Aucbvax.1871
fa.energy
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!OAF@MIT-MC
Tue Jun 23 06:22:53 1981
Energy digest
Administrivia
Energy costs of operating a nuclear reactor,
Iraq attack,
Clipping service - part 7,
Basic technology awareness test
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Administrivia: I'm back, and will do the energy mailings again. Part 8
of the clipping service is already available, but will be held for a day
or two to let the mailer breathe. The entire clipping service (to date)
will go into an FTP-able file shortly, and be made available.
Oded
------------------------------
ES@MIT-MC 06/10/81 23:18:08
Re: Energy costs of operating a nuclear reactor.
"A 45 MW plant is enough to enrich the fuel required by a 1000 MW plant.
And about 6% of a reactor lifetime output is needed to build and operate
the reactor." -- Petr Beckmann, "The health hazards of not going
nuclear", p. 127.
Of course, with breeder reactors, alot less enrichment is needed.
------------------------------
Date: 11 Jun 1981 0931-PDT
From: ICL.REDFORD at SU-SCORE
Subject: Iraq attack
Anybody know more about the Iraqi nuclear reactor that the Irsaelis
just blew up? I've heard that it had a 70 MW thermal output, but wasn't
intended to produce power. What was the stated reason for getting it?
Isotope production? Source of neutrons? I've also heard that only 25
pounds of enriched uranium was ever going to be there at one time, which
doesn't seem like enough to make much of a bomb. One bomb wouldn't do
them much good anyhow. They would need at least one for testing, and
then enough to annihilate Israel. If they just blew up Tel Aviv the
Israelis would have the sanction of the world to lay waste to Iraq.
-------
------------------------------
Date: 11 June 1981 19:57 edt
From: Schauble.Multics at MIT-Multics
Subject: Clipping Service - Nuclear Industry Series, part 7
This is the seventh in a many part transcription of a Phoenix Gazette
series on Three Mile Island and the nuclear industry. All material is
by Andrew Zipser, Gazette reporter.
The next two items are
- a summary of the Rasmussen report, and
- a brief description of plant security and evacuation measures
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Silent Accident
Fuel Cycle poses risks from beginning to end
We're talking about a substance that is so incredibly toxic that
everybody who comes in contact with it and gets it into their
lungs will die of a lung cancer. You don't know you've breathed
it into your lungs. You can't smell it, you can't taste it, and
you can't see it.
Nor can I, as a doctor, determine that you've got plutonium in
your lungs. When a cancer develops, I can't say that cancer was
made by plutonium ... And you'll feel healthy for 15 to 20 years
to 30 years while you're carrying that plutonium in your lungs,
until one day you get a lung cancer.
Dr. Helen Caldicott, pediatrician at Boston's Children's
Hospital Medial Center
The wind that whips across the deserts of the Colorado Plateau
has left its mark. Age after endless age it has chisled the
landscape ever more finely, working with sand and patience and an
abundance of time beyond comprehension.
Now its breath is tainted with poison.
The uranium used by power plants is neat, compact, and efficient.
Yet its origins are in the bowels of the earth, where it is rare and
diffuse. It has to be mined and it has to be milled, and that is a
dirty, hazardous business with its own share of risks. And the result
is not only neat, compact fuel pellets but mountains of dirty,
hazardous waste.
The problems associated with the mining and milling of uranium go
back more than 30 years, to a time when the U.S. government needed
fissionable material for its atomic bomb program. The uranium it was
after is buried in that high plateau that stretches across four
states; the men who mined it were, by and large, people of the Navajo
Nation. They worked without respirators, in shafts that often had
little or no ventilation. Some say they drank the water flowing
through the mines, not knowing they were poisoning themselves.
And 10 to 15 years later they started dying. Some tribal
spokesmen have claimed that more than half of all the miners who
worked from 1948 to 1966 have died of radiation poisoning, a figure
consistent with radiation fatalities encountered in European mines 20
and 30 years later.
In 1978, responding to the miner's pleas, Phoenix attorneys
William Mahoney and Stewart Udall filed suit against the Federal~r
government and against the companies that had worked the mines. More
than 200 plantiffs were named, including 39 widows and 185 disabled
miners and their families; the damages sought, for alleged
negligence, run into the millions.
"The tragedy," Udall says, "is that these Navajos didn't speak
English, they didn't know what they were getting into, they didn't
get workman's compensation. You have a first-class industrial tragedy
here -- no one got anything and the big companies just walked away...
The pro-nuclear people are asking the wrong questions when they say
nobody's been hurt by nuclear power. If people are killed by
radiation in mining, that's nuclear power -- that's part of the
entire cycle."
Udall, former Secretary of the Interior, says he was "an
unswerving supporter of nuclear power" when he left office in 1969.
Since then, he adds, "The more I look at the tragedy that's been left
in the wake of this thing, the more horrified I am."
Three years later the legal actions are still wending their way
through the courts. An appeal on the civil suit won't be heard before
the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for another six to eight months,
Mahoney estimates. The case against the government has progressed
even more slowly.
Spokesmen for the nuclear industry, while deploring the Navajo
fatalities, have argued that accidents will happen in any industry --
that coal miners are also susceptible to cancers and other lung
diseases, that in any industry there are hazards that must be
accepted if energy is to be produced and goods are to be manufactured.
Yet there is another aspect of the uranium mining business that
has a broader health aspect, affecting not only the industry but the
general public. Ten to 15 million tons of ore are processed each year
by the country's 16 uranium mills; more than 150 million tons of
tailings, a fine powder left over after the uranium is extracted,
have accumulated. These tailings still contain large amounts of other
radioactive elements such as thorium, radium, and radon.
Twenty and 20 years ago, before the danger posed by this waste
was recognized, the tailings were used to build houses. Millions of
dollars were eventually spent to tear most of these dwellings down,
but even today, officials of the Environmental Protection Agency say,
people in more remote areas are living in radioactive homes. Don
Hendricks, with EPA's Las Vegas office, says his agency recently ran
a gamma scan throughout most of the Navajo Nation, "and there are
certainly homes in the Monument Valley area that are built with them
(tailings) and people are still living in them."
The tailings that haven't been used in construction are also a
problem. Typically, they sit in large, uncovered piles. Some of the
dust is carried away by the wind. Some leaches into the ground, where
it will eventually contaominate the ground water.
Hendricks says the EPA has targeted 25 tailings for cleanup,
including one in Monument Valley and one near Tuba City. [For
non-Arizona residents, these are in the northern part of the state.
PLS] Because the Arizona wastes are relatively isolated, cleanup will
probably consist of burial. Other tailings are in heavily populated
areas and will have to be removed. A pile of tailings in Salt Lake
City, Hendircks estimates, will cost up to $100 million to move. The
bill in most cases will be picked up by the taxpayers.
Radiation exposure of a different kind has been claimed in the
wake of an accident at Church Rock, N.M. On the morning of July 16,
1979, a mile-long earthen dam burst and sent an estimated 94 million
gallons of radioactive water down the Rio Puerco. Although the spill
was brought under control within a few hours, the volume of water was
so great it broached the river banks and eventually reached 40 miles
across the state line into Arizona.
The Navajo response was one of outrage. Charging that cleanup
efforts were inadequate and the response of Federal officials
delayed, tribal vice-chariman Frank E. Paul blasted the entire
industry at Congressional hearings in Washington, D.C. "We are
unwilling to submit to either the tyranny of exploitation by energy
companies ... or the tyranny of regulation by Federal agencies who
are responsible to no one else other than their own desires to
expirement with the future of America," he said.
Congressman Mo Udall, chairman of the House Interior
subcommittee, was in at least partial agreement. The company's own
consultants had warned about soil conditions at the dam, he noted,
and cracks had appeared as far back as December, 1979. "At least
three and possible more Federal and state regulatory agencies had
ample opportinity to conclude that such an accident was likely to
occur," he added, virtually echoing the criticisms that had been
leveled at Three Mile Island.
This incident, too, is now in the courts, with 125 Navajo
plaintiffs arguing that the spill poisoned water supplies and
livestock. But here also a resolution is unlikely for several years:
while the Navajos have sought to have the issue heard in tribal
court, United Nuclear Corp., the defendant, has tried to have it
moved to a state or Federal arena. The jurisdictional dispute alone
will "take some time yet," say attorneys in the case.
And in the meantime, claims attorney Stephen Harvey, seepage at
the tailings pond continues to contaminate the groundwater supply
with "thousands and thousands of gallons" of radioactive water. That,
he says, is "a separate but related problem to the whole situation."
----------
Three Mile Island raised a lot of "what ifs".
What if events had developed otherwise? What if the dreaded
hydrogen bubble had exploded after all, as was first thought by
government regulators? What if the series of incredible blunders had
continued just a little longer, resulting in a melt-down and a
subsequent steam explosion? What if, by one mechanism or another, the
containment building had been ruptured, spewing highly radioactive
wastes over hundreds of square miles?
How many would have died? How many more would have sickened? How
many would have lost their homes and livelihood, forever banished
from a lethal wasteland?
The answers to those questions have been debated for two years,
with little chance of a consenus ever evolving. The industry's basic
position is that the questions are beside the point: that there are
so many safeguards built into reactors that the possiblilty of anyone
being killed by a radiation release are too remote to contemplate.
Others dispute that assessment as groundless and self-serving.
To understand the hazards of radiation, one must first understand
a little about what it is and how it is produced. Reactors are fueled
by uranium, a naturally occurring substance mined principally, in
this country, in New Mexico and Wyoming. Uranium is one of several
elements that are radioactive; it emits highly charged subatomic
particles. When those particles hit other uranium atoms they cause
them to fission, or split; some of the fissioned particles are also
radioactive.
That radioactivity comes in several forms. Gamma radiation is
comprised of the the smallest particles, called photons, which have
so much energy they can pass right through several feet of concrete.
Beta particles, which are high-speed electrons, have slightly less
energy and are blocked a little more easily. Alpha particles, made up
of two protons and two neutrons, are the biggest and slowest and have
so little energy, comparatively speaking, that even your skin can
stop them.
The danger posed by these radioactive particles is that they
affect non-radioactive elements as well as the radioactive ones.
Radiation that strikes the body, for instance, will disrupt
individual chromosomes. If enough vital cells are irradiated, death
will result; lesser damage will result in genetic defects or in
cancers that may not crop up for many years.
This damage is cumulative. In other words, if you suffer a little
radiation damage now and a little more two years from now, it all
adds up -- the body isn't able to heal itself between exposures.
That's why doctors are now much more careful about how many X-rays
they give their patients, since X-rays are also a form of radiation,
similar to gamma rays.
There are two other things one should know about radiation. The
first is that of all species, man seems the most sensitive to its
effects. The other is that it can't be detected except with special
equipment. If TMI had suffered a steam explosion and a radioactive
plume had been released, none of the residents downwind of the plant
would have seen, smelled, or tasted the fallout as it passed
overhead. Their only information that anything disastrous was
happening would have come from the officials at the plant.
If the contents of a reactor were suddenly spewed into the air,
the plume would be a cookbook of poisonous elements. Some would be
gamma emitters, some would be beta and alpha emitters. Some, such as
iodine-131, would decay into less dangerous elements within a matter
of weeks; others, such as carbon-14, would remain hazardous for tens
of thousands of years.
Such a plume would be carried by the prevailing winds, dispersing
with distance and therefore posing less of a threat with each hour.
But those within its range would be exposed in three different ways:
- The plume's gamma emitters would irridiate every sturcture over
which it passed. The only protection would be several feet of
earth of concrete, as might be found in the basement of a large
office building.
- Although the plume would be made up of gases and aerosols, some
of the heavier aerosols would start sinking to the ground. This
radioactive debris would continue to irridiate anyone in the
area long after the plume had passed.
- Some of the aerosol compounds would be breathed in and would
lodge in the lungs. There would be no way to filter these
particles out of the air.
The effects of such an accident, depending on the amount and mix
of radioactive elements released, could last for thousands of years.
Some particles, such as radioiodine and strontium 90, would
contaminate grass, get eaten by cows, would be concentrated in milk,
and then be ingested by children. The iodine would be absorbed by
their thyroids and the strontium by their bones, which is where red
blood cells are manufactured. Years later, depending on the dose,
those same children would stand significantly greater chances of
developing cancer of the thyroid, bone cancer, or leukemia.
Serious as those consequences might be, some people are even more
concerned about yet another substance manufactured by nuclear
reactors. Plutonium is almost never found in nature and is
essentially a man-made element. It is created when uranium in a
reactor doesn't split, capturing some of the neutrons that are
bombarding it instead of splitting under their impact.
The danger of plutonium is that is lasts almost forever, with a
half-life of 24,000 years. That means that if you have an ounce of
plutonium today, 24,000 years from now you'll have only half an ounce
left; the rest of it will have decayed into something else. After
another 24,000 years you'll have a quarter ounce, after yet another
24,000 years you'll have an eighth of an ounce, and so on.
Plutonium is also an alpha-emitter, which means that you could
carry a pound of it in your pocket and not worry about your
chromosomes -- unless you breathed some of it into your lungs. Then
you'd be in a lot of trouble indeed, because the minutest piece of
this substance would constantly bombard your lungs with those slow
but heavy particles. And no one would know you had ingested any
plutonium because radiation monitoring equipment wouldn't be able to
detect it -- your own body would act as a radiation shield.
How much plutonium are we talking about, and how much is enough
to cause problems? A nuclear plant the size of those at Palo Verde
will produce approximately 800 pounds of plutonium each year. The
amount that will cause lung cancer, most scientists say, is a
millionth of a gram.
----------
The plutonium problem, and the problem of radioactive substances
in general, is not confined to speculation about accidents at nuclear
plants. Even if there never is another Three Mile Island, all the
nuclear waste produced by the nation's 72 reactors has to be disposed
of in some manner. And because it is so highly toxic, and because it
has to be protected for thousands of years, no one has yet decided
what to do with it.
As matters now stand, virtually all of the high-level waste
generated by commercial reactors is stored at the reactor sites. At
Palo Verde, for instance, one-third of the fuel rods will be removed
from the reactor each year and will be stored in nearby pits filled
with water. The pits have a capacity of seven years of operation and
can, with some modifications, have this increased to 17 years.
But storing spent fuel rods at Palo Verde and at other plants is
only an interim solution. The final responsibility of dealing with
the waste is the Federal government's, which has delayed a solution
for decades -- essentially ever since the mid-'50s. The problem has
become so critical, some analysts say, that several reactors will
have to shut down within five or six years because they are running
out of places to put their nuclear garbage.
The frustration felt by industry officials is palpable. "I
believe the industry has done everything it can to force the
government to get on with it, to take the responsibility and make a
decision," says Ed Van Brunt, project manager at Palo Verde. The
delays, he adds, are not due to technical considerations, but to
political ones -- a view echoed by Gov. Bruce Babbitt, who says he is
satisfied that waste disposal "is technically very manageable."
Yet the political problem is not an insignificant one: Babbitt,
although he has supported the idea of regional waste depositories in
principle, has not been as quick to nominate an Arizona site for
consideration. Nor is he unique; the issue is a hot one in more than
one sense.
High-level wastes are both toxic and thermally hot. If you put
just one spent fuel rod on the ground, according to Dr. Helen
Caldicott, and drove past it on a motorcycle going 90 miles per hour,
the radiation will kill you. The accident at Kyshtym, Russia, is
believed to have occurred because reactor wastes ruptured their
containers and migrated underground, eventually reaching critical
mass and exploding.
So final disposal has to keep the wastes isolated, shielded, and
separated. And it has to be effective for thousands of years because
of the long half-lives of the elements involved. That all adds up to
a lot of considerations.
Today's conventional theories hold that the way to do all this is
to ceramicize the waste, then bury it in deep granite or salt dome
deposits. Salt domes are generally preferred, partly because they are
indicative of geologic stability and partly because the heat from the
waste containers would fuse the salt around them, providing radiation
shielding comparable to concrete.
Yet there are a lot of "what ifs" surrounding these proposals,
too. There is the possibility of accidents to the wastes while they
are being transported, with an estimated seven shipments a year
required for reactors the size of those at Palo Verde. There is the
problem of forecasting geologic stability over periods of time longer
than all of recorded civilization. There is a history of leaks at
some government storage facilities, where steel containers designed
to last 50 years have given out after only three, leading critics to
question our technological abilities.
These and other concerns have resulted in endless delays. When
Jimmy Carter first came into office, estimates of when a central
depository would be available were targeted at 1985. Two years ago
the Federal government's Interagency Review Group on nuclear waste
management reported to Carter that "the preferred approach to
long-term nuclear waste disposal may prove difficult to implement in
practice and may involve residual risks for future generations."
And last year, as Carter was preparing to yield his office to a
new president, an even gloomier forecast was being made. The
Department of Energy, asserting there are no major technological
problems, nevertheless said a commercial underground dump is at least
17 years away. An application for a specific site won't even be ready
until 1987, DOE reported, with construction expected to take a decade
-- and 20 years if the NRC decides exploratory shafts should be
drilled first.
------------------------------
Date: 17 Jun 1981 1138-EDT
From: JoSH <JOSH AT RUTGERS>
Subject: basic technology awareness test
I'm soliciting questions for a test to be given to people who
come to your door with petitions against (they are always against)
various projects in the neighboorhood they deem offensive or
dangerous. The idea is to scare off the ones who are nothing
but mouth, and find out how much the rest know about what they're
talking about.
Here's a sample of the questions I've come up with:
Standardized Basic Technology Awareness Test
Answer by checking some of the answers given to the question.
Example: The following are food:
[ ] wood
[x] ice cream
[ ] aluminum siding
[x] stuffed crab
It is quite possible for a question to have no correct answers
given, or for all of the given answers to be correct.
1. The following are kinds of radiation:
[ ] light
[ ] uranium
[ ] sound
[ ] ozone
[ ] microwaves
2. Which of the following might produce static (ie on a radio or TV)?
[ ] turning on a water faucet
[ ] plugging in an iron
[ ] walking across a carpet and touching a doorknob
[ ] rubbing two sticks together
[ ] putting salt into a carbonated beverage
3. These are feedback mechanisms:
[ ] a garbage can
[ ] a thermostat
[ ] the control knob of a washing machine
[ ] the filter in a washing machine
[ ] the unbalance signal in a washing machine
4. The following correctly describe the electricity available at
an ordinary household wall socket:
[ ] 100 watts
[ ] 110 volts
[ ] interleaved
[ ] asynchronous
[ ] .06 kilohertz
5. A turbine would typically be found in which of these kinds of
electric generating plants?
[ ] hydroelectric
[ ] coal-fired
[ ] oil-fired
[ ] nuclear
6. If I were planning a power system, I might want to provide:
[ ] a kilowatt-hour per person
[ ] a kilowatt per person
[ ] a kilowatt per person per day
[ ] an arctangent per second
[ ] a megajoule per second
[ ] a kilometer per second
If you think of a good question or two, please send them to JOSH@RUTGERS.
I'll distribute the results to anyone who requests them.
-------
END OF ENERGY DIGEST
********************
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