Nuclear Disasters of the Past
Thursday, March 17th, 2011 at
1:59 pm
So, Three-Mile Island was the worst nuclear accident on US soil. How many deaths are epidemologically attributed to the accident. Well, one study I was quoted in passing by a co-worker was that 50-100 deaths resulted from the accident. All these deaths alas, were due to the increased coal mining and pollutants from the increase in coal fired electrical production.
Who wants to guess that the aftermath of the recent earthquake and reactor incedents have similar “fallout?”
Filed under: Mark O. • Offbeat Questions
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How do you define “accident?”
The worst nuclear screw-ups on American soil involved the mining of uranium and its refining, and testing of atom bombs in the atmosphere at the Nevada Test Site. I’m guesstimating that at least 5,000 died from those exercises directly linked to the stuff, maybe another 5,000 to 10,000 with links more tenuous.
Failure to understand and prevent those deaths goes a long way toward making the current unjustified paranoia.
Ed,
You’re not making sense. Mining Uranium is dangerous not because of radiation but because its a heavy metal. Why, oh why then don’t we hear an outcry to halt the mining of other rare earths used in electronics and batteries? Stop buying hybrid autos for heavens sake, you’re killing miners!
Nevada test sites? Those were atmospheric explosions involving exactly what sort of reactor?
Failure to think sensibly goes a long way toward justifying your irrational paranoia.
You saw the widely noted XKCD graphic? Battling innumeracy would be another big step. And you’re on the wrong side of the line, mister.
To most people, nuclear is nuclear. They don’t distinguish between radiation from a power plant and radiation from an atom bomb — nor should they, really — same stuff, same byproducts. The only issue is dosage.
But on nuclear anything, authorities have a long, long history of misinformation, disinformation, and lying to the public about what went on. I remember the executive from the American Power Institute who cornered me at a Georgetown party and went on at length about how ‘more people died in the back of Ted Kennedy’s car than have ever died from nuclear power production.’ He’d never heard of the Arco, Idaho reactor blowup. “Well, that was an accident, and not sabotage.” It was sabotage. Now I see that there is even some question about whether it was radiation or steam that killed the guys — the word for years was steam, but then they buried the reactor, I hear.
Mining was dangerous because no one told the miners about radiation. At the mine on the Navajo reservation there was nearly 100% fatality due to lung cancer — among non-smoking Indians. Same in Marysville, Utah. Mining uranium was dangerous because of radiation that doesn’t occur with non-radioactive rare earths.
The “safe” levels of radiation from the Nevada test site caused acute cancers and leukemia in about 2,000 people downwind, killing several hundred kids. Thousands of people lost their thyroids.
Three Mile Island occurred just a few weeks after my run-in with the API guy. His groups had testified just a few weeks earlier that such an accident was absolutely impossible, and they blamed Jane Fonda for the movie “China Syndrome.” The accident at Three Mile Island was almost a carbon copy of the accident portrayed in the movie.
I think we need to be safe with nuclear power. Safety and security need to be assured. That’s the right side of the line. If you’re promoting killing a few thousand more people with bad data, or if you’re now claiming that history somehow disappeared, it will come back to kill the nuclear industry again.
In the end, it wasn’t the safety and security troubles that killed new construction. The plant costs were underestimated so much that investors sued because they were certain that they’d been lied to. Palo Pinto here in Texas came in at about five times the cost sold to investors and the banks who lent the money. When the power companies said they hadn’t lied, the issues of safety and security and confirmed lies came up. It wasn’t pretty.
It’s telling, I think, that while the Japanese power officials have been astonishingly open, and the government of Japan has pushed for even more openness, people think they’re lying about radiation releases.
You can’t cure a credibility problem with bullying.
You’d do well to get a copy of John McPhee’s book on safety and security in all phases of the nuclear industry, The Curve of Binding Energy.
Ted Taylor is gone, alas. I think when the guy who understands nuclear fission better than everybody else tells us we need to worry about safety and security, we should listen. Nothing much has changed since he died.
Get the McPhee book.
Ed,
I read the book in the 1970s. I came out of it a strong proponent of nuclear power. Why didn’t you?
Are your really saying that? Do you suggest then that household bleach should be banned because it contains chlorine and chlorine killed tens of thousands in WWI? No. And for the same reason you can’t compare When you’re having a discussion of nuclear energy it is not relevant to discuss nuclear weapons testing. Sorry.
Look. You’re not even listening to me. I asked you to look at the XKCD chart. Did you see where the 3-mile Island radiation leak intensity falls. Do you want to ban the medical things of the same scope? Do you want to ban airline flights because of radiation dangers?
In the movie the core sustains a meltdown. There was no fuel movement at Three Mile Island and very little radiation release.
Do you know why plant install costs go up? It’s because of religious objections to nuclear power coming from the green movement that can at any time halt construction for “yet another study” and it doesn’t matter if a study was done before. Regulatory barriers and burdens are what are killing the costs.
And apparently you can’t cure it with demonstrations of what radiation levels mean, e.g., the chart mentioned above. You might take your own advice regarding AGW, btw. Because there bullying has been the primary tactic.
Can you explain why the max annual radiation leakage requirement for nuclear plants is far lower than that what coal fired plants emit?
Plant designs have improved over the decades. However, because regulations have blocked all new plant construction our plants are 30-40 years old and have antiquated designs. A person who was actually truly interested in safety would be pushing for new reactors to be built ASAP … not to block them.
Ed,
If you’re actually willing to read something, I’d suggest the pdfs linked in essay of mine a while back here. It’s a MIT study which makes its recommendations for the future of power in the US focusing on nuclear considerations.
I did — but I got Taylor’s message. Safety and Security first.
There is no regulation “blocking” construction of a nuclear power plant in the U.S., except this: Bankers won’t lend the money, because nuclear construction was inherently dishonest in forecasting costs.
If you really think the Securities and Exchange Commission must be gutted before a nuclear power plant is built, you’re wackeier than I thought.
A great tribute to the people who backstopped the system that had been claimed to be “failsafe.” (In the movie, the core doesn’t blow down, either — it was the same accident. No release of radiation in the movie, either, just the secuirty guys shotting the nuclear engineer who saved the plant and the corporation.)
My point you don’t deal with. Testimony to Congress was that such an accident couldn’t happen. Then it did. Some would call it karma. Some would call it a message from God. In any case, it exposed as false the claims from the nuclear industry. So, what else did they claim that was untrue?
There were no serious protests to stop the Palo Pinto plant. But the plans were inadequate for existing safety regulations, and redesign inflated costs a lot. No environmentalist insisted on redesign. No environmentalists sabotaged the first set of plans. No environmentalist picketed the banks.
No environmentalist hoaxed up the safety inspections of welds at the Indiana, Pennsylvania site. That was done by . . . well, we don’t know who, exactly but by someone who should have known better than to duplicate the x-ray of one good weld 50 times for 50 other welds, hoping that no one would ever notice.
No regulation required the AEC to withhold safety information from the uranium miners on the Navaho reservation, nor in Marysville, Utah. No regulation required AEC and Defense to lie about fallout levels across Utah.
Taylor makes the case strongly that nuclear power can be safe and secure. He exposed flaws in safety and security, and he wondered — wisely, we see now — whether business executives could ever be trusted to build safety and security into their systems.
Ed,
“Accident” is overstating the Three Mile Island incident quite a bit. Again that’s because of news hype by the uniformed I’m thinking. And nuts like you who are pretending to be nuclear proponents when you’re not.
“Average total dose to someone living within 10 miles of Three Mile Island 80microSv”
“Radiation received from a flight from NY to LA 40 microSv”
I think testimony to Congress might be afterwards … that what happened was pretty much irrelevant regarding impact to human health and safety and your pretending otherwise is really the question. What is your motivation? Why? What is really going on here?
The incident at Three Mile Island was an accident prevented from being a catastrophe — but it certainly was not intended!
I agree that the doses from Three Mile Island were minuscule. That’s rather beside the point. Such a problem wasn’t supposed to be possible at all. It’s doubtful anyone outside the containment area was injured — but the credibility of the nuclear generating industry was shattered.
Testimony to Congress afterward did not claim that the accident was impossible — don’t confuse the hearings before the commission that studied it with testimony to Congress.
All I’m saying is, don’t make claims for safety that can’t be backed up. People may be paranoid, and overly so. No one will win them over by telling them they are paranoid, nor especially when such pronouncements are accompanied by erroneous and outright false information.
It’s telling that there is a problem at all. To the best of my determination, the TEPCO people have been open and accurate, and the Japanese government has been transparent and on the ball. Potassium iodide sales along the west coast of the U.S. are phenomenal — few people think anyone in authority is shooting straight.
Actual doses are irrelevant when no one believes the announcements.
Ed,
I can’t parse that sentence. What point are you trying to make?
And entirely unnecessary, a product of media scare tactics. Profiteering as well?
At Three Mile, are you saying there were people at the plant who were injured. Really?
No. The plant was shut down and need not have been … and it shut down any more nuclear plant construction in the US. That is the point. The problem isn’t impossible claims made by nuclear industry supporters. It’s counter factual claims and scare tactics by the so-called green movement.
If you can’t win over the paranoid by pointing out that they are paranoid … how do you do inform the paranoid of their particular plight?
You mean like statements of the nature that nuclear device testing = nuclear plant safety because they both include the adjective “nuclear”? What false information do you claim I am peddling?
You had said:
I don’t think it’s an overstatement at all. In the grand scheme of things damages were held to small scale. It was still an accident. It was not intended in any fashion — so it’s not a stretch to call the incident an accident.
Ed,
Now your being disingenuous. All unintended incidents do not rise to the level of accident.
When you are driving turn left by mistake, and have to correct by taking a longer course than intended, this does not rise to the level of what we would term an automobile accident. Similarly with Three Mile Island, the quantity of release does not rise to the level which, in a sane world, would be termed an accident. That is, an unintended release of radiation that is dwarfed by the normal operational radiation release from a coal burning plant only rises to the level of accident due to the oversensitivity to all things nuclear in the press, and apparently you as well.
Mark said:
I’m using the language the utility used, the language the NRC used, and the language the GAO used. For example, here’s one GAO report on the affair:
A half-billion dollar incident, I think, rises to the level of “accident.”
By the way, much of the assessment of the incident was done by a commission appointed by the president, The President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island.
Let’s call a shovel a shovel, a spade a spade, and an accident, an accident.