

Chernobyl's radioactive trees and the forest fire risk  - JumpCrisscross
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18721292

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jdietrich
The comments are already all about nuclear safety, so I'll just say this:

Per watthour, nuclear power is the safest form of energy production, by a very
large margin[1].

Chernobyl is the worst nuclear disaster in history. The UNSCEAR report states
that 62 deaths can reliably be attributed to the disaster. Peer-reviewed
estimates of additional deaths in the long-term range from 6,000 to 50,000.

You mightn't have heard of the Banqiao Dam, but you should have. In 1975,
Typhoon Nina destroyed 62 dams in Henan Province, China. The biggest of these,
the Banqiao Dam, released 700 million cubic metres of water over the course of
six hours. The resulting flood destroyed six million buildings, killed 26,000
people and caused a humanitarian disaster that killed another 145,000.

The business of energy is inherently dangerous. We have an instinctive
aversion to radioactivity, because it's strange and invisible, but it's just
energy. Someone falling into a nuclear reactor seems inherently more horrible
than a solar panel installer falling off a rooftop, but a death is a death.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone seems innately more frightening than the beaches
cordoned off after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but cancer from crude oil
exposure is still cancer.

We've got very good at controlling the risks of nuclear power. We know what
the worst case scenario looks like. Radiation exposure isn't nice, but neither
is a mine collapse, a gas explosion or climate change. Stories involving
radiation are attention-grabbing, but we can't allow that to distract us from
the hard data.

[1] [http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/10/snapshot-of-deaths-per-
tera...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/10/snapshot-of-deaths-per-terawatt-
hour.html)

~~~
bootload
_"... Per watthour, nuclear power is the safest form of energy production, by
a very large margin ..."_

The kids in Fukushima disagree, segment from _"Children of the Tsunami,"_ BBC,
March 1, 2012 ~ <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JS0Rf_gWFA>

~~~
dnewcome
Citing a single data point doesn't refute the quoted assertion. It is
basically the same as me trying to refute that air travel is safer than
automobile travel per passenger mile by mentioning a single notable crash.

I'm not trying to downplay the plight of those affected, but it's worth
separating these concerns when evaluating the true risks involved with any
technology that can potentially have great benefits for the bulk of humanity,
the rare catastrophe notwithstanding.

~~~
yread
You can always look at different statistics. If you count deaths per journey,
air doesn't look that good anymore
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_safety#Statistics>

~~~
nitrogen
Deaths per journey is a silly statistic. People don't fly to the neighborhood
supermarket to buy their groceries. All the inconsequential car trips at
mostly sub-lethal speeds would significantly deflate an automotive death-per-
journey statistic.

------
delinka
I digress thus:

I am two minds on the subject of nuclear power. But the "ain't so safe" side
tends to win out because humans make mistakes. We put all the failsafes in
place, we put up seawalls, we presume to know that the walls will never be
breached at the same time too many other failsafes have indeed failed. When
one valve doesn't function and no one knows because that monitoring system was
down for maintenance and the automatic switch for the backup generator got a
little too rusty and that maintenance guy hadn't reached that item on his
checklist and then the hurricane sweeps too much water inside the infallible
seawall...

We seem to hit the "too much shit failed at once" lottery too often. In
hindsight, these things may or should have been preventable. But that's after
meltdown and contamination and global panic ... This is why nuclear energy is
unpopular. And it will remain so as long as failures have the slightest chance
of contaminating so much of our world.

~~~
ScotterC
I completely agree with you. On western style reactors I think we should be
removing a lot of unnecessary safe guards and educate the public on what
actually happens in the case of a western designed, pressurized water reactor
meltdown. What happens is practically nothing but fear and panic. Chernobyl
was a very dangerous design. Fukushima was not.

No one died from radiation exposure from fukushimas meltdown and no one was
going to die. Radiation exposure is very hard for the public and even educated
people to understand. Releases of radioactive materials from a meltdown like
Fukushima are barely above normal radioactive background noise and simply will
not cause the devastation people believe it will. The most recent numbers I
saw were that in the next 20 years, 4 out of every 100,000 in the area around
Fukushima were likely to contract a form of cancer when as it was 40,000 out
of every 100,000 were already going to get some form of cancer.

This modeling is also based on the Linear No Threshold (LNT) theorem which is
patently wrong. Aside: LNT states that if 100% of people die at a high
radiation exposure then, linearly, at 1% of that exposure, 1% of people will
die. This is false. It is equivalent to saying that since 100 out of 100
people die from falling from 100ft up then at least 1 out of a 100 people will
die from falling from 1ft.

Radiation is just not the monster it's made out to be.

What happens in a meltdown in a pressurized water reactor is the fuel turns to
a solid mass with enough decay heat that it's still hot. It ruins the plant,
yes. It's a economic loss, yes. But as far as I'm concerned, if it's not
dispersed into the atmosphere then it's not an issue and it won't be dispersed
into the atmosphere because it won't light on fire. Not in a design like
Fukushima or three mile island.

~~~
knb
Your post is so wrong that it is almost trolling. Just some counterexamples.

The Fukushima Mark-1 reactors are of very dangerous design, and that is well-
known. (For example their containment is perforated at key positions, by
design)

Ambient radioactivity is so high in central Japan that it should definitely be
considered a hazard (just search on Youtube for Japanese people filming
themselves walking around with Geiger counters and measuring the signal, e.g
Youtube user "Chanbukimi"). Government ignores it or plays it down.

Exremely radioactive "radiotrophic funghus" (see Wikipedia) is everywhere in
the Fukushima area and even in Tokyo.

Cancer risks by long-term low-dose radioactive exposure are even higher than
estimated by the models promoted by governmental regulatory bodies. Risks are
higher for children and women in particular, and simple back of the envelope
calculations can show this convincingly (to me, that is).

The whole food chain in Japan is messed up for the foreseeable future, and
this holds for Pacific seafood as well. Young Tuna fish catched in the San
Diego area are slightly radioactive, although these fish are so young that
they could not have stayed in radioactive seawater near Japan for more than a
couple of months, and they are still contaminated.

There is much more contamination to come as the radioactivity spreads just by
natural mass transfer processes (water cycle, carbon cycle).

I for one am very pessimistic.

~~~
nitrogen
I will be first in line to eat any fish with evidence of radioactivity from
Fukushima that still meets legal limits on radioactivity in food.

------
wtracy
When I first read the subject line, I expected to see some outlandish claim
that the trees had accumulated enough radioactive material to generate enough
heat to make the tree spontaneously ignite.

The actual concern is that radioactive materials sequestered in the trees
might be re-released into the atmosphere if the trees were to catch fire. That
is an unsettling possibility.

------
ChuckMcM
I always wonder that given how efficiently the trees pick up the nucleotides
of Cesium that there isn't a logging program in place where trees are logged,
then processed into charcoal, and then run through a power plant where the
burned by products are post processed to remove the Cesium.

~~~
agilebyte
More than 90% of the radioactivity of the Red Forest is concentrated in the
soil.

[<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Forest>]

