We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Quantity and quality

Those who have a superstitious aversion to nuclear power on the grounds that “the waste will be radioactive for thousands of years, man!” really ought to learn to ask, ‘what?’ and, ‘how much?’

Medical (and industrial) use of radioisotopes is happily accepted (or at least ignored) by the same people. Medicine is good. Industry is hidden in a black shade of ignorance. But power stations are bad. Like the Bomb.

This rather misses that medical materials can be very dangerous. Those “thousands of years” for power waste also indicate lower specific activity. Is a long period of mild, static, buried, danger really a thing to have nightmares about, when really fearful stuff is to be found loose at the end of the street?

Perhaps this story will lead to better public understanding:

The Oxfordshire-based company was transporting part of a piece of cancer treatment equipment, which had been decommissioned at Cookridge Hospital in Leeds, to the Sellafield complex on 11 March, 2002.

But a “plug” was left off a specially built 2.5 tonne container to carry the contaminated material on a lorry.

Mark Harris, prosecuting for the Health and Safety Executive, said: “Through pure good fortune no-one involved in the removal, containment and transfer of the source may have been directly exposed to the radiation beam.

“The risk of such exposure was undoubtedly present – at Cookridge, during the journey and at Sellafield.”

He said detected radiation at Sellafield was between 100 to 1,000 times above what would normally be considered a very high dose rate.

Mr Harris said it was beyond the capabilities of normal hand-held monitoring equipment.

Even discounting the doom-mongering approache of HSE prosecutors, this is a pretty alarming incident. But the chance of its changing public attitudes, or even inspiring curiosity about risk, is close to zero. We may get a small addition to the towering mass of safty-anxiety, but a sense of proportion? Never.

PS. Remarkable don’t you think, that the BBC story I cite is illustrated with, not a picture of a container lorry or a piece of radiotherapy equipment, but a glowering shot of Sellafield. The place where the danger was discovered and made safe is made the villain. The ‘Sellafield baa-d’ habit of mind – look, it even has the capitalist word “sell” embedded in it, what could be more damning? – cannot be eradicated by what RCD calls “pesky facts”.

26 comments to Quantity and quality

  • Personally I think the best thing to do with the waste is shoot it into the Sun. The sun is a huge unshielded reactor anyways. Or fire it at the moon, I dont see us colonising the moon anytime soon.

    The slowdown of space development since the 70’s has caused many of the spin-off industries not to develop as they should have (micro g manufacturing for example).

    I know there are logistical difficulties with putting radioactive waste on top of a rocket but those are merely engineering problems within our grasp to solve.

  • Pete_London

    Remarkable don’t you think, that the BBC story I cite is illustrated with, not a picture of a container lorry or a piece of radiotherapy equipment, but a glowering shot of Sellafield.

    Err ….. nope.

  • Julian Taylor

    Do you have any idea how heavy a spent Uranium fuel rod is? To give you a small idea consider the size of your little finger from tip to the first knuckle – that would weigh around 2Kg if it was Uranium, and considerably more if it was Plutonium.

    Far better maybe to take all those disused deep coal mines, or even those 4 mile-deep disused gold mines in South Africa, and bury it in there. Of course we could just load it all up into C5’s and drop it all on Riyadh.

  • Andrew Duffin

    It’s true that radio-isotopes are widely used in medicine and that nobody minds.

    However it is also interesting that the good old Chemical technique of “Nuclear Magnetic Resonance”. when used in a medical context is called “Magnetic Resonance Imaging”.

    Notice that the evil scary word has been left out.

    Ignorance is bliss, it seems.

  • guy herbert

    Do you have any idea how heavy a spent Uranium fuel rod is?

    Well that’s pretty much the point of my suggestion that people ask “what?” and “how much?”. It is the actual physical and chemical properties of the materials in question that matter, not magical thinking about whether they are radioactive or not.

    Most ‘low-level nuclear waste’ really isn’t noticeably radioactive compared with, say, the average Aberdonian kerbstone. If the gowns and gloves that make up a lot of it were being incinerated rather than entombed in concrete, it would make more sense and be little cause for concern.

    On the other hand, a spent fuel-rod would not be a suitable pillow, but a rational disposal policy would be worrying rather more about heavy metal poisoning than radiation exposure.

  • John Rippengal

    The point nobody even here seems to appreciate is that the required storage area for dangerous high level waste for the whole of the Uk nuclear industry both military and civil since the forties when it all started is just the small corner of one mine; not even the whole of a little mine let alone multiple mines.

    Such is the propaganda power of single issue maniacs.

  • simon

    The BBC types know that nuclear power is unnecessary because everyone should start to live a much greener lifestyle and forego many modern ways of life. All except them of course. They will continue to consume much more than the average earth dweller, using their bloated paypackets that are guaranteed by snoopers and the criminal justice system.

  • We are in the process of replacing a radiosurgery units at one of our hospitals. The “core” is so hot and active that it decays to a level that is not useful in only a few years, and is housed in what amounts to a concrete bunker.

    And people are kicking each other in the shins to install more of these. Next to hospitals! The horror! You’d think we’d have giant paper mache puppet marches and drumming marathons non-stop. But no, if it doesn’t look like a demonic temple of nuclear evil, the usual suspects don’t mind.

    They’ve got these things married up to CT scanners now, so they can hit a moving target within your body and not the surrounding tissue. Way cool.

  • Steve P

    “Personally I think the best thing to do with the waste is to shoot it at the sun….Or fire it at the moon.”
    Isn’t there a danger that the accumulated waste could cause a chain reaction of explosions, resulting in the moon being blasted out of orbit?
    Then again, that was supposed to happen in 1999 wasn’t it?

  • I think it revealing that we have megatons of low level nuclear waste, much of it stored with 1940’s era technology, in multiple facilities all over the US and the rest of the developed world and that we have had effectively zero incidents and no fatalities, yet people still contend that we don’t understand how to handle these materials. Clearly such people are not working from an empirical analysis of the actual track record of handling nuclear materials.

  • nic

    I wouldn’t imagine you guys here would be that pro-nuclear power. For sure it gets ridiculously bad press in some areas. But there is another reason it is problematic. No private firms will actually take on board the risk of running it. They will build it, but I think governments have always had to be the ones actually managing it. So if companies aren’t willing to invest, does that not suggest the market has de-selected nuclear?

  • Julian Morrison

    You know, I think that an whole lot of people associate power stations with “bad” because they’re simply so ugly. All that steam, smoke, bare muck-streaked concrete and vast, windowless boxy construction.

    If the people who built the things at least went to the bother of painting them some vaguely non-objectionable colour, a lot of PR good could be done. Even better, build them pretty from the get-go. A bit of brick facade, perhaps fake some windows. Rocket science it isn’t!

  • guy herbert

    I’m not so much pro-nuclear-power as anti-irrational-policy. I don’t mind people having irrational motivations and strange beliefs, but if someone wants to tell other people what to do, then they need to have solid grounds to do so.

  • Ben

    Look at New Zealand. An ally in the war on terror, yet refuses to allow ships containing nuclear material in it’s ports.

  • guy herbert

    That’s an impressive non-sequitur, at first sight, Ben.

    As far as I know the NZ objection is to nuclear weapons, which don’t have an obvious use in low intensity warfare (of which there is none in New Zealand currently). They do import medical isotopes.

    Care to expand your line of thinking?

  • Julian Taylor

    I’m not so much pro-nuclear-power as anti-irrational-policy.

    Absolutely. I have never understood the rationale of the UK environmentalists that nuclear energy either does more damage than any other power generating form, or ‘could’ do more damage. The French have over 78% of their power requirements handled by nuclear reactors and the Czech Republic has over 60% of its power needs from that, while the UK has less than 24% from just 7 GCR reactors and one fairly old PWR at Sizewell B.

    I’m clearly against the logic that built a pretty big Gas Cooled Reactor station on impacted shingle (Dungeness apparently has a fleet of trucks working 24/7 in order to reinforce the coastline around the power station) but I still find it very weird that environmentalists would prefer IGCC coal-fired stations to nuclear, given that the coalgas processing method still involves the disposal or burial of extremely hazardous and harmful waste residues

    No private firms will actually take on board the risk of running it. They will build it, but I think governments have always had to be the ones actually managing it.

    The UK’s nuclear stations are actually managed by a privatised company – British Energy Plc – albeit with significant subsidies from the government.

  • Joshua

    I believe the New Zealand nuclear ban is against nuclear armed and powered ships. It’s fine to bring medical isotopes in, but not on ships that run on nuclear power (and certainly not on ships packing nuke heat).

    Weird country.

  • Gormie

    You don´t die from the radiation typically emitted from medical isotopes – even at 100-fold higher doses than recommended. Close-up exposure to disasters like Chernobyl, however, will kill you in a matter of days. I think the death toll from that disaster amounts to a couple of hundred plus maybe +1000 early deaths from thyroid cancer. (Curiously, early deaths due to all other cancers are pretty much unaltered in Ukranie and Belorussia). Generally, the radiation scare has been blown out of proportions. I say, lets build some more nuclear power plants and employ radioisotopes in ALL fields of medicine…..

  • The Last Toryboy

    One of the worst nuclear accidents actually happened due to a medical isotope – caesium chloride, in Brazil I think it was.

  • guy herbert

    You don´t die from the radiation typically emitted from medical isotopes – even at 100-fold higher doses than recommended.

    Well, that rather depends on the damage done.

  • Gormie

    Guy Herbert:

    The girl mentioned in the article is being treated for a brain tumor (which may kill her under all circumstances) with high intensity radiation not unlike X-rays. These rays can cause serious burns, which is what she so painfully has learnt. Anyways, apart from the burns no new tumors or diseases has been detected… And she may still recover completely.

  • Nick M

    I lived in Gateshead in the 80s. We had a vaguely loony -left council who put up lots of nice smiley sun signs declaring Gateshead a nuclear free zone. Every week a train would rattle past my house taking stuff to Sellafield. The council couldn’t stop it so they didn’t mention it. What they did block was the Queen Elizabeth hospital’s attempt to buy a NMR scanner, because the N stands for nuclear. The hospital bought it anyway because when they called it an MRI scanner there was no complaint. Which might explain Andrew Duffin’s point.

    The anti-nuke lobby are, frankly, bonkers. They generally don’t have the slightest idea how a nuke station operates. I do because I’ve got 2 degrees in physics. The idea that we can do something as big as electrify an entire country without any unpleasant consequences is farcical. The idea that we can do it with windmills is beyond contempt.

    I like nuke plants, except Iranian ones.

  • Peter Melia

    I was intrigued by the HSE official’s characterisation of the offence as a “beam” of radiation, for the journey of 130 miles. The HSE thought it was “fortunate” that the beam pointed down to the ground. Logically there now exists, in England, an irradiated track of ground 130 miles long. How wide is it? How “hot”? The moving lorry irradiated the ground it passed over, and when the lorry stopped at traffic lights, there must have been more intense irradiation, giving hotter spots than when the lorry was moving. Places with traffic lights might well be more heavily populated than the open road, and therefore the risk to humans might well higher. Shouldn’t this frightfully dangerous stretch of England now be fenced off for the half-life period of the radiation, for reasons of public safety?

  • guy herbert

    Only in the twisted logic of radiophobes.

    The substance involved would have to have been a gamma-emitter. No actual leakage of material required for a dangerous beam. Any inadvertent ionization of bits of road is likely without further radioactive consequence.

  • Paul Marks

    A good posting.