3 ms·
Way to conflate different isotopes that are short lived or don't bioaccumulate. The total Cs137 (which caused most of the damage) entering the biosphere from n
by Schroedingersat 4y ago
Way to conflate different isotopes that are short lived or don't bioaccumulate.
The total Cs137 (which caused most of the damage) entering the biosphere from nuclear testing was officially reported as 545PBq.
My figure from La Hague was accidentally the total including H3, not just Cs137, but seeing as that's completely fine, let's use Stellafield before big mean Greenpeace and the nuclear alarmists held them to account at the end of your supposed golden age.
This was around 4PBq/yr for reprocessing around 1500t/yr of low burnup SNF which would produce around 200t/yr or of MOX or about 10GWe
Producing 10TWe or enough energy to power the world in your fantasy breeder scenario would be 4000PBq per year of Cs137 or 8x the fallout of the entire testing program every year if even a small portion of reprocessing operated in this completely fine and normal way.
Your comparison to K40 is facile because Cs137 bioaccumulates up to 100x in food and it doesn't blend into the ocean evenly. The fukushima plume was still concentrated over a relatively small area and a few hundred m deep when it hit the coast of california 5 years later. There are still hotspots in Japan
Now prove it's safe.
- Manuel_D 4y agoThe cesium 137 that "hit" the west coast was less than a trillionth higher than the pre-release concentration. 100x of an incredibly small number is still an incredibly small number. We test waters and measure their level of radioactive material. We do the same with fish. They're not even remotely close to hazardous levels. In fact they're not even consistently above baseline: https://doh.wa.gov/community-and-environment/radiation/fukushima-update/fish-and-shellfish-testing https://doh.wa.gov/community-and-environment/radiation/fukus... You're assuming that every reprocessing plant will release the same amount of radiation as Sellafield, which was a particularly badly run plant that saw over a dozen contamination incidents. And even then, it was still less than half the figures you initially claimed La Hague was releasing. No such releases have been measured. Greenpeace's claims of widespread contamination we're not replicated. The tests around the oceans in la Hague all indicate levels of cesium isotopes orders of magnitudes lower than unsafe levels. Fish are not showing radiation contamination. Greenpeace makes fake radiation readings all the time. They tried to claim the Olympic torch path was contaminated, nobody else was able to replicate their findings: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/04/radiation-hotspots-found-near-fukushima-olympic-site-greenpeace https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/04/radiation-hots... If one activist group published tests supposedly disproving anthropic climate change, would you just ignore all scientific concensus and believe this one group? Why is that valid reasoning when it comes to believing a fringe group's claims about radiation exposure? It's just a coincidence that no healthcare authority, no food and drug agency, no oceanography department, no group besides activists seem to be able to detect this contamination? Again, just think about how absurd this idea is: France is poisoning the English channel and the UK, Belgium, and Netherlands are totally okay with it? Somehow they're able to keep radiation levels under wraps when anybody can walk out to shore and collect a sample? Fish are being contaminated but nobody seems to be able to find radioactive
- Schroedingersat 4y agoI never said it was currently unsustainable. And you're the one that wants to expand nuclear energy 50-fold and switch to breeders when the fuel runs out. Three or four coal plants would be fine. Just like the insignificant amount of reprocessing going on now is fine. You said Sellafield's emissions which were a product of a regulatory framework of the 70s were completely fine and insignificant. Now prove it. Back your position up. Demonstrate that its releases were insignificant when scaled to meet world demand and that it won't poison coastlines. Be sure to include the result of hot spots and bioaccumulation.
- Manuel_D 4y agoTest results show no level of contamination. If they existed we should be able to test a spot in the ocean and find dangerous levels of radioisotopes, but we can't. The "hot" spots are a fraction of a percent above the background levels of radiation, a fraction so small you could increase it a by a million times and it'd still be a fraction of one percent of a hazardous concentration. No bioaccumulation is happening because we don't see radioisotopes accumulating in fish, unlike say Mercury. In fact the highest cesium readings among fish in the Northwest were from before Fukushima, because concentrations are so small that Fukushima's influence is drowned out in the background noise. Governments, universities, and volunteers all monitor radiation fastidiously. They put their data online for real time monitoring, as I linked earlier. None of them find the radiation contamination you claim exist. If tests showing no contamination isn't enough for you, nothing will. You've resorted to the broken logic of demanding that others prove a negative. There's no point in trying to convince someone resorting to this kind of fallacious thinking.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoAgain, Sellafield released quadruple the radiation of Fukushima. The west irish sea, english channel, the coast of Japan, and even the coast of California all have measurable but safe accumulation of Cs137. But you are not suggesting one Fukushima, or one La Hague. You explicitly said the thousands of Sellafields required to power the world with that level of regulation and incompetence with reprocessing were fine. Suggesting that the several fukushimas a day you said was fine should be avoided was enough to earn me a condescending rant about how I don't understand radiation. Demonstrate that known models of fluid flow and known bioaccumulation factors predict these levels will stay within safe bounds in such a scenario. This isn't some fallacious broken logic, this is the exact same standard anyone who wants to pollute the ocean and says the amount is too small to be a problem shoukd be held to.