EPA says a little radiation may be healthy

[NNadir]

8. Thank you for your kind words. The text contained syntactic errors from my inability to...

...smoothly type on a cell phone (and to fight off the autocorrect) given my fat fingers, but you seem to have gotten the basic idea despite my sloppy typing which I had no time to correct.

We all distrust Trump, but keep in mind he's a monstrously stupid man, too stupid even to understand if he is accidentally doing good in spite of himself.

I have no interest in looking at the proposed regulations, but let me say this:

When I started investigating nuclear energy issues seriously, I began from the position of being a rote anti-nuke. Even as I began to change my mind about whether nuclear energy was a horrid technology or whether it was in fact a superior technology, I passed through a phase where I considered that the escape of any radionuclide was unacceptable and tried to envision ways in which every atom could be contained indefinitely.

I was, in short, a moron.

One hears from very, very, very, very stupid organizations like say, these people, who want you to get your hair to stand on end because (gasp) there's cesium from Sellafield in the Arctic ocean: OH MY GOD!!!! SELLAFIELD CESIUM IN THE ARCTIC!!!

These functional morons even tell us how much Sellafield cesium is in the arctic, 40,000 billion bequerel!!!!! (Their calculation, given their stupidity is probably not valid, but it doesn't matter. Even if they're right, it's an idiotic concern.

A curie is 3.7 X 10^10 Bequerel. It is the unit originally associated with the number of decays in one gram of radium, radium being an element that is extracted from rock as a side product of gas fracking and dumped, without restriction in flowback water. It has since been rounded, for convenience, to round numbers.

Thus, 40,000 billion bequerel is a little under 1100 curies.

Scary, huh?

Sometime ago, by appeal to rather simple arithmetic and reference to a few basic calculations, I calculated what I consider to be a very reasonable estimate the total radioactivity of the ocean from radioactive potassium-40 alone. I posted my calculation on the internet here: How Radioactive Is the Ocean?

In this calculation, I completely ignored the other sources of radioactivity in the ocean, specifically the 5 billion tons of uranium in equilibrium with its decay daughters. (This is the source of Po-210 found in all fish.)

I showed, by appeal to a few scientific references, that the oceans contain roughly 530 billion curies of potassium 40 alone. Thus all of the cesium from Sellafield reported by the dumb shit anti-nukes at "WISE" is roughly is roughly 2 billionths of the radioactivity that the ocean contains naturally from K-40 alone.

If anyone would like to challenge my calculation, I invite them to do so.

Now, since these people elevate their idiot paranoia and ignorance over the the deaths of seven million people each year from air pollution, they don't address what I call the "Richter question" posed by the late Nobel Laureate Barton Richter in his comment on a scare mongering paper about "Fukushima in California" written by the lawsuit happy idiot professor at Stanford, Mark Z. Jacobson, a pretty boy with a weak mind in my opinion.

He didn't try to sue Richter of course, but Richter's paper cut to the chase: Opinion on “Worldwide health effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident” by J. E. Ten Hoeve and M. Z. Jacobson, Energy Environ. Sci., 2012, 5, DOI: 10.1039/c2ee22019a

Since Richter's paper is apparently not open sourced, I'll quote from Richter's remarks:

What struck me first on reading the Ten Hoeve–Jacobson (T–J) paper was how small the consequences of the radiation release from the Fukushima reactor accident are projected to be compared to the devastation wrought by the giant earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011. The quake and tsunami left 20 000 people dead, over a million buildings damaged and a huge number of homeless. This paper concludes that there will eventually be a 15-130-1100 fatalities (130 is the mean value and the other numbers are upper and lower bounds) from the radiation released from reactor failures in what is regarded as the second worst nuclear accident in the history of nuclear power. It made me wonder what the consequences might have been had Japan never used any nuclear power.

The bold is mine. Being demonstrably (by orders of magnitude) a far better scientist with far greater competence than Jacobson - whose response to another criticism by a body of scientists criticizing another of his mindless papers - Richter noted that the death toll from not using nuclear power in Japan would have been higher than the high extreme calculated by Jacobson from air pollution.

In other words, not building nuclear power plants because one confidently and correctly predicted the event at Fukushima would have killed more people than radiation did (or will, since not many people have demonstrably died from radiation, although some long term radiological consequences are worthy of anticipation.)

Many other smart people have made this point.

Now, what are the real health consequences for Sellafield releasing one 2 billionths of the radioactivity the ocean contains from natural and biologically essential oceanic potassium? Are they likely to compare to the health consequences that would have been obtained were the fuel reprocessed at Sellafield never existed, the Richter question?

It is not necessary for nuclear power to be risk free to be vastly superior to all other options. It is only necessary for it to be vastly superior, which it is.

For the record, over its lifetime Sellafield released (to the ocean) more cesium-137 than Fukushima did. My personal opinion is that this was unnecessary and unwise, since it prevented the isolation of the Cs-137 to do the wonderful things that gamma radiation can do when concentrated, but any health effects, should they have existed, are easily dwarfed by the far more dangerous and deadly use of combustion. To the extent that the existence of Sellafield restrained the use of combustion, it saved lives.

I have, in the past, looked into the risk calculations for radionuclides and the criteria by which they are used, but not recently. Since I was better educated at the time I looked into it than I was as I was first emerging from anti-nuke credulity, I recall being somewhat astounded at the low levels of risk being proposed as actionable limits for radionuclides, given I live on a planet where 7 million people die each year from breathing largely unregulated or barely regulated combustion products.

We lack balance, and this has nothing to do with Trump. If he accidentally improves the world by relaxing radioactive standards, we can be sure that his intent was to screw the world with his contempt for humanity, but that, in spite of his attempts to express his puerile contempt for humanity, the actual effect may be to save lives, not that he cares about human life or the future.

Have a wonderful Friday.