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 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 ******************** ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.