and logic doesn’t need any proving. In the streets if you sling shots about someone and coyly don’t cough up the dough (of proof), that you’re a liar is the least of terms you’d be labeled. I’ve yet seen Arnie or Helen cough up the dough. That’s what vexes me about pro organizations like ANS and NEI shying from taking on these two media darlings toe-to-toe and publicly trashing their poisonous rants and assertions. I mean, they’re only out to scare and sway whole populations to shut down the bases of nuclear livelihoods and professions.
James Greenidge
Queens NY
If Gundersen is lying, how come much of what he warns about comes to be? In the first days of Fukushima, he was calling the accident worse then TMI. Industry publicly disagreed with him. It was only months later that national media reported that the severity level of the Daiichi accident was upgraded. Time and again we see Gundersen being attacked on issues of credibility and time and again his positions are vindicated.
I don’t take Rod seriously enough to really direct a response towards him, but as for you Meredith, I sat in that audience when you debated Gundersen and listened to what sounded like you comparing a nuclear reactor to a banana. As you said “‘Lying’ means you KNOW something is not true, but you say it anyway,” and since I don’t think you are a liar, I’m forced to think that you either don’t eat bananas OR don’t mind licking spent fuel…
@Gene Stone – If you believe that there have been lies told here about Gunderson, make an effort to correct them with references and other proof. Taking drive-by shots at the author does nothing to make you credible or helps Gunderson’s position.
I’m hopeful over the last few years Mr. Adams, ANS, NEI and others are responding to false and unjustified claims from the global anti-nuclear lobby spread of FUD Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt in media.
I feel AGW, anti-nuclear, overpopulation control groups and the politics they espouse fit an agenda of self-limiting strategies to limit human advancement & aspirations. Oddly enough they tend to go contrary to reproducible investigative science in service of anti-human goals.
I spoke with Arnie by email and his wife wrote back because he was travelling. I mentioned hormesis and that perhaps they were doing a dis-service to the Japanese people by leaving out any knowledge of Radiation Hormesis.
Apparently they believe in LNT … no wonder they are scaring people. the LNT hypothesis is widely believed apparently without a scrap of science behind it. Arnie and Maggie said that LNT was the theory of choice and they did not believe in it. I wrote back with a lot of evidence to support radiation hormesis but they never wrote back.
Ian Soutar
Vancouver Island.
I think Mr Gunderson is getting the real truth about nucular power out to the public, It is just to dangerest. No safe storage for spent fuel. Dead zones all over the word for hundred of years. AND yes thousands of cancers…you would half to be a fool to think radiation is safe in any amount. I would love to see a debate between you and gunderson. Nucular power is not cleaner if you look at the total contaminants but I have to admitt it is greener in corporate pockets !!!!
Well, now that we’ve heard from the teenage, illiterate portion of the Internet, I guess we should all “admitt” that we need to contemplate how “to dangerest” nuclear power is. We would “half to be a fool” not to do so.
Personally, I would love to see “Randall” purchase an English dictionary and actually read it. That might eliminate many of the contaminants from his attempts to communicate using the English language.
After he or she is finished with the dictionary, perhaps following up with a good science textbook would be time well spent before showing up to comment here again on “nucular” power.
There a Gunderson fan for you. I guarantee that Gunderson’s target audience has a mean IQ below 80.
@Randall
You honestly believe there are “dead zones” all over the world? Do you ever read corporate financial reports? Can you honestly tell me that nuclear energy provides more “green” to corporations than selling coal, oil, or natural gas? (The revenues from selling various flavors of fossil fuel energy dwarf the nuclear industry by several orders of magnitude.)
I think Arnie has jumped to conclusions but you have quoted old facts. From Tepco’s figures themselves Fukushima has released roughly 1/4 of Chernobyl (this is for air only in both figures).
Also figures have shown that the land contamination isn’t as bad as Chernobyl at the moment(it can fluctuate). However these area’s are more densely populated.
I think it’s safe to say Chernobyl up until now has caused roughly 1 million premature deaths. I don’t think you can scientifically say yet how many people the Fukushima accident will prematurely kill. But I think we should put safety first and if assumptions are needed, take the worst case scenario.
@Gaffney
You are wrong by more than five orders of magnitude. Chernobyl has caused about 65 deaths. The report that a former editor of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences printed as a favor to Greenpeace (an perhaps under pressure by a certain wealthy member of the board who has made billions as a Russian-American oil and gas oligarch) is a work of creative fiction. You can read all about the issue on Atomic Insights by doing a search for “NYAS”.
For a more accurate understanding of the effects of the Chernobyl accident on the people who lived in the area, I highly recommend visiting the UNSCEAR site dedicated to the topic and following the links to detailed papers that paint a completely different picture from the one that Yablokov fabricated.
http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html
If you want to gain a more accurate picture of the evacuated zone in Ukraine and Belarus you might want to read “Wormwood Forest” by Mary Mycio. There is another book that was just covered by NPR titled “Visit Sunny Chernobyl” that looks like it might also challenge the assertions about the long term effects of a serious reactor accident that released significant quantities of radioactive material by the professional opposition to the use of nuclear energy.
Pertaining to the contaminant and pollution content…
The contrast in waste products from nuclear and chemical reactions
is equally as dramatic. The radioactive waste from nuclear plants
is much more toxic than most by-products of coal production, but that
toxicity must be weighed against the much smaller quantities of waste
produced. If reprocessing is used to separate the unused uranium from
the spent nuclear fuel, then the amount of highly radioactive waste
remaining from the 1000-MW(e) nuclear plant amounts to substantially
less than 10 tons per year. In contrast, 5% or more of the coal
burned becomes ash that must be removed and stored in a landfill or
elsewhere at the rate of more than five 100-ton-capacity railroad cars
per day. Likewise it may be necessary to prevent nearly 100 tons of
sulfur dioxide and lesser amounts of mercury, lead, and other impurities
from being released to the environment. But the largest environmental
impact from burning fossil fuels may well be the global
warming caused by the thousands of tons of CO2 released to the
atmosphere each day by a 1000-MW(e) coal-fired power plant.
Fundamentals of nuclear reactor physics. (Lewis, 2008)
The weight of danger associated against nuclear contaminants is still of measurable debate however against conventional fuels.
Pertaining to news ramblings: People are much more interested in fear and
panic than the truth, whatever the ‘truth’ may be. It’s all a political game unfortunately.
The queries of the interviewer seemed to incite doubt in the viewers, especially when he asked about similar reactors in the US being near highly populated cities. I support the
smaller Thorium reactor infrastructure as well.
You all entertain me immeasurably on here.
Well now, the way I see this as a past Operator of muti fuel boilers, recovering chemicals, making process steam for mutiple operations at mutiple pressures, steam was used from 900lb.to 50lb. before it was condensed. There was danger there too, but if I lost power the only problem was the mess of the crash. —–IF I LOST POWER OR EARTHQUAKE —— I NEED NO INCOMING POWER LINES, OR BACK-UP GENERATORS. I CAN BE DOWN FOR 1 DAY OR 10 YEARS, WITH OUT MELT DOWN. There are MUCH better ways to boil water, and use of Steam with more than a single process. Nuke as it is now should be discontinued, because of the total waste of heat and the giant pile of trash that is impossible to work on or around the older the system gets. As a past Health and Saftey Chairman , all I can say is good luck and please take me to anouther planet free from nuke bombs, bullits, and boilers. Arnie is just calling it as it is.
@Bill Blasko
I have visited a number of nuclear power plants and have never seen any “giant pile of trash.” You can perform the same exercise using Google Earth. In contrast, I HAVE visited several coal fired power plants that were right next to huge landfills where their ashes were piped. The facility that made the biggest impression on my memory was the Big Bend power station on the Tampa Bay. Since the terrain there is really flat, the growing mountain of ash spread over several dozen acres makes a huge visual impact.
That plant also happened to have been the site of a hydrogen explosion that rocked the communities surrounding the Bay with a very loud bang and resulted in killing several operators as it blew the walls off of the turbine building.
I’m also pretty certain that many of the highest tech fossil fuel plants have backup generators that are an absolute necessity to allow for a safe shutdown in the event of a loss of power. Coal dust makes for a rather delicate situation if you do not shut down huge boilers with some amount of care to ensure explosions do not happen. You might not need that backup power for very long, but you still need it.
With regard to melted reactors, the real question is who was harmed? The crumple zones worked, only about 100 kg of long lived material was dispersed and there will be no long term health effects because the doses were well within the normal variations of background exposure to all but a tiny handful of site workers.
Well, Rod the way that you see things they will always be clean, as they do nothing but boil water. What you forget about is the processes required to get your “fuel” . When you only get less than 5% of all total metel mined and the rest is considered as depleted and then spread that around the world calling it amunition there is a slight problem. Having been highly exposed my self working across street from Climax U Tailing pile running a foundry 40 years ago, then moving back to the reservation back in montana, i got a little sick, it has taken me 30 years, with the last 10 being Health and Safety Chairman within the Atomic and steel workers union , what ever it has now merged into, to find out what happened to me in the Colorado desert. Plus I have been trained by the same people in Wa. D.C. who wrote all of the CFR rules you or I must operate under. My ex father in law worked on Project Ruleson and Rio Blanko , and many of co-workers had worked on the Hanford clean up and many Navajo friends who were miners or in processing ore, they are not here any more. I feel lucky my res. Dr. figured it out , or I would be dirt napping whith my friends. Yes i’m a down winder ,and bomb tested, so I look at it differently than you , never being a true operator in a field sense, always seeing the good, but nothing inbetween. As far as a large coal or gas fired boiler, no there in no emergency generators, yes we have gen. systems, but only to restart systems , with out power all fuel stops when all valves are power to open , loss of power drops fuel so fast there is no time , it just gets quiet as all Id and Fd fans spin down, e/ power is only need ed for turning gear on grn sets and fans as they are so big and heavy they cannot just sit idle or they will bend. So my friend look a little more at the fossel side, the place i was for 20 years is gone, scrap.and the land around it is still useable, not so in your field . One other thing , if it is so good why are Drs. forbiden to tell you if you are exposed as a outsider, you should read “Killing Our Own” ..one of my daughters has a thyroid problem from the Tucson incident layed out in this document. This could go on forever so i will stop at this point, as I used to believe as you do, but cannot any mre as i educated my self . To say a man is lying, well do more research an you might see things different, I do have a simple ?…where and what is done with your “cont. blow down water & manual blow down water”?
I trust Mr. Adams will never find himself wrong-footed.
Stop all nukes. Stop uranium mining. Kickstart renewable energies. Conserve where there’s a deficit.
Nukes = Displacement and Death.
I see. Shut down a power source that’s on U.N. record of barely killing anyone over in 60 years worldwide so you can be happy with ones known for generations to’ve killed and hospitalized literal millions with health aliments and inflicted tens of thousands in worker and local civilian deaths by accidents. Yea, you’re one real public health Brainniac alright. And “renewable” ain’t gonna cut it without a _real_ baseload power source backing it up if you want a vibrant high-powered economy, brains.
James Greenidge
Mr. Adams, you may not have a diagnosed cancer as yet… but I have personally known two nuclear engineers who worked for GE in California – both deceased in the past fifteen years from leukemia. I had a total thyroidectomy in the 1960s for papillary cancer caused by Xrays “to stimulate the thymus gland” as an infant. And I still have to deal with MDs who are not knowledgable about the long term effects of radiation on the immune system, blood pressure, genetics, etc. No unusual family medical histories, but first child severly autistic, second bi-polar/hearing loss and grandchild autistic. Amazing what a little excess radiation can do!
@M Curie (nice pseudonym, by the way)
Your anecdotes are not terribly convincing. I work around nuclear engineers ever day. None of my colleagues have any occupational exposure to radiation, so any leukemias that might develop would have nothing to do with radiation. I have not been diagnosed with cancer, but I can name at least a half dozen family members or very close friends who have died from the nasty disease. Not one of them had any radiation relation. It is a disease that ends up being responsible for about 20-40% of all deaths, depending on the country being studied.
The autism and hearing loss in your children are personally tragic, but there is no evidence in any credible science reports of either one of those negative health consequences arising as a result of radiation exposure to a parent. I don’t know what kind of tripe you read or what kind of quacks provided your diagnosed cause of their issues, but you need to find more credible sources of information.