David Walters

As far as Storm van Leeuwen and Phillip Smith’s “semi-technical document” is concerned, I’m planning a new diary that will hopefully serve as a pointer in the future for when anyone brings up their flawed studies.

I actually don’t plan to spend much time on SLS, at least not more than they deserve — a good mocking of their ridiculous assumptions, mostly based on their silly “rebuttal” to the WNA critique. Rather, I plan to contrast their conclusions, which the anti-nuclear folks (such as Caldicott) parrot all the time, to the report by Wall Street Access on Uranium that was released earlier this fall.

This will not be a very in-depth diary, considering my target audience does not have a very large attention span, but even so, it will be tricky for me to find the time to write it, since I’m preoccupied with other things at the moment. Wish me luck.

Dilution is a solution with radioactive materials. Why? Because a radioactive atom emits its radiation only once. The rest of the time it is doing nothing, it is not emitting radiation. If I get five atoms of a long lived nuclide in my body, such as plutonium, the odds are that these atoms would never emit any radiation during my lifetime.

Should a waste site leak there will be damn few radioactive atoms that can get into a position to get into my body because of molecular dispersion. If they are long lived nuclides, then it is unlikely that they will emit radiation in my (or anyone else’s) lifetime.

The relationship of half-life and number of atoms actually works in our favor when the number of atoms are few. A properly designed waste site, where leakage and subsequent molecular dispersion is slow, will remove the short-lived nuclides leaving only the long-lived nuclides. Molecular dispersion of the long-lived nuclides pretty well insures that only a couple of atoms might ever get to a person.

The same is true for why TMI gave so little dose to people in the area. Basically the only nuclides that were released were gases and these gases readily disbursed, thereby causing a huge dilution-being-the-solution factor.

To echo bryfry, great rant!

That’s the thing about these anti nuclear energy arguments – they all tend to keep saying the same thing, to a large extent. So, they bring up Storm van Leeuwen and Phillip Smith’s work, well, you can just get out your existing argument against their work, if they bring up Chernobyl, well, you already know what to say about that, and so forth – well, at least it makes your side of the argument easier.

cheers
andrew/engagemedia

You even got the Chernobyl “burning” graphite part right! Even most people who are quite knowledgeable about nuclear technology screw that one up.

Major kudos!! Good job!